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‘Cogently argued and rich in illustrative detail, this important book eloquently
REGIME
REGIME CHANGE IN CONTEMPORARY TURKEY

describes the mimetic nature of Turkey’s renewed descent into authoritarianism
under the AKP. Essential reading about a country once touted as a democratic
CHANGE IN
model for others to follow.’
Gareth Jenkins, Senior Fellow, Silk Road Studies Program
Explores the transformation of Turkey’s political regime from 2002
Turkey has faced a series of upheavals in its political regime from the mid-
nineteenth century. This book details the most recent change, placing it in its
broader historical setting. Beginning with the Justice and Development Party’s
CONTEMPORARY
rule from late 2002, supported by a broad informal coalition that included
liberals, the book shows how the former Islamists gradually acquired full power
between 2007 and 2011. It then describes the subsequent phase, looking at
TURKEY
politics and rights under the amorphous new order.
This is the first scholarly yet accessible assessment of this historic change,
placing it in the larger context of political modernisation in the country over
Politics, Rights, Mimesis
the past 150 or so years.
Key Features
• Covers the main issues in contemporary Turkish politics: the effective
concentration of powers in the government; rule by policy rather than law;
the religious and secular divide; the state of the media; basic freedoms;
Necati Polat
minority rights; the marginalised in society; economic growth at the cost of
dire public dispossession
• Places Turkey in the broader milieu of the Arab Spring, especially in terms of
Islamist politics and Muslim piety in the public sphere, with some emphasis
on ‘Islamo-nationalism’ as a local Islamist variety
• Uses the concept of mimesis to show that continuity is a key element in
Turkish politics, despite the series of radical breaks that have occurred
Necati Polat
• Effortlessly blends history, politics, law, social theory and philosophy in
making sense of the change
Necati Polat is Professor of International Relations at the Middle East
Technical University, Ankara. He is the author of International Relations, Meaning
and Mimesis (2012).
Cover image: 7 June 2013, PM Erdogan met by supporters at airport in Istanbul on his return from North Africa during
the Gezi protests © Thanassis Stavrakis/AP/Press Association Images
Cover design: Barrie Tullett
ISBN 978-1-4744-1696-2
edinburghuniversitypress.com For personal use only; not for distribution purposes
Polat_7_Final_Final.indd 1 03/08/2016 20:05

REGIME CHANGE IN CONTEMPORARY TURKEY
For personal use only; not for distribution purposes
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POLAT 9781474416962 PRINT.indd 2 19/08/2016 09:19

REGIME CHANGE IN
CONTEMPORARY
TURKEY
Politics, Rights, Mimesis
Necati Polat
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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish
academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social
sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to
produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
www.edinburghuniversitypress.com
© Necati Polat, 2016
Edinburgh University Press Ltd

The Tun – Holyrood Road
12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
Typeset in 11/15 Adobe Garamond by

Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire,
and printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 1696 2 (hardback)

ISBN 978 1 4744 1697 9 (paperback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 1698 6 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 1699 3 (epub)
The right of Necati Polat to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and
Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Published with the support of the University of Edinburgh Scholarly Publishing Initiatives
Fund.
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CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction 1
PART I CHANGE
1. What Changed? 41
2. Run-up to Change 75
3. Trials 92
4. Resistance to Change 115
PART II AFTER CHANGE

5. Context 141
6. Gezi Protests 186
7. Media Engineering 206
8. Anything Goes? 227
9. Peace at Home 253
10. Everyday Atrocities 290
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vi | reg i me cha ng e i n c o n te mp o r a r y tur k e y
Conclusion 319
Notes 341
Bibliography 408
Index 419
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PREFACE
A historic regime change took place in Turkey between 2007 and 2011.
This book provides an account of the change and the use of power in its
immediate aftermath, offering a prismatic survey of virtually all of the major
issue areas in the domestic politics, with some emphasis on rights. As such, the
book is very much about the political rule under the Justice and Development
Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi), a self-defined ‘conservative’ force that
emerged out of the local Islamist politics to be in charge from late 2002. The
book charts the phenomenal rise of this political party, notably supported
by a group of secular intellectuals intent to use it as a vehicle for reform, the
turnaround it led by wresting power from the grip of the bureaucracy long
at the helm, and the no-nonsense majoritarianism the change would subse-
quently initiate. The discussion attempts to make sense of the shift in the
political order by placing it in the larger context of political modernisation in
the country from the second half of the nineteenth century, articulating and
rehearsing answers in so doing to one apparent conundrum that pervaded
the assessments of some of the salient aspects of authority in the wake of the
recasting of power. The drive behind the readjustment had looked, for most
of the way, a bona fide quest for political normalisation, with the masses to be
fully enfranchised via unqualified observance of basic rights for the first time,
and through in-depth integration with the wider world, principally Europe.
The unhindered mandate of the elected government, achieved by 2011, was
vii
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viii | reg i me cha ng e i n co nte mpo r a r y tur k e y
only the initial goal towards that much-promoted end, dubbed ‘advanced
democracy’. How did this pursuit of normalisation along the model of more
evolved democracies develop, shortly after an all-embracing sway had been
secured for the political rule, into what seemed to be simply a new form of
authoritarianism?
The transformation drew on a broad base, convincing along the way key
international policy circles, which would extend considerable support to the
repositioning in process, in turn inhibiting much that would otherwise have
been in the way domestically. For all the toils and resourcefulness, including
some serious guile and chicanery on the part of the government, the reorder-
ing would be accomplished first and foremost because the established scheme
could no longer be sustained, for a myriad of reasons to do with a diversify-
ing, maturing society and the way the organised polity interacted, or had to
interact, with the greater political, economic and social milieu. The modu-
lation into an unrestricted licence for the elected government would thus
appear before long to be firmly in place, rather than radically questioned in
opposition circles for having ‘enabled’ the subsequent episode that had been
little bargained for. The overall recalibration in the system certainly stood out
to be comprehensively shaped and consolidated through appropriate power
dispensation arrangements, ideally to be reflected in a rewritten constitution,
which remained pending, as the ruling party would begin faltering on the
possible contours of the switchover.
The book is in two parts. The first part describes the change, which
effectively ended the long-standing dichotomy between the ‘state’ and the
‘government’, reclaiming for elected politicians vast areas of policy formerly
controlled by the bureaucracy, both military and civilian. This is basically
what the book understands by ‘change’. The second and larger part in the
book seeks to capture the mood in the following period and the government
practice, detailing the main patterns in the exercise of authority after the
change: virtual concentration of powers in the government, including the
judiciary; a rule by policy rather than law; the euphoric and increasingly
daring discourse of some of the Islamist ideologues associated with the gov-
ernment; the attendant panic among the secular urbanites; the allegations
of massive corruption and bribery; the state of the media, basic freedoms,
minority rights; and the plights of some of the exceptionally marginalised
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pref a ce | ix
sectors in society, primarily women and workers. The book at once links
the change in Turkey to the much-highlighted public confrontations in the
Middle East and in North Africa with a host of settled regimes at about the
same time, registering some of the dynamics at work, such as the barely antic-
ipated strength of the local authoritarianisms and the evident encumbrances
on Islamist politics in the region in likely democratic contestation.
The argument advanced on change in the book is also one of ostensi-
ble ‘continuity’ over a somewhat lasting stretch, despite a series of ‘radical’
breaks from the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1993 film Groundhog Day,
an obnoxious man gets caught in a time loop, going through one horrid
day again and again. Close observers might notice a roughly similar ‘loop’
in Turkish politics throughout the history of political modernisation in the
country, notwithstanding various splits and reshuffles spectacularly dramatic
on the surface, particularly tangible with the latest regime change, yet ulti-
mately submitting to a more profound level of recurrence and replication of
‘desire’ in a common pool of amazingly resilient local political culture. In
putting forward this contention, I draw on René Girard’s work on mimesis,
which allows me to rethink and branch out my own earlier notions in the
book International Relations, Meaning, and Mimesis (2012) on the function
of ‘iteration’ as pivotal to meaning, which I suggested relying principally on
the work of the later Wittgenstein and Derrida. Let me add that the minimal
theory ‘talk’ that there is in the book is in a simple language that is careful
to avoid jargon, often against a backdrop of colourful political sketches. As
the book at once purports to communicate a plain register of major events,
bordering on a task-conscious study of history in the actual period, the hope-
fully unobtrusive ‘thematic’ assumptions in the background should not imply
diminished use for the work for those with little or no interest in such theo-
retical flourishes.
Of the ten chapters in the book, in addition to an Introduction and a
Conclusion, Chapters 1–4 include, in places, material previously published,
though substantially reworked. The rest is seeing the light of day for the first
time, albeit that I did comment between October 2013 and June 2014 on
some of the current issues on the short-lived blog Human Rights Practice
in Turkey, taken off the web briefly afterwards, and the book treats some
of the day-to-day events roughly along the lines of those former notes. The
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x | reg i me chang e i n co n te mp o r a r y tur k e y
publications partly used in Chapters 1–4 are as follows: ‘Identity Politics and
the Domestic Context of Turkey’s European Union Accession’, Government
and Opposition (Vol. 41, No. 4, 2006), pp. 512–33; ‘The Anti-Coup Trials
in Turkey: What Exactly is Going On?’ Mediterranean Politics (Vol. 16, No.
1, 2011), pp. 211–17; ‘Regime Change in Turkey’, International Politics
(Vol. 50, No. 3, 2013), pp. 435–54; ‘Resistance to Regime Change in the
Middle East: A Liberation Theology of the Neo-Con Variety?’ Interventions:
International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (Vol. 16, No. 5, 2014),
pp. 634–54. I would like to thank the publishers Cambridge University
Press, Taylor and Francis, and Palgrave Macmillan for the material used. I
am indebted to a good number of people for conversations around the topics
in the book, particularly so to those who commented on specific parts of
the work, Costas M. Constantinou, Oliver Richmond, Dietrich Jung, Erik
Mohns, Michael Moran and Michael Cox. My heartfelt thanks go also to
my students at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara for enabling
the airing of some of the ideas set forth in the book and for the inspiring
exchanges. I am beholden for insightful comments to two anonymous read-
ers who reviewed the book for Edinburgh University Press (EUP). Nicola
Ramsey, head of editorial at EUP, and commissioning editor of the book,
was incisive, efficient and accommodating far beyond the usual compass, and
I am grateful. Others who diligently contributed to the production of the
book at various stages include Ellie Bush, Eddie Clark and Lel Gillingwater.
Last but by no means least, Serpil and Cem, people in the closest vicinity,
were good, considerate friends, especially during the spell close to a year from
July 2014, when I concentrated on the book and grew more insufferable than
ever. The book is dedicated to the memory of Necmi Polat (1957–2008),
who loved talking Turkish politics.
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INTRODUCTION
O ne frequently articulated observation by the critics claimed with the

