As we described in p.2, the irreconcilable differences between major classes concluded with the 1960 military takeover of the Turkish government. The lower level officers who initiated the coup, with their fixed incomes like their civilian bureaucrat counterparts, bore the brunt of the Islamic Democratic Party’s deliberate policy of income transfers from urban and industrial development into the pockets of rural elite and small peasants. When it came to May 1960 the Turkish population was literally divided into two hostile camps. On the military’s side were the lower and middle level bureaucrats, the limited income groups from the white-collar workers employed by the private sector, state employees like university professors, judges and lawyers, and the urban and semi-urban industrial bourgeoisie. On the side of the Islamic Democratic Party were the wealthy landed bourgeoisie and semi-urban commercial bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie and the middle and subsistence farmers. Industrialization was not yet a big threat to the Anatolian petty bourgeoisie (artisans and craftsmen) since they played the role of a middleman between the urban sector and the consumption-hungry rural dwellers. The situation in terms of economics favoured these conservative layers of the population who also were pleased by the religious liberalization that the Democratic Party undertook during its ten years tenure (Ergil, 1975), (Robinson, 1963).

From an economic point of view (made understandable in P.3), throughout the 1960s and 70s, Turkish private industry assembled the foreign manufactured parts of consumer durables, like cars, and refrigerators, with  joint venture deals. Under high tariff walls and state subsidies those sectors produced mostly shoddy goods since there was not any serious competition in the domestic market. Turkey’s two biggest conglomerates, the Koc and Sabanci groups, immediately seized opportunities during the import substitution years both to initiate partnerships with foreigners and to increase their profits through being the sole technological suppliers to the Turkish economy (Yeldan, in Savran and Balkan(eds), 2002b) .

As one can see, the bias against the rural landed bourgeoisie and agricultural sector was clear in those first five year plans of the military government. Though the military officers responsible for the 1961 coup, put a land reform proposal into their agenda and defined it as a duty of the state in article 37 of the new constitution, the records of SPO showed that the state mainly saw agricultural sector productivity as a component of its general aim to keep urban consumer prices lower, contrary to the actions of the Menderes governments for whom the rural vote and development plans were perceived as primary tasks (Ergil, 1975).

The general import substitution framework of the new strategy also, in parallel with all Keynesian-Fordist models, increased the purchasing power of the urban masses, especially their demand for primary consumer goods. Real wages of urban workers almost doubled during the first decade of import substitution, which made them the primary consumers of domestically manufactured goods. In order to create this mass consumption -mass production equation and a consumer society’s individuals, the urban bourgeoisie, civil bureaucrats, intellectuals and military officers promoted the civil and social rights of the people in a previously unheard manner. In the new constitution of 1961 people were granted the right of habeas corpus before the courts and for the first time in Turkish history a constitutional court was created to check the actions of the executive and legislative branches. A Senate was established as an institution to further prevent the tyranny of the majority, about which the new dominant classes complained a lot during the Democratic Party years. But the inclusion of all those members of the CNU into the Senate as appointed, not elected members, along with professors and civil bureaucrats displayed the top-down nature of these progressive reforms (Karpat, 1967).

The biggest effect of the 1961 constitution was its ramifications for the working class and labor conditions within the country. Previous governments starting from 1947 legislated labor laws but most of these efforts aimed to form a state-guided unionization among the Turkish workers. The Turk-IS (Turkish Trade Unions Confederation) was founded for that purpose. But from the1950s until 1963, the labor laws and trade unionization lacked some fundamental elements. First of all, the industrial working class composed less than 8 percent of the total workforce in a country where 80 percent of the work force was employed in agriculture. A corollary of that fact was the weak and limited level of class consciousness among workers. In the 50s labor legislation, a further obstacle that was created by governments was the lack of right to strike and the prevention of formation of official ties between the unions and political parties. The most important cultural obstacle to the unionization efforts of the working class were the paternalistic attitudes of so-called labor leaders within the factories. Those leaders generally continue their feudalistic (sometimes favoring regions, or towns) attitude towards labor, as if factories are the extension of cotton fields in Turkey (Mahirogullari, 1998), (Mumcuoglu, 1979)

As a parallel to the aim of creating a mass consumption society, Turkish civilian-military bureaucrats and the industrial bourgeoisie created entirely new labor legislation with the Turkish Trade Union Law in 1963. This piece of legislation revolutionized capital-labor relations by recognizing workers’ right to strike. The 1963 law not only defined worker as a person who works at manual labor but also included people who do jobs with intellectual labor. That article somewhat strengthened the labor solidarity between white- and blue-collar workers. Another innovation that legislation brought forth was the use of a check-off system in collecting dues by the trade unions, which facilitates the financing of day to day union operations. Moreover, the unions were allowed to establish organic ties with the political parties, which reinforced the democratic tendencies of the 1961 constitution. By that attempt, the organizers of the 1961 constitution also opened the way for social democratic organizing among the working class population, especially in industrialized urban areas.

This connection between working class politics and union organizations concluded with the establishment of Turkey’s first socialist workers party, the Turkish Workers Party (TIP). The initial founders of the party were 12 trade unionists, who radically challenged the way Turkish labor unions organized against industrial capitalism. Their declaration that all major parties were the agents of bosses significantly redefines the political struggle of Turkish masses. From 1961 to the 1967, when the first socialist oriented trade union confederation of Turkey, the Turkish Revolutionary Workers’ Unions Confederation, (DISK) was founded, the Turkish Workers Party effectively organized all around the country. The founders included unionists like Kemal Turkler, and Kemal Nebioglu. For the first time in Turkish history the Turkish left formed a coalition between the white-collar intelligentsia and ordinary workers through these revolutionary unionists, whom could be called the organic intellectuals of the working class (Mahirogullari, 1998).

The Turkish Workers Party, with its nationwide network and the convenient framework of 1961 constitution for socialist organizing, supplemented by the spreading of intellectual journals like Yon in 1960s to promote alternatives to capitalist system, achieved a small but not insignificant success in the 1965 elections. It got more than three percent of the votes and sent fifteen representatives to national assembly. That parliamentary representation made the working class voices more vocal within the political scene. Though this party became the voice of the workers and the left, it immediately suffered from intellectual divisions within the Turkish left regarding the suitable strategy for Turkish revolution and because of its illusions about the nature of the Turkish state, army and the official ideology of Kemalism (Culhaoglu, in Savran and Balkan, (eds), 2002). The most significant problem with the party’s understanding of the Turkish state was its attribution of anti-imperialism and progressiveness to Kemalism and its army. The army’s support for 1961’s progressive constitution might have been responsible for that interpretation, but the understanding of the Kemalist elite as anti-imperialist actually incorporated the working class masses into the official propaganda of Turkish nationalism. In the1960s Third World decolonization and the heyday of Third World independence movements strengthened that confusion. So even though the party was initially organized on the basis of class, this incorporation with the state ideology caused misidentification of the potential enemies and problems of the working masses.

