In Turkey, the regime slides from soft to hard totalitarianism

“Humanitarian aid to [civilians] must
be allowed immediately. ‘Surrender or starve’ tactics are directly contrary to
the law of war.”

Any western leader might easily use
these words to scold the Turkish state, and its starvation of Kurdish towns to
the south-east of the country. But it would be highly unlikely. In fact, John
Kerry’s tweet was aimed at the
Syrian regime, not the Turkish one.

Why do American leaders describe
Assad’s strategy of ‘surrender or starve’ as a war crime, while they ignore
Erdoğan’s?

Perhaps because Turkey is an American
ally, the hypocrisy is natural. But take one look at America’s mainstream
press, and the reality is clearly far more complex. In November 2015, the New York Times magazine ran
a gushing feature, “A dream of utopia in ISIS’ backyard”, which set out western
Kurdistan as the only fulfilment of the Arab Spring’s dreams of autonomy and
gender equality. Pictures of women fighting for Rojava filled the pages of the
magazine, echoing the frequent mainstream media fascination with female
guerillas ever since the rise of ISIS.

Autonomy in western Kurdistan has
been built by the Turkish regime’s biggest enemy, the Kurdish guerrilla
movement PKK and its Syrian and other affiliates. At any place during the last
50 years, such enthusiastic support for the Turkish state’s armed rivals would
be unthinkable anywhere near the American mainstream. Today, forces within that
mainstream are trying to push American diplomacy in a more pro-Kurdish
direction.

The
official American silence regarding Turkish brutalities in northern Kurdistan
is not only the result of hypocrisy (a given), but also confusion.

As the
Kurds remain the only effective ground force fighting ISIS, and the Turkish
regime keeps shifting in a fascistic direction, liberal-conservative America is
completely confounded over who its real, long-term allies in the region are. (The
melding of confusion and hypocrisy reached another peak when the whole western
world roared against Turkey’s shelling of Syria’s Kurds, while even the liberal
press was silent as Turkey butchered its own Kurds only a few days ago). This
is not simply a difficulty of the moment. Structurally, emergent Middle Eastern
dynamics have dynamited Pax Americana
and the values it stands for. Neither liberalism nor peaceful conservatism are
viable options for the region any more. The whole Middle East is sliding
towards varieties of extreme, violent conservatism or fascism – a word I use
with care.

The choice of using any derivative of
the word ‘fascist’ will be considered bad taste, given that the label has come
to be used as a curse rather than an analytical category. However, as many
regimes throughout the world shift to the extreme right today, it is not only
possible but necessary to distinguish those that are based on mass mobilization
from the rest.

Erdoğan’s turn to authoritarianism
has been compared to the
rise of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. But if (following Poulantzas) we classify
non-liberal capitalist regimes according to three ideal types (Bonapartism or
right-wing populism, military dictatorship, fascism), the new AKP’s parallels
with fascism are much stronger. Unlike other forms of right-wing dictatorship,
fascism is based on a political party’s extensive civic networks. Although
Bonapartism also involves some mobilization of the populace, the dictator’s
organic links with the people he mobilizes are much weaker. The Italian and
German fascist parties, by contrast, built on a long tradition of civic
participation and mass mobilization, which runs deeper than loose right-wing
networks (most significantly, in the case of Italy, fascism incorporated
converts from syndicalism and left-wing socialism).

In all of these regards, Turkey’s new
path is definitively distinct from most post-war dictatorships (such as Salazar’s
Portugal and post-Metaxas Greece, as well as Pinochet’s Chile), which were
primarily built on the institution of the military (though they emulated
aspects of the fascist experience). This even includes Franco’s Spain, the
fascistic roots of which withered away in time.

The party’s neo-fascism is also a response to the unravelling of global neoliberalism.

Nevertheless, the AKP’s new path
cannot be simply characterized as fascism, since it is definitely breaking new
ground. This is not only due to Turkish specificities, but the intervention of
historical time. The fascist experience, squarely situated in the interwar era,
cannot be directly repeated today. At the level of mass movements, Third World
revolutions, Maoism, and ultimately the Islamic revolution of Iran have followed
the interwar years. In Turkey’s new regime, we can see traces of all of these
(or at least, responses to these).

Importantly, the party’s neo-fascism
is also a response to the unravelling of global neoliberalism, which clearly
has different dynamics than the unravelling of classical liberalism that
occurred in the 1920s. Most starkly, the absence of an organized left and the
relative insignificance of organized labour signal that today’s post-liberal
regimes are under different kinds of pressures.

Despite these historical and
structural differences, the AKP’s authoritarian turn feeds from sources that
can be compared to interwar fascisms.