regime change that the new and as yet amorphous order, in place roughly
from 2011, was shifting in its early phase conspicuously towards reproducing
the old one. The critics included some of the former supporters of the govern-
ment, who had grown increasingly disenchanted and bitter, particularly the
small group of liberal intellectuals that had earlier been skilfully co-opted by
the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP)
into the broad informal coalition against the status quo. The ‘authoritarian-
ism’ characteristic of the republican rule for close to a century had merely
changed hands, and returned – possibly with a vengeance. This ‘new’ authori-
tarianism, palpable from mid-2013, and playing havoc with some of the most
basic rights and the rule of law on a scale arguably hitherto unobserved, with
the possible exception of brief periods in the past directly controlled by the
military, would soon push the domestic scene into a thick and escalating
political mayhem. The phenomenal rise of the AKP, which had called itself
‘conservative democrat’ for about a decade from its inception, had prompted
some of the affiliated literati euphorically to re-embrace the long-forgotten
tag ‘Islamist’ in an impassioned debate in the pro-government media already
in the summer of 2012. This shift in the discourse in circles known to be
intimate with the actual power holders, and ubiquitous in no time through
rather uninhibited speculations and suggestions of some of the local Islamist
1
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2 | reg i me chang e i n co n te mp o r a r y tur k e y
ideologues, would do little towards soothing the profound insecurity felt all
along by the secular urbanites with the AKP gaining mandate from late 2002
– anxieties that were not always well grounded, thinly disguising a hankering
for the erstwhile ‘anti-majoritarian’ order that had largely disenfranchised
the pious and practising Muslims, among other dissident political groups.
Having received the support of close to half of the overall electorate by 2011
in a steady increase, the AKP was unequivocally and hugely successful. In the
subsequent period this political party would ostensibly choose strategies to
hold on to that base at the cost of further alienating the other half. Freshly out
of a brief yet triumphant drive against the long-standing bureaucratic sway
over politics, the government would proceed to interpret the majority behind
it as a blank cheque for a score of new and somewhat intimidating policy
initiatives, chiefly in education, designs that had been kept mostly in the dark
until the regime change was complete. This resurgent ‘Islamism’ was arguably
more a consequence of an increasingly distinct populist authoritarianism
though, than a cause of it.
The adverse effects of the unsettling denouement would be greatly
averted with the help of two main factors. One was an inept mainstream
political opposition still partly rooted in the old order, and the other a rela-
tive vibrancy in the economy based on massive redevelopment of state-owned
lands and on privatisation, unhindered, unlike similar efforts under previous
administrations since the 1980s, by a shaky political power and a defiant
judiciary. The second factor seemed to be particularly important. The verve
in the economy would allow lavish public revenues and, more consequential
still, soak up the domestic capital and idle labour considerably. Attributed to
an ostensibly deft administration, the largely make-belief wealth primarily
through intense use of the construction sector would in turn contribute to
the domestic political sturdiness for good measure, which would be critical
during and after the street protests of 2013, particularly in response to the
massive corruption allegations that would follow at the end of the year. In
evident desperation, despite the apparent solidity in the economy and a lack
of alternatives in politics, the AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (prime min-
ister for over a decade from March 2003, and president from August 2014)
would prove proficient in identifying a set of domestic and international
scapegoats, rallying behind him the core supporters accordingly in warding
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i ntroducti on | 3
off the charges of dishonest financial dealings, nepotism, mismanagement

and the threatening political volatility at home and in the larger region. The
heavy-handed government sally to the street unrest, suddenly and extensively
highlighted in world media, and the sweeping yet clearly tenuous claims of
alleged conspiracy simultaneously articulated by Erdoğan to suppress the dis-
sidence, would quickly alter the hard-earned reformist image of the admin-
istration in international public opinion. Most observers would read into
Erdoğan’s nascent and increasingly unscrupulous rhetoric a frantic effort to
abort democratic accountability at any cost, especially after the substantive
claims of corruption.
There would be little doubt in the period from early 2014 onwards
about the specific cast in the use of power. What had started out as a bid for
improved democracy had turned into plain authoritarianism. In resorting
to this term, I rely implicitly on a wide scholarly consensus on the descrip-
tion of basic authoritarianism, with giveaways in the unfolding ruling style
in the early phase after the regime change, which I intend to demonstrate
in Part II of this book; namely (1) a curbed accountability for the admin-
istration through an effective obstruction of the elementary function of the
separation of the state powers, (2) a mass management style premised on
fighting vaguely identified enemies, (3) serious restrictions on the legitimate
political activities of democratic rivals and of the public, and (4) an indefinite
executive power put to use somewhat in defiance of the formal constitutional
order.1 With roots in the local Islamist politics, the AKP had introduced itself
as a novel instrument for pressing change in the ample space provided in the
wake of the economic meltdown of 2001, ascending to power in November
2002. The regime change that would end the long-established distinction of a
‘state’ ruled by the bureaucracy headed by a president and an elected ‘govern-
ment’ that could only rule within the strict red lines of the bureaucracy would
take place between 2007 and 2011, initiated by the election of a politician
from the ranks of the ruling AKP for the post of president. The change would
be finalised through a heated referendum for a set of constitutional amend-
ments in September 2010, when, (1) the masses content with the economy
and growing global integration under the AKP, (2) the pious and practising
Muslims, and (3) some liberal public opinion leaders intent using the AKP as
a transformative force, would enable an all-time high 58 per cent support for
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the government for an overhaul of the system of high courts, the sole endur-
ing fortification of the once formidable bureaucracy. Legislative enactments
in early 2011 would enable the constitutional amendments at issue to take
effect, and in June of the same year the AKP would renew its mandate for the
third time by receiving close to 50 per cent of the votes.
What Exactly Happened?
How do we explain the subsequent authoritarianism, once the regime change

was complete? How did a reformist administration, which achieved a wide
democracy-aspiring coalition beyond the core supporters it had taken over
from the former Islamist politics of its leaders, and which was thus recipi-
ent of worldwide adulations for a decade for integrating the society behind
wholesome democratic ideals, come to mutate, seemingly almost overnight,
into a replica, if not worse, of the rule that it had battled and defeated shortly
before? Several interpretations of this bewildering state of affairs, each with
obvious merits, seem to be possible. First of all, it may be argued, as the few
liberals who went on trusting the administration did in the early phase after
the old regime, that it was yet too early for a full depiction of the whole
case. We might have to be patient and give time to the colossal change that
had taken place only recently to settle before rushing into judgements as
to the possible directions of the ‘new’ regime. On that account, the radical
transformation in the use of domestic power, accomplished through a set of
decisive gestures between 2007 and 2011, was definitely a huge step forward,
yet still under the assault of those loyal to the old order. If nothing else, the
recasting of power had bridged the long-prevalent gap between the masses
with somewhat limited enfranchisement in the administration and the elites
driven by an oppressive identity politics introduced with the onset of politi-
cal modernisation, not only in the republican era, but also arguably since
the mid-nineteenth century. Accordingly, the continuing resistance to the
change, especially that by the still prodigiously potent elites, forced the agents
of change, namely the government, to resort to some ‘exceptional’ tools that
were often identified with the old order. Further, this view seemed to assume,
the increasing visibility of religious symbols under the new rule, viewed by the
critics as signs of an embryonic Islamist regime, was not only to be expected,
as the former state–government gap holding masses at bay had been removed,
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i ntroducti on | 5
but was also perhaps conducive to a smoother and healthier transition to

democracy. The key part played by the Puritan heritage in the development
of democracy in the United States, as evident in abundant religious imagery,
including a belief in the sovereignty of God rather than of the nation as
articulated in the historical discourse, had been a rather similar case perhaps,
and could give further credibility to this argument. As such, the Puritan
culture had conceivably facilitated the transition to an improved democracy
by enabling the masses to somehow ‘relate’ to politics of the elect. Later, the
Puritan religious discourse and the symbols, some still in use as little more
than harmless lore, had not necessarily translated into everyday workings of
politics, hindering free democratic choices of vast and heterogeneous masses.
This was the first of a set of plausible takes on the new authoritarianism
in the country. Another possible explanation, though not as compelling as
the first perhaps, accounted for and excused the oppressive politics in the
immediate aftermath of the regime change through a concern on the part of
the administration for the pace and nature of decision-making towards rapid
economic growth, with possible democratic hurdles in the way conveni-
ently swept aside. Accordingly, the economic success stories in Asia from the
1960s formed sound evidence of economic thriving via business-like policies
adopted under the respective authoritarian rules, chasing away conceivable
disarray likely to be caused by a fully democratic governance that could
otherwise hamper the state apparatus in being sufficiently agile in adopt-
ing measures as demanded. Hence, for instance, the brazen disregard of the
public tender principles under the AKP rule, with competition practically
eliminated with the handing out of public works to contractors close to the
ruling circles.
Finally, a reading, which, unlike the first two, was much less patient with
the emergent ruling style, construed the episode as a typically populist policy
switch. The discourse was hardly peculiar to the locality, observed rather in
various settings globally that were otherwise disconnected; as with Silvio
Berlusconi in Italy, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Viktor Orbán in Hungary,
Narendra Modi in India, and Ross Perot and Donald Trump in respective
presidential campaigns in the United States, including perhaps the known
policy patterns of some of the European far-right political parties. Populism
as such was a somewhat well-recognised variety, thoroughly studied in its
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manifestations in disparate milieus, without necessarily a common thread of

