Gönül Tol, Erdoğan’s War: A Strongman’s Struggle at Home and in Syria, Hurst, 332pp., 2022, £30.
Birol Başkan and Ömer Taşpınar, The Nation or The Ummah: Islamism and Turkish Foreign Policy, Suny, 222pp., 2021, £64.35.
It is a difficult task to read an authoritarian leader’s mind. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is one of the most intriguing leaders, even compared with his other authoritarian peers. Most recently, the NATO Summit in Vilnius re-kindled the discussions over Erdoğan, his motivations and future ambitions. Although he has irked policymakers in the West with his erratic moves in the last decade, he pleased many by approving Sweden’s NATO membership and his cordial dialogues with President Biden and European leaders. While many observers argued that Turkey has returned to the Western alliance in the Vilnius Summit, some Turkey experts urged to lower expectations, given Erdoğan’s pragmatism and endless quest for power. As this last debate points out, even after two decades of his rule, understanding Erdoğan is still contentious.
It is possible to see many different Erdoğan throughout his political career. For sure, this is, to some degree, true for many people. People change. Yet, Erdoğan’s transformations are unusual as they oscillate in a wide range of political ideologies, like radical Islamism, a kind of conservative liberalism, nationalism, and vice versa. What complicates the picture more is Turkey’s and the world's transformations during his reign. With China’s growing influence, Russia’s revisionist aggression, and the rise of the rest, global politics and the world economy have radically changed since 2002. The Turkish politics, economy, and society have changed too. In many ways, Turkey is a different place than the early 2000s when Erdoğan first came to power. Moreover, Turkey’s liminality between Islam and secularity, modernity and imperial nostalgia, or East and West adds another layer of complexity to these transformations. The problem for many Turkey observers is contextualizing Erdoğan’s transformations within these extremes and establishing a consistent chain of causality. And, as these theoretical frameworks provide different readings of Turkey’s recent history, they also have different implications for its future.
In this respect, it is interesting to see how two recent books on Erdoğan’s transformation in foreign policy construct different narratives using the same historical materials. In her book, titled Erdoğan’s War: A Strongman’s Struggle at Home and in Syria (2022), Gönül Tol depicts Erdoğan as a ‘political chameleon’ striving to survive and maximize power. For Tol, Erdoğan’s use of ideas is purely utilitarian as he can shift to any ideology that better helps to grip power and crush his rivals. With ample evidence, Tol certainly presents an appealing argument. Yet, with the same historical material, another book (The Nation or The Ummah: Islamism and Turkish Foreign Policy, 2021) makes an alternative approach that attributes agency to Erdoğan’s Islamist ideology. Using the foreign policy analysis method, the authors, Birol Başkan and Ömer Taşpınar, argue that when the conditions were ripe, the Islamist ideology found a chance to take the lead in Turkish foreign policy.
This is certainly a theoretical disagreement that mostly interests scholars and analysts. Nevertheless, this theoretical difference is a part of a larger discussion that has wider implications for an intellectual reckoning over the death of Turkish democracy at the hands of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the ideological construction of a new Turkey.
Erdoğan as a Power Maximizer
Putting the Syrian war into perspective, Tol gives a comprehensive account of Turkey’s transformation under Erdoğan. The Syrian war has been one of Erdoğan’s most important battlegrounds and, therefore, has been in interaction with many different dynamics of Turkish politics. As a matter of fact, Tol asserts that foreign policy is just an extension of domestic politics. Thus, the author explains how Erdoğan’s endeavours in domestic politics have shaped his foreign policy and how he has employed various ideologies to that end.
In the book, Erdoğan’s ascension to power began with his Islamist predecessor’s failure to capture power. Although Islamists seized a considerable number of seats in the Parliament in the 1990s, the ultra-secular Turkish military and judiciary did not allow them to rule the country. After a turbulent era, the Supreme Court closed the Islamist parties and introduced political bans on its leading figures. This led Erdoğan and his aides to shift to a more democratic and pro-EU discourse that denounced Islamism. So, indeed, the favourable political and economic conditions allowed Erdoğan’s Islamist but democratic party to come to power and thrive in the first few years. But, more importantly, the pro-EU discourse helped Erdoğan to curb the influence of the military and thereby consolidate his rule.
Nevertheless, the EU’s reluctance to accept Turkey and the rising nationalism forced Erdoğan to focus on more regional alternatives. ‘Zero problems with neighbours’ policy, which encouraged Turkey to cultivate friendly relations with its neighbours, was, in fact, a ‘prelude’ to a more Islamist policy, Tol notes (58). The posture of a regional leader was a useful instrument for Erdoğan to polish his image in domestic politics.
