From Weimar to Ankara: Carl Schmitt,sovereignty and democracy

Introduction

In this article, I examine the implications of Carl Schmitt’s philosophy of law and politics on the emergence, maintenance and transformation of a legal/political order in Turkey. ¹ Schmitt is a controversial figure and his association with anti-legalism and anti-Semitism is unsettling (Scheuerman 1993). Having written extensively about the constitutional crises of the short-lived Weimar Republic (1919–1933), Schmitt’s central concern was restoring order in the context of political turmoil and economic problems the republic had to deal with. He abhorred liberalism, which he equated with pluralism and compromise, and despised parliamentarianism, as it was not true democracy – which for him required a distinction between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ and meant identity (sameness) between the ruler and the ruled (Schmitt 2004, 28; Schmitt 2008, 241–42, 264–67).

Nonetheless, his influence as a political and legal theorist has been substantial. According to Andreas Kalyvas, he is considered ‘one of the most prominent constitutional and political thinkers of our century’ (the 20th century; Kalyvas 1999, 87–88). Schmitt informs contemporary research in examination of several theoretical and practical issues, including the reasons of the failure of liberal constitutionalism (Dyzenhaus 1997; McCormick 1997a), the tension between liberalism and democracy (Mouffe 1993), the notion of sovereignty (Kalyvas 1999), state of emergency (Agamben 1998), the authoritarian tendencies in the idea of free-market liberalism (Cristi 1998) and the conflictual nature of the political (Mouffe 2005). Because Schmitt defines the political in terms of homogeneity and rejects heterogeneity, and because his thought has authoritarian conclusions, those who have been inspired by Schmitt reworked his writings (Loughlin 2014), proposed to be reconstructive and selective about his thought (Kalyvas 1999) or intended to use his writings to reject his own conclusions (i.e. Schmitt against Schmitt) (Mouffe 2005).

Political and legal theorists to date have discussed Schmitt’s ideas mainly within the context of the Weimar Republic. Nonetheless, the issues examined by Schmitt as well as contemporary scholars who critically engage with his ideas are specific neither to the Weimar constitution nor to Western democracies. Contemporary Turkish politics and the constitutional crises in this country may be an illustrative case and thus another laboratory through which one could draw insights about the implications of Schmitt’s ideas. In fact, Schmitt considered the political regime of the newly established Turkish Republic as an example of ‘modern democracy’ in Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, as he defined the concept (Schmitt 1985 [1923], 9). The democratic nature of the regime, for Schmitt, was due to the population exchange between Turkey and Greece that aimed to create national homogeneity (p. 9); he referred to this example again in Constitutional Theory (CT) (Schmitt 2008 [1928], 262). Almost a century after Schmitt had appreciated the homogenous nature of the regime in Turkey, the political movement of the Justice and Development Party (or Ak Parti or Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, hereafter AKP; i.e. the coalition of the political Islamists, conservatives and nationalists) challenged the old establishment and claimed to represent the political unity of the Turkish nation in their own way.

The aim of this article is to examine this political struggle over the political decision of the regime in the modern Turkish political history. Such decision is political, in Schmitt’s account, because it involves making a friend/enemy distinction or distinguishing ‘us’ from ‘them’. He suggests that the community as a whole, distinguishing itself from outsiders, agrees on the parameters of its political unity (Schmitt 2008, 257–64). A democratic political form is built on this decision; such that, a regime is democratic to the extent that rulers identify with this decision (Schmitt 2008, 264–67; Schmitt 1985, 8–17). A democratic ruler, thus, does not represent a particular faction or an interest, but the political unity (Schmitt 2008, 239–48). Nonetheless, it is not entirely clear who or which entity makes or should make a political decision in Schmitt. On the one hand, Schmitt suggested that the political community as a whole makes such a decision. On the other hand, starting with Dictatorship (Schmitt 2013), he sought an agent – either commissioned by the people or self-authorized – which would guard the present political decision or could bring about a new one. The example of modern Turkish political history is then illustrative, enabling an examination of the connection between a claim to represent the political unity of a nation or people and a political wilfulness to decide the foundational norms and values of a constitutional settlement in a given political community.

Indeed, Turkey being an illustrative case, both for theoretical and practical purposes, is not something new. In the aftermath of World War II, this country’s secular republican regime was presented by modernists as a model for the Muslim world (Lerner 1958; Lewis 2002). They suggested that traditional societies that are allegedly late in modernization and celebration of the ideals of the Enlightenment might consciously seek to forge a trail similar to that taken by Turkey. For modernists, separation of state and religion and accepting the authority of positive law would eventually weaken traditional institutions. Nonetheless, this prediction failed in Turkey; radical institutional reforms have not precluded the influence of religion in society. The modernist approach lost its popularity in the late 1970s, when it faced criticism for its problematic teleological understanding of historical development and for its confidence that statism could explain modernization as reflected in state policies (Yavuz 2003, 16–17).

Turkey became popular once again during the 2011 Arab Spring. This time, the country was presented as a model for the North African and Middle Eastern countries, as its secular and liberal–democratic constitutional regime was said to have managed to accommodate the political demands of Islamist groups and social conservatives (Bâli 2011; Dede 2011). The earlier performance of the AKP and its motivation to gain the European Union (EU) accession and to collaborate with the liberal international order were shown as evidence supporting the claim. These commentators now struggle to make sense of the dramatic changes in the attitude of the AKP since 2011 (Taspinar 2014). Its recent authoritarian turn has been startling for scholars and practitioners alike because they saw the AKP as an agent of democratization and of political and economic stability.