‘substance’ or ideology intrinsically connecting to each other a multitude of
instances of authoritarian rule or discourse deemed to be populist. The sug-
gestive symptoms of this rule included a sharp dichotomy of the people and
the elites at the discursive level, with the elite often described as a self-serving
class at best and otherwise as foreign cronies or accidental lackeys, if not plain
traitors and spies. This rhetoric inevitably brought in a radical polarisation
in society. Not infrequently, the profound resentment towards the opposi-
tion was coupled with an undermining of the separation of powers in the
state apparatus, amassing power in the hands of the administration in its
self-professed fight against treason and treachery. Last, but by no means least,
populism virtually fed on a mass clientelism in the form of financial and
material handouts to voters, the source of which was often formed by none
other than widespread corruption. The emerging regime in Turkey from
2011 issued most, even perhaps all, of these signs. The frequent references
in the ruling party discourse to the early republican administration as the
loathed, local Ancien Régime, and to the völkisch ‘aboriginality’ assumed to
have consistently been suppressed by that regime, at once arguably connected
the new politics to fairly well known ‘nativist’ currents in Europe historically.
In what follows, I rehearse by way of an introduction to this book an
additional factor that is not necessarily outside these accounts but is comple-
mentary in some sense. Unlike the foregoing, I refuse to treat the authori-
tarianism with the demise of the old regime as an overt policy choice, fully
or in its own right, but include an irreducible element that is to some extent
in excess of that choice. In so doing I draw on the anthropological insights
developed by René Girard in a solitary yet persistent line of work since
the early 1970s. The argument, detailed in the sections below, is centred
on the seemingly ‘bizarre’ machinations of basic human desire. Briefly put,
desire, such as that which drove the ruling AKP up to 2011 to put an end
to the status quo, is notably ‘mimetic’, imitative, modelled on the other: that
is, desire is to do more with simulation and reproduction of another desire,
namely the desire of the other, which the desiring subject looks up to, than
a self-contained and autonomous exigency like some biological need. For
the fulfilment of desire as such in a specific case, the subject seeks typically
to ‘copy’ the desire of the other, the model. In point of fact, this model is
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i ntroducti on | 7
none other than the ‘rival’, held subliminally in esteem, while being detested
at the same time, by the desiring subject. Negating it for power, the desiring
subject at once goes as far as perversely appropriating the very identity of the
rival. The new authoritarianism in Turkey, which seemed to emerge closely
to reiterate the old one, I argue, could be understood as a play of desire in
this mould. The compulsive move by the government towards mimicking
the adversary, the old guard, came from 2011 to effectively terminate the
disparity between those who were in truth two authentic rivals. Yet, this
was a perilously disruptive course on the whole, for the differentiation at
issue, separating and marking apart the desiring subject from the model, was
ontologically crucial for the basic stability in the community. The age-old
routine, Girard explains, when some such ‘disordering’ is the case, is to seek
purification through scapegoating, a mechanism he details at great length.
Scapegoating tacitly restores the disrupted stability and meaning in the com-
munity simply by picking on random victims. Concomitant with the regime
change, the new rule would correspondingly ‘lynch’ a number of victims to
reconstruct a measure of that same stability. Normally, this arbitrary violence
should have produced a new sacred, a new order, banishing, if temporarily,
the mimetic ‘violence’ that was menacing to the community, as is the pattern
historically. Yet, as Girard insists, unlike archaic societies, this mechanism of
order through violence has long been demystified in modern societies. To
be sure, the communal disciplining nowadays does follow the same course
regardless, seeking order through arbitrary violence, even revenge. Instead
of order, however, violence tends now to beget simply more violence, for
modern societies have been dispossessed of that happy credulity that was a
key component historically.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the violence that was attendant with the
emerging political order in Turkey would go on simply to contribute new
cycles of violence. The administration arguably lynched a mass of dissidents
in a set of show trials by using, as rumoured, the Gülenists (see Chapter 5),
the ambiguous Islamic cult known to be well connected in the law enforce-
ment system and in the judiciary. Yet, this ‘victimage’ would ultimately serve
only to intensify the violence rather than halt it. At war with the government,
and purged from the judiciary and the police in no time, the Gülenists would
soon come to have a taste of their own medicine. The damning corruption
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revelations made ostensibly by the cult from December 2013, betraying the
highly questionable manner in which Erdoğan allegedly financed politics
over an extended period of time, indicated that a new round of lynching
might soon make Erdoğan himself ‘the fall guy’, the archetypal victim of
the spiralling violence. That which made the victims innocent or random in
any of these cases appeared to be the mere fact that the victims were being
targeted not necessarily for the offensive or criminal deeds that might be
attributable to them, but as part of an instance of primordial violence, which
was haphazard, and which primarily sought, before justice, a reconfiguration
in the order; that is, a new sacred. Some of those put on trial from mid-2007
were hardly innocent of various underhand dealings against the political rule
in its early phase. The corruption charges levelled at the government by none
other than prosecutors did on the whole look well documented and con-
vincing. Yet, revealing those secretly amassed irregularities in a war of attri-
tion, under way for some time between the government and the Gülenists,
looked barely innocent. The ostensibly Gülenist members of the judiciary
and the police were indeed being opportunistic beyond merely performing
their duties, staging a ‘coup’ in some sense, as claimed by the government.
No party seemed to be blameless. Still, the rulers, as those singled out before,
could at once be considered as ‘innocent’ for the random and indiscriminate
nature of the response they received respectively from those who held or
shared in the power. It was victimage and lynching in each and every case
towards reconstituting the sacred.
Moreover, this may be part of a trope, as I argue below, linking simply
all of the attempts at a new sacred in the history of political modernisation in
Turkey, assumed to have been in motion from the early nineteenth century:
the new constitutional order of 1876, the bureaucratic order of 1909, the
initiation of the republican era in 1923, the liberal ascendancy to power in
1950, and finally, the most durable of all, the bureaucratic trusteeship system
established through the military coup of 1960. In all of these cases of regime
change, prior to the most recent one led by the AKP, which is the subject
matter of this book, it may be possible, I claim, to identify the main gestures
of desire, proceeding simply to replicate the rival and lead in no time to vio-
lence, scapegoating and more violence.
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Identity, Desire, Violence
The concept of desire denotes, crudely put, some form of strong emotional
attraction to that which is its object. That desire as such is ‘covetous’ in a
significant sense is an idea usually attributed to the seminal work of Jacques
Lacan. Although Girard claims that Lacan, among the rest, ‘failed to discover’
the mimetic quality of desire,2 this hardly rings true. Pivotal to his overall
work, Lacan appears to borrow a mimetic notion of desire, long pre-dating
that of Girard, from Alexandre Kojève, whose seminal lectures on Hegel
in the 1930s Lacan is known to have attended. In interpreting Hegel on
self-consciousness as the defining trait of human person, Kojève is seen to
invoke desire as uniquely human in contradistinction to ‘need’ that is both
human and animalistic. Desire as an exclusively human attribute, he adds,
is ‘the Desire of the other’, which, besides a craving to be ‘recognised’, a
yearning for prestige, is a harbouring of wishes towards things and states of
affairs that are entirely ‘mediated’ by the other; ‘it is human to desire what
others desire, because they desire it.’3 The well-known Lacanian edict would
later communicate none other than this basic assumption on desire: ‘Man’s
desire is the desire of the Other.’4 As with Kojève, the thought supplies Lacan
with a two-fold (and interwoven) purpose for desire: it is always already
towards being desired or accepted by others and, as a corollary to this, it is
at once about other desires. ‘The object of man’s desire, and we are not the
first to say this,’ Lacan notes in a piece penned in 1951, with Kojève in mind
obviously, ‘is essentially an object desired by someone else.’5 Further, in this
specific sense intimated by both Kojève and Lacan, the object of desire does
not even ‘exist’, as far as the desiring subject is concerned. The object ‘itself’
that is outwardly welded to pure desire is a mere extension of the ultimately
arbitrary interest of the other in the object, which is the real magnet for the
desiring subject. In other words, desire is hardly pure at all; it is motivated
not by some need, immediately connecting it to a thing or a situation, as in
the case of animals, but by an ontological drive that renders the object desir-
able merely for being desirable or desired by others. As is well known, this
impulse behind desire mediated through the other is to do for Lacan with
the essential ‘void’ that defines human subjectivity. This void is nothingness,
empty space, a non-being; and yet it is at once the source of constant and
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10 | reg i me cha ng e i n c o n te mp o r a r y tur k e y
unbounded burning to ‘be’ or to ‘belong’ by acquiring an identity that is safe

and comforting for being firmly aligned with the other, easing the dread of
the inescapable vacuity within.
That it is more the desire of someone else (you desire what the other
desires) than an aching linked intrinsically to the object as such, means that,
over and above a desiring subject and a desired object; the mechanistics of
desire seeking identity always already involve an intermediary, a ‘model’, as
Girard puts it. The model not only functions as a template for the subject but
also has the clearly ‘dominant role’ in the process, as the subject only hankers
after the object knowing that it is dear to some model that is in effect a para-
gon as well as the ‘rival’.6 Since the subject compulsively imitates the model
in being drawn to the object, desire is ‘essentially mimetic’.7 Girard points
out this unmistakeably mimetic nature of desire in childhood, which should
indeed be obvious to us all. The specific desire burning in a child is invariably
connected to the apparent desire of simply another child that is in the periph-
eral vision of the desiring child in relation to an object desired. ‘Adult desire’,
Girard notes, ‘is virtually identical’ with the desire we observe with children.
The sole and frustrating difference perhaps is that, unlike children, adults are
pathetically self-conscious, tending therefore to hide or block this mechanism
for the ‘lack of being’ or the hollowness it implies.8 Moreover, again, as with
children, desire that is based on fluid and fluctuating imitation is ultimately
inexhaustible and full of paradoxes. The discontent that sets in with most of
us soon after possessing what we have long desired may mean that in the end
desire aims what is impossible; as in the famous Groucho Marx joke: ‘I don’t
want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.’ This absurdity
is not far removed from that of recognition as highlighted by Kojève, more
or less in the same context, in reading the Hegelian interaction of the master
and the slave: the recognition sought by the master to be a master, which is
to be issued only by a slave, inevitably so, becomes worthless instantly, for
the recognition at issue is understood as an appreciation extended by a mere
dependent consciousness, a slave.
It all starts with desire, then, the fundamental motivation behind human
action, when the action in question is motivated by more than an automated
or physical need, like hunger. In responding to hunger, that which grips
you is both fixed and limited. Yet, when you desire, what you can include
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in your desire is not; desire is measureless, insatiable and never-ending. This,