In its (liberal-conservative) first
decade, the party had liquidated remnants of Islamist populism (known as
National Vision) from its ranks. Some of the liquidators had targeted National Vision
in their youth because it was not radical enough. However, the discourse of
liquidation during 2002-2005 was based on Islamic liberalism. As a result of
this liquidation, the party had joined (and indeed became the new leader of)
Turkey’s old power bloc (while at the same time weeding off Kemalists).

From the mid-2000s, the party started
to mobilize radical and revolutionary Islamists. Two socio-political
organizations that were key to this mobilization can give us an idea about the
regime’s new direction after that point. The Haksöz circle, with its roots in
Iran’s Islamic revolution, remained a part of anti-regime street action in the
party’s first ten years. Now, whenever it takes to the streets, it is to
support the regime.

More significantly, a quite large and
old Islamist organization, generally known as the Malatya circle, had upheld
what some journalists called a proletarian version of Islam. Coming from an
Islamist-nationalist background (influenced by the Italian experience to the
point of sewing brown shirts for themselves while training in paramilitary
camps), the Malatya circle had repented its nationalism and shifted in a social
revolutionary direction under the impact of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. But from
the mid-to-late 2000s, some of the Malatya circle’s members came to occupy
central places in the state bureaucracy, as well as the mainstream media: they
now put their revolutionary rhetoric to the service of a capitalist regime.

Salafi-jihadism has emerged as the only dynamic option that can channel Islamic anti-establishment energies.

Broader than these, the civic
networks of newspapers, debate circles, Qur’an courses, dormitories, and so on,
intensified their activities with an explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-western
discourse, from around 2010. Many nodes in the movement-regime complex began to
sound like Third World revolutionaries of the 1960s-1970s. An excessive focus
on the person of the leader, even though he might have parallels to the Führer
here and the nephew Bonaparte there, obscure these structural dynamics driving
Turkey’s new regime.

Finally, the rise of Salafism
throughout the globe should be taken as a special factor that places a unique
stamp on Turkey’s neo-fascism. Turkey’s sharp turn to authoritarianism cannot
be analysed in isolation from the new global direction of the Islamist
movement. As a result of the failure of Islamic liberalism in Turkey and
revolutionary Islam’s shortcomings in Iran, Salafi-jihadism has emerged as the
only dynamic option that can channel Islamic anti-establishment energies.

As a confluence of all of these
factors, religion has trumped race and nation as the primary thread that runs
through the regime’s (and its allies’) totalitarianism.

Nevertheless, the continuity with
historical fascism should not be completely downplayed either. One direct
thread that connects the interwar years to Turkish neo-fascism is the
remobilization of the Grey Wolves. The paramilitary right-wing nationalist
organizations known as the Grey Wolves were quite effective in fighting
Turkey’s short surge of left-wing mobilization in the 1970s. The organization
and ideology of these forces were directly modeled on Spanish Falangism. The
military coup in 1980 split the Grey Wolves into a more Islamic and less
Islamic faction. The Nationalist Action Party of the last three decades
effectively de-mobilized the less Islamic faction, which remains by far the
more populous one. (The AKP’s grand coalition of the 2000s already included
Nationalist Action figures, but of the liberalized and de-mobilized variety).

But one of the AKP’s glaring
strategic successes over the last couple of years has been in re-energising and
re-mobilising both factions; severing them from their parties; and building violent
organizations by the name of Ottoman Hearths on the remnants of their base
organizations (Ülkü Ocakları and Alperen Ocakları). Especially since June 2015,
these base organizations have burnt down Kurdish party buildings and attacked
Kurdish protesters.

Yet another expression of the AKP’s
absorption of Turkey’s extreme right-wing tradition can be seen in prominent mafia
leaders joining forces with the party. One of these figures, Sedat Peker,
recently threatened academics who signed an anti-war petition by declaring
he would “bathe in their blood.”

These paramilitary forces are
obviously not alone in fighting the Kurds, but the lines between them and the
official security forces have been blurred. In their siege of several Kurdish
towns, the Turkish military and police forces are currently deploying both verses
from the Qur’an and ultranationalist slogans as they kill militants — a ‘bottom-up
spirit’ that was relatively lacking during the anti-Kurdish war of the 1990s.

And as I have pointed out, the making
of Turkey’s new regime intersects with the rise of ISIS. I want to further
highlight the three-way intersection that exists between intensifying global
Salafi-jihadism, the Turkish regime, and the mass mobilization I have just
described.