For example journals like Yon describe state intervention in the economy as an indispensable means to improve the conditions of the masses, but their diagnosis was not accompanied with an analysis of the class nature of Turkish politics and the state. Such views perceived the state as an instrumental element, but could not provide the critique of the more fundamental contradictions within the mode of production and in the level of property relations. Even the radical leftist groups of the 1968 movement adopted Kemalism and its nationalist discourse as a part of their anti-imperialism. Throughout the late 60s and 70s, these leftist movements on the economic level articulated the grievances of the masses and even somewhat changed the traditional cultural patterns of thinking in the countryside (Ergil, 1974), (Senses, in Eralp, Tunay, Yesilada (eds) 1993)

But in crucial issues like the analysis of a forward agenda, the Turkish left could not agree on some general proposal and program. Most of the participants of those discussions in the 60s and 70s focused on whether the Turkish national elite or parts of it were worthy of alliance in a national democratic revolution. Some more radical fringes argued for a direct socialist revolution in Turkey, but their interpretation also suffers from the confusion that the existing socialism in the U.S.S.R. created. Namely their approach was authoritarian and very elitist and tended to evaluate the Soviet Union as the epitome of socialism, which clearly was parallel to Stalin’s ideal (Culhaoglu, in Savran and Balkan, (eds), 2002).

Putting aside the ideological disputes among the left, the reason why Turkish socialists could not transform their economic-corporate level dominance into a real counter hegemony was the creation of a labor aristocracy due to the nature of the import substitution strategy. As import substitution strategy with rising real wage levels aimed to increase mass consumption, created a privileged layer of the working class whose unionized jobs with generous benefits made them potential allies of social democrats within the state bureaucracy and the urban intellectuals. Those urban intellectuals were mostly involved in civil service and they performed the role of the traditional intellectual, in the Gramscian sense (an intellectual whose main task is to spread the effectiveness of dominant and ossified ideologies, the existence of which serves both them and the ruling classes) rather than being organic intellectuals of the working classes. The Turkish leftists were successful in organizing the masses that migrated from rural areas to the cities, especially in the shantytowns where these people resided. But the ideology of the socialists could not identify the common interests between these shantytown dwellers who worked in informal and lower-wage jobs and the unionized workers that were in higher-wage jobs. Even the contacts that were established largely failed to transform the feudal and patriarchic relationships of rural Turkey into an open-minded socialist consciousness. I already referred to the effects of nationalist ideology and the lack of a proper analysis of the role of state in Turkish society and the so-called anti-imperialism of the Kemalist elite. So in the above paragraphs, we saw why Turkish socialists could not translate their achievements at the economic level into a meaningful counterhegemony (Savran, in Savran and Balkan (eds), 2002).

With  the October 1961 elections under proportional representation forced  the military to accept a grand coalition between the CHP and the AP (Justice Party) an offspring of the former Democratic Party. This coalition, rather than showing stability actually showed the deep rift between the conservative rural bourgeoisie, landowners, artisan, craftsmen (these elements supported AP) and the leadership of the coup, urban bourgeoisie, big industrialists and the civil service bureaucrats. The mandatory coalitions between 1961and 65 were not stable and left a lot of social and class disputes unresolved, a process which was interrupted by two additional coup attempts from young officer cadres. However, the initial resilience of CHP and its leader Ismet Inonu against those attempts prevented the breakdown of parliamentary rule. As a result, in 1965 when the AP achieved a parliamentary majority, the class alliances also shifted. The AP, who mainly represented rural interests, also started to flirt with big business, especially in its adamant application of high tariff protections for Turkish assembly industry. The AP government and its leader Suleyman Demirel tried to form links with the European Community to diversify Turkish foreign trade as opposed to the Menderes years’ total dependency on American capital and military aid.

This rapprochement between the AP and big business, given the advantages of big business in getting favorable credits, their support from foreign capital and the almost monopoly power they enjoyed in the domestic market, engendered a rift within the bourgeois bloc. The conservative Anatolian bourgeoisie and the small businessmen from rural Turkey, artisans and craftsmen sought to find an alternative outlet for their economic and ideological aspirations (Pamuk, 1981).

In that conjuncture as we have seen, a conservative believer from Central Anatolia, Necmettin Erbakan, successfully organized small and middle size businessmen to challenge the leadership of big business in the Turkish Union of Stock Exchange and Commerce. As his victory in winning the presidency of the institution raised eyebrows among metropolitan-based big business owners, it was cancelled by the AP government. He immediately started to form his own party, the MNP (National Order Party). This party along with the social organization of the National Outlook Movement, (a movement of socially conservative Muslims) aimed to create a new socio-economic order in Turkey.

Their primary reference was the mixture of nationalism and Islam in economy and politics. Parallel to what I wrote above, their party program defined their basic targets as: First, there was an emphasis on the national production of heavy machinery and the crucial intermediate capital goods and the reduction of the Western encroachment on the Turkish economy. At the time, one of the primary complaints of the small to medium size businesses was the undeserved competitive advantage the big metropolitan corporations over them through the joint-ventures with Westerners, especially in import substitution industries. Second, there was a strong reaction to the interest based dealings of large banks and credit institutions in the financial sector which overwhelmingly favored big business, since the criteria they used in extending credit discriminated against less profitable small businesses. Third, there was a strategy change in the orientation of state-owned enterprises in which MNP recommended more generous credit and technology aid to small-size businesses rather than just facilitating the infrastructurerelated problems of metropolitan-based industries(Ergil, 1975), ( Ayata, in Eralp, Tunay, Yesilada (eds) 199).

On the political plane the MNP program criticized the imposition of Western inspired secular cultural patterns on Turkish Muslims. They expressed their opposition to those modernization experiments due to their eroding effects on traditional family and social values. Alongside this, the MNP also rejected the concepts of ”alien” ideologies like Marxism as plausible prescriptions for the ills of contemporary society, since these “external” ideologies stressed social conflict, as opposed to Islam’s emphasis on social harmony among believers. MNP argued for the instalment of mandatory religious courses in public schools and spreading private religious educational institutions with the help of the state’s Directorate of Religious Affairs. As an extension of those criticisms, the nation’s first Islamist party wanted to create a presidential system with strong executive powers to expedite the legislative process, coupled with freedom to change and reappoint state cadres without intrusion from the judiciary (Bugra in, Sungur Savran and N.Balkan (eds), 2002).

All these economic and political demands of Erbakan’s Party clearly reflected the rifts within the establishment, but as it was very pragmatic on questions like social justice and economic inequalities it was not criticizing the order fundamentally. Instead they were very open in their condemnation of “alien” structural solutions of Marxism and were very explicit in their belief in the correctional power of the Islamic faith. So for them the crucial problem lay not with capitalism or structural conditions but with the spiritual environment and the ideals of the men who governed the system. But their program would not have gotten any support from either big business or the military or the civilian bureaucracy and would have remained a marginal element within the broader struggle between right and left (bourgeoisie and working class) had not changes in global and local capitalism provided the opportunity for their rise. In the context of the late 60s and early 70s in which Left unions in DISK and the student movement increasingly contested bourgeois rule, coupled with the problems of rising budget deficits of government and the related difficulty in providing foreign currency for imports, this break up after 1967 within the ruling classes further shifted big business towards the right and in 1971 the Turkish military, this time with a regressive Ceasarist role, intervened in politics again.