according to Girard, is an idiosyncratic trait that bonds us with archaic socie-
ties, even perhaps with animals, where, as Nietzsche famously says, we really
belong; since desire as the sole distinguishing evidence is captivated by an
immaterial object of desire, we are left, as with animals, with need only,
which has a fixed object beyond the ‘game’ that defines desire. That is, the
difference between humans and animals could be only one of degree rather
than category – befitting the possibly overrated human sophistication – and
observed as a marker for grading also among different species of animals;
although, I should add, Girard himself would be at least partly uneasy with
this Nietzschean conclusion, for Girard goes on to posit religion, an epi-
phenomenon of desire, as a fundamental gap that sets humans apart from
animals.
Desire as such is predicated on a primordial form of violent rivalry, for
(1) the model not only possesses or desires the object that is desired by the
desiring subject, but enthrals also the person of the desiring subject who is
consumed by her or his desire. This evidently signals a transgressive sway
by the imitated over the imitator. More significant still, because the specific
desire only ends or receives fulfilment, even if ephemeral, with the subject
copying the identity of the other, in the final analysis, (2) desire is the wish to
‘be’ the other, to steal the identity of the model – a manifest aggression on the
part of the imitator; that is, the model will be pleased with being imitated by
the subject, but also displeased as the subject wishes simultaneously to be her
or him, ending the ranking between the two. By the same token, in mimick-
ing the other, (3) the subject comes effectively to do away with alterity, which
is a condition for the self. You are (to be) only through the desire mediated
by the other. Yet, when you become literally the other instead, you end up
practically devoid of the other, the source of your identity. Ontologically this
is an impasse based on (now) self-inflicted aggression. Finally, (4) a basic con-
tradiction emerges in this play of desire insofar as the imitation, as dictated by
desire at the cost of difference, becomes a threat to the wider community that
valorises differentiation for its systems of identity and meaning. ‘Sameness’
will aggressively abort signification. That is why, Girard notes, twins formed
a source of ‘terror’ in archaic communities, leading to a ‘crisis’, which would
often culminate in the sacrifice of one.9
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This is an encounter between the subject and the other, with a set of
fundamental antagonisms attached to it, taking place in the vastly important
domain of meaning, identity and prestige. To repeat, inviting rivalry, desire
is perpetual and irremediably conflict inducing. It is to do with the hope-
less insecurity formed by the void in the subject’s being, to be filled by the
‘otherly’ desire towards a temporary sense of completeness. Yet, when ful-
filled, the imitation threatens the disidentity that is focal to both the self and
the larger community. ‘Thus, mimesis coupled with desire’, argues Girard,
‘leads automatically to conflict.’10 The whole process appears to be immensely
destructive as well as ineluctable. A formidable instance of violence overall,
this in turn brings about an ontological crisis. The community, based on
differentiation and disidentity, will not let itself be destroyed by the mimesis
that defines desire. To this end, the community defends and saves itself by
responding to the violence fermented by desire with more violence – a ‘vio-
lent cure’.11
The cure is invariably to be found in a ‘surrogate victim’, who is singled
out as the one ‘polluted’, thus putting at risk the whole community. A ritual
‘sacrifice’ then duly immolates the random victim. Collectively sacrificed, the
victim serves to prevent the ‘contamination’ of the rest. Arbitrarily defined
and picked on, this victim is of course no more than only a ‘scapegoat’.
Girard maintains: ‘Any community that has fallen prey to violence or has
been stricken by some overwhelming catastrophe hurls itself blindly into
the search for a scapegoat.’12 The sacrifice in question is primordial: it is a
form of communal violence that is holy, ritualistic and shared. ‘At a single
blow, collective violence wipes out all memory of the past’,13 and the com-
munity becomes sort of cathartically reborn. Those who relegate the sacrificial
event habitually to a distant and now surpassed phase of human history,
Girard thus claims, ‘remain the prisoners of the theology they have not fully
analysed’.14 Accordingly, properly understood, one of the functions of this
‘theology’ is to ‘mystify’ the event at any cost. The scapegoat mechanism
transforms the random victim into a ‘monster’, to which the crisis is imputed.
This monster that imperils the very foundation of the community is at once,
and paradoxically, a ‘saviour’ in the shape of a sacrifice that lends urgent
succour to the community, leading it out of the looming mimetic confusion.
The whole process then comes to be obscured through collective, popularly
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upheld narratives or myths, that is, a theology that manufactures paramount

credulity. Violence embodied, and cryptically communicated at the discur-
sive level, this theology in turn proceeds to perform duties for the commu-
nity, warning against, and holding in check, possible transgressions that are
set off by the covetousness let loose through the mimetic quality of desire.
The narratives that thus mystify and conceal the founding violence, Girard
warns, are not at all to be trifled with: this is how the community perennially
subdues violence. By the same token, a wayward attempt at ‘demystification’
of the sacrifice, revealing the victim as only random, a scapegoat, would strip
the event of its crucial function, leading to incredulity and consequently to
surging violence.15
Various forms of sacrifice in history, human or animal, Girard asserts,
constitute one single and foundational event. ‘The function of sacrifice is to
quell violence within the community and to prevent conflicts from erupt-
ing.’16 Again, to reiterate, just as desire is inevitable, so is violence triggered
by the mimetic quality of desire. Violence thus unleashed is then controlled
by a constitutive violence that takes the form of communal sacrifice through
scapegoating. Girard goes further and contends that violence in this specific
sense, namely as the founding violence, obscured in a theology, is not some-
thing that is to be confined to archaic communities only. This, he argues, is
basically how violence is controlled also in modern times. The workings of
the sacrificial rite as ideally or typically observed in the past do subsist, he
points out, in modern systems of justice for instance, serving much towards
the same end.17 In both cases – the archaic and the modern – a machinery of
scapegoating turns arbitrary ‘victimage’ into the protection of community,
which is based on difference threatened by mimetic desire. Steal, and you are
going to be penalised. Is there anything other than the ultimately arbitrary
definition in the law that designates you as a thief? None. The law makes you
a victim for challenging through covetous desire the fundamental orders of
differentiation in the community; in this case, the concept of property. The
sacrifice, as you are punished, serves then to unify and reinstitute the com-
munity. The paradoxical (monster–saviour) relationship with the surrogate
victim helps the community to resolve that which is on the horizon and
which promises to be an erratic and pervasive state of conflict. The commu-
nity, picking on a victim to avert more sinister and omnipresent victimage
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in its midst that may eventually destroy it, introduces a sacred or sanctioned
violence in order to prevent the brewing ‘profane’ violence.
Here is the crux of the matter that may put the whole question of mime-
sis under a new light. This account of communal witch-hunt notably inverts
the received wisdom on scapegoating: that which is persecuted and victimised
in the community historically is not difference but, on the contrary, possible
moves by members of the community towards jeopardising of difference.
Accordingly, weakening difference outside the systemic or allowed lines will
irretrievably undermine and destroy the specific system of differentiation.
‘Religious, ethnic or national minorities are never actually reproached for their
difference,’ Girard thus explains, ‘but for not being as different as expected,
and in the end for not differing at all’.18 Marring or reducing the semantic
value of difference may amount to a most dangerous revelation, unveiling the
constructed or arbitrary nature of distinctions and polarised identities in the
community, in turn shaking the faith in the established order of meaning.
Therefore the principal abomination in the community is not dissimilitude,
but precisely the emergent incongruence and incredulity towards it. ‘In all
the vocabulary of tribal or national prejudices’, comments Girard, ‘hatred is
expressed, not for difference, but for its absence.’19
To recapitulate, then, desire is structurally mimetic; it is always already
the desire of the other. Practically bracketing off the object of desire, which is
trivial, desire ultimately instigates a copying and compromising of the identity
of the other, and subsequently a subverting of the very self, by playing down
difference. This in turn induces conflict, to be overcome by a sacred violence
that consists of a round of scapegoating, victimage and sacrifice. Desire as
such is at the heart of all violence. Moreover, from the very beginning, all
manifestations of human culture are based on this violence that maintains
dissimilitude in the community in the face of mimetic desire. A theology
that is the main thrust of this culture points to likely, albeit arbitrary, culprits
poised to annihilate differentiation. This is how Girard declares violence as
constitutive of all culture: ‘I maintain that the original act of violence is the
matrix of all ritual and mythological significations.’20 Religion, for one thing,
is unequivocally some such epiphenomenon of violence patrolling the sensi-
tive zone between desire and fear, both inflicting and containing violence
along the way, although Girard himself would not agree with this radical
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inference, as he seeks somehow to salvage Christianity, which he views as a

historically unique instance that not only acknowledges (rather than mysti-
fies) the innocence of the victim but also somehow departs from the settled
tradition of sacrifice.21 Yet, against Girard, it is possible to construe also this
apparent ‘demystification’ observed with Christianity as simply a fresh tem-
plate of mystification, which, rather like the modern systems of justice, con-
ceivably shifts sacrifice to a new plane, as opposed to removing it altogether.
This does not mean that the pattern of violence and the sacred out-
lined here is entirely stationary, excluding transformation in time. Girard
indicates a crucial discontinuity in this regard between ancient and modern
practices of the sacrificial rite. To be sure, the earlier civilisations and the
present-day, modern civilisation are very much in continuity on the whole.
Both are discernibly based on a violent sacred, that is, an order in the face
of the mimetic, subversive workings of desire. The modern state, as per
Weber, exists only to control this violence through its ‘benign’ monopoly.
The monopoly at once reproduces the age-old mechanism of scapegoating,
with ultimately ‘arbitrary’ victims subjected to a legitimate and holy violence
in the name of unifying and saving the community. At the global level,
human rights discourse can be seen simply to mimic the state monopoly
on violence by operating through basically the same principles: it seeks to
defragment world community via equally ‘arbitrary’ scapegoating, which
paradoxically restores the fragmentation or differentiation that is the basis of
meaning and identity. All the same, a major discontinuity with the archaic
tradition, Girard explains, is the fact that it no longer is possible for all in
the community to ‘buy’ the victim as a monster, for the process has been
greatly demystified in modern times. As a result, instead of producing a
lasting sacred, violence now produces only more violence.22 Girard’s own
example is the French Revolution; Robespierre, eventually scapegoated, was
a scapegoater himself earlier. This demystification, which has to do with an
evolving ontology, rather than Christianity (although, again, Girard would
disagree), appears to be a major epistemic break. Avenues of incredulity left
irreducibly open, the lynching of the ‘innocent’ no longer brings about a
simple purification, restoring stability in the community. The practice of
scapegoating, ostensibly unrelenting despite this radical break, leads instead
simply to more and more violence.
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New Sacred
The kinship this account reveals with the instances of victimage that accom-
panied the regime change in Turkey, leading only to growing violence, is
striking. The Gülen community, an ally with a formidable presence during
the transition, understood to have mercilessly ‘lynched’ the loyalists of the
old order on behalf of the emerging regime, would soon face a similar fate.
Moreover, Erdoğan would be the victim of an almost identical lynching. The
‘innocence’ of the victims in such lynching is to do, let us recall, not with
the absolute irreproachability of those lynched, such as Erdoğan, which was
hardly the case, but with the ‘causal’ incongruity or the randomness that
defined the victimage. In bringing a number of damning corruption cases
against the government, the prosecutors appeared to be after a new sacred,
while pretending to have purely legal concerns. Care was taken to conceal
the real, foundational violence via the political trials engineered against the
leading dissidents, the Gülenist assault on Erdoğan, or the subsequent bat-
tering of the Gülenists. The formal charges levelled, such as coup-plotting,
espionage and corruption, did perhaps have validity at some level, yet we have
every reason to believe that those charges had little to do with the bashings
at issue. The actual violence was a purifying, constitutive violence, mystified
largely under the incipient sacred of the ‘anti-coup’ politics. The mimetic
quality of desire in a set of relationships of rivalry had thus already ensured a
basic continuity with the old regime.
Notably, the overall scapegoating under the new regime would issue
signs that the victimage was being conducted, as is the pattern indicated by
Girard, not for the ‘difference’ attributed to the victim, but precisely for the
lack of it. A vivid example would be the treatment of non-Muslims ‘affiliated’
with Turkey and Turkishness historically, considered to be a threat to the
communal identity simply for weakening the assumed difference. Erdoğan
was known to have used on separate occasions, once in 2011 and later in
2014, the ethnic tags ‘Greek’ and ‘Armenian’ respectively, as offensive words
denoting insult and slur, particularly so, because the said ethnicities had been
attributed to him personally by the neo-nationalist (ulusalcı) adversaries loyal
to the old regime.23 ‘They called me names’, he would complain in the presi-
dential election campaign of 2014. ‘They even called me “Armenian”, do excuse
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i ntroducti on | 17
the language.’ Clearly, it would hardly have occurred to Erdoğan to refer in