Under these circumstances, contemporary Turkish politics is an illuminating case for studying political movements, in the words of Ulrich Preuss (who reflects on the possible implications of Schmitt’s constitutional thought), that struggle for political power to claim that they have understood the silence or the diffuse acclamation of the people correctly or, respectively, the overwhelming feelings of public opinion, and hence are legitimized to act on their behalf outside the constitution (Preuss 2017, 479; emphasis in original).

The political project of the AKP and the charismatic leadership of Erdogan befit this argument; although they did not refer to Schmitt, nor is there a clear indication that they have read his work. The political leadership of the AKP has established a new regime and a political order. This founding act has been largely justified by the political narrative suggesting a presumed historical antagonism between the repressed Muslim majority and the modernist ruling elites.

According to this narrative, the republican regime precluded the expression of the will of the people in at least two ways. First, it culturally repressed the Muslim majority by restricting the presence and expression of Islam in the public sphere. Furthermore, modernist elites imposed a new world view, one that did not match with the cultural identity of the people (Küçükömer 1969; Mardin 1973). Second, the new regime did not allow other groups to challenge the establishment. The military and the bureaucratic elite thus acted as the guardian of the state or of the founding ideology of the Republic (Işıksel 2013).

Building on this narrative, the political movement of the AKP claimed to establish a better democracy than the regime guarded by the military and the bureaucracy. However, the party’s challenge to the establishment and the guardianship model (or, as it is called in Turkey, the tutelary regime) did not result in a liberal–democratic constitution (i.e. as the second narrative had expected). In contrast, the party gradually took an authoritarian turn, starting with its second term (2007–2011). This authoritarian turn was conflated and was partly justified, with the narrative of conservative groups’ oppression or exclusion by the Kemalist bureaucratic elites. Although in the intellectual history of political Islam, and that of Turkish conservatism, there was sufficient source of inspiration for the founders of the AKP, ² they managed to merge the resentment of the conservatives and political Islamists with the criticisms of some major liberal and socialist intellectuals.

For instance, the arguments of Mardin and Küçükömer have proved to be extremely influential: not only in informing the scholarly debate, but their work also had a practical influence on the political life in modern Turkey. In his seminal article, Mardin (1973) proposed the tension between a bureaucratic centre and a rural periphery – whose identity is shaped by religion – as an analytical framework for understanding Turkish politics. He argues:

The Republican People’s Party, the single party through which Republican policies were channeled, was unable to establish contact with the rural masses…The members of the bureaucratic class under the Republic had little notion of identifying themselves with the peasantry. (p. 183)

Küçükömer (1969), in a similar way to Mardin’s analytical template, described the Kemalist regime as one of repression, particularly oppressing the identity of the majority. For his part, Küçükömer’s contribution was to designate the allegedly oppressed Muslim majority with the role of an agency that could realize political and social transformation towards a democratic society. ³

Indeed, Erdogan/AKP committed himself/themselves to establish a new regime after 2013, by claiming that the party and its leader offer a genuine representation of political unity by virtue of identifying with the will of the people on the grounds of cultural similarity. Thus, the AKP’s authoritarian turn has attempted to fix an alleged aberration concerning the mismatch between the ideals of the founders of the Republic and the ethos of the society by, to use Schmitt’s terms, establishing an identity (sameness) between the ruler and the ruled; between the governor and the governed (Schmitt 2008, 264).

The argument is developed in the following order. ‘Decisionism and democracy’ section highlights the key concepts in Schmitt’s decisionist constitutional theory and elucidates them in relation to his understanding of democracy. Building on the conceptual framework developed in previous sections, ‘Political decision in Turkey’ section examines unresolved antagonism between the founding ideology of the republic and the world-view of conservatives. ‘The AKP and the new normalcy’ section reflects on the period of AKP rule (2002–present) followed by concluding remarks in the last section.

Decisionism and democracy

Schmitt characterizes democracy as a political form in which the rulers and all the ruled share substantive identity (Schmitt 2004, 28; Schmitt 2008, 241–42, 264–67). The precondition of such identification is that the community as a whole creates a political identity by deciding its outsiders (Schmitt 2008, 257–64). This implies that the community cannot take a political form and cannot be democratic when it does not distinguish insiders from outsiders.

Schmitt expressed these ideas in Crises of Parliamentary Democracy (CPD) (Schmitt 1985) and Concept of the Political (CP) (Schmitt 2005). In CPD, Schmitt suggests, ‘Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second – if need arises – elimination or eradication of heterogeneity’ (p. 9). Schmitt revised his earlier thoughts that he developed in CPD and CP, but key elements in his thought concerning the connection between political identity and democracy remained intact. In CT, he introduced the principle of political equality as a condition of democracy (p. 257–267). He also introduced the principle of representation, which he designated as one of the two principles of political form, with the other principle being identity (Schmitt 2008, 239–48).

However, he insisted that equality could be realized when a political community distinguishes itself from a constitutive outside. He argues, ‘The democratic concept of equality is a political concept and, like every genuine political concept, includes the possibility of distinction. Political democracy, therefore, cannot rest on the inability to distinguish among persons, but rather on the quality of belonging to a particular people’. He also submits, ‘This quality of belonging to a people can be defined by very different elements (ideas of common race, belief, common destiny, and tradition)’ (CT, 258).