In the late 60s and early 70s, the manifestations of the working class movement, especially strikes, and the 68’s student demonstrations increased to such levels that the cooperation between DISK and TIP really threatened the already insecure big bourgeoisie. The first attempt at eliminating DISK in June 1970 was repudiated with harsh and militant working class actions in Istanbul and Izmit. This potential insecurity of the big bourgeoisie not only was rooted in the historical formation process of the Turkish state and the bourgeois order but also in the fact that the 60s import substitution policies provided enormous capital accumulation opportunities to the urban bourgeoisie. The assembly industries that were constructed as joint ventures with foreign capital and associated profits increased the rate of concentration of capital and tendencies of monopolization in Turkish industry, especially in automotive, textiles and consumer durables (Pamuk, 1981). These tendencies forced Turkish capital to seek control of financial credit, which quickened the fusion of finance capital into industrial capital or vice versa in parallel with the global developments. That effort by big capital needed a smooth transition period but the Turkish working class movement was not an easy opponent at the time. Another dimension was the search for monopoly control over credits and foreign currency, which deepened the rift between medium and small level conservative business and the urban bourgeoisie as Turkish budget deficits soared with the rising oil crisis and ever-growing import prices. The structural problem of Turkish import substitution to compensate for imports of machinery through agricultural and agro-industrial exports like textiles, and processed food brought the economy nearly to a grinding halt in the face of worldwide competition and recessionary pressures (Owen and Pamuk, 1999).

In this political context, the AP and CHP could not reconcile on constitutional matters as the growing workers’ power pulled CHP to the left when Bulent Ecevit, general secretary of the party declared his party’s position as left of center within the political spectrum. AP, as a response, identified itself with right wing conservatism, an anti-communist stance. But the political polarization between left and right could not be confined within the bourgeois set of rules. The left and right paramilitary groups took their fight onto streets and into rural areas. As a result, the Turkish military intervened again but this time they revised the 1961 constitution, especially the labor and penal codes, and pruned down most of the civil liberties in order to correct the “anarchy” in the country. The military sponsored “technocrat” government, whose members were chosen from the parliament, adopted a neutral discourse between right and left and initiated some changes in economics and politics. Most of the left, who attributed progressiveness to the Army, were disappointed with the repression that was unleashed against working class organizations (Ergil, 1975) (Landau, 1982). DISK and TIP were closed. Labor code was changed and the new articles made it very hard for unions to organize strikes in the private sector. It was a dress rehearsal for the 1980 military coup.

But the military did not touch either the TUSIAD (Association of Turkish Businessman) or the other medium-scale business organizations which meant the bourgeoisie had an unfettered labor environment. The most deliberate indicator of that was the hanging of three student/worker movement leaders in 1972 to create an example for the masses. For the conservative Anatolian bourgeoisie under the rhetoric of progressive reforms against anti-secularist groups, the military closed down the MNP (National Order Party) of Erbakan and restricted the openings of private religious courses. Big business with the help of new government immediately started to clean the chambers of commerce around the nation of “anti-secular” elements, which coincidentally turned out to be conservative Anatolian small businessmen (Ahmad, 1981).

But in the first elections after the military-appointed government in 1974, contrary to the wishes of big bourgeoisie, the centre-left social democrat CHP and Bulent Ecevit got most of the votes but had to form a coalition with Erbakan’s MSP( Milli Selamet Partisi), the successor of MNP, which got 8 percent of the votes. In that contradictory coalition, which lasted 6 months, working class groups and Anatolian conservatism clashed, especially when Erbakan revealed his ambitious national development projects such as the opening of thousands of factories to produce armament for the military. In that coalition MSP’s religious agenda and program did not differ from the MNP’s strategic goals. But the land reform program of CHP that antagonized the rural landowners and its highly secular education policies, i.e. schooling of village girls, etc, engendered resentment in large sections of the bourgeoisie. After the break up of the coalition, the center-right AP, fascist MHP (Nationalist Action Party) and Erbakan’s MSP formed successive nationalist coalitions. In the mid 70’s the discourse of bourgeois nationalism redefined its meaning, contrary to the anti-imperialist nationalism of the left, these nationalist governments emphasized the superiority of the Turkish race, and culture, coupled with their rabid anti-communism. The Nationalist Front of these three parties implicitly signaled the efforts of big bourgeoisie to shore up its hegemony by incorporating the other factions of capital into its praxis (Ahmad, 1981). The unifying cement of this front was anti-communism since the revival of working class movements after the coup could not be prevented. DISK’s activities flourished and strike numbers started to increase after 1974, in one of the largest demonstrations on May Day of 1976 the main Taksim Square of Istanbul saw 300,000 people, mostly workers. While the left was strong in the trade union movement, the conservative MSP also established its trade union confederation HAK-IS (Confederation of Religious Workers). Its organizing efforts however were a mere shadow of DISK, whose membership numbers surpassed half a million in the late 70s. Fascist MHP’s trade union organization MISK remained a puppet of the state and bosses as did its state founded counterpart TURK-IS. But this turn of events did not favor the working class. Given the fact that strike numbers and membership of DISK increased enormously after the first election in the wake of the military intervention, Turkish history saw the biggest conspiracy the against working class on May Day of 1977 (Ergil,2000) (Kasaba,and Bozdogan, 2000). The 500,000 workers who gathered to celebrate the worker’s day were fired upon from the roof tops of neighborhood buildings. Even today there is not any confirmed number for the deaths of that day, which closed Taksim Square to all public demonstrations in the aftermath of the bloody event.

 

The 1980 Military Coup

As the infighting among different factions of the bourgeoisie and the working class offensive against them as a whole class continued, the fascist movement rose in terms of power. This was a phenomenon in which the petty bourgeoisie unable to find sound leadership from either the working class or a faction of capital deviated to support populist and authoritarian solutions of nationalist groups. In the Turkish case, MHP (Nationalist Action Party) was the embodiment of that tendency, and also was supported by sections of rural bourgeoisie. But this growing fascist movement also had ties with the secret organizations of the state and CIA-controlled contra-guerilla actions in Turkey after 1976. They were involved in numerous attacks against the Left and in provocations to spur ethnic and religious differences (Landau, 1982). The crisis of politics was an indication of the deep bottlenecks within the economy.

The Turkish import substitution policies which depended on a protected domestic market with high tariff walls and the consumption of civil servants and blue collar workers in urban areas largely neglected the agriculture and rural sites except close to election times. The urban privileged class was controlled by high wages and income distribution from the rural areas, which exacerbated the immigration into cities. But the process of assembling the parts of foreign made machinery and products in Turkey behind tariff walls did not inspire any rise in the quality of domestic products. This lack of competitiveness in export markets and over-reliance on national markets created a foreign currency reserve crises since the only foreign reserve earnings of Turkey came from the agricultural sector and light industry like textiles, which had traditionally produced low value-added commodities. The foreign currency required to purchase intermediate capital and heavy machinery was supplied by international banks in the wake of the petro-dollar glut after 1975 (Pamuk, 1981). Turkish government and private sector indebtedness rose meteorically even though the terms of international trade (especially oil prices) and finance rates were extremely disadvantageous to Turkey.

