Turkey Reframed

Constituting Neoliberal Hegemony

İsmet Akça, Ahmet Bekmen, Barış Alp Özden

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781849649803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Economics

The first decade of the 2000s was a period of radical change in Turkish society and politics, marked by the major economic crisis of 2001 and the coming to power of ex-Islamist cadres organised under the Justice and Development Party (AKP). As the 'Turkish model' gains traction across the Middle East, this chronicle of Turkey's recent history dispels some important myths. This period of radical change, with its continuities and breaks, pays close attention to the AKP, the main actor in the creation of a neoliberal hegemony in post-1980 Turkey. The contributors map relations between the AKP and the Kurdish people, the evolution of Turkish nationalism under the AKP and look at how everyday politics, from social welfare to housing, have been effected by the AKP's 'stabilisation strategy'. What is revealed is modern Turkey's conflictual, turbulent and painful recent histories, which vary wildly from the national myths that sustain neoliberal hegemony in the country.

PART I

Politics of Hegemony

CHAPTER ONE

Hegemonic Projects in Post-1980 Turkey and the Changing Forms of Authoritarianism

İsmet Akça

The post-1980 period has witnessed the rise of a state-centric analytical approach in both academic and public milieus in explaining the socio-political power relations and form of the state in Turkey, which has become ‘hegemonic but dissident’ (Yalman 2002). In this line of analysis, the authoritarian nature of the state and the political sphere in Turkey is explained solely by the exclusive power of the state elites over other social actors, including dominant classes and social groups. As a result, class-based socio-political power relations and the capitalist crystallisation of the state are rendered invisible and ignored in explaining the authoritarian restructuring of the political sphere and the state. The political horison has likewise been limited to a democratisation discourse understood simply as the implementation of formal-legal reforms and civilianisation vis-à-vis the military tutelage regime (Akça 2010a).

This chapter draws upon criticisms of such hegemonic state-centric analyses to analyse the socio-political power relations and changing forms of authoritarianism in the post-1980 period through the problematic of hegemony, i.e. through the formation of ‘hegemonic projects’ and ‘accumulation strategies’, as outlined in the introduction of this volume. Although hegemonic projects are manufactured in civil society, political society and the state with the participation of distinct social and political actors, in this chapter I will specifically focus on the level of political society, in which the political parties have exceptional importance in the formation of hegemonic projects in a process of interaction with different social classes and groups. The authoritarianism of the post-1980 period is thus analysed within such a political sociological framework. As Gramsci long ago underlined, ‘the ‘normal’ exercise of hegemony on the now classical terrain of the parliamentary regime is characterised by the combination of force and consent, which balance each other reciprocally, without force predominating excessively over consent’ (Gramsci 1999: 80). Or, as Mark Neocleous puts it, ‘the question of hegemony is not about coercion or consent, but about coercion and consent’ (Neocleous 1996: 42). In that sense, this chapter aims to analyse attempts to form capitalist hegemonic projects and to explore the dynamic relationship between consent and coercion within those processes by dividing post-1980 Turkey into four sub-periods.

The first is the coup d’état of 12 September 1980 and the subsequent military regime. This period can be read through the installation of neoliberal capitalism via militarism, the re-structuring of class-based power relations, and the construction of an authoritarian state form. The second period is the Motherland Party (ANAP) period, which was characterised by a failed attempt at hegemony in the framework of New Right politics. The 1990s, the third sub-period, was marked by a crisis of political hegemony and the dominance of the Neoliberal National Security State. The most recent period, since 2002, has seen the successful implementation of the hegemonic project of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) through neoliberal, conservative and authoritarian populism.