the same tone to some radically alien ethnicities, namely those that were not
somehow ‘entangled’ with the Turkish identity. On the contrary, sufficiently
removed from the local setting, the ‘complete’ others, such as the German or
Indian, would perhaps have been exotically and seductively acceptable, even
flattering. Yet Greeks and Armenians were simply too close. They were to be
held at an arm’s length for constituting a ‘threat’ through an undermining
of identity by exposing the constructed or arbitrary nature of differences in
identity formation. That is, the claims mixing Turkish identity with those of
Armenians and Greeks served to weaken the differences assumed between the
Turk and the Armenian, the Turk and the Greek, which was anathema, for
the fusion articulated in the allegations, linking Erdoğan to those identities,
revealed the haphazard way in which identities were assembled locally. In
the assertions that displeased Erdoğan, some ‘valuable’ differences appeared
to be somewhat feeble or readily transgressed. Quite paradoxically, bigotry
that emphasised – rather than obliterated – differences thus immediately
found a fertile ground. In other words, the Greek and the Armenian were
easily ‘wasted’ by Erdoğan, not for being different, but for being not different
enough; they were in fact confusingly close. Blurring the distinction between
the self and the other more formidably than a radical other, the ‘domestic’
other was a threat by shaking the faith in the system of signification at work
locally, amounting to perilous mimetic violence, in turn to be countered
only by more violence, with the Armenian and the Greek identities readily
sacrificed.
The scapegoat thus effectively imagined and wasted is both malevolent
(‘polluted’, therefore to be sacrificed) and benevolent (‘purifying’ through
victimage that restores the order). Remarkably, this paradox may extend also
to the conception of God. As Girard observes, ‘gods are as much scapegoats
as the others.’24 The Soma mine disaster of May 2014, which killed over
300 miners for callous neglect of basic safety, which I discuss in this book
(Chapter 10), would prompt the government to send to the grief-stricken
area a detachment of members of a religious community,25 while banning the
locals from having any contact with human rights activists and lawyers. The
righteous out-of-towners would call on the miner families door to door, pre-
sumably pointing out and alerting to God’s mysterious ways of punishment
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and reward, ostensibly in order to calm down the small mining community.
God would thereby be affirmed to be as much malevolent, killing mercilessly
to teach a lesson, as he was indeed also benevolent. Girard notes: God ‘crushes
the faithful in order to bring them back to the straight path; he corrects their
weaknesses which prevent him from immediately showing his beneficence.
He who loves greatly punishes greatly.’26 Did this mystification work at all in
Soma? Apparently not. Erdoğan would receive possibly the worst nightmare
of his career when he would later visit Soma, with the locals taunting him on
the town’s high street. Unable to control his anger, Erdoğan would improvise
a tough-guy act as seen in subsequently released video captures, inviting
protesters to ‘come close’ and repeat the jeers to his face. Surrounded by
security forces, Erdoğan would then batter with his own hands the first local
he could corner in a market, screaming at the man, ‘You, Israeli spawn!’27
The reference was merely to another ethnicity, which, as with the Armenian
and the Greek, had been used before to describe Erdoğan himself, and which
was thus clearly of a kind that might threaten to muddle up the revered (yet
insecure) Turkish identity.
It was no surprise, then, that the use of power following the regime change
was being increasingly observed to ‘copy’ the old one. The long-harboured
Islamist desire appeared to have been modelled precisely after the desire of
its other, the rival, which Islamists were at once supposed to have fought
and defeated. The evidence in this regard, fast accumulating from 2011 as
the regime change became complete, would be abundant to dispel possible
doubts as to what exactly was happening under the new rule. The denouncing
of the demands towards a widening of political participation in the society as
mere conspiracy, a tool used potently against Kurds and the pious Muslims
during the old regime, would resurface and be directed at the young and
restless urbanites that memorably attracted the attention of the world public
opinion at the Gezi protests of 2013. Again, allegations of treason and plain
espionage about dissidence, only to bolster the authoritarian rule in the coun-
try, which was a permanent feature of the old regime, would come increas-
ingly to be put to work. In so doing, the new power holders would arguably
outdo the old ones in places through a somewhat brazen engagement in
identity politics at the cost of identities other than those linked to that of the
pious and practising Muslims. A Jacobin social engineering that would be
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growingly exercised, a declared policy from 2011 apparently seeking a meta-

morphosis of a whole new generation through education, and dictating life
styles on the community, was also clearly part of the desire appropriated from
the old regime. Added to all this was a continuing centralisation of the higher
education system and a partisan judiciary, the tell-tale signs of the old order
in marked continuity under the new one. Moreover, the new rulers could be
said to have greatly done away with the distinction between the ruling politi-
cal party and the public authority, with local governmental agencies, the gov-
ernorships, having gradually been put at the service of the party, exactly as in
the practice of the republican rule in its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s – an
era otherwise fiercely criticised by the new power holders. As is well known,
a regular feature of the old regime throughout was coups d’état, disruptions
in constitutional order, taking place almost once in every decade. The new
regime would not refrain from reproducing this trait either, having effectively
put aside the constitutional order from 25 December 2013, in response to
the grave corruption reports compiled by the police and the judiciary involv-
ing the government. Again, behaving as an ‘executive’ president in blatant
disregard of his largely ceremonial role in the established system, Erdoğan
would later declare: ‘Accept it or not, Turkey’s administrative system has de
facto changed.’28
Finally, an imprint of the first couple of decades after modern Turkey
had been set up in 1923, a leadership cult that dictated the virtual infallibility
of the leader, in turn steering towards public lynching of the critics, including
figures within the ruling circles, even government ministers, would come to
be the trademark also of the new regime from 2011. An ironic give-away in
this regard was Erdoğan starting the election campaign that would ascend
him to Atatürk’s throne as the president of the Republic from the Black
Sea town of Samsun, where Atatürk had started his legendary campaign of
national liberation in 1919 against the invading powers. Meticulously trailing
Atatürk from Samsun to Erzurum in the east, Erdoğan would dub his cam-
paign as a war of ‘national liberation’, claiming that the very survival of the
nation was at stake under the imminent threat of domestic and international
foes out to get the nation. When he was about to be seated in the throne, as
he came out of the presidential poll victorious, having received close to 52 per
cent of the overall votes, he would be crooned and praised in ways that would
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greatly reproduce the Kemalist leadership cult. True to the tradition that
had formed in the 1930s, the following by a noted literary figure would be
published in a pro-government newspaper to greet Erdoğan two days before
he would be sworn in (except for the bracketed ones, the dots in the extract
do not indicate omissions in the text but are actually part of the original,
ostensibly for the maximum ‘hymnal’ effect in the veneration):
For eyes that can see, the shimmering lights of the birth of a new Turkey
are becoming visible . . .
The architect of this new Turkey is Recep Tayyip Erdoğan . . .
Under his leadership . . . Under his guidance . . .
With contours that are increasingly more distinct, the profile of this
true leader is coming into view on the horizon . . . (. . .)
The people of Turkey are about to entrust their future to the acumen
and sagacity of this leader . . . Or, rather, they did that already . . .
They reckon that the leader whom they put to the test several times is
once again going to make proud his people and country . . .
They stand by him even on those occasions when he gets stood up . . .
The new Turkey is taking shape under his leadership . . . As for the
leader, he defines himself as a common trooper among his people, and this
is precisely why he is being loved . . .29
Replacing Erdoğan’s name with that of Atatürk would give us a sample of the
typical acclamations of the latter historically, to say nothing of the alarming
notions of national leadership and guidance, with the ‘nation’ understood as
an organic being, for a political movement that previously had strong demo-
cratic aspirations. Actually, exaltations of leaders in this unusual cast had
barely been the case locally since World War II. Often associated with the
interwar leaders of the country, principally Atatürk, the original cult and the
attendant hero-worship were synchronic to some extent with the treatment
of some of the European leaders at the time. This said, it also needs to be
remembered that venerations of the type towards rulers by established liter-
ary personalities had a firm rooting in old Turkish literary practice, in which
praising the qualities of statesmen formed a poetic genre in itself – a tradition
which, coupled with the European leadership cult of the time, would be ele-
vated to new heights in the 1930s. Just as with the earlier Atatürk cult, those
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few secular intellectuals that persisted in their support of Erdoğan’s leader-

ship would justify his ‘authoritarian streak’, having readily acknowledged it,
by resorting to a claim of a singularly intransigent opposition,30 comparable
to the way the early republican rule by Atatürk was habitually justified by
the republicans by pointing to the extraordinary circumstances in the years
following World War I, both domestically, when the regime newly in place
was fighting a fierce domestic opposition, and internationally, with interwar
authoritarianisms in the offing in Europe.
The new order, greatly mimicking the old one, and introduced through
a series of decisive gestures from 2007 to 2011, and to be in full swing
from 2012, is the central event in this book. Yet the pattern of violence
and the sacred motivated by desire as outlined here could well be argued
to suffuse the whole history of a series of decisive ‘breaks’ in political mod-
ernisation (muasırlaşma, later çağdaşlaşma) in the country, roughly from the
mid-nineteenth century.31
The most salient feature of political modernisation already under way in
the first quarter of the nineteenth century was growing centralisation at the
cost of the local notables, who had been bestowed upon with ‘feudal’ privi-
leges until then. The centralisation would make great headway with the new
administrative measures, remarkably facilitated through the first ever popula-
tion censuses in the Ottoman community akin to the modern practices, con-
ducted from 1831 and later, more fully, yet still partial, in 1844.32 Predictably
risking a redoubling of the traditional absolutism, the centralisation would
both produce, and in turn be carried out by, a new class of bureaucrats who
would gradually shift the focus of political power from a solitary monarch to
the emergent bureaucracy, called the Sublime Port (Bâb-ı Âlî). In close con-
sultation and cooperation with the representatives of the European powers in
Istanbul in regulating the state business, the bureaucrats would urge and draft
a landmark Imperial Reform Edict in 1839, which would initiate a new era
in the history of modernisation in the country known as the Tanzîmât (liter-
ally ‘the Regulations’). The edict, declared with unusual splendour, sought
ostensibly to ease the new absolutism that came with the greater centralisa-
tion through a political commitment to the protection of some of the basic
rights and of the rule of law. This commitment would prompt a uniquely
busy phase of legal reforms in the country, as reflected in swift codification
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efforts that blended the traditional sources of the law with new European
legal initiatives. An Imperial Reform Edict in 1856, communicating a politi-
cal will to end the discrimination against non-Muslim subjects conclusively,
would be appended within weeks to the Paris Treaty of 1856, which would
make Ottoman Turkey the first ever power outside the European core to
be admitted to European public law (that is, the future international law)
as an equal participant. The era also witnessed the advent of an Ottoman
public sphere through print media, comparable to that in Europe at the time,
beyond the traditional venues of political exchange such as the coffee houses
and the public baths.
A new variety of intellectuals who were, again, the product of the era
would form a broad reformist coalition as the Young Ottomans, increasingly
advocating a concept of limited government (meşrûtiyet) based on arguments
that hastily and precariously mixed European ideas of human rights and
constitutionalism with the local concepts and principles, such as meşveret
(consultation), the Islamic notion that urges dialogue and deliberation in
worldly affairs.33 Set up in 1865, the Young Ottomans are known to have
been ‘the first political opposition in the modern sense’34 in Ottoman history.
The fact that the designation would in time reach beyond Turkey, especially
after the organisation’s move to Europe in 1867, evolving into a generic term
as ‘Young Turks’ that signified a new and radical opposition of the young
more or less in all contexts, should testify to the impact and stamina of the
movement.
Series of Breaks
The first critical break in the history of political modernisation in the country
would be initiated with the deposition of Sultan Abdülaziz in 1876 through
a bureaucratic coup. Held answerable for standing in the way of urgently
needed reforms, the sultan was probably murdered after the dethroning,
although the official version would be that he committed suicide. Skipping
the brief (about three months) period when Murad V took to the throne,
only to be deposed through allegations of mental instability brought about by
alcoholism, Abdülhamid II would be invited to the post as the new sultan. This
would follow a rather rigorous interview by the reformist bureaucrats, when
the future sultan would promise to cooperate with the bureaucracy, chiefly
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by allowing and promulgating the first ever Ottoman Constitution (Kânûn-ı