Nationalist front governments preferred to feed that urban constituency and allocate money to rural areas during election times through foreign borrowing rather than attempting a massive overhaul of the economy and production structures. But this behavior directly increased the rift between economic actors and their political representatives since after the mid-1970s, especially the industrial bourgeoisie saw that reliance on the domestic market with welfare expenses and high wages of the working class and lack of competitive edge in export areas would ultimately stall the profitability of their enterprises.

However, the massive transformation that was sought by capital could not find a stable hegemonic political party that could pursue those objectives within the framework of chaotic 70s parliaments. Also the potential response from the working masses to any measure that would reduce their living standards further scared the bourgeois political representatives too much to promote a radical change in favor of the dominant classes (Pamuk, 1981), (Yildizoglu, 1981).

Under those conditions, the remittances of workers who worked abroad were used to finance Turkish imports. Remittances, which composed mainly half of all foreign earnings, came to a halt with the recessionary tendencies in Europe. The massive immigration to cities in the wake of less income from European remittances, and unemployment in the countryside put enormous pressure on cities both in terms of demand for services and commodities and population numbers who sought work in urban factories. Turkish industry, with its selective production to a definite stratum, did not raise its capacity. Instead it increased its prices as a response to increased demand. The added demand of urban areas was not enough to spur further capital investment given the fact that imports were expensive and there was no export oriented production. The result was rising inflation with unemployment and ascending informal black markets, which alienated large sections of the population from the system as people tended to see politicians as merely corrupt and parliament as a toothless structure. The consumer inflation numbers increased from 30 percent in 1977 to three digit numbers at the end of 1979. This prevailing inflation eroded living standards of the urban constituencies of the import substitution policy , as the bureaucrats, and civil servants all had fixed incomes (Tunay, in Eralp, Tunay, Yesilada (eds) 1993).These urban groups shifted largely to the left, even though at the same time Turkish socialists had were meddled by in-fighting regarding the correct interpretation of Marxism. Large groups outside the social democrat CHP such as the TKP (Turkish Communist Party) chose to follow guidelines that were imposed by the Soviet Communist Party, which dictated a very orthodox understanding and relatively alien prescriptions to Turkey’s conditions.

At the same time in the country-side, the import substitution policies exposed Turkish farmers and peasants to the volatilities of international markets. In 1978-79 coupled with domestic inflation, rural groups also sought political alternative to the existing system. But conservative traditions in central Anatolia frequently channelled these dissidents towards the religious MSP and the fascist MHP. One can say generally the Turkish left’s association with urban factories and the working class narrowed its organizational outlook, and its movement was seen as something foreign and aloof from the country-sides’ problems. The Islamist movement’s ideological supremacy, with which the MSP’s support was hovering around 8 to 10 percent in those years, was nowhere near hegemonic (Culhaoglu, in Savran and Balkan, (eds), 2002).

Under those conditions the 1980 presidential election by the parliament reached a stalemate which ironically signaled a balance of forces between different factions of capital and working class. Between 1978-80 Turkish foreign debt reached 16 billion dollars and the government told the bankers that it could not service that debt. Given the geo-political circumstances of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the IMF immediately stepped in to help. The international banks restructured Turkish debt in June 1980 and the IMF provided 1.65 billion dollars (Pamuk, 1981). The proportion of the debt to GDP and massive 4 billion dollar annual requirements were in no way paid by the meager import substitution earnings of the economy. The Turkish industrial bourgeoisie and its main association TUSIAD (Turkish Association of Industrialists and Businessmen) were increasingly disturbed with the prevailing conditions.

As the working class strikes reached unprecedented levels, civil war like conditions ensued after numerous anonymous bombings and assassinations of public figures and intellectuals. DISK general secretary Kemal Turker was assassinated by MHP militants in the same year, which aggravated the situation. Turkey’s religious minority, the Alevites, who traditionally support the secular left, were increasingly targeted by Sunnis, the dominant sect of Muslims. In that religious and political turmoil the democratically elected government could not establish a stable order.

Thus on 12 September 1980 the Turkish army intervened violently in the socioeconomic situation. They immediately overthrew the government and closed the parliament. All parties and civil associations except the business organization TUSIAD were closed. The party leaders were arrested, the DISK was shut down, unionists were arrested, and all the collective agreements signed by unions were cancelled, and then workers’ wages were frozen. In the 12th September coup, the military dictatorship arrested tens of thousands of people, many of whom were then tortured, with hundreds killed, hanged and disabled. Here are some figures:

- 650 thousand people were arrested, the majority of them were tortured,
- Over 50 thousand people were forced to migrate to European countries as political immigrants,
- 700 death sentences were demanded, 480 of them sentenced to death, 216 were suspended in the parliament, and 48 were hanged,
- Around 200 people were killed under torture,
- 23,677 associations were banned. (Savran, in Savran and Balkan (eds), 2002: p 16).

When the European response to the human rights violations of the military regime soured relationships, Turkish governments turned towards the U.S., for whom the geo strategic position of Turkey against Soviet Union and the Iranian Islamic revolution was still important. U.S military supplies and debt relief through international agencies thus provided crucial assistance to the Turkish military regime under an extremely stressful economic situation. The leftist movement and state-supported MHP were pacified by repression. The army decided to transfer to a civil regime in 3 years, but nothing would be the same in the coming decades.

At this point no socialist or social democratic kind of proposal could come from the dominant forces since they supported the military intervention against the rising working class militancy and demands. However, the ruling strata aimed to create a synthesis to achieve a broad based consensus at least among conservative sections of the population. The means for that project was the Turkish-Islamic synthesis.

In fact there was a long tradition in Ottoman-Turkish writing about the nature of the relationship between modernity (the Western world) and Turkish society. Since Ziya Gokalp and Yusuf Akcura, the prominent nationalists argued for a combination of Islamic spiritual elements with the centuries-long Turkic traditions against the attacks of alien forces, especially cultural forces (Heper, 2000). Meanwhile in 1980, the Turkish generals, the leaders of the coup, supported the foundation of Aydinlar Ocagi (Hearts of Intellectuals). This institution stated that its primary task was to reconsolidate the Turkish-Islamic traditions of Turkish society; “since given the anarchic situation of the 1970s Turkish culture is again under attack from imperialist countries and alien ideologies like Marxism” (Savran, in Savran and Balkan (eds), 2002: p 18). So they began a nationwide movement to raise the consciousness of the people about this danger, with a significant amount of state support. The strategic aim of the U.S. to form a Muslim containment circle around the U.S.S.R., fit conveniently into the general picture.

As for education, starting from the 1980s mandatory religious classes for Turkish students until university age were introduced into the curriculum. The government increased the budget of the State Directorate of Religious Affairs threefold. Moreover, the government permitted the opening of private Koran courses around the country, most of them under the supervision of religious officials of local mosques. The Imam Hatip high schools (high schools that trained imams) numbers increased also as most of the conservative charities competed with each other to construct mosques even in the remote corners of the country. It was ironic that at the time the numbers of mosques was triple the number of schools in Turkey (Gok, in Savran and Balkan (eds), 2002b).

