Since the failed coup of July 15, Ankara has moved with lightning speed to eliminate all possible dissidents inside the government and out. For example, so far, more than 6,000 members of the military, 8,000 police officers and thousands of employees from all levels of government administrations have been detained, over 20,000 schoolteachers have been suspended, all deans from all universities across the country have been ordered to resign, all academics banned from traveling abroad, almost 3,000 judges have been suspended and/or arrested and the news about more measures to “cleanse” the public sector continues to flow almost hourly.
{mosads}All the while, images of the public demonstration of support for the democratically elected government and the extensive purge it is carrying out continue to be shown on TV, while mosques across the country continue to broadcast calls full of religious fervor to encourage the people to come out to public squares and show their support for the President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Borrowing a page from the late 19th-century Sultan Abdülhamid II’s handbook, Erdoğan has perfected the use of religion as a unifying factor when addressing the long disaffected, often poor, and sometime less-educated Sunni Muslim Turkish nationalists — those often simply referred to in Turkey as “Turks,” as opposed to other Turkish citizens who are ethnically Kurdish, Armenian, Jewish, Greek, Arab, etc. — who have for decades felt excluded and marginalized, if not oppressed, by measures that seemed to benefit a thin layer of society that benefited from an increasingly ephemeral form of Kemalist “secular” nationalism. Thus some prospered, while most felt actively excluded form the political process, with only limited access to economic opportunities. Perhaps most importantly, they felt that their rights to religious and cultural expression where actively stymied by the ruling class.
Erdoğan managed over more than a decade to completely transfer the entire political system in Turkey. With every election that he won, he felt more emboldened to describe and implement his vision for a “New Turkey” that would be bring back the old glories (imagined or real) to a proudly Muslim regional power broker. When opposition would arise, like the famous Gezi Park protests in 2013, he described the protesters as foreign threats and even terrorists, that, if not controlled, would threaten his project of making Turkey great again.
The Turkish government has positioned the failed coup similarly, describing the people who ordered the coup not simply as internal traitors, but as agents who got their orders from abroad — from rural Pennsylvania, to be exact. Fethüllah Gülen — a Turkish clerk living in Pennsylvania, from where he heads a well-funded, well-organized global network that promotes a strange blend of Islam and a global form of Turkish nationalism — provides the only real competition to Erdogan’s vision of New Turkey. What makes Gülen a foreign threat is his place of self-imposed exile in the U.S. Erdogan portrays him as a tool of often-hinted-at foreign conspirators whose aim is to take away Turkey’s power, which is represented by Erdoğan’s regime. In fact, even the soldiers who participated in the coup (many of whom were following orders, while being told that they were carrying out an anti-terrorism operation), were declared by the increasingly powerful minister of religious affairs as nonbelievers, not able to receive a religious burial.
In other words, they were declared non-Turks for eternity.
The political logic is an over simplified us vs. them populism. If you are not on our side, you must be a foreign threat; one of them.
Sounds familiar? It should.
Populist politics which seeks and targets part of a nation’s population that has felt politically marginalized, economically disadvantaged and mistreated by the elite, a group that often transfers its anxiety toward a perceived existential threat posed by what it considers to be outsiders (i.e., not “real” Turks/Americans/French/British/Austrians, etc.) is unfortunately a sign of the times we live in. It is a global phenomenon.
A politician comes along, moving the political rhetoric to the extreme right, addressing this population by validating feelings of marginalization while reinforcing fear of what this population considers to be a foreign threat. Tough-talking populist politician, like Erdoğan and Republican nominee Donald Trump, who do not mince words about their plans to recreate a nation in their image: A nation that would reward sameness and ban/punish/subdue the “outsiders,” as they are “threats” to real Turks/Americans. They promise to take the country back to its imagined homogeneous essences (white/Anglo-Saxon/Muslim/Christian, etc.), manifesting itself in what I believe to be a dangerous slide toward fascism.
On July 15, Erdoğan’s government received a boost to justify an extremely accelerated implementation of its plan to make Turkey “great again.” The British xenophobic right got a boost with the surprise vote for Brexit. Popular right-wing parties in France, Austria, Hungary and Poland, amongst other, are pushing to take their countries in the same direction.
In November, will the American people stop their country from going down a similar road as that of Turkey and its European neighbors, or will they take the risk of sliding toward a fascist form of nationalism and authoritarian rule in the guise of making America “great again”?
Minawi is assistant professor of History at Cornell University, where he is also director of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Initiative (OTSI). His book, “The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz,” was published by Stanford University Press in June 2016. Follow him on Twitter @MostafaMinawi.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.