Turkey has become a breeding ground
for ISIS. In two massive explosions in July and October 2015, ISIS massacred a
total of 136 people. As importantly, in the second of these explosions, the
police tear-gassed the survivors and blocked ambulances. And perhaps more
significantly, football fans at a national game booed the moment of silence
held for the victims. The international press did not pay much attention, until
other Turkish football fans booed the Paris victims in November. During both
games, the moment of silence was interrupted by not only boos, but Islamist
slogans as well.

What does this show? The recent
authoritarian turn in Turkey goes far beyond mere regime change. It signals
mass mobilisation in favour of radical-right ideas.

In Turkey, the formation of the
totalitarian regime has followed a quite different path from the establishment
of German and Italian fascisms. Most intriguingly, the same party has first
built a liberal-conservative order (based on the American model) with its own
hands, and then demolished this system, not least through purging the most
creative liberal and conservative elements within it (most importantly the
conservative Gülen community and the liberal intelligentsia, who had
spearheaded the soft totalitarianism of the party’s first decade).

Another striking difference from the
interwar years is the intense popular mobilization the party’s totalitarianism still
faces. When Trotsky and Gramsci theorised fascism as the movement of the petty-bourgeoisie,
sandwiched between the militant working class and a monopolistic business
class, they got one element entirely wrong: interwar fascism arose from the
ashes of the ‘red years’ (Europe’s revolutionary uprisings of 1919-1921). The
petty-bourgeoisie’s most important contribution was cementing the dispersed and
disorganised power blocs, rather than quashing the labour movement and
communism, which were already in decline in much of western and central Europe.

The AKP similarly rose on the
shoulders of an upstart bourgeoisie in alliance with the petty-bourgeoisie and
saved Turkey’s power bloc from its hopeless fragmentation. But the similarity
ends there. The Kurdish movement is going through probably its strongest moment
in its entire history. This is a strange fascism that is being built in the
middle of ongoing and perpetual civil war.

A comparison might be made between
Spain and Turkey, since Franco’s regime was also established through a civil war.
But the Spanish Civil War was extremely intense, covered the whole country, and
lasted for only three years. The invincibility of the Kurdish movement (and its
expanding Kurdish and Turkish base) sharply distinguishes Turkey from all
interwar totalitarianisms, which did not have such strong contenders as the
PKK. Despite that, the regional and ethnic spine of the PKK presents only a
partial break on the total fascistisation of Turkey.

There is another dimension we should
not downplay. I have already alluded to Spain’s central distinction from Italy
and Germany earlier – its military-based dictatorship counted on intense mass
mobilization only shortly, but did not have the civic and political means with
which to sustain this mobilization (nor the appetite to do so). Consequently,
unlike Germany and Italy, it did not face constantly mobilised masses. Italian
and German fascisms derived their power from these masses, but that power
ultimately became self-destructive: within the boundaries of capitalism, the
desires of the mobilized masses could not be satisfied. Their thirst for action
could only be quenched through imperialist expansion, which also allowed these
regimes to delay and divert the masses’ dissatisfactions (with the persistence
of capitalism despite fascism’s anti-capitalist discourse). These regimes were
already strongly motivated towards war, but perpetual anti-capitalist mass
mobilization added structural pressures that rendered their imperialist efforts
even more chaotic and unpredictable. Post-war Spain obviously did not encounter
these problems, and became a regime that could be tolerated by global
capitalism.

The AKP is building a very creative, revised version of fascism.

The new Turkish regime, by contrast,
has been intensifying its mass mobilisation. Its newspapers are resorting to a
discourse that is more anti-capitalist by the day. The resulting bellicosity of
the masses and regime causes concern among western powers.

At the same time, paradoxically, the
regime is trying to convince the west that it is global capitalism’s best bet
for peace in the Middle East, although unlike only a couple of years ago, it is
not so convincing in this regard. But even this willingness demonstrates that
its relationship to global capitalism is very different from that of interwar
fascism’s. The Turkish regime is also the west’s stick against the Middle
Eastern refugees. The EU especially needs Turkey to stop the immigrant flow,
and therefore neglects all kinds of abuses in the country.

If Turkey is not Franco’s Spain, it
is not exactly Hitler’s Germany either. The PKK’s strength and Turkey’s complex
relations with the west can be taken as the two main reasons why the shift to hard
totalitarianism has been indecisive.

In short, the AKP is building a very
creative, revised version of fascism. We must focus in on its exceptional
qualities: being built by a previously liberal-conservative party, which was
once the darling of the west and the Middle East’s liberals. Why did this
transformation happen?

The mainstream narrative still takes
the AKP’s first two terms (at least its first term) as a glaring success. The economy
was in wonderful shape. Freedoms accumulated. Then, the prime minister amassed
too much power. And power corrupts. (As side factors, mainstream accounts hold
that the blockage of the European process and the Arab Spring also added to his
delusions).