The ideological suppression that was unleashed against the left and (less violently) the extreme right mainly aimed at the organizational cells of these groups, houses, university dormitories, and art and media centers. However, the main organizational focal points of the religious or Islamic groups, namely mosques, were never suppressed because of the religious sensitivities of the Muslim religion. A coup that expressed its determination to exterminate godless communism could not oppress the traditional ritual place of the devout believers. But one striking fact is that the leaders of the September 12, 1980 military coup emphasized the strict secularism of the Turkish republic. So from those statements one can assume that they wanted a moderate Islamic culture for Turkey, not like the radical one in Iran. Islam should be strong within the private sphere of the person and should regulate personal relationships but it should not become a political tool to criticize the socio-economic system or the dominant social relationships between the state and its citizens (Yavuz, 2000).

At first sight even though the plan of the generals and the backers of the coup such as business organizations looked very reasonable from their point of interest, their projects completely ignored the reality of the concept of hegemony. Hegemony, as Gramsci argued, required the unity of base and superstructure. Only cultural hegemonic efforts to spread Islamic conservatism cannot be successful unless the initiators of the process have a wide base across the classes and a material redistribution program. The structural conditions of neo-liberal capitalism were hardly compatible with a new Keynesian-Fordist style welfare arrangement and the political regulator of this new order, the nation-state, was not equipped to handle an international crisis.

Turgut Ozal, as the architect of the 1980 structural adjustment package and later elected as prime minister of the country in 1983, created ANAP (Motherland Party) to articulate a nationwide popular hegemony for the new right. The ideology of ANAP was, in parallel with the Turkish-Islam synthesis, the conservative nationalism in which Ozal tried to coalesce four different groups: the economic liberals, the religious conservatives, the nationalists and the old social democrats (Saribay, 1985). As the party and Ozal refrained from being seen with coup leaders, they promised some popular measures during the first elections in 1983, such as decreasing unemployment and inflation and raising the standard of living of new “ortadirek” (this was a Turkish term for new middle class at that time, allegedly ranged from artisans and craftsmen, to civil servants and workers) (Ozbudun, in B.F Stowasser (ed), 1987). However, this new so-called middle class was a complete repudiation of the legacy of the 70s in which the ideological stances of people was between left and right and definitely on a class basis. In the 1980s the Motherland Party tried to achieve a cross-class consensus, or what Gramsci calls an expansive hegemony, through tying the interests of subordinated classes to the project of the dominant factions in the ruling class (Tunay, in Eralp, Tunay, Yesilada (eds) 1993), (Ayata, in Eralp, Tunay, Yesilada (eds) 1993)

The first economic measure was to promote exports and foreign oriented production within the country through incentives, tax rebates, government assistance for export promotion and reducing the amount of bureaucracy over exchange controls and custom tariffs. The liberalization of trade and financial markets opened up an export fury in Turkish markets. From 1980 to 1988 exports increased three-to four-fold compared to their pre-1980 numbers, as real wages almost returned to their 1970 levels in the absence of any organized labor movement. But after 1989, most of those exaggerated export growth numbers appeared to come from “paper” exports (Balkan and Yeldan, in Savran and Balkan (eds), 2002b). Frequently corporations used export incentives from the government, even though they listed agricultural and light industrial goods as heavy machinery or technological commodities. The cheap labor that was required for the export promotion model was sustained by restrictive labor laws. The only labor union that was permitted to operate was the state-controlled Turk-IS. For example, under the new 1982 constitution student workers cannot be affiliated with a labor union, and only the labor unions that have been in a certain sector more than 10 years had the right to sign collective agreements. Also, legislators severed the ties between labor unions and academia and political parties by cutting off associations of unions with anything political or academic (Mahirogullari, 1998).

Under the new constitution, the Motherland Party centralized the supervision of universities by creating YOK (the Higher Education Council). They restricted academia’s affiliations with political parties and civil institutions, as founding civil organizations were made almost impossible by the new anti-terror law. The Turkish government severely curtailed the right of free speech and organization through new laws governing demonstrations and marches. People needed government permits even for routine press briefings. To elevate its anti-terror struggle, the military and the legislators also passed a law that formed new State Security Courts, independent from normal civil law, precisely to investigate anti-state groups or individuals. But the most visible effect of the 1980 military junta was the emphasis they put on the MGK (National Security Council) in the constitution. This body, composed of five generals and five civilians, was designated to decide the crucial domestic and foreign security questions and recommend policy options to the civilian government. In practice, usually those recommendations were usually perceived as orders (Ergil, 2000), (Yavuz, 2000).

In addition to all of the above, the new conservative nationalism furiously rejected any cultural or social demands of the country’s Kurdish movement. Kurdish political groups, who began to organize around the late 1970s and demanded recognition from the central government, were repressed under martial law in the south east of the country. The existence of either the Kurds or the Kurdish language was denied as some nationalist scholars tried to establish theories alleging that the Kurds are part of old Turkish tribes and originally their culture tied to that of Central Asian Turks. In reality Kurds have been in Anatolia more than 2,000 years and their language resembles the Med civilization in Persia rather than that of Turks or Arabs. In that context in 1984, one of those Kurdish groups PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) started an armed struggle against the Turkish government for an eventual separation demand (Taspinar, 2004). However, as in other military regimes in the underdeveloped world, Turkey’s counter-insurgency operations and the anti-democratic climate of the 1980s largely confined this civil war to the mountains of the South East. The 15-year active civil war in the region witnessed more than 30 thousand deaths of soldiers and PKK militants, numerous human right violations during the evacuation of Kurdish villages and a rise in unemployment and economic deprivation for the region’s inhabitants (Senesen, in Savran, and Balkan (eds), 2002b)

Throughout the 1980s and 90s these forced village evacuations put enormous pressures on the urban areas in Turkey, especially cities like Istanbul, and Diyarbakir, which received huge numbers of immigrants. Coupled with the gradual withdrawal of the state from welfare services, these shanty towns of immigrants on the outer perimeter of large cities became hotbeds of oppositional political activity, albeit with a more conservative orientation than the 1970s (Ergil, 2000) (Kasaba and Bozdogan, 2000).

In the economic area at the end of the1980s the numerous promises of Motherland Party governments regarding unemployment, inflation and income redistribution fell through. The conservative nationalism’s predominant neo-liberal economic agenda, which promoted exports and manufacturing for foreign markets, encountered structural difficulties mainly stemming from the volatilities of the process of integrating Turkey into global capitalist markets. First, the export drive of the Turkish bourgeoisie in the 1980s mainly concentrated on the low-skilled and low-value added sectors such as textiles, clothing, leather, glass products and some very basic electronic, steel and iron goods. However, in commodities or products that required high-skilled labor and capital intensive investment such as bio-chemicals and engineering, Turkey remained a net importer at an accelerating pace. As a result of the policies of neo-liberalism, product diversification through export orientation was not delivered (Turel,in Eralp,Tunay, Yesilada(eds), 1993) Compared to the1970s, Turkey’s share of exports remained roughly in the same non-durable consumer goods sector and in some unsophisticated intermediate capital goods that largely use natural resources as their inputs.