Neoliberal Militarism and Authoritarian Statism

Even though the military coup of 12 September 1980 should not be overemphasised as a factor that explains everything related to the political sociology of our day, it did constitute an important breaking point in the formation of contemporary Turkey. The military intervention was both a consequence of, and a response to, an organic crisis that itself combined crises of capital accumulation and hegemony that had been gradually deepening from the second half of the 1970s onwards. The 1970s were marked by a global accumulation crisis that was manifested in Turkey as the crisis of the inward-oriented accumulation strategy based on import substituting industrialisation policies. The accumulation crisis was organically related to the declining profit rates and its symptomatic manifestation was the lack of foreign currency (Barkey 1990; Keyder 1987; Boratav 1987). After 1977, all fractions of the bourgeoisie agreed to contextualise the crisis in terms of class struggle, specifically by complaining about high wage levels, trade union rights, collective bargaining, and the other rights of the working class (Ozan 2012). The working-class organisations responded by radicalising their struggle in order to resist such attacks. ‘The number of strikes and days lost to strikes increased rapidly, from an average of 65 strikes and just under one million days between 1973 and 1976 to 190 strikes and 3.7 million days between 1977 and 1980’ (Keyder 1987:192). In short, the second half of the 1970s was a period of protracted and heightened class struggle. By 1978, by putting aside intra-class cleavages for the time being in order to focus on the task of disciplining the working class, fractions of the bourgeoisie came to the conclusion that the adoption of IMF-guided neoliberal austerity measures was inevitable. The economic decisions of 24 January 1980 anticipated both the stability measures and structural adjustment policies guided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) (Sönmez 1980, 1984). However, the minority government of the centre-right Justice Party (AP) did not have the necessary political power to apply them. Instead, it was the military regime that was able to implement them.

The military intervention was not the inevitable result of the accumulation crisis yet the latter was part of, and a negative factor in, the crisis of hegemony. The political scene was marked by a crisis of representation, which was itself a symptom of the crisis of hegemony. On the one hand, the left populist strategy of the centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP), which was unable to win enough votes to form a single-party government, was unable to get the consent of the Turkish bourgeoisie or the more radical fractions of the working class (Ataay 2006). On the other hand, the authoritarian populist strategy of the centre-right AP won the support of important sections of the bourgeoisie but lost, to an important extent, its capacity to get the consent of the dominated classes. In the second half of the 1970s, the AP moved closer to radical right parties (both Islamist and nationalist), formed coalition governments with those parties, and consistently called for an authoritarianisation under the parliamentary regime by arguing for the necessity of ‘re-establishing the state authority’ (Cizre-Sakallıoğlu 1993; Demirel 2004). Outside parliamentary politics, the revolutionary leftist politics emerged to become more popularised in the 1970s. However, it too was incapable of developing a counter-hegemonic project due to its engagement in an escalating armed anti-fascist struggle, which isolated radical leftists from ordinary citizens, and also because of the ideological and political crisis which was reflected in the dramatic fragmentation of the socialist and communist left (Aydınoğlu 2007; Salah 1984). The political crisis was deepened further by the violent response to the rise of the revolutionary left and working-class movements by the security actors of the state and the fascist movement in Turkey. Thus, because parliamentary politics could not develop a hegemonic project to establish the unity of the dominant classes and gain the consent of the dominated classes, it was unable to deal with Turkey’s multifaceted crisis.

As a result, all the fractions of the bourgeoisie, together with their political and military representatives, who considered that their survival was at stake, engaged in an open class struggle through authoritarian strategies, first under the civilian regime, then under the military regime (Sönmez 1984). In fact, the 12 September process had already started in 1978. The militarisation of the political sphere had been increasing during the 1970s as the political struggle of the working class and revolutionary left movements became radicalised. From the end of 1978, the major cities were already governed by martial law administration with the military assuming the role of policing everyday life, and using extensive coercion and violence in order to discipline both the radical left political movements and the working class (Üskül 1997). The National Security Council closely monitored and intervened in the parliamentary political process (Çelik 2008). As Simon Clarke (1992: 148) notes, ‘a crisis in the state form arises when the working-class challenge to the power of the capital extends to a challenge to the constitutional authority of the state’. By 1980, this was the perception of the Turkish bourgeoisie and the military. It was the political dimension of the protracted class struggle of the 1970s that reflected itself as a crisis of state. In the military officers’ language, this corresponded to a threat to the survival of the state, to state security issues, according to which ‘the constitutional order and the security of life and property was under challenge’.¹ A clear illustration of the organic relation between the class struggle and the military intervention came from Halit Narin, the then head of the most radical organisation of the Turkish bourgeoisie, namely the Turkish Confederation of Employer Associations (TİSK). Just before the military intervention, he commented that ‘production will not increase unless the DGMs [State Security Courts] are founded’ and then, just after the military intervention, referring to the workers, added, ‘Up until now you laughed, now it is our turn’ (Ozan 2012).