Meanwhile, Schmitt’s usage of representation is related neither to representative democracy nor to direct democracy (Rasch 2017, 330). He uses representation in symbolic terms; namely, what is being represented is the political unity of the people (pp. 239–48). He even argues that, in every state, there must be someone saying ‘I am the State’ (p. 241). From his approach to democracy and representation, he concludes that a liberal–democratic constitution cannot be a democratic political form, because it does not involve a distinction, and thus fails to preserve political unity and political equality (Schmitt 2008, 235–38, 258).

In CT, Schmitt adopts a historical and contingent explanation by expounding different forms of the substance of democratic equality (pp. 259–63). Here, he considers national democracy (and, national homogeneity) among the possible manifestations of substantial equality. Schmitt revisits Greek state theory, medieval theory, religious convictions, national democracy and the Bolshevik policy of the Soviet Republic (CT, pp. 259–263). In each type, for Schmitt, the condition for the possibility of democratic equality is the distinction between insiders and outsiders (or friends and enemies).

Schmitt continues to see national homogeneity as a prerequisite of national democracy in CT. ‘The nation concept means’, Schmitt argues, ‘a people individualized through a politically distinctive consciousness’. (p. 262). Schmitt then lists a number of aspects that can contribute to the unity of the nation. They include ‘common language, common historical destiny, traditions and remembrances, and common political goals and hopes’ (p. 262). He thus does not regard ethnic homogeneity as a prerequisite for collective identity. He even suggests that the linguistic differences in a community can be overcome by ‘genuine revolutions and victorious wars’, which foster ‘the feeling of national belonging’ (p. 262). Elsewhere in CT, when explaining the ‘subject of constitution-making power’ (p. 126), he separates ‘nation’ from ‘people’. Nation refers, for Schmitt, to

the people as a unity capable of political action, with the consciousness of its political distinctiveness and with the will to political existence, while the people not existing as a nation is somehow only something that belongs together ethnically or culturally, but it is not necessarily a bonding of men existing politically. (p. 127)

On this account, Dyzenhaus (1997, 3) argues that the ultimate sovereign-creating decisions of politics count as such because they express and constitute the most fundamental categories of politics: the categories of ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’. He describes this as follows:

A friend is a fellow member of a homogeneous nation or people, and the criteria for homogeneity are determined existentially, that is, by a genuine decision about the existence of such a unit within the parameters of a particular situation. Conversely, an enemy is that individual or group excluded by the criteria of substantive homogeneity given in the decision. (1997, 4)

In short, Schmitt’s understanding of democracy and the people or nation as the subject of constitution-making are linked to his concept of the political: a democratic political form requires distinguishing friends and enemies. The implication of this distinction, as Schmitt explores in CT, is a decisionist constitutional theory.

Schmitt’s decisionism integrates the question of constitution-making capacity (power or authority) into constitutional thought (Schmitt 2008, 64). Natural law theory and legal positivism found this capacity and its pertinence to the validity of the constitution redundant, because that which creates a constitution is ‘political, metaphysical, or theological’ (Loughlin 2014, 222). For Schmitt, the validity of a constitution is not explained by positive-norm or hierarchy of norms, but is instead generated from a ‘constitution-making capacity (power or authority)’, which establishes the constitution/state (Schmitt 2008, 64). More tellingly, a normative view of the constitution advanced by legal positivists and natural law theorists is incapable of grasping the political decision behind the constitution, because this view discards the authority that generates political power (i.e. constituent power) from the sphere of law. On the contrary, a decisionist view suggests that there is always a political decision that explains the emergence of a constitution (Schmitt 2008). As Loughlin expresses, “Constitutions are not purely normative constructions: they are bound up with the historical processes of statebuilding. Modern constitutions, drafted at particular moments in time, establish their authority only through a political process in which allegiance is forged” (Loughlin 2014, 227). Bockenford (p. 9, fn. 9) goes further and, while considering Schmitt’s decisionism in relation to sovereignty, argues that ‘Sovereignty, defined legally, does not mean a monopoly of coercion or power but a monopoly of decision’.

This brings us to the one of Schmitt’s most-cited statements: the ‘sovereign is who decides on the exception’ (Schmitt 2005, 5). Building on Schmitt, McCormick intriguingly argues that the sovereign makes two decisions: ‘whether there is an extreme emergency as well as what must be done to eliminate it’ (McCormick 1997b, 169; Schmitt 1985, 5). Furthermore, a sovereign not only determines the distinction between the friend/enemy but also decides whether the exceptional situation should be addressed via restoration of the present constitutional order or creation of a new one. The second option allows the sovereign to determine the distinction between normalcy and the exception.

Political decision in Turkey

The founders of the Turkish Republic ⁵ expressed the ethos (that which is characteristic of the society) and the telos (the direction in which the society moves) of the new state as modernization, secularism and an ethnically homogenous nation state. ⁶ This amounts to the political decision of the founders of the republic. This political decision, associated with Kemalism (i.e. the founding ideology of the republic named after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk), was ‘determined to build a nation-state out of the multi-national Ottoman Empire, and then to modernize it on Western lines’ (Cizre-Sakallioḡlu 1994, 255). Secularism, nationalism and Islam were related to each other in a peculiar way.