Second, the productivity numbers of industries were not very impressive either.
The large scale assault by employers and the state against the working class during the military years often encouraged employers to increase absolute surplus value amounts rather than that of relative surplus value, parallel to the economy’s general trend in specializing low-value added sectors. Moreover, the increase in the size of small businesses at the expense of large manufacturers, coupled with a rising informal economy and subcontracting in almost all sectors did not qualitatively change the Turkish economy.

The oligopolistic market structures promoted monopoly pricing by dominant firms, who often used their import-substitution era supremacy over their sectors to attract joint ventures with foreign business. Thus, all the pumped-up advertising about the neo-liberal development model and Turkey as the IMF’s so-called golden child merely increased the speculative short term or monopolistic long term foreign currency inflows to the country. At the end the employment and inflation numbers were not bright due to the fact that most of the export drive was sustained on further capacity utilization instead of deepening of capital investments. Also, the assault on real wages to promote cheap exports and elements above greatly reduced the purchasing power of the masses, especially wage-labor and people with fixed incomes (Turel, in Eralp, Tunay, Yesilada (eds), 1993) ( Ercan, in Savran, and Balkan (eds), 2002b).

Third, the natural course of free-market policies and the so-called comparative advantage principle of neo-liberal economics engendered a volatile and crisis-prone financial market for Turkey. The liberalization of foreign trade and withdrawal of currency controls in the 1980s encouraged investors into more rentier investments as the small domestic market did not provide a stable future growth hope for many. Many private commercial banks and holdings increased their interest rates to attract small savings from the public, though most of the time these banks used these savings to lend money to the state, which itself under a high inflation, unequal-taxation and a growing informal economy, preferred to finance its current accounts with accelerating short-term debts and bonds. In addition to all these, the reserve and liquidity requirements of private banks were simplified and the central bank’s control over them decreased (Yeldan, in Savran, and Balkan (eds), 2002b). As the public investment on state industrial enterprises was reduced significantly, these institutions were forced to borrow from financial markets at high interest rates. The government and state banks guaranteed to finance the deficits of state enterprises, which aggravated the public indebtedness problem. At the same time by the provisions of the 1984 financial liberalization law prime minister Ozal’s brother Korkut Ozal and his partners in Faisal finance were provided tax reductions and a convenient regulatory framework to promote Islamic financial groups (Baskan, in Clement and Wilson (eds), 2004). Saudi Faisal-Finance and Al-Baraka Turk the Kuwaiti enterprise was first to benefit from that legislation. That legislation, when state industries were starving for funds, displayed the ironic face of the neo-liberal state and what kind of interests dominated the decision-making processes of so-called “neutral” state (Yalman, in Savran and Balkan (eds), 2002)

After all, when it came to the end of 8 years of ANAP government in 1991, none of the crucial problems like inflation or unemployment had been solved. On the contrary, the promises of product diversification in exports and an end to import dependency could not be realized. With the inflation rate hovering around 80 percent and ascending corruption and income inequality, coupled with the volatility of speculative short term funds that entered the country in the 80s, Ozal’s party was defeated at the polls.

Nevertheless, the DYP (True Path Party) of former prime minister Demirel, which replaced ANAP, despite their populist rhetoric, continued the neo-liberal policies of previous governments. In 1991, when ANAP failed to create a new national popular will around its conservative nationalism project, and given the geopolitics of global relations after the collapse of Soviet Union, the Turkish elite decided to go for a much narrower project which did not emphasize religion as much as the earlier project. The neo-liberal hegemonic project failed primarily because Ozal’s government could not sustain the support of privileged strata within the middle class as their counterparts had in the West (Tunay, in Eralp, Tunay, Yesilada (eds), 1993). For example, Reagan cooperated with the Sunbelt states in the U.S and Thatcher crafted a middle class support base for her neoliberal project from small business, the civil bureaucracy and parts of the industrial working class in Britain. Due to the above reasons, the Turkish economy and development capacity could not enlarge the pie enough to support either a privileged strata nor could it establish a sustainable worker aristocracy in export industries. As a result, the ANAP’s idea of creating consensus through gathering four different political tendencies within one party, especially in a new party without a traditional local base, disintegrated as the tensions between the pro-American liberals and the pro-Islamist conservatives within the party went their separate ways in the1991 election. In that election, the former members of the MSP of Erbakan began to join the new IslamistWelfare Party, whose votes tallied around 7 percent in the 1980s (Tunay, in Eralp, Tunay, Yesilada (eds), 1993), (Yavuz, 2000) (Vergin,1985).

The dissolution of the U.S.S.R and changing global strategies of American capitalism forced the Turkish elite to rethink its support of the Islamist movement. As the Social Democrats fell into a twilight zone within that ideological emptiness, growing parts of the public began to recognize the Islamist Welfare party as the effective opposition movement against all the inequalities and injustices of the 80‘s (Sakallioglu, 1996). Furthermore, the unconditional support of the last ANAP government for the Americans in the First Gulf War deepened the rift between the project of neo-liberalism and the Islamists, who had gained some sophistication within public administration over those 10 years, and whose project was mainly suspicious of Westerners and their intentions. Below, we will discuss the factors that helped Turkey’s Islamist movement to challenge the secular basis of the Turkish state in the1990s.

 

Political Islam

Until the 1980s Turkish labor policies can be characterized as liberal as indicated by the rising numbers of union memberships and real gains in the wage levels during the import substitution era. But in 1980 after the military coup, in parallel with the new accumulation model of export orientation, whose main comparative advantage for Turkey was cheap labor and labor intensive industries, Turkish governments and the constitution created legislation which aimed to curb domestic demand in order to provide supply surplus for export markets. The military government in 1980 and the successive governments banned most strikes and accused or arrested many union leaders for politically motivated strikes. As the main business organization TUSIAD was negotiating the trade policies with the ruling circles, most of the trade unions, especially DISK, had their activities significantly restricted (Savran in Savran and Balkan (eds), 2002).

In addition to cutting the political and academic affiliations of trade unions, the military governments designed legislative obstacles against the collective bargaining rights of labor unions. For example, a union cannot have the eligibility to sign a collective agreement until it represents a majority in an establishment as well as at least 10 percent of the workers who work in that branch of activity. Through specific laws, government arbitration councils entered into the picture, most of the time watering down agreements in favor of employers. Administrative controls like security checks on the political connections of labor union leaders, who could not be nominated if they have less than 10 years of service in that branch, and the designated ceilings on membership contributions to the unions, gravely affected the efficacy of trade unions. In 1984, one year after the junta regime, the number of strikes in the country was 4, a more than 90 percent reduction compared to 1980 (Senses, in Eralp, Tunay, Yesilada (eds), 1993), (Culhaoglu, in Savran and Balkan (eds), 2002).

Also, the new export-oriented model neglected the many welfare measures of previous years for the workers. Educational and health care aids from the governments were cut or reduced to minimal through price inflation, which further exacerbated the well being of the working class. The privatization of state enterprises accompanied by the contraction in public sector employment negatively reflected on labor unions since the largest union organization Turk-IS was organized largely in the public sector.