When the Arab Spring began in 2010, Erdoğan had already put the army back into the barracks and asserted himself as the real power holder. This allowed him to further shift towards Islamism to ‘delegitimize’ the secular opposition. By supporting the Islamist groups and parties in the region, Erdoğan presented himself as the leader of Muslims. The author, nevertheless, reminds us that ‘Erdoğan deployed a “thinner” understanding of Islamism in which Islam was instrumentalized to mobilize a coalition of Islamists, pious Turks and Kurds for his political goals. Islam was stripped of its moral code, reduced to a “performative piety,” and became a tool to cover up corruption and delegitimize opponents (74). In other words, this was not the Islamism that Islamist ideologues like Hasan al-Banna or Sayyid al-Qutb suggested. It did not even aim to change the secular nature of the regime. In line with Kemalism’s decades-long policy of ‘controlling and co-opting Islam to mobilize constituencies, legitimize the state’s authoritarian practices and contain ethnic conflict,’ Erdoğan secularized and instrumentalized Islam to mobilize his base and guarantee his presidency (80).
Erdoğan’s fall out with first the Gulen Movement and later with the Kurds led him to ally with the nationalists and ‘the military’s secular, ultranationalist Kemalist members, whom Erdoğan had demonized since coming to power in 2002’ (165). This has given way to today’s Turkey’s Islamist-nationalist alliance, which allowed Erdoğan to switch to a presidential system and establish a one-man rule. This alliance carried out military operations against the Kurds in Syria and Iraq, brought Turkey closer to Russia, and pursued an aggressive regional policy under the mantra of ‘blue homeland.’
Given Turkey’s economic troubles and growing social tensions around Syrian refugees, Tol had a more hopeful conclusion that hinted that Erdoğan’s reign was close to the end. After all, the opposition’s victory in the 2019 local elections was promising for the future of democracy. But, needless to say, the 2023 general elections once more dashed those hopes. Even so, Tol’s hinted optimism does not overshadow the book’s quality. Yet, more important questions about the ideologies await.
Tol makes a strong case in favour of interests and power. Ideas are just window dressing for the author. Politicians do not stick with one certain ideology. Based on the needs of their survival and power maximization goals, they switch between different ideologies to ‘generate consent for their agenda’ (14-15). However, this strict attitude towards ideas and ideologies causes some follow-up questions. If ideas are just ‘henchmen,’ why was Erdoğan at loggerheads with the ultra-secularist military at the outset of his career? As she sidelined the ideas, Tol should have offered interests- and power-based explanations to the historical conflict between the military and the Islamists – the conflict that led Erdoğan to embrace pro-EU policies.
Another question lies in power-driven Erdoğan’s choice of ideologies. According to Tol’s narrative, the domestic political realities put a clear choice of ideology for Erdoğan to deploy against his rivals. However, those choices were not so certain and definitive back then. Tol’s overemphasis on power and interests holds back the author from extensively discussing this complex process that shaped Erdoğan’s choices of ideologies and, thereby, policies.
It is possible to extend these with questions raised against the rational choice theory. Yet, still, the book provides a ‘simple and elegant’ framework to understand Erdoğan’s and Turkey’s transformation.
Islamism Behind the Wheel
Başkan and Taşpınar discuss how the Islamist ideology shaped Erdoğan’s foreign policy. Yet, in this endeavour, the authors do not take the easy way out of the ‘thick constructivism’ that explains the political reality as a pure world of ideas. Instead, Islamism could only find room when domestic and international political conditions allowed. But, when those favourable conditions allowed, the Islamist ideology began to steer the wheel of foreign policy.
Başkan and Taşpınar, too, emphasize the role of domestic political constraints that the Turkish military set for Erdoğan in the 2000s and how he tightened his grip on power in the early 2010s, just before the Arab Spring. They also acknowledge the ‘primacy of domestic dynamics for Erdoğan’ and how he utilized foreign policy in domestic politics (131). But albeit bound by those constraints and concerns, ideology still has a role to perform, the authors argue.
The authors assess the impact of ideology by removing all other factors. Unlike Tol, who argues that Erdoğan’s turn to Islamism was based on domestic concerns, Başkan and Taşpınar state that ‘No obvious or compelling economic or political reason seems to have driven Turkey’s embracing of the Arab Spring’ (142). This is why Islamism is a strong contender as a driving force behind Turkey’s Arab Spring policies.
The key term in the book is uncertainty. When the demonstration started in Tunisia in December 2010, it challenged Turkey’s ‘zero problems with neighbours’ policy and its basic assumptions, leading Ankara to act cautiously. At that critical juncture of history, the Islamist ideology gave Erdoğan an intellectual framework with explanatory power and promised great returns for Turkey. ‘Islamism provided an interpretative framework or prism through which foreign policymakers in Ankara interpreted the regional and the world developments’ (142). Accordingly, ‘embracing the Arab Spring was a clear vehicle to achieve a sense of Muslim unity under Turkish leadership’ (127).