Hector Schamis’ (1991) arguments concerning the Latin American military interventions in the 1970s (Chile and Uruguay in 1973, Argentina in 1976) also apply to Turkey in 1980. That is, these military interventions were qualitatively different from previous bureaucratic authoritarian interventions and military regimes since they totally broke with the previous hegemonic project and accumulation strategy to engage in a total restructuring. ‘Their policies display a striking similarity to the neoconservative projects of some advanced industrial countries. Issues such as “ungovernability”, “crisis of the state” and “demand overload” (Schamis 1991: 202) were on their agenda. Their practice was not a deepening of ISI through the political and economic exclusion of popular masses, as was the case with bureaucratic authoritarianism. Rather, they restructured the economy, society and politics through ‘a combination of market economics and repressive tactics’ (Schamis 1991: 207). Since the social and political struggle of the working class was seen as responsible for the organic crisis in question, the main concern of the military regime was ‘putting an end to class-based politics’ (Yalman 2002: 38). This was also the main prerequisite of the transition to the new accumulation strategy, materialised in the decisions of 24 January 1980. The military regime also implemented the neoliberal stabilisation and structural adjustment policies required by the IMF and WB (Sönmez 1984).

Ending class-based politics no doubt meant the disciplining of the working-class movement, the radical left and the democratic social opposition in order to solidify the political power of the bourgeoisie. In this context, the violence and coercion against these societal powers constituted a strategy of discipline in the short run. Under the military regime, more than 650,000 people were detained; police files were opened on about 1,680,000 people; there were 210,000 political trials, in which 7,000 people faced the death penalty; 50 of 517 death penalties were executed; 300 people died in prisons for allegedly unspecified reasons; 171 people died from torture; 1,680,000 people were classified in police files, 388,000 people were deprived of their right to a passport; 30,000 people were fired from the civil service; 14,000 people lost their citizenship; 39 tonnes of published material were destroyed; and 23,677 associations were closed down (Öngider 2005; Mavioğlu 2004).

The long-term strategy of the military regime included restructuring the institutional architecture of the state, narrowing the political sphere for dominated social classes and groups, limiting the possibilities of political democracy, and the securitisation of the political to inscribe and establish a new balance of forces between classes. In fact, such changes were not specific to countries such as Turkey, nor they can be explained solely by the autonomous political power of the military. This transformation, which can be conceptualised through Poulantzas’ concept of ‘authoritarian statism’, reflected rather a structural tendency of neoliberal capitalism. Poulantzas first used the concept of ‘authoritarian statism’ in 1978 in order to describe the new ‘normal form of state’ under construction in the face of the crisis of capitalism. Authoritarian statism is characterised by:

intensified state control over every sphere of social life combined with radical decline of the institutions of political democracy and with draconian and multiform curtailment of so-called ‘formal’ liberties’, the transfer of power from the legislative to the executive and to the limited and upper levels of public administration, the extensive use of decree laws, the decline of law and the elimination of the formal separation of powers, crisis of political representation reflected in the decline of political parties and their statisation by losing their social-class ties. (Poulantzas 2000: 203–204, see also 217–247)

The Turkish military regime institutionalised such a state form through the 1982 constitution and all the main laws it enacted. Among the 669 laws enacted under the military regime were laws on political parties, elections, trade unions, collective bargaining and strikes, the senior judicial system (Constitutional Court, Court of Appeal, High Council of Judges and Prosecutors), State Security Courts, martial law and the state of emergency. The new juridico-political structure produced by the military regime thus narrowed the boundaries of the political sphere and political participation to a great extent. It favoured a metaphysical, sacred state positioned against the individual and society. All basic and political rights and freedoms were undermined by legal terms open to arbitrary interpretation, such as ‘the survival of the state’, ‘national security’, ‘public order’ and ‘public morality’. The executive was especially strengthened over the legislative in the name of the creation of a state-strong government-strong administration that could not be touched by societal powers. The decision-making mechanisms within the executive were centralised even more through the prime minister, in institutions directly connected to the prime ministry or in institutions such as the National Security Council (MGK). Governmental decrees were frequently used in order to bypass the legislative in favour of the executive. The capacity of political parties to establish organic relations with trade unions and organised social classes and groups was severely undermined. Their scope of activity was severely contracted and their closure was made easier. The universities were put under strict state control by establishing the Council of Higher Education (YÖK) (Parla 1993, 1995; Tanör 2002).