These developments, in the absence of DISK, political oppression and covert government support to religiously affiliated unions like HAK-IS , which virtually operated as a subsection of the Welfare Party within the labor movement, coupled with the humiliation of former militant labor leaders in the eyes of the public, literally ended the supremacy of social democracy whose efficacy was hurt greatly by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent ideological panic that ensued among official left circles (Ergil, 2000) .

The post-Fordist era’s global production relations as it exported industrial jobs into deregulated areas of cheap labor in the world, deepened the crisis of fixed understandings of Fordist era expectations of the working class. The informal economy, subcontracting, lessening of welfare payments, and rising uncertainties in terms of job guarantees created more individualistic labor relations with the employers. Those individualistic relations were consolidated by the return of small businesses, growing family-operated small manufacturing. Overall these contributed to the patriarchal and feudal personalistic dominance of employers over the potential employees. As the question of for whom do you work blurred in the annals of the global market, this ideological vacuum fed pre-industrial era political tendencies among public. In Turkish shanty towns in the outer perimeters of large urban areas, the excluded work forces of the neo-liberal model encouraged tribal ties and religious and ethnic identities against an unidentified enemy (Bugra, in Savran and Balkan (eds), 2002).

The Welfare party, especially after 1991, was the major beneficiary of that environment as they began to replace the state as the welfare provider. In those shanty towns, Welfare party activists used leftist-like discourses which criticized the secular order for being unjust. Readers should pay attention to this theme since it is an indication of how the Islamic party used the residual power of old Ottoman tradition within Turkish society. Also they challenged the secular commonsense, in the Gramscian sense, by using Muslim identity, encouraged by all government behavior since 1980, as a unifying principle of the society. They asked people if everyone’s common identity is their religion, why are the cultural norms and political life of the nation so contradictory to religious teachings? This was a challenge that nobody in the junta of 1980 would think of during their gradual islamization of the public sphere (Bugra, in Savran and Balkan (eds), 2002), (Cakir,2002)

Since the foundation of the republic, the Kemalist elite saw education as the main diffuser of the new culture for which the secular republic struggled very hard. Also, in the 1961 constitution the legislators perceived education as a social right of all citizens and mandated the state to provide elementary education up to university level free to all its citizens. In those years, or before the 80s, education’s primary task was to spread the principles of the Kemalist republic into remote corners of the country. Although inequalities existed in terms of educational opportunities among rural and urban sections of the population, the state’s educational drives significantly broadened the literacy base.

In the 1960s and 70s the teaching profession was one of the most respected occupations as an indication of the emphasis on educational policies. In terms of providing a skilled work-force to the economy, one can say that often the curricula and programs of vocational schools were determined by the Ministry of Higher Education. So the striking point about education in Turkey before the 1980s was that it had a social aspect and was not commoditized (Gok, in Savran and Balkan (eds), 2002b).

After the 1980 military coup, the coup leader Kenan Evren and ANAP’s leader Turgut Ozal questioned numerous times citizens’ right to send their children to state schools free of charge. Though they could not openly support the idea that the state should completely withdraw from basic education, with the neo-liberal model private schools were greatly encouraged by tax rebates and incentives. Ozal consistently argued that health care and educational expenditures were major burdens on government budgets. At the same time the government initiated a build-your-own-school campaign as a preparation of the public for the future withdrawal of the state from that provider role (Gok, in Savran and Balkan (eds), 2002b). The ANAP government and military, after they increased the numbers of Imam training high schools, opened the universities to the graduates of these high schools, even though all other vocational training high schools’ main target was to send experts into specific areas. The numbers of graduates from these Imam Hatip high schools were around 86,000 between 1950 and 1984, but between 1984 and 1992 the same schools distributed 304,000 diplomas (Gok, in Savran and Balkan (eds), 2002b). Though the profession of Imam is exclusively male under religious rules, girls began to be admitted to these schools after the 1980s. Ironically Turkey saw its veiled female student problem in public schools in the early 90s, which proved to be one of the basic ideological ammunitions of the Islamic movement in Turkey. Religious courses were made mandatory in state schools for every citizen as the ANAP government allocated more money to building mosques and opening state-sanctioned Koran courses (Bugra, in Savran and Balkan (eds), 2002).

In addition to these, the government started to increase the differentiation in terms of educational opportunities further by creating new state high schools whose instruction language is English. The entrance to these privileged high schools was extremely competitive and through nationwide central examinations, which opened a market for the private sector to prepare children for these exams through private courses or tutoring.

The numbers of private high schools and elementary schools in the country tremendously increased after 1985 when the Ozal government legislated a favorable educational law which allowed opening non-profit educational institutions with a sub-article noting profit-making can only be allowed for the development of the general quality of education in Turkey. That provision legally sanctified the neo-liberal model’s commoditization of education. For example in 1988, a Turkish teacher’s monthly salary was $250, a fact that forced a lot of teachers to either transfer to private schools or work in another job to sustain their meager standard of living under the highly inflationary conditions of Turkey (Onis, 2004) (Vergin, 1985).

As state subsidies to state schools were diminishing, people who could not afford to send their children to private schools looked for alternatives, especially the ones that could help their children to pass the national entrance examinations for Turkish universities. In that context, religious groups like Naksibendis and Nurcus, who appraised the value of education in terms of disseminating their societal norms and world views, began to open educational institutions. In mainly private tutoring courses, these religious sects not only use their own instructional methods but also provided additional, mostly free, services such as dormitories, meals, and stipends to their students to encourage them to share the same type of social life. Fettulah Gulen, leader of the Nurcu sect, owned 89 private schools, 373 private tutoring courses and 500 student dormitories in 1998 (Baskan, in Clement and Wilson(eds), 2004).

In terms of foreign connections, a Saudi originated organization, World Islamic League, which advocated the foundation of an Islamic federation based on Sharia, contributed to numerous education and religious projects in Turkey after the 1980 military coup. The so-called secular generals condoned the payment of salaries of Turkish religious functionaries in Belgium and Germany by this institution. This event happened at a time when the leftist organizations and trade union leaders were prosecuted for their alleged links with foreign elements such as the U.S.S.R. According to Erhan Akin, the World Islamic League created its political and economic connections through prime minister Turgut Ozal and his brother Korkut Ozal. This Saudi group financed the construction of a mosque within the Middle East Technical University campus, a hotbed of left political activity before the coup, in Ankara and provided aid for the Kocatepe mosque in the center of downtown Ankara. Also, the World Islamic League’s general secretary visited Turkey numerous times and proposed cooperation in the Central Asian Turkic republics to “educate” Muslim youth after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The ironic thing was that the promotion of these Saudi views were regularly aired on Radio Free Europe, an American project, with the participation of Paul Henze (former CIA station chief in Ankara) (Akin and Karasapan, 1988).

After the September 12, 1980 military coup, Turkey furthermore began to integrate itself in the world capitalist markets to solve its foreign currency problem and large indebtedness. As we have seen, the military governments and Ozal administrations had closer ties with Saudi financing, though in a covert way. First in December 1983 and then again in 1984 two separate but related financial laws built the foundations of Islamic private banking in Turkey in parallel with the Washington consensus’ conditions that debtor countries should liberalize their financial markets to attract foreign investment. However, in the Turkish legislation, the Ozal government provided extra incentives and temporary tax rebates to these non-conventional Islamic Banks (Baskan, in Clement and Wilson (eds), 2004).