The authors remind the importance of context, too. The impact of Islamist ideology is not uniform in all spheres of foreign policy. As Turkey’s economic, social, and political ties varied between different Arab Spring countries, Ankara’s Islamist ideology had different consequences in those countries. Accordingly, Islamist ideology has to be re-interpreted and re-contextualized for every other country. Within this scope, Başkan and Taşpınar provide a more intricate framework.
Nevertheless, the monolithic and homogenous description of Islamist ideology is one of the intriguing points in the book. Başkan and Taşpınar give an extensive account of the intellectual tenets of Islamist thinking through excerpts from primary sources and leading ideologues. But, the interpretation of basic concepts of religion and their political implications is a vivid discussion among Islamists. The authors are certainly aware of the impact of intra-Islamist discussions and disagreements on Turkish politics, as Başkan wrote about in his previous studies. Thus, when they discuss Islamism, they could better reflect on those differences.
Islamism’s exact role is another issue that needs further clarification. Başkan and Taşpınar explain the ideological roots of Muslim unity, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy thinking within Islamism. But it is hard to see these concepts’ real impact in the part they discuss Ankara’s Arab Spring policy. Islamism appears in the book as a ‘switchman of history’ that set a direction for Ankara at a critical turning point by convincing Erdoğan to embrace the Arab Spring. However, as understood from the book, it was material factors and calculations based on interests and power that decided Turkey’s strategic goals, priorities, and instruments. Even so, Başkan and Taşpınar’s book gives a sound theoretical ground to understand the role of Islamism without falling into the dichotomy of Islamism versus modernity.
A Reckoning
Although the main goal of both books is to explain Erdoğan’s foreign policy transformation, they also respond to neo-Kemalist accusations of being Erdoğan’s accomplice in, knowingly or unknowingly, supporting AKP’s Islamist project. Neither book mentions those accusations. But their theories, conclusions, and arguments certainly fit into the context of this wider discussion. Both books reject holding Islamism responsible for Turkey’s authoritarian drift.
According to the neo-Kemalist scholars, liberals, leftists, Gulenists and Kurds (in other words, everyone but themselves) were complicit in Turkey’s authoritarian turn and international troubles. From 2002 to 2013, these groups gave unequivocal support to Erdoğan’s policies by trusting his promises of ideological change in EU membership reforms and pursuing policies that were oriented toward democratic values and human rights. Nevertheless, their desire to see Kemalism torn down blinded them to the dangers of Islamism. However, what encouraged Erdoğan and the AKP to embrace EU reforms and democratic discourse was nothing other than deception with tactical concerns to weaken the military’s influence. They did not sincerely believe in those democratic values. After all, Islamism was not compatible with those values. What the AKP called ‘zero problems with neighbours’ is actually just a hidden hegemonic policy with nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire. Liberals and other non-Islamist AKP supporters backed Erdoğan blindly without enough recognition of his ideology.
Tol’s (and partly Başkan and Taşpınar’s, too) response to this is to downplay the importance of ideologies. The driving force for Erdoğan was not his Islamist ideology but power and interests. Erdoğan could deploy any ideology that would make more returns. Thus, overfocusing on Islamism or any other ideology is just misleading. Too much emphasis on power and structure, however, leads the reader to a kind of determinism. Accordingly, broad national and international forces, which determine the power and interest distribution, made authoritarianism unescapable for Turkey. Erdoğan was just a pawn that played his destined role. Başkan and Taşpınar, on the other hand, have larger maneuvering rooms here. For them, ‘the end of the Turkish model has more to do with failed governance, rampant illiberalism, and populist nationalism’ rather than ideological tenets of Islamism (222).
Also, both books highlight how Erdoğan cooperated with ‘ultranationalists and even some of ultra secularist pro-Russia Eurasianist circles within the Kemalist establishment’ even after he undeniably turned into an authoritarian leader (222). Erdoğan is not ‘an Islamist dictator determined to bury Atatürk’s secular legacy’ (222).
Although a cliché, any explanation of Turkey’s authoritarian turn and foreign policy troubles has to rely on the agency of the leadership, namely Erdoğan. Authoritarianism was not an inescapable endpoint that Islamism or interests drove Turkey to but a consequence of choices that agents gave at critical turning points. Secondly, it is necessary to dive more into Islamism's varieties (as well as transformations) and the relationship between different Islamist actors. As Tol noted, ‘ideology, Islamist ideology, in particular, is [not] an unchanging, constant force in the life of a politician’ or anyone else (14-15). Islamism in the 1980s, in the 2000s, and the 2010s said different things and imagined different futures. In this respect, next to power, structures, and ideas, agency, temporality, and uncertainty are three key concepts that need more attention in understanding Turkey’s recent history.
In two great books, Tol and Başkan and Taşpınar draw the reader into a lively discussion on how Turkey has come to this point. Although they employ different theoretical approaches, both studies present compelling reasoning for their thesis. The intellectual reckoning over liberal support for Erdoğan will continue to occupy scholars – which can be a significant gain for Turkish studies.
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