The founders of the republic adopted a rationalist and positivistic world view, through which they thought to change a traditional society. The mono-party regime (the Republican Peoples’ Party, CHP) tried to achieve a great social and political transformation in the 1920s and the 1930s by imposing radically secular policies and by pursuing a state-building process that abandoned the major political and cultural institutions of the ancien regime (Keyman 2007). The Sultanate was officially abolished in 1922, before the new Turkish Republic was proclaimed in 29 October 1923. The new state soon abolished the institution of Caliphate, in 1924. The same year, the state took the control over education, abrogated religious schools (medrese), replaced the Ottoman Ministry of Sharia and Waqfs with the Directorate of Religious Affairs in order to control and regulate religious affairs of Sunni population (Somer 2015, 28) and abolished religious courts. These reforms were followed by a ban on mystic orders and sects (tarikats) in 1925, and in 1926 implemented a civil code that was a direct translation of the Swiss Civil Code. Religious law (the Shariat) was eliminated from the criminal law, along with a constitutional reference to Islam in as the religion of the state, in 1928. Also, in 1928, the Latin alphabet replaced the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, which is a version of Persian–Arabic script. Finally, laicism was introduced to the constitution as a foundational principle in 1937.

However, the meaning and use of secularism was politically charged. The intention of the founders was to replace the traditional marker of identity (i.e. Islam) with that of secular nationalism. Secularism, thus, had a political function. It was a key element of a political project for both establishing political unity and transforming society. On the one hand, as Cizre-Sakallioḡlu (1996, 255) contends, ‘Secularism became entangled with the definition of the nation as a homogeneous, uni-ethnic (Turkish), uni-linguistic (Turkish), and uni-sectarian (Sunni) entity’ (p. 234). On the other hand, both secularism and nationalism, or secular nationalism, were key elements of a ‘gigantic project of Westernization’ (Cizre-Sakallioḡlu 1996, 234). Their understanding of nationalism thus sharply differed from that of the Islamists and conservative groups; these groups privileged Islam and were not content with the identity politics of the modern state. This will be expanded upon in the following.

The understanding of Kemalist secularism, although it is often affiliated with French laicite, has been at odds with the Western understanding of the term. As has been mentioned earlier, there was no separation of religion and the state, because Islam was controlled by the state. What is more, the state was not neutral (in the liberal understanding of the term) against all religions. The Directorate of Religious Affairs provided religious services only for the Sunni population. Under a secularization process, Islam did not disappear, but was reinvented and reinterpreted. For the Kemalist ruling class, the religious authorities of the old regime (i.e. Ulema) defended a reactionary view of Islam and hindered progress and technological developments. The Kemalists contended that Islam was not against modernity and the ideals of Enlightenment.

But this does not mean that the Kemalist regime intended to modernize Islam from a theological standpoint. The Kemalist state approached Islam instrumentally, for the purpose of justifying its secular policies. In particular, Ataturk resorted to Islam to justify reforms and policies in the fields of ‘modern education, sexual equality, and technological and infrastructural investments’ (Cizre-Sakallioḡlu 1996, 236). Under the militant phase of secularism in the 1920 and 1930s, there was no practical need for appealing to Islam. When the military – supposedly the most secular institution and the guardian of the political decision – invoked Islam in the wake of its takeover of political power in 1980, the context and conditions were different. The military wished to use Islam in a way compatible with nationalism against the threat of communism (Eligür 2010). However, nationalism in this blend has little to share with the usage of nationalism in a rationalist and positivistic manner in earlier periods of the republic. In the case of the 1980s, nationalism was shaped by the Turkish conservative discourse. This discourse had different views about nationalism and Islam, and about the relationship between both, than the views advocated by the Kemalist elites in the 1920s.

The Republic was founded in the aftermath of a war of liberation against the imperialist powers, but the enemy of the new state was identified to be the Ottoman Empire. For republican elites, the Ottoman Empire had been too slow to adapt to new sciences and modern industry, due to the influences of religion and tradition (Bora 2015, 39–43). For the founding elites, the Ottoman Empire was ancien regime, or from Schmitt’s political-existential account, the constitutive other.

However, the Turkish Republic failed to establish hegemony over socially conservative groups. The experience of the Turkish leaders differed from those of French republicans and the German state, for example, which won their Kulturkampf and managed to impose their will over the Catholic Church around the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Hobsbawm 1987, 99, 266). By contrast, the modernization attempts of the Turkish Republic were incomplete, as the whole society did not celebrate it. This created an unresolved tension about the political decision of the Republic and the ideal people.

Turkish political Islamists/conservatives rejected the idea that the present situation was normal. That the Republic abandoned the regulating principle of the historically genuine political decision, or ethos of the Ottoman state (i.e. normalcy in Islamist/conservative thought): the supreme state (Devlet-i Aliyye), social order (Nizam- ı Alem) and a willfullness to the world domination of Islam (i’lay-ı kelimetullah) (Bora 2015, 32; see also Ocak 1998; Turan 1969). ⁷ With Schmitt’s concepts in mind, Turkish political Islamist/conservative thought’s definition of normality and exception concerns the first sovereign decision: whether or not the present order is an ‘exception’. Cizre-Sakallioḡlu (1994, 255) argues, ‘In general, as bases of state formation and legitimation, Islam and the radical variant of pan-Turkish nationalism have had an antagonistic relationship with Kemalism throughout the life of the Republic’.