Esâsî) towards a limited government. Relating the heavy toll in the transition,
namely the murder or suicide of a sultan, of a chief of staff (serasker) known
possibly to have instigated the homicide of the sultan, of a number of ministers
(nâzır), and the derangement of yet another sultan, a semi-official historian
of republican Turkey would later describe the events as of a kind ‘that might
surprise even authors of tragedies’.35 Curiously, this historian would note
immediately that the ‘victims’ sacrificed in this transition from an ‘old’ order
to a ‘new’ one had been only a ‘natural’ cost, adding that the losses were ‘by
no means for nothing’.36 Ironically, the same historian would then proceed
to describe the era of Abdülhamid II, which lasted almost thirty-three years
from 1876, as one of unbridled oppression barely experienced or seen until
then. Having promulgated the Constitution drafted by a progressive group
of bureaucrats and intellectuals in the year he came into power, with a newly
elected parliament to be inaugurated in the following year, Abdülhamid II
would nonetheless act in 1878 to indefinitely suspend the parliament and
go on becoming the sultan in the modern history of the country that would
succeed equating his name with archetypal political oppression in the eyes
of all of the otherwise fiercely conflicting political forces, including some of
the leading Islamists. The aversion also by the Islamists contributed further
irony, because the foreign policy that defined the era would later be recalled
as one of pan-Islamism open to the newly formed, anti-colonial Islamist
ideology. Abdülhamid II centralised all power, formed a daunting intelli-
gence apparatus and introduced a vast system of censorship. ‘Homeland’,
‘freedom’ and ‘limited government’ would be among the terms on a list
of expressions strictly prohibited in the print media. He would go as far as
banning the very book Üss-i İnkılâb (Grounds for Revolution/Reformation)
that he himself had commissioned in the first year of his reign to Ahmet
Mithat Efendi, a master literary figure of the time, and which had rejected
all political oppression, advocating basic rights and a constitutional rule
instead.37
The next break would come in the early twentieth century. In the last
decade of the nineteenth century, the Young Ottomans had evolved into a de
facto political party under the name of the Committee of Union and Progress
(İttihâd ve Terakkî Cemiyyeti, CUP), having secretly organised bureaucrats,
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intellectuals and some young military officers in a concerted opposition

against the political rule. The plan of action by the CUP to start a nationwide
rebellion in 1908 would force Abdülhamid II to end the moratorium on
the Constitution, suspended thirty years earlier. The proclamation of this
so-called Second Constitutional Period (İkinci Meşrûtiyet), after the aborted
one in 1876, would create an atmosphere of optimism and political festivity
in the country arguably still unparalleled. The CUP, now a legalised political
party, would win the elections in the same year, with the sole contending
group, the Liberal Party (Ahrâr Fırkası), failing to have elected any of its
candidates for the parliament. The regime change thus initiated would be
complete with the suppression of a series of events breaking out on 13 April
in the following year,38 which the official history would come to describe as a
‘rebellion of the reactionaries’.39 The rebels had allegedly protested against the
latest tuning in the political order by shouting on the streets of Istanbul their
passionate support for the old sharia regime. The third army positioned in
Salonika (Thessaloniki), a CUP stronghold, would depart for Istanbul at once
and quash the rebellion within about two weeks after its start. Charged with
inciting the rebellion, rather iniquitously so – and paradoxically in purported
breach of none other than the sharia that the rebels had championed40 –
Abdülhamid II would be deposed through a bureaucratic coup soon after the
suppression of the rebellion. The deposed sultan would be exiled to Salonika
and Sultan Mehmed Reşad would be brought to the throne to replace him.
Amid allegations, still unsettled by historians, that the ‘rebellion’ had in
fact been engineered either by the CUP having been after a pretext, or the
opposition,41 a military court would sentence forty-nine people to death,
thirty-seven to fortified life imprisonment, and hundreds of others to incar-
ceration and exile.42 More importantly perhaps, the incident would contribute
to the vocabulary of the governing order the epithet ‘reactionary’ (mürteci),
a formidable curse that would be put to good use for about a century in
the political life of the country to stigmatise and disenfranchise opposition.
With the exception of a spell (of about six months) from mid-1912, a CUP
oligarchy would dominate politics and drag the country, to all intents and
purposes, from one disaster to another. The catastrophes experienced under
the CUP rule included World War I and, more appallingly, the systematic
annihilation of the large Ottoman-Armenian community during the war for
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both a diabolic concern for security and, at the same time, in a ghastly experi-
ment towards forging a somewhat homogenous nation, ostensibly with the
Muslim Ottomans tragically cleansed from the freshly lost Balkan territories
in mind. Defining resistance to the heavy oppression under Abdülhamid II
as its whole raison d’être, the CUP is generally thought to have incomparably
aggravated the already miserable state of basic rights and freedoms as soon as
it was in full control from January 1913, so much so that many intellectuals
formerly critical of Abdülhamid II for his oppressive policies would appear
before long to fondly recall the time of oppression under Abdülhamid II, as
with the poet Süleyman Nazif, stating in a poem: ‘Pining now for the days
of the former oppression’ (Hasret olduk eski istibdâda biz). The CUP leaders
would flee the country in a state of panic following the armistice towards the
end of 1918. Tantamount to a total surrender, this deal would bring the war
to a close for Ottoman Turkey.
A growing national resistance in the form of separate civilian initiatives
by locals throughout inner Asia Minor would then be successfully organised
from mid-1919 by a defiant Ottoman pasha, Mustafa Kemal, who would
later come to be known as Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. Engaging
mainly the Greek occupation forces in the west of the country, this popu-
lar movement would sideline the administration in Istanbul by procuring
a hard-fought peace deal with the victors of World War I (Britain, France,
Italy and Greece) in July 1923, the Lausanne Peace Treaty. The National
Assembly created by the resistance movement three years earlier in Ankara
as an alternative to the one in Istanbul would soon vote and declare Turkey
a ‘republic’. The republican Turkey would have the charismatic leader of the
national resistance, Mustafa Kemal, as its first president. Within months,
early in the following year, the National Assembly would abolish the institu-
tion of caliphate as leadership of Muslims worldwide, a status nominally held
since the sixteenth century, and send into exile the members of the imperial
Ottoman dynasty.
This apparently dramatic break with the Ottoman order would, however,
barely hide the more profound continuity between the old and the new. The
connection would soon be bitterly grasped by some of the intelligentsia and
dignitaries who, having quickly turned dissenters, would be promptly sup-
pressed, despite most of them having been on the forefront of the national
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resistance movement with Mustafa Kemal Pasha only recently. The dissidents
were of the opinion, as succinctly articulated by Erik Zürcher, ‘that calling
the state a republic did not in itself bring freedom and that the real differ-
ence was between despotism and democracy, whether under a republican
or a monarchic system’.43 The increasingly tightened political control, justi-
fied through the new sacred of ‘modernisation’ at any cost, would come to
pale, to a certain extent, the despotisms and persecutions under either of the
previous regimes, the CUP rule or the sultanate of Abdülhamid II before
it. The confederation of local organisations that had formed the resistance
during the war of national liberation, the Defence of Rights (Müdafaa-i
Hukûk) movement, had already merged in 1922 with the ruling Republican
People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Fırkası, CHP).44 The party would in turn be
melded with the state apparatus, initiating the so-called ‘single-party regime’
that would last until 1950. The regime would thwart a notion of demo-
cratic competition practically at all levels, notably replacing elections with
appointments for the deputies in the legislative organ. Besides rival political
parties, particularly a liberal initiative by the once close friends of Mustafa
Kemal, the Progressive Republican Party (Terakkiperver Cumhuriyet Fırkası),
long-standing non-governmental organisations that were not controlled
directly by the regime would also be dissolved, such as the nationalist Turkish
Hearths (Türk Ocakları) and a dedicated women’s organisation, the Turkish
Women’s Union (Türk Kadınlar Birliği). A close watch of the academic
world would complement the total print media control under the regime,
with the nonconformists fired in the early 1930s from the only academic
institution of the time, Istanbul University (Darülfünûn). Finally, dress codes
for the general public would be introduced, imposing assumed modern out-
fits on all, to be backed by callous criminal regulations. Most of this would be
facilitated by an emergency rule (Takrîr-i Sükûn) established in the country
on the pretext of the Kurdish insurrection in eastern provinces in 1925.
Speaking of the Kurds, the new regime would continue the CUP experi-
ment in fashioning a homogenous nation and render invisible minorities
such as the Kurds, Assyrians, Jews and Greeks. To be greatly expelled through
a population exchange with Greece, most of the latter group was in effect
formed by the survivors of the little-known slaughter of tens of thousands
during the Turkish War of Independence, especially in the Pontus region
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along the Black Sea coast. A merciless wealth tax (varlık vergisi) imposed on
the leftover non-Muslim minorities in the years 1942 and 1943 would effec-
tively contrive towards the ultimate dispossession and literal pauperisation of
the non-Muslims.
The Independence Tribunals (İstiklâl Mahkemeleri), with their originally
wartime jurisdiction extended, and active between 1920 and 1927, would
issue thousands of death sentences, mostly on the basis of flimsy charges,
and crush all opposition worthy of the name. A researcher who would later
desperately seek to defend these notorious judicial bodies set up in vari-
ous regions would nevertheless be forced to note that the tribunals at issue
‘did not operate in accordance with legal rules but by revolutionary princi-
ples’.45 In addition to this simply astonishing toll in finishing off opposition,
many intellectuals, some of whom having once been rather close to Mustafa
Kemal, would be either officially deported or choose to be self-exiled, such
as Mehmed Âkif, a moderate Islamist and the author of the words of the
new national hymn, and Hâlide Edib, a famed liberal and early feminist who
was cosmopolitan enough to write some of her books directly in English –
presumably considered as ‘too European’ for the new regime. Beyond the
innocence or randomness as revealed in the causal incongruity in the punish-
ments accorded, which is how I have defined victimhood for the purpose of
the argument here, the victims sacrificed by the regime would also and glar-
ingly reveal the monster–saviour paradox in the rituals of communal violence
staged: somehow polluted, the victims would at once serve to purify the now
vigorously reshaped society through the immolations that they would enable.
In short, setting in motion a territorially smaller and radically reformed
Turkey, the modern republic instituted in 1923 would perversely reproduce,
if not intensify, the authoritarian frame of mind that it would ironically and
passionately historicise with the rise of the new regime. This same paradox
would come to be roughly applicable also to the ‘liberal’ reformers who would
seize power in 1950 with a switchover to the multi-party system – ostensibly
as part of an effort, coupled with a perceived Soviet menace at the onset of
the Cold War,46 to integrate the country to the newly victorious ‘democratic
world’, as World War II would end the bulk of authoritarianisms. The liber-
als organised through the Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti, DP), a breakaway
from the CHP, would show next to no interest as they came into power,
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in structurally transforming the system that was clearly open to macabre