Organised labour was excluded from the political decision-making process and disciplined economically. Labour union activities were first suspended then severely restricted through the new legislation on trade unions, collective bargaining and strikes (Doğan 2005 and in this volume). Another strategy was the depoliticisation of class identities and discrediting the trade union movement through the discourse of authoritarian individualism, ‘by appealing to virtuous virtues of individuals’ (Yalman 2002:41). The military regime differentiated good workers, who were industrious, patriotic and did not define themselves by class identity, from bad workers, who were ideological and oriented towards class struggle. As the leader of the 1980 coup makers, General Kenan Evren, put it:

Industrial peace was disturbed with strikes and similar action slowing down production so that the economy, already suffering from bottlenecks, worsened further because of ideologically inspired strikes . . . All rights of the industrious and patriotic Turkish worker will be safeguarded within the framework of current economic conditions. However, the activities of certain labour bosses who exploit the innocent Turkish worker and resort to all kinds of pressures and tricks to use them in the direction of their own ideological views and personal interests instead of trying to protect workers’ rights will never be permitted. All sorts of measures will be taken for all employers to help improve labour peace without deviating from legal rules. (General Secretariat of the National Security Council 1982: 27, 231–232)

The peculiarity of this subsequent authoritarian state form in countries in which the transition to neoliberal capitalism was realised by a military regime is the central role of the military. In Turkey’s constitution, the military bureaucracy was defined as the third organ of the executive, along with the government and the state president. The MGK, which was founded by the 1961 constitution after the military coup of 27 May 1960, was reinforced by the 1980 constitution to become more influential in the political sphere. The number of military members increased and the members are cited one by one, while the power of sanction of MGK decisions was strengthened, the military members’ dominance was increased, and its power to enforce decisions was also enhanced. In addition, the content of the ‘national security’ concept became so widely defined that all issues pertaining to the political, economic, social and cultural spheres, and both internal and external threats, could be categorised as ‘national security issues’, hence under the authority of military power. The MGK has become an institution collecting data, analysing issues, defining principally the political orientation, and controlling and following up the implementation of policies in all these areas. That is, the MGK and its general secretariat have been given new powers that make it a shadow government. ‘A double-headed political system’ both at the executive and juridical levels was created, with the military enjoying prerogatives at political, juridical and economic levels (Cizre-Sakallıoğlu 1997; Çelik 2008; Bayramoğlu 2004).

The critical point to emphasise here is that this new authoritarian state form was not solely or even primarily the result of the autonomous political power of the Turkish military, as suggested in the hegemonic state-centred paradigm (Akça 2010a). Rather, it was a combined result of neoliberalism and militarism. The securitisation of politics was part of the ‘invalidation of democracy, which lies at the centre of the ‘politics of neoliberalism’ (Munck 2005). As for the technocratisation of economics and politics, which is the other main strategy of ‘the invalidation of democracy’, that was institutionalised by the New Right policies of subsequent civil governments.

The 1980s: The New Right’s Failed Attempt at Hegemony

The transition to an electoral regime took place in November 1983, when the newly founded ANAP got 45 per cent of the votes in the general election from which previous political parties and many of their prominent figures were banned. The ANAP and its leader, Turgut Özal, followed an almost typically New Right political line, though with some Turkish peculiarities. While the ANAP was able to form a single-party government between 1983 and 1991, its percentage of the vote fell continuously, to 36.3 per cent in 1987, 24 per cent in 1991, and just 21.8 per cent in the local elections of 1989.

New Right ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Politics of Hegemony
• Part II: Re-orientation(s) of the Social Question(s)
• Notes on Contributors
• References
• Index