The modernization of the political system and society along Western lines had already begun in the 19th century. Turkish authors (mostly conservative but including some liberal) contended that this process opened a gap between the world view of rulers and the cultural identity of the majority of society; this gap was further deepened by the proclamation of the republic in 1923. Under these circumstances, those who were not content with the radical changes (i.e. conservatives broadly defined) in general agreed on the need to problematize the excesses of Turkish modernization (e.g. radical secularism) and on the fear of an erosion of the culture (Bora 2015). Turkish political Islam/conservatives have thought that adopting Western culture has corrupted the society’s authentic identity (Bora 2015, 41; Küçükömer 1969). Most conservative thinkers have tried to accommodate religion and tradition within the republican state and endorsed the political legitimacy of the new state but by critically engaging with the new political regime (Çetinsaya 1999).

In political sphere, conservative right-wing parties (the Democrat Party, Justice Party, the Motherland Party, the True Path Party and AKP) mobilized socially conservative groups since 1946 by emphasizing the elitist, exclusionary and anti-Islamic nature of the mono-party period of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and that of the establishment. They vividly criticized the secularization of society (not the idea of secular positive law itself) and the guardianship role played by the military, the judiciary and the bureaucrats. Mainstream right-wing parties never directly questioned the figure of Ataturk or the republican form of the state. Nonetheless, these still kept a discourse of resentment to the establishment. For instance, the famous motto of the right-wing Democrat Party, which won the elections in 1950 and ruled the country until the military coup in 1960, was, ‘It’s enough, it’s now up to the people to decide’ (Edelman et al. 2015, 36). This motto set the discursive frame for all successor right-wing parties, each of which, including the AKP, tried to connect to the Democrat Party tradition. The brutal execution of the DP leader by the military junta in 1960, unsurpisingly, intensified social resentment to the Kemalist establishment.

Resentment of Turkish political conservatives overlapped with the concerns of the Islamists. By both accounts, Kemalist elites tried to impose secularization – an untenable social ethos – upon a traditional society whose common reference of identity was Islam. Both saw the secular republic as an exception in Turkish history (i.e. a state that was founded and governed by unfitting principles to the society), as noted in the previous section. The republican elites, according to both, turned away from Islam and accelerated moral decay by adopting Western culture, norms and institutions.

Islamists lacked a theory of revolution, but others worked on this on their behalf. Anti-Kemalist liberals and socialists, who have also been critical of the mono-party era (1923–1950), viewed the early years of the republic a despotic regime that endeavoured to engineer a homogenous society through top-down reforms. Not only conservative groups, but also non-Muslim groups, Alawites and Kurds (most of which also were also conservative), were negatively affected by this attempt. Liberals and socialists refuted the republican project of homogenization, because its state-building process excluded these groups from politics and marginalized them in society. This led many critical intellectuals to conclude that the Turkish Republic brought a new form of oppressor–oppressed relationship between the Kemalist elites (i.e. the founding establishment), the state-sponsored bourgeoisie and urban middle classes and the conservative populace and other minority groups. For instance, as an author suggests, ‘Islam has always remained a strong “symbolic force” in the social identity formation of the Turkish people’ (Keyman 2007, 217). Nonetheless, for many commentators, the founding ideology ignored this fact, resulting in the exclusion of the vast majority and their political demands both from the founding ideology and the political institutions of the new state.

Some authors among those intellectuals thought that Turkey could only be democratized by the agency of conservative religious populace that had been repressed by the authoritarian state. The ur-text of this position was theorized by a socialist, İdris Küçükömer (1969), titled ‘The Alienation of the System’ (Düzenin Yabancılaşması). Even the title is telling about how the Marxist theory has influenced this theoretical position; what was alienated in Turkish politics, according to this view, was the conservative society. By this account, Turkey could become a liberal–democratic country only by the agency of the then-oppressed conservative Muslim community. Similar to agential function of the working class that is supposed to collapse the bourgeois order and emancipate society; conservative groups would bring the repressive Kemalist regime to end, according to Küçükömer’s influential argument. It connected Marxist theory of revolution and to the agency of the political Islamists and/or conservatives.

Küçükömer’s argument, although inspired by Marxist theory, refuted historical materialism and class struggle. Conservative groups, on this account, were not a class like the proletariat. In place of historical materialism, Küçükömer found a new analytical frame to expound the alleged suppression of conservative populace; namely, antagonistic relationship between the repressive state and (civil) society. This frame reconsidered the oppressor–oppressed relationship in terms of identity politics because, on this frame, the repressiveness of the state derives from imposition of a foreign culture in a traditional society.

Küçükömer’s argument has further implications. Küçükömer’s position confronts to the normalcy of the new state by defying its founding ideology and social engineering vision in a similar vein to Mardin’s centre–periphery argument. Nonetheless, according to this argument, flaws within the new state could be corrected through the electoral process, or within the frame of the positive norms of the constitutional settlement.

Both Küçükömer’s argument and Islamists/conservatives challenge refer to creation a political regime that is consonant with the cultural identity of the society. However, there is a noticeable difference: Islamist/conservatives intend to revive an even stronger state tradition, the imagined golden age of which was in the early period of the Ottoman Empire and the last quarter of the 19th century.

