Happy to announce the publication and public examination of my dissertation titled "Beyond Populism: From Scholarship to Politics in “New” Turkey."

It's available at http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-51-6486-5 and the defense will be livestreamed via Zoom: https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/69821122103?pwd=M21ocnoxL1RuUzBlTE1pcVIvZFoyUT09

#Turkey #populism https://twitter.com/SocSciHelsinki/status/1303305383704961026

@PaulTLevin has graciously agreed to act as the opponent at the defence on Thursday the 10th, which will be overseen by the custos @vmikkomattila.

A little bit of summary before the big date:

1- Book argues that the moment mainstream media, pundits & scholarship began to call #Erdoğan & #AKP populist was, in fact, roughly the time when they took a hard turn to radical-right where nativism & authoritarianism came to fore at the expense of their earlier #populism.

2- Contrary to mainstream narrative on the AKP and Erdoğan, the research finds that the party entered the political scene in #Turkey as populist parties elsewhere do: claiming to represent the down-trodden people against an illegitimately powerful elite.

3- In a typically populist way, AKP codified its opponents as members of an illegitimately powerful elite who didn’t so much defend Kemalism b/c they believed in its principles but rather weaponised it to preserve their hegemonic position vis-à-vis the ordinary people.

4- It was baffling to see that despite its archetypally populist discourse (which the book doesn’t treat as sthg negative), at the time so few in media & academia defined AKP as such. Hence, I went down the scholarly rabbit hole to find the reason for that little curiosity.

5- What I found was a fascinating symbiotic relationship between the mainstream intellectual accounts of Turkish politics and the AKP’s “conservative democratic” self-branding. Let me try to explain it as briefly as I can within the limits of this thread:

6- Lots of brilliant examinations of AKP’s “conservative democracy” were produced over the years, which identified it as a self-conscious attempt by ex-islamists who had to re-brand themselves post-9/11 in order to enlist West’s backing against ultra-secularist enemies at home.

7- Though this was accurate & accounted for reasons behind AKP’s zealously pro-EU discourse, it didn’t help me in the populism front, so to speak. Until I went through everything Erdoğan and prominent AKP ideologues such as Yalçın Akdoğan wrote and said during those early years.

8- What Erdoğan, Akdoğan & others were doing at the time was (as we say in Turkish) “tereciye tere satmak” or (less accurately) “preaching to the choir”! That is to say, “conservative democracy” was being marketed to those who were longing for it for decades!

9- Having (consciously or not) formed their entire understanding of Turkey around Mardin’s framework of #centre-periphery, mainstream analysts at home & abroad read everything through the lenses of a dichotomy btw Kemalist bureaucratic centre vs. religious peripheral masses.

10- According to this understanding, #populism was a birth-defect of Turkish democracy that was gifted by DP in 50s. It offered no more than clientalism, patronage & instrumentalization of religion to take over central power by manipulating peripheral masses’ parochial interests.

11- Interestingly enough, Mardin imported this model from Edward Shils, whose elitist account of populism was developed in collaboration w/ Richard Hofstadter. They saw populism as a result of failed/incomplete modernisation whereby ignorant peripheral masses’ inherent failure...

12- to appreciate superiority of elite’s central value system, rather than being overcome by modernity, is manipulated by populists. Modern tools such as education, markets, and mass media enable elite values to infiltrate the peripheral masses, resulting in a ‘wholesome’ society

13- with a minimal gap between centre & periphery. Mardin’s contribution was to adapt this model to Turkish context. He identifies the emergence of populism in the Kemalist elite’s failure to permeate their own values into the periphery thoroughly enough.

14- As a result of this failure, structural C-P gap deepened w/ each failed attempt by Kemalist C to impose its value system to P, where masses held onto their own values/interests harder & harder. It is in this sense populism is seen as the birth-defect of Turkish democracy.

15- Populism is seen as the most persistent way in which political demagogues convert recurrent failure of C into political capital by manipulating P’s values/interest, which also widens C-P gap. Conversely, the supposedly “right” way of conducting politics is to close that gap.

16- This is, ofc, the ultimate liberal dream of creating a unitary society with no antagonisms! The final horizon of politics here is to achieve politics w/out politics. Which is exactly what AKP's “conservative democracy" offered. A uniquely capable political actor who isn't...

17- just perfectly in touch with C & P simultaneously but also wants to unite them. That's why liberal-minded mainstream analysts couldn’t resist it! And that is also why they couldn’t possibly tarnish this liberal messiah image of Erdogan/AKP with a term as vile as populist!

18- For that meant, looking through the C-P, the exact opposite! Hence the literature is filled w/ praises of AKP's “non-populist” character. It is also fascinating to see in early AKP discourse this C-P terminology word by word!

19- So much so that Erdoğan & Akdoğan both published in a 2006 edited volume alongside some of the most prominent liberal scholars of Turkish politics. It was only when AKP took a hard turn to radical-right, articulating populist elements of its earlier discourse through...

20- nativism & authoritarianism from 2011-onwards that an avalanche of accusations of “populism” came crashing into the scene. Since populism was a bad thing that bad politicians did, it took for Erdoğan to beat & gas millions in front of cameras during Gezi to deserve that title

21- The book argues that, in post-2011 & especially post-Gezi era, what defines AKP ideology is not so much populism but nativism & authoritarianism. e.g. “people” gave way to “nation” with a special emphasis on its “native and national” (yerli ve milli) character.

22- Simultaneously, the target of AKP’s attacks was not so much the “elite” any more but “non-native” members of the society whose very opposition to the party’s rule was rendered as a “criminal foreign conspiracy” aimed at weakening the “nation.”

23- Although populism has been present throughout the 18-years of AKP era in gradually diminishing degrees, due to this discursive transformation, book concludes that it’s analytically much more accurate to emphasize the radical-right character of Erdogan’s rule today. #end

24- While much of the book’s methodology is indebted to discourse-theoretical conception of populism developed by Yannis Stavrakakis & Benjamin de Cleen, populist radical-right as an uneven combination of nativism, authoritarianism & populism is borrowed from @CasMudde

25- And finally the analysis of #Erdoganism as a distinct political discourse and its perils for politics, in turn, is inspired by the concept of bipolar hegemony @epalonen developed in her analysis of contemporary Hungarian politics.

I guess a picture of the book is in order after all this rant