abuses, designed purely as a tool of ‘benign’ oppression, with indifference
to genuine democratic accountability. A cynical majoritarianism would thus
shortly set in, and the liberal aspirations articulated earlier would gradually
degenerate into a populist autocracy under the banner of the new sacred, ‘the
popular will’, a notion claimed to have been overlooked by the foregoing
modernisers. Before its first term in a decade-long administration was over,
the DP would already legislate and lay claim for the state treasury to the
assets of the CHP, the former ruling party from which the DP had just dis-
affiliated.47 The non-governmental organisations closely linked to the CHP
would also be dissolved, with all of their property confiscated. The oppression
would grow rather than slacken in the later phases of the DP rule, leading to
increased media censorship, control of universities, restrictions on the free-
dom of assembly and on the political activities of the opposition. Intolerance
to criticism would be combined with practices that had gained the preced-
ing regime under the CHP some notoriety, such as a suspected electoral
fraud in 1957 and bigotry towards the non-Muslim minorities, notably the
state-engineered pogroms in Istanbul in September 1955. The ill-treatment
of the opposition would be on a dramatic rise in the last years of the DP rule,
parallel to a fast declining economy and an alarming fall in popular support,
prompting the government to take steps towards an ultimate liquefaction of
the CHP through the work of an investigation committee set up in the parlia-
ment for that purpose. Hardly overstating the case, Feroz Ahmad notes on
the whole DP era: ‘The positive contribution of the DP to the development
of democratic practice in Turkey was virtually nil; however, their negative
contribution was considerable.’48 The liberal-turned-populist rule would end
in May 1960, with the military, which some would claim to have been egged
on by the opposition,49 taking over the administration.
The coup would usher in the penultimate break in the history of politi-
cal modernisation in the country prior to the transformation to be led by
the AKP about half a century later, which is what this book is about. A
set of show trials conducted by the military would issue a total of fifteen
death sentences, eventually only three of which to be executed (the prime
minister and two members of the cabinet), and thirty-one life imprison-
ments, in addition to various other judgements of incarceration. Among the
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victims in the new period would be members of the Greek community, who
had been exempted from the forcible population exchange with Greece in
early republican Turkey and who had survived the pogroms of 1955. They
would be either officially deported or intimidated and driven away from 1964
during the renewed political tension over Cyprus, reducing the number of
the Greeks in the country to only a few thousand.50 The forced Islamisation
of the remaining Armenians would gain a new momentum.51 Forms of vio-
lence in the absence of the elementary rule of law and fair trial would enable,
and in turn become mystified through, an awakening of the earlier (and yet
‘incomplete’) sacred of the republican modernisation at any cost. The move
would be reflected in the fresh variety of tutelary democracy introduced in
the newly drafted Constitution of 1961, with novel measures to foil possible
relapses inimical to modernisation. This basic law, often described as libertar-
ian for the rights and freedoms it invoked and protected in the immediate
aftermath of the ruthless oppression under the DP rule, would withhold
spheres of politics from the elected power, bringing about an almost formal
distinction between the ‘state’ and the ‘government’. The new measures initi-
ated would instigate the order that would later come to be called an order
of trusteeship or tutelage (vesayet) under the bureaucratic authority, namely
a virtually autonomous army to be represented in the executive organ in a
newly set up National Security Council, and a fortified system of high courts
to keep electoral majorities in check.52 A fine-tuning in 1980 via a singularly
brutal military takeover would add to this order a centralised higher educa-
tion system beyond the reach of elected governments.
The military, the high courts and the higher education system, compris-
ing the ruling bureaucracy together, would be long in place and tried out,
invariably with success, in keeping a tight rein on politics when the AKP
government from November 2002 pitched in a set of confrontational policies
(chiefly on Cyprus and the European integration) in 2004. The subsequent
change in the whole order, rapidly taking shape from 2007, would be com-
plete by 2011. The discernible signs of a new authoritarianism under the
AKP rule would become apparent crudely from early 2012, as detailed in
this book.
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Change and Continuity
This account of breaks in the history of political modernisation in the country

reveals a succession of attempts at transformation following the monarchical
absolutism of the mid-nineteenth century: namely, constitutionalism (1876),
neo-constitutionalism (1909), republicanism53 (1923), populism (1950),
neo-republicanism (1961) and neo-populism (2011). Each of these orders
was organised around a sacred, epitomised, respectively, in ‘freedom’ in the
second half of the nineteenth century, in the ‘nation/patria’ in the early
twentieth century, and finally in ‘modernisation’ and the ‘popular will’ in the
republican era. All of these sacreds originated in meticulously concealed ritual
sacrifices and lynching in a ceaseless series of scapegoating and victimage that
were ultimately traceable to specific instances of mimetic rivalry in each case.
The pattern, fuelled by imitative, impersonating desire, and thus responsible
for somewhat deviant forms of mirroring and emulation between the rivals,
the holders of power and those oppressed, could also be linked to the sinister
mimesis which, as the controversial abuser/abused hypothesis holds, seems to
define desire in the case of everyday abuse in which the victim, we are told,
compulsively imitates the offender.
This apparent continuity barely means, incidentally, that there has been
no difference, no change, between any two successive phases in the flow, such
as the single-party republicanism up to 1950 and the liberal populism that
immediately followed, or the pluralist neo-republicanism from 1961 and the
later Islamo-nationalist or Islamo-nativist (Millî Görüş)54 populism under
the AKP. A striking instance, exemplifying change, is the protracted Kurdish
issue. In the early 1990s, about a decade before the AKP came into power, it
was clearly out of the question for the public authority to acknowledge even
the mere presence of the Kurds in Turkey. Memorably, during the Gulf War
in 1991, when Iraqi Kurdish refugees amassed on the border, Turkish news
outlets were stuck for a term to describe the ethnicity of the refugees, eventu-
ally opting for the then little-known Kurdish word for guerrilla, peshmerga. In
the grip of a paradigm that ignored Kurds not only in the country but amaz-
ingly also abroad, this was an effort on the part of media, under considerable
strain, towards being able just to report the plight of over a million civilians,
mostly women and children. Yet, within a short time, this threshold would
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be left behind, and some of the highest-ranking officials in the public author-
ity, chiefly the then president Turgut Özal, would concede the long-denied
Kurdish identity. The same authority would be observed from 2012 to hold
direct talks with the leadership of the armed wing of the Kurdish political
movement towards a permanent settlement of the issue. Again, the ban on
the hijab in education and in public employment, particularly tightened
through a neo-republican adjustment in February 1997, would come to be
significantly loosened under the subsequent regime. Arguably more impor-
tant in this regard would be the recasting of centre-periphery relations as a
long-standing paradigm of political cosmology in the country, which I dis-
cuss in the next chapter. The liberal intellectuals who passionately supported
the AKP government for being the sole available agent of change would be
surprised to find out from 2011 that, although the paradigm seemed to have
greatly disappeared under the present regime, this huge variation from the
old order had little impact on the deeper current of authoritarianism, which
was still intact.
Here, then, is the rule that governs change under unrelenting and grim
recurrence induced by rivalry based on mimetic desire: there will be myriad
forms of renewal and restyling under the incoming regime, no doubt; yet
the new regime will be ‘offbeat’ only to the extent to which the departures
and differences thus introduced will somehow allow us to recognise the old
in the new. The ‘old’ in this sense refers to no transcendental signified, no
fixed essence, which would be an undeviating and common thread run-
ning through the otherwise conflicting uses of political power. It is rather
a dynamic and non-essentialising continuity that is perhaps best commu-
nicated in Wittgenstein’s useful concept of family resemblance.55 As in a
family formed by blood connections, not a single trait in all, but various
characteristics that notably differ between the family members will serve as
sites of possible triangulation, linking distinct instances to each other, such
as the CUP proto-nationalism, with lethal use of the myths ‘the nation’ and
‘the patria’, and the Islamo-nationalism of the AKP from 2011, within which
those notions remained resilient. The family resemblance at issue takes on
board the fact that the later regime hardly repeated or slavishly reproduced
the CUP oligarchy, known to have ruthlessly ‘purified’ the emerging nation
in the blood of hundreds of thousands of victims. On the contrary, the AKP
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regime would come closest ever to admitting the systematic slaughter of