Turkish political Islam/conservative thought has never been anti-statist, which is reflected in phrases such as Devlet- kadim (i.e. deep-rooted state, which refers to an established state tradition), ⁸ Din-u-devlet (i.e. religion and state, which refers to an identity – sameness – between state and the religion) and Devlet-ebed-muddet (i.e. state’s eternal existence, which refers to trans-historical characteristics of the state) (Bora 2015, 32; Ocak 1998, 82–83). ⁹ These three interpretations of the state inform Turkish political Islamist/conservative political thought in at least three ways. ¹⁰

The first is to see the Turkish state as transcendental metaphysical entity or an imagined ontological construct (Bora 2015, 32, 58; Çinar and Duran 2008, 24; Heper 1985). The second concerns perceiving the Turkish state as a trans-historical entity. This suggests an un-interrupted continuity in the Turkish state. ¹¹ The third is to normalize the supremacy of the state over other domains such as the economic, moral and legal spheres, for the political sphere executes its own rationality and ethics. Such rationality, or raison d’etat, does not only confer to the state’s ultimate authority to protect the territory and the people, but also to promote the common good (Görgün 2000; Heper 1985; İnalcık 2000; Ocak 1998).

Such vision was manifested in the ideology of a Turkish–Islam synthesis that emerged after the 1960s and was a constitutive element of conservatism. It integrated into right-wing ideologies positioned both at the centre and the periphery (Çetinsaya 1999; Duran and Aydın 2013). On this account, the modern republic deviated from the historical norm; it has not maintained the identity between the state and religion, as I have already mentioned, but it also renounced a historical mission to spread Islam globally. ¹² Instead, the new state adopted a limited geostrategic vision of the Turkish state. ¹³ Thus, in conservative thought, the republic was a historical aberration not only because it culturally abandoned Islam and intended to impose a secularized society by top-down reforms, but also because republican elites deliberately established a state that is weaker than past Turkish states. To refer to Cizre-Sakallioḡlu (1994, 255) a last time, ‘Both Islam, and to some extent, radical nationalism have challenged Kemalism on the very grounds of its raison d’etre. Both ideologies claimed superiority in providing better sources of national identity, social cohesion, political unity and government tradition than Kemalism’.

Thus, in the words of Schmitt, both Islamists/conservatives and Küçükömer agree on the first sovereign decision, that is, both argue strongly that the Republic is an aberration (or an exception). Nonetheless, they disagree about the second sovereign decision: what to do under this exception and what constitutes normalcy.

This disagreement eventually takes the form of identifying conflicting sets of tasks: those which Küçükömer prescribes for conservative groups, including political Islamists, and those which these groups assume for themselves. Küçükömer projects a function similar to that of commissarial dictatorship, because, according to him, conservative groups must return to the norm of the liberal constitution after demolishing the establishment. Nonetheless, the normalcy of Islamists/conservatives has proved not to be the same. Their hostility to, or uneasy engagement with, the radical secularization policies of the republic and corrupt republican elites have eventually informed the AKP to stand and act as new founding authority.

As for the second decision, that is, determining what ought to be done in an exceptional situation, and how create a new normality; Turkish political Islamists/conservatives thus had a wish and desire to change the situation in Turkey. But their influence was dwindled by the restrictions of the new regime in the earlier period of the republic.

Radical secularization policies of the modern republic also hindered the development of an Islamist political and intellectual movement. Consequently, between the 1920s and the 1960s, Islamists organized in networks in Sufi orders. The first Islamic political party (National Order Party, or Milli Nizam Partisi) was established in 1970 (Yıldız 2003). Thereafter, Turkish political Islamists engaged in party politics and participated in elections with a vision to come to power and then use centralized state institutions to Islamize society (Mardin 2005, 160). From this, one may argue, it follows that Turkish political Islamists adopted a reformist strategy that is comparable to social–democratic revisionism, defended by Bernstein (1993) around the late 19th and early 20th century for socialists as an alternative strategy to revolution.

This strategy has a peculiar implication, whereas the constitutional strategy that emerges from Bernstein’s account is to create a new norm (i.e. socialism), gradually and peacefully within a capitalist system, Turkish political Islamists – willingly or unwillingly, strategically or non-strategically – began to use party politics as a means to engage themselves with their self-perceived exceptional situation. Within the boundaries of the Kemalist constitutional settlement, there was no room for political demands against the political decision of the constitution. There was no room for an incremental evolvement toward an Islamic society, either.

That is to say, Islamist parties (including the AKP) could never openly assert an objective of establishing an Islamic state or abandoning the secular foundations of the constitution, even if these were their real political ambitions. The constitution restricted the establishment of a political party on religious grounds, and those restrictions had implications for the ability of Islamist parties to develop a transparent political narrative. As some authors argue, ‘Turkish Islamism has been a primarily power-oriented’ but ‘with vague aims and ambiguous political orientations’ (Çinar and Duran 2008, 23). Until the 1990s, Islamists lacked capacity to realize their second sovereign decision. No one (including Islamists themselves) foresaw the coming of an electoral victory of an Islamist party until the 1990s, when they had victories in several cities including Istanbul and Ankara in the local elections. Even at that point, long-lasting hegemonic control by an Islamist party was still not imagined. Nobody ever sought to ask: What would an Islamist group do when in power?

