Ihsan Yilmaz spoke about the challenges to civil society, press freedom, freedom of speech and pluralistic democracy in the aftermath of the August presidential elections in Turkey on Thursday, September 4, 2014. Other domestic issues such as the Kurdish issue and abuses of power against the individuals and civil society will be also covered. Dr. Yilmaz will touch upon the foreign policy challenges as well, ranging from middle east to black sea.
Ihsan Yilmaz is Associate Professor of Political Science at Fatih University, Istanbul, Turkey where he is also the Director of the Ph.D. Programme in Political Science and International Relations at the university’s Institute of Social Sciences. He received his BA in Political Science and International Relations from the Bosporus University in 1994 and completed his Ph.D. at the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the University of London in 1999. He then worked at the University of Oxford as a Fellow between 1999 and 2001 and taught Turkish government and politics, legal sociology, comparative law and Islamic law at SOAS, the University of London between 2001 and 2008. He was the Deputy Chair of the Centre for Ethnic Minority Studies at SOAS (2003-2008) and the Director of the London Centre for Social Studies (2003-2008). He is the author of (2005) Muslim Laws, Politics and Society in Modern Nation States: Dynamic Legal Pluralisms in England, Turkey, and Pakistan, Aldershot, Ashgate.
He is the editor of Turkish Journal of Politics (TJP). He has published his work in international scholarly journals such as British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Middle East Journal, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Muslim World, International Journal of Turkish Studies, Journal for Islamic Studies, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Journal of Caucasian and Central Asian Studies, Journal of Economic and Social Research, International Law and Politics Journal, European Journal of Economic and Political Studies, Turkish Journal of Politics, Journal of Research Society of Pakistan, and Insight Turkey. He is a regular columnist of Today’s Zaman, an English language daily published in Turkey. His current research interests are Islam-constitutional law-human rights; and Federal Shariat Court of Pakistan.
Summary
Dr. Ihsan Yilmaz, an expert, and Islam-constitutional law-human rights shared several insights on the current Turkish political atmosphere, within the context of its political history. Often people fail to realize that Turkey actually has a long history of not only Islamism but also secularism and democracy that dates back into the Ottoman Empire.
In the 17th and 18th century the Ottoman caliph began “to ’copy and paste’ Western institutions” to increase progress. The Ottoman state then became more secular and, by the end of the 19th century, “all laws were secular”. Furthermore, the first parliament in the Muslim world was established in 1876 during the Ottoman Empire, which included both Muslim and non-Muslim representatives. Therefore “democracy did not come to Turkey just after the establishment of the Republic” (7:20). The focus during the beginning of the Republic was therefore not so much about democracy as it was about “constructing a homogenous nation” (7:40).
The focus became nationalism; the new government used the “ideological apparatus of the state” as a way to build an identity around Turkey, through the law, education, media, and religion. There was “no private religion in Turkey… [And] only the state can teach [religion] because they wanted to implement their own version of national Turkish Islam”. These teachings were focused on “nationalism, heroism, obeying the rulers, respecting the state as if it was a sacred institution”. In order to be a respected citizen you had to be considered ‘civilized’; however, demographically only about 20% of the Turkish population actually fit the “respected citizen mold”. According to Yilmaz, it is the secular elite that as controlled all of the society until the beginning of the 21st century and the rise of the AKP party.
The AKP party began to rise in power around the time that the Republic began to pursue a membership in NATO because in order for Turkey to become a member, Turkey had to be a multiparty system and “with democracy all of these submerged and suppressed identities [the other 80% of the population] come forward” (14:14). This gave rise to Turkish Islam as a group, which was “anti-western, but mild and always worked within the parameters of democracy”. Initially, they were unsuccessful until the AKP party realized that unless the party became pro-democracy and pro-human rights, they would be unable to take or maintain power. Therefore with their new platform that included pro-EU, pro-secularism, and pro-democracy policies, the AKP won the 2001 elections in a landslide victory.
The party stuck to its commitments up until 2011, where signs of increased authoritative tendencies and a new trajectory towards Islamist policies began. By 2011, Erdogan had sidelined much of the government and his own party. He was able to use the courts to eliminate competition from other parties and to eliminate any military threat of a coup, and furthermore, he received 50% of the votes. With this lack of opposition, Erdogan has now been able to talk openly against the secularized section of society, and at this point “prefers to justify [his decisions] with his own religious view, instead of relying on a secular justification” (23:02). Furthermore, Erdogan is proposing a constitutional amendment that would eliminate any type of checks or balances on the presidential position, which may be successful if he wins the 2015 election.
That being said, there are several secular and religious groups that are pro-human rights and European relations in Turkey. Therefore this possible authoritarian regime that may result if the AKP wins the next election, cannot last because the population has had a taste of democracy. Looking at the history of Turkey will “give us confidence that Turkey will not just be any other Middle Eastern nation, that is not democratic and so on, but also it will show us that it is a kind of fragile situation at the center of the Middle East that does not guarantee that democracy will not continue without any problems” (4:30).