What this narrative neglects is
double-fold: the repression of Alevis, striking workers, environmentalists,
socialists, and occasionally the Kurds during the AKP’s first two terms; and
the western world’s and Turkish liberals’ occasional support for this
repression. All of these had already culminated in a soft totalitarianism,
where all kinds of anti-systemic politics came to be perceived as irrational
and ‘anti-democratic’ (and silently ‘dealt with’).

The title of a 2014
editorial from the Financial Times
exemplifies the liberal analysis of Turkey’s dilemma: “Arrogance undoes the
Turkish model”. The real problem, according to once-unquestioning supporters of
the AKP, is that the AKP was not AKP enough: it retained too much of the
political and ideological culture (mostly, Turkish nationalism) it had
inherited from the older regime.

Verso Books. All rights reserved.I advance an alternative explanation:
liberalising capitalism multiplies points of tension (unlike especially
non-fascist forms of corporatism, which are designed to contain them). Only a
few countries are strong enough to repress or absorb the tensions created by
liberalism. I argue that quite generalizable mechanisms, rather than Erdoğan’s
personality or Turkish culture, are at the root of Turkey’s recent descent into
authoritarian totalitarianism.

So, what are these generalizable
mechanisms? Liberal democracy fights against the enemies of liberal democracy.
That’s far from surprising. Hence, both the west and Turkish liberals supported
(or created excuses for, or ignored) the repression of anti-market forces
during the first two terms of the AKP. What caught them off-guard was the
turning of this repressive machinery against themselves.

Over the last couple of years, the
AKP regime has moved from soft totalitarianism to hard totalitarianism. Its
exclusion (now carried out publicly and with pride) expanded from Alevis,
striking workers, environmentalists, and socialists to liberals and the Gülen
Community (a liberal Islamic group). There are certain conjunctural reasons for
this. For the Gülen community, for instance, the primary problem turned out to
be Israel. There were struggles between the Gülen community and old Islamist
cadres regarding how to share the spoils of power. This never got out of hand
until Erdoğan’s relations with Israel grew tense. After that point, the two
components of the old AKP regime gradually split.

But there is also a broader dynamic
at play here. Liberal democracy always suppresses its enemies (one need only
look to America’s Red Scare). In the advanced world, liberal democracy can live
with such exceptions. But in ‘emerging markets’ there are too many enemies to
repress, and the McCarthyism sooner or later runs loose.

American democracy could survive as a
liberal democracy despite the heavy repression of socialists and radical labour.
However, in much of Europe, these forces were so strong that the state’s
repressive apparatuses expanded indefinitely. When they were not sufficient,
civilians were mobilized, and fascism was born.

What is clear, in light of the
Turkish case, is that liberalisation and democratisation cannot go hand-in-hand
for an extended period of time in structurally weaker societies. While the
spoils of a semi-productive model could satisfy many social groups, the downturn
of the world economy after 2008 gradually dynamited the cash basis of the AKP’s
consent. In this new global scene, the party had to incorporate more and more
Islamist cadres to retain a mobilised base, but these very cadres pushed the
regime into a collision with Israel, the liberal intelligentsia, and various
(local and foreign) capitalist interests.

Under increasing pressures from the
emboldened cadres (and the opening granted by the Arab Spring), the party’s
hardly contained imperial ambitions were bolstered further and eventually ran
out of control. Becoming more Islamist first seemed to be a wonderful
resolution to the problems created by slowing economic growth, but this
political choice backfired.

The resemblances to interwar Italy
are unmistakable. Il Duce first united Italy’s fragmented upper classes and put
a stagnant Italian capitalism on an efficient path, not through only top-down
policies, but by mobilising ex-socialists, ex-syndicalists, former officers and
middle strata. Similarly, the AKP’s empowerment of Islamist cadres throughout
the 2000s restored the post-1980 neoliberal-conservative regime. The economic
liberalism, cultural conservatism, and political authoritarianism that a
military regime initiated in 1980 were first ‘democratised’ by a
liberal-conservative party (ANAP) in the 1980s. Despite an initial decade of
popular enthusiasm, liberal conservatism alienated broad strata in the 1990s.

The neoliberal actors could save
Turkey’s post-1980 direction only through merging with their former enemies.
The Islamists inherited these lethargic actors’ overall package and modified it
through radical policies and discourses. And the results are gradually turning
out to be almost as fatal as Italian fascism for their erstwhile benefactors.

Cihan Tugal's new book, "The
Fall of the Turkish Model", will be published by Verso.