The AKP and the new normalcy

To recap the previous debate, since its establishment, conservative political discourse has defined the modern republic as an aberration (an exceptional situation). It has also brewed a desire for grasping power in order to fix this situation thus awaited a political agency that would realize the second Schmittian decision. The AKP emerged against this background and was informed by the two historical narratives (antagonism and wilfulness to power) which I elucidated above. The party though did not immediately confront with the establishment when it won the elections in 2002. One may categorize the AKP period in three periods: a liberal revolution (2002–2007), elimination of the guardians of the old regime (2007–2011) and an interregnum involving the entrenchment of a new normalcy (2011–present).

Unstable coalition governments failed to govern the country during the 1990s (Insel 2003); and, as a result, the mainstream parties on both left and right shrank rapidly, opening up a space for alternative political movements and leaders that dissociated themselves from the corrupt and inefficient political system and ideologies. But the most dramatic event to influence the nature of Turkish politics was the military intervention in 1997, known in Turkey as the 28 February process. The coalition government, which included the AKP’s antecedent, the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi), came to an abrupt end by the military intervention in 1997. The Welfare Party was abolished, as was its successor Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi). The AKP was established after this experience.

The AKP soon succeeded in unifying a coalition of disparate groups, and the party started its political life as a hub of conservative liberals, anti-Kemalist liberals and socialists and urban and rural bourgeoisie, thereby creating an organizational base for the coalition of a power bloc. The emergence of the AKP as a major political actor in Turkish politics was looked on by Kemalist elites with suspicion, as the leadership that established the party came from a political Islam tradition. The party, however, managed to convince many liberal and socialist intellectuals that it had moved away from its roots in political Islam and that it now aimed to become a mainstream conservative party (Heper and Toktaş 2003; Özbudun 2006; Smith 2005). The AKP’s claim to make Turkey more democratic (read: curb the influence of the military and secular elites) was seen as convincing and genuine because the party represented peripheral social forces. On this foundation, the AKP could claim right to institute a new state by obliterating the traditional elitist power compact that comprised the military, bureaucracy and judiciary. The party also convinced liberal elites and industrialists that it was not a threat to the free market economy or neo-liberal capital accumulation (Tugal 2009). This helped justify the party not only at home but also abroad, as the party was seen as non-threatening to the economic constitutional order, but instead would keep Turkey integrated within global capitalism. Consequently, the narrative concerning an enmity between corrupt modernist elites and conservative society served almost like an empty signifier (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) in the early 2000s, articulating the demands of disparate groups that have issues with the present norms and values of the republican constitutional settlement.

Most scholars, in turn, celebrated the AKP’s early years (2002–2007), because the party proved to take on the political leadership amid acute political and economic crises and political life in Turkey seemed to stabilize (Cinar 2006; Hale and Özbudun 2009; Smith 2005; Yavuz 2006). The party pursued constitutional reforms in connection with Turkey’s accession bid to the EU (Özbudun and Gençkaya, 2009; Yazici 2010), which the party leadership successfully used in propagating an understanding that the AKP was the sole democratic party in the country and that the reforms that were made during the AKP era were revolutionary (Kalaycıoğlu 2011, 276). ¹⁴ Befitting Küçükömer’s argument, conservative sections of the society, mobilized the party, appeared to launch a liberal revolution by means of initiating series of legal reforms that could rectify authoritarian remnants in the1982 constitution (Isiksel 2013). ¹⁵

There was a demand in the public for a new constitution because it would obliterate the tutelage (or, authoritarian enclaves) of unelected entities, in particular, that of the military, over the elected politicians; enhance human rights; improve Turkey’s standards in democracy by including the groups that have been underprivileged due to the strict secular and nationalist attitude of the state. The AKP responded to, or capitalized on, the demands concerning writing a new constitution. But the party soon abandoned its consensual approach to constitution-making and began imposing its will on other political parties (Arato 2016, 235–38). The new constitution may have followed the successful examples of incremental or post-sovereign constitution-making (Arato 2016). However, the AKP did not try to get the consent of other groups by pursuing deliberation and compromise (Arato 2010b, 2016). In contrast, the political leadership antagonized the society and, particularly after 2007, concentrated on a project of creating a socially conservative Turkey, a project that has the characteristics of a revolution in that it intends to change the political decision of the Turkish Republic.

The alleged liberal revolution turned into an existential struggle between the AKP and the old establishment, which the latter lost during the party’s second term. During this process, the AKP’s initial reformist stand concerning democratization of the constitutional law evolved into a direct confrontation with the old regime. The conflict arose when the party wanted to nominate one of the key figures from the AKP, Abdullah Gul, as a candidate to the Presidency of the Republic. The old establishment considered this to be a challenge to normalcy of the state because Gul’s wife wore a headscarf. The conflict escalated when the election was held in the parliament. Gul had a decisive victory, and the largest opposition party, the People’s Republican Party (CHP), which boycotted the elections, appealed to the constitutional court of Turkey for annulment of the elections because of the violation of the requirement about the quorum. The constitutional court pushed the limits of constitutional interpretation and accepted this request thus acted politically as the guardian of the state (Köker 2010, 332–36).