Armenians under the CUP rule in 1915.
A highly relevant question in this context is whether it is at all possible
to disrupt the cycle that somehow attached the AKP to the CUP a century
earlier, the way, perhaps, as suggested in the hypothesised abuser-abused
pattern, where a reversal is known to be feasible. More specifically, how do
you move from a regime like Nazism in Germany to a subsequent European
democracy that seems to be in clear contrast? Where exactly does the ‘vam-
pire theory’ of interminable recurrence come in, when we do observe what
seems to be a clean break with the past? Sadly, some such optimistic break
may not be a possibility. The transition between the two apparently discon-
tinuous regimes such as Nazism and contemporary European democracy is
arguably enabled, once again, by violence and scapegoating; in this case, the
violence of World War II and the Cold War. Moreover, the new regime that
mystifies itself through a new sacred of democracy, human rights and the rule
of law, thereby manufacturing vital credulity towards its violent order much
more readily than before, may be argued in effect simply to reproduce the
old one at some other level that is not immediately recognisable. This ‘new’
level of violence may involve not only such unmistakeably violent practices
as immigration laws and financial and commercial drifts that exact blood
and dispossession in more inventive and pragmatic ways than before, but
also somewhat eerier practices such as governmentality and biopolitics in the
Foucaldian sense, which I invoke in this book in claiming a basic continuity
between a markedly authoritarian regime such as that in Syria before the civil
war and the ‘humane’ modern democracies.
Yet, there can be another answer to this question of breaking free, not
of violence obviously, which is perennial, but of at least the specific cycle. A
capacity for this kind of break, which was perhaps the case in post-World
War II Germany, may perhaps be facilitated by possible epistemic fallouts in
the specific context, inhibiting or obstructing imitation. A sharp discontinu-
ity in communal knowledge may disrupt and blunt the attraction towards the
desire of the other, prompting the desiring subject to recoil from reiterating
the rival. Or it may transform the rival (that is, the model) from the ‘authen-
tic’ one, in this case the Nazis, to some other model that will start mediating
the desire anew in the place of the authentic model. In other words, a ‘drastic’
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i ntroducti on | 33
change may be conceivable if the focus of desire could somehow be diverted

from the rival. Intercepting humdrum mimicry by somehow reducing the
pull of the ‘original’ model may prevent recurrence, and the desiring subject
may instead steer towards mimicking a tenable and fresh rival outside the
circuit – a new model. This then would be a dramatic variation in the pattern.
That the pattern outlined above is open to such novel mechanisms is evident
in the argument, articulated by Girard, that a major discontinuity seems to
have occurred between archaic and modern societies in generating credulity
towards the order. This is regardless of the fact that the order is always already
based on violence. The modern ‘demystification’ of the whole process of
order, disabling lasting credulity, has ostensibly followed an epistemic sus-
pension at some point. This interference, Girard claims, has brought about an
unending cycle of violence rather than closing it with some finality through
a stable new sacred. In the place of abiding order, the founding violence in
ritual sacrifice now produces simply more violence. Although striving, as ever,
for a mystification that strictly matches the mythic mystification in archaic
societies, the new myths of democracy, the rule of law and an irreducible set
of rights for all are fluid precisely for this reason, in response to the new and
formidable flair for incredulity. Ironically, the ingenious new make-up thus
accorded to the sacred in our time, presenting the reigning order as left wide
open and capable of constantly revising itself, can be said only to intensify
violence in other forms by rendering it smoother and more palatable for
masses, rather than excluding or impeding it altogether.
A final question pertains to the assumed ‘universality’ of the pattern, on
grounds that the human desire on which the pattern is based is universal.
How is the pattern described here a ‘general’ one, since we do not appear
to observe in, say, Norway or Australia, the political drama that has been
unfolding in Turkey? The answer is that we should perhaps be careful not to
confuse the pattern with a specific manifestation. Although the pattern could
be general, the desire that is at the heart of the specific rivalry and violence
is not; it is local. Therefore, the bulk of the stark variations between any two
manifestations of the pattern, say, in Norway and in Turkey respectively, are
attributable arguably to the variations in desire that is tied firmly to a unique
setting. In other words, the pattern may indicate a horizontal continuity
regardless of the location, with the desire ensuring the vertical and temporal
POLAT 9781474416962 PRINT.indd 33 19/08/2016 09:19

continuity in one specific location: all is the same, yet each at once remaining
unique and different. Still, this explanation may not be sufficient to account
for dramatic differentiations out there and seal the issue conclusively. We do
know, however, that the pattern is open to revisionist inputs through epis-
temic dissimilitude, enabling radical changes. It may be the case that some
of the striking divergences or fluctuations in the pattern that we observe out
there may point in the direction of novel factors arising in different settings,
which need to be carefully researched and elaborated on.
Synopsis of the Book
The book is divided into two parts. Part I provides a description of the process
leading to the regime change from late 2002, with the sudden ascendancy of
the AKP in domestic politics. Chapter 1 details the ‘institutional’ change that
took place between 2007 and 2011, signalling a historic shift in the use of
power in the country, long controlled by a staunch and virtually autonomous
bureaucracy, both military and civilian, in the face of fragile democratic
politics. The discussion focuses on the discourse of Europeanisation, though
not in the strict sense used in the context of the European Union, as a unique
leverage used by the AKP in bringing about the change. Originally part and
parcel of the identity politics of the bureaucracy from the nineteenth century,
this long-standing discourse also known as ‘Westernisation’ (Batılılaşma) was
deftly appropriated by forces defiant of the bureaucratic rule to reconfigure
access to power. Following this basic account of the change, Chapter 2 pulls
back the timeline slightly and recounts the fascinating realignment in domes-
tic politics with the rise of the AKP into power. The discussion underlines an
ostensible transformation in the largely essentialising forms of identity poli-
tics that until then defined much of the political cosmology in the country.
The usual cast of identity politics that relied on a rather cynical exploitation
of identity demands seemed significantly to recede in the spell between 2002
and 2007 in favour of a set of civic, non-divisive political gestures around
the reintroduced identity goal of Europeanisation. This remodelling would
expand the electoral compass of the ruling AKP beyond the former iden-
tity alignments, ensuring widening reach, and, equally important, prompt
ambivalence in the bureaucracy, considerably breaking the resistance in the
way of change. Chapter 3 focuses on the extensive legal probes and subse-
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i ntroducti on | 35
quent trials from 2007 in response to alleged attempts towards a military

takeover. Accelerated during the regime change, the investigations and trials
would be uniquely instrumental in silencing the opposition, formal or popu-
lar, in resistance to the recasting of power. The chapter chronicles the legal
cases that would continue in full throttle until late 2013, with a number of
surprise twists to follow, ultimately almost fully aborting the whole process.
The last chapter in this part, Chapter 4, is about the stamina of resistance
to the change, not only in this specific setting but also in the greater region
in the immediate vicinity. The argument is that treating, as was habitu-
ally done, the draconian and unyielding regimes in the region as deviations,
or as vestiges of past and native authoritarianisms, lacked insights into the
ostensible strength of the regimes. A characteristically ‘modern’ rational-
ity, the argument suggests, was clearly implicit in the project of forced and
ambitious emancipation of the masses that largely defined the despotisms in
the region. Motivated by a drive to save the locals ‘from themselves’, such
manifestations of authority were de facto supported by forces, both domestic
and international, that perceived the regimes as enforcers of modernity in
the face of traditional identities and practices. Functioning as a perverse
‘liberation theology’ for promising agency and deliverance from the tutelage
of the local, this ideology not only manufactured a crucial element of consent
in respective domestic societies but also brought together strands of global
neo-conservative thinking, all possibly motivated by a normative commit-
ment to modernity, ultimately in favour of those authoritarianisms.
In Part II, the book depicts politics and rights under the AKP rule from
2011, with some remarkable mimetic continuity with the old regime increas-
ingly in place. Chapter 5 covers the overall domestic context and the main
contours of the Islamo-nationalist populism now in full swing. The discus-
sion looks into the mood in pro-government circles, with some emphasis
on Islamist speculations on democracy – terrifying to the secular masses
– and the effective rule by policy, rather than law, enabled by the growing
cult of Erdoğan. One centrifugal factor detected in portraying the setting is
the formal commitment to the human rights protection system in Europe,
which, paradoxically, acquired greater intensity during the regime change in a
desperate attempt on the part of the government to bypass the former centres
of power, namely the bureaucracy. Chapter 6 is about the historic Gezi Park
POLAT 9781474416962 PRINT.indd 35 19/08/2016 09:19

protests in the summer of 2013, which promised a novel fusion of otherwise

disparate political forces, comparable perhaps to the broad democratic alli-
ance led by the Islamo-nationalist politics from the late 1990s, enduringly
bringing together a colourful variety of political forces, initially in opposition
to an urban development plan in Istanbul. The somewhat harsh response by
the government to the protests, which would do much to damage the reputa-
tion of the administration before international public opinion within only a
span of days, is illustrated in this chapter through the plight of three protesters
– a young man battered within an inch of his life by law enforcement officers,
a young woman persecuted by the judiciary beyond the limits of credibility,
and a child murdered during the protests. The state of the national media,
curbed in independence far exceeding the typical manifestations of media
capture, to be allegedly re-engineered and taken over by the government from
2007 through moot uses of public authority and public resources, is narrated
in Chapter 7. This chapter also looks into the increasing government control
of Internet access. Chapter 8 is on a set of rather dubious practices by the
government in securing success at the ballot box, including the way in which
it allegedly financed politics, arguably transforming democratic pretensions
of the administration into a sham. The chapter includes a section on the
role of the military in the new phase, with an assessment of its possibly resil-
ient reflexes. Chapter 9 illustrates the government policies in a host of long
outstanding issue areas, mostly predating the AKP rule, such as the tension
between piety and secularism, especially in exercises of free speech, the basic
Alevi rights, gross impunity of the security forces in the name of tackling
the Kurdish insurgence, and the debate on the ghastly fate of the Ottoman
Armenians. The chapter also comments on the purported government com-
plicity in the jihadist bloodbath in the greater region following the Arab
Spring. Finally, Chapter 10 focuses on some routine malfeasances in society,
mostly ignored, if not necessarily exacerbated, by an exceptionally strong
administration with an unusually lengthy mandate. The chapter presents
a catalogue of some of the most pressing causes for concern in this regard,
detailing, where available, the government initiatives and actions in respec-
tive areas: femicide, violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and
intersex individuals, especially transgender women, the ordeal of sex workers,
dying prisoners, the astonishing toll of workplace mortality, and, last but
POLAT 9781474416962 PRINT.indd 36 19/08/2016 09:19

i ntroducti on | 37
by no means least, the defacing of urban space in gargantuan proportions

through a construction craze in the wake of the old regime. Endeavouring to
make sense of the highly disputed function of urban construction works for
the government, the chapter also includes an evaluation of the state of the
economy under the AKP rule, which appeared to have failed to modify the
economy structurally, relying merely on various palliative and crisis-ridden
schemes. The concluding chapter muses generally on the regime change, its
potentialities as well as perils, giving thought in the light of the foregoing to a
genuine and lasting idea of change against the ostensibly uninterrupted flow
of desire.
POLAT 9781474416962 PRINT.indd 37 19/08/2016 09:19

POLAT 9781474416962 PRINT.indd 38 19/08/2016 09:19

PART I
CHANGE
POLAT 9781474416962 PRINT.indd 39 19/08/2016 09:19

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© Necati Polat, 2016

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

Typeset in 11/15 Adobe Garamond by

ISBN 978 1 4744 1696 2 (hardback)

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PART II AFTER CHANGE

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O ne frequently articulated observation by the critics claimed with the

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off the charges of dishonest financial dealings, nepotism, mismanagement

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What Exactly Happened?

How do we explain the subsequent authoritarianism, once the regime change

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but was also perhaps conducive to a smoother and healthier transition to

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manifestations in disparate milieus, without necessarily a common thread of

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Identity, Desire, Violence