Under the sway of this event, the party had gained an astounding electoral victory in 2007 elections. Conditions that could enable the realization of the second sovereign decision for political Islamists surfaced, and to a certain extent this was pushed by the old establishment. After 2007, the AKP began distancing itself from its role as an agent of a liberal revolution in both rhetoric and practice (Arato 2010a; Özbudun 2014). The party began acting without compromise and did not hesitate to recruit Islamists to key positions such as the Presidency of the Republic, the Speakership of the parliament and the prime ministry. A Turkish political scientist observes that the party openly promoted an Islamist image after 2007: ‘It appears as if the AKP and its conservative–Islamic revivalist sympathizers decided to confront and challenge the secularists head on by scaling up the conflict to the highest positions of the Turkish state’ (Kalaycıoğlu 2011, 274). One may argue that the party began knitting a political-legal order, in which the AKP was intending to entrench the identity (sameness between the ruler and the ruled).

The party’s dramatic turn to Islamic revivalism led the judiciary to take two critical actions: (1) it found the party guilty of being a threat to the constitutional regime and (2) it rejected as unconstitutional the amendment that intended to empower individuals with the freedom to wear headscarves in public offices and schools. As a response to the judiciary’s actions, the AKP launched a frontal attack on the old power compact. Whereas legal cases of Sledgehammer and Ergenekon offered a chance to eliminate secular military officers and elites between 2008 and 2013 (Aydınlı 2012), three constitutional amendments implemented in 2007, 2010 (Arato 2010a, 2010b) and 2017 opened the way for the settlement of strong executive rule and its absolute control over the legislation and judiciary (Esen and Gümüşçü 2016; Somer 2016). Furthermore, the AKP has speeded up its Islamization policies since 2011, especially in the fields of foreign policy and education (Edelman et al. 2015; Kaya 2015) and through the empowered Directorate of Religious Affairs (Öztürk 2016).

The third period of the AKP was shaped by constitutional amendments. While the constitutional amendments of 2010 served to eliminate secular judges from office, ¹⁶ the constitutional amendments of 2017 brought in a peculiar form of presidential system, such that the new system rules out separation of powers by allowing the president to rule by decree and by a team of president-appointed vice presidents (Esen and Gümüşçü 2017; Öztürk and Gözaydın 2017). Also, the new changes permit the president to control judiciary by sanctioning the president to appoint the members of the constitutional court and higher courts. Even before the 2017 amendments, the AKP could rely on its majority in the parliament to control the legislative process, where debate, deliberation, compromise and consent had not been the norm since 2007. Finally, the amendments eradicate the legal neutrality of the president, as the president can now act as a party leader. The government now suppresses any form of dissent. ¹⁷

The presidential regime in Turkey, which has characteristics of Schmitt’s ideal president, came into force in June 2018. ¹⁸ In Legality and Legitimacy (Schmitt 2004), he defends a strong presidency that can materialize democracy (in Schmitt’s terms), represent the political unity of the people and guard the state (pp. 67–83). Schmitt would have celebrated these changes as manifestation of democracy: that Erdogan/the AKP had identified with negations to the political decision of the Turkish Republic and claimed to act as a new founding agent by virtue of establishing truer democracy than the old regime. The new regime, however, has not utterly erased the political identity markers of the old regime. Resembling Kemalists’ redefinition of Islam in an effort to legitimize secularist policies, Erdogan’s new regime integrated the symbolic meaning of Atatürk and Turkish nationalism into the new regime. These reflections are not to suggest that there exists a linear line between Erdogan’s regime and with that of the old regime. The new regime detaches the name of Atatürk from the Kemalist ideology and secularism from nationalism, thereby inventing an image of Atatürk and nationalism purified from the modernist/secularist orientations of the founding political decision. This new image of Atatürk and the understanding of nationalism stand for anti-imperialism and popular sovereignty; therefore, they speak to broader sections of society. They speak to conservative nationalists in ordinary times and to secular nationalists under the perceived domestic and external threats.

Conclusion

In this article, I reflected upon contemporary Turkish politics from an analytical frame inspired by Schmitt’s political and legal thought. My aim has been to cast theoretical light on how a populist claim to represent the political unity or homogeneity of a nation or people is connected to a political wilfulness for shifting the determinants of exception and normalcy in a given political community. The article contends that both the founders of the Turkish Republic (i.e. the Kemalist elites) and the political movement of the AKP (i.e. the coalition of the political Islamists, conservatives and nationalists) claimed to represent the political unity of the Turkish nation in their own way.

From Schmitt-inspired analytical framework, I analysed the conceptual implications of two separate decisions that a sovereign makes. The first decision concerns deciding on whether there is an exceptional situation, whereas the second decision concerns what to do in this exceptional situation. As regards the first decision, political Islamists and Turkish conservative political thinkers claimed sovereign power by defining the secular revolution of the Turkish Republic as an aberration within the Turkish history. They believed in rectifying this aberration and thus success would be realized when Turkey once again – consistent with their imagination of Turkey’s heroic past – would be a strong state governed by a ruler whose identity was consonant with that of the ruled. The Republican aberration, they argued, resulted in an antagonism between secular rulers and the conservative society they ruled. The AKP has been pursuing since 2007 the second sovereign decision. The party realized wilfulness that was brewed in the Islamist/conservative political thought throughout the Turkish Republic. It challenged the political decision of the Turkish Republic and now intending to introduce (or bring back) the traditional normalcy, or the authentic situation. The AKP began its political life as an agency of civil society and liberal revolution, but finally institutionalized a plesbisciterian regime that is based on rule by decree, through which the president reserved for himself the authority to realize the second sovereign decision, namely replacing the old establishment in order to redetermine the exception and normalcy in the society.