Islamic banking began to spread worldwide from Saudi Arabia within the context of the oil boom after the OPEC’s decision to triple prices around the 1973 October war.

The large amount of petro-dollars flowing into the Middle East encouraged rich Saudis to use this newly found financial power for the advantage of Saudi foreign policy, which opposed the revolutionary and leftist versions of Arab nationalism or Arab socialism. In 1975, the Islamic Development Bank started its operations by opening branches first in Arabian peninsula, then in other Arab countries. Real momentum gained after 1979, when the Pakistanis completely islamicized their banking system and the Sudanese and Egyptians opened their own Islamic banking branches (Warde,in Clement and Wilson (eds), 2004).

In Turkey with the assistance of the Ozal government’s decrees, Saudi Prince Faisal spearheaded the effort with a joint-venture with Salih Ozcan. The prime minister’s brother Korkut Ozal followed their footsteps by founding the Kuwaiti partnered Al-Baraka Turk Finance House (Akin and Karasapan, 1988). As these institutions were removed from the supervision of the ministry of finance and put under the over sight of the prime ministry, their numerous financial dealings, especially fund transfers from abroad, remained outside the banking regulations of the country at the time. The Kuveyt Turk Finans in 1989, Anadolu Finans in 1991, Ihlas Finans in 1995 and Asya Finans in 1996 were the other prominent Islamic finance houses that opened in Turkey. After 1999 the Faisal Finans was acquired by Ulker group and renamed Family Finans (Bulut, 1999). The increase in the numbers of these finance houses and their market share after 1991 can be explained by several things. First, the collapse of the Soviet Union increased financial and geographical opportunities for these Middle Eastern-based companies. Even prominent American corporations like Citibank created their own Islamic banking branches. Second, the devout Muslim population, who concealed their savings from the conventional interest-based financial world, began to believe in the credibility of these finance houses against the western based financial institutions. Third, the Anatolian small businessmen, craftsmen and artisans of the 1970s, under the new liberal market conditions, found sound export markets within Western Europe and the Middle East. As traditionally not favored by big business’ commercial banks in the provision of easy and cheap credits, these new entrepreneurs found these Islamic banks more convenient to their business model. These private finance houses charged less in terms of lending rates (Islamic groups do not call it interest) and were more friendly in their approach to these Anatolian businessmen as their potential constituency. Readers should remember that Erbakan’s political movement in the 1970s had promised the Anatolian bourgeoisie, craftsmen and artisans easy finance opportunities from state banks to promote national development. At this time, it was not an Islamist party but Islamic finance houses that delivered on that promise (Bulut, 1999).

In addition to these, the increasing rift between the American style neo-liberal secular model and the promises of Islamization of social life that was engendered by rabid anti-communism and the national conservatism of the 1980 junta forced devout sections of the ANAP to join Erbakan’s Welfare Party. People who were disillusioned by corruption and the unequal nature of the free market project of successive governments, coupled with increasing fear on the part of the big bourgeoisie about the strengthening Islamic political movements in Turkey, provided perfect terrain for an intra-class fight between sections of the bourgeoisie. In this struggle, conservative sections of the bourgeoisie saw that they needed economic power houses as well as a political party to change the Turkish political landscape (Cakir, 2002).

As part of this juxtaposition between two sides of the ruling classes, Islamic finance houses opened more branches in cities that were more Welfare-party friendly. In their operations these institutions strictly refused interest based financial dealings. Their main financial operations based on three different concepts. First, murabaha, in which the Islamic bank would buy an asset that a particular customer needs, for example heavy machinery, and then through negotiations of a reasonable profit rate, it leases the equipment or asset to the customer. However, this practice was relatively abandoned after the economic crisis and hard-hitting devaluations in Turkey. Second, in the mudaraba, a customer and the Islamic bank engaged in a joint venture in which the bank supplies credit for the initial business and the customer provided his/her labor. At the end, the resulting profits and losses, are shared according to the primary banking agreement signed by the two sides. The third concept, musharaka, means that both the customer and the bank are responsible for supplying credit and labor, like partners whose profits and losses are shared as argued above. As it is clear, these banks’ dealings, unlike conventional banks, aim to provide funds for productive enterprises and form partnerships with the customer rather than being just a financial instrument for the bank. It inevitably requires constant supervision of the bank since shared losses put more burden in terms of costs on the credit provider. At that point, the principles of the Washington consensus, the transparency in balance sheets, financial liberalization and less government bureaucracy and efficiency, intersects with the requirements of Islamic banking as a more liberal model decreasing the potential costs of doing business (Bulut, 1999), (Baskan, in Clement and Wilson (eds), 2004), (Onis,1997)

On a different level, one can argue that these Islamic finance houses became the finance capital of the Islamic Anatolian bourgeoisie as they not only opened branches mostly in conservative towns but also their credit schemes provided immense support to newly industrializing towns in Turkey such as Kayseri, Denizli, Gaziantep, Konya. A look at the interactions between the former merchants (today’s businessmen) and these banking institutions would reveal that it was mostly the devout sections of the Anatolian bourgeoisie that used the interest-free instruments of Islamic banking. The new tendencies of post-Fordist flexible system of production brought forth regionalization, the importance of small businesses, craft models and pre-industrial paternalistic, religious and kin-based production relations. So in those small towns religious identity was the basic unifying element among different sections of the populations, which had covert state support since the 1980s and had relative freedom in terms of expressing ones’ ideas. These ideas permitted certain sections of merchants, the unemployed, peasants, and the commercial bourgeoisie to come up with regional development projects supported by the Islamic banking system (Onis,1997).

As the conflicts between the religiously oriented trade union HAK-IS, whose organizing activities were facilitated by the state through repression of leftist trade unions, and the MUSIAD in collective bargaining negotiations demonstrated, the Islamic values of the Prophet Mohammed’s time are not congruent with the demands of contemporary industrial production. Many times, the HAK-IS officials complained about the anti-union behavior of the MUSIAD members. However, in many speeches MUSIAD members clearly defended the ideas of the neo-liberal model when they both replace the social state with the benevolent relations of Islamic charities and emphasized the lost years of the Fordist-regulated atmosphere of the 1970s. These declarations revealed that Islamic business organizations primarily aimed to transform power relations within the bourgeoisie, rather than a complete overhaul of the mode of production, which would have repercussions on their position vis-a-vis the working class (Bugra, in Savran and Balkan (eds), 2002), (Cinar,1997).

Erol Yarar, the president of the association, declared in his speeches that the ideal economic and social environment that the MUSIAD yearned for was the days of the Prophet Mohammed’s Medina, in which enrichment through commercial activities with minimum intervention with the freedom of agents in markets became the ideology of the rising Islamic civilization. In that civilization, the religiously sophisticated people respected each others’ rights due to their social responsibility stemming from the teachings of the holy book, the Koran. Thus in his critique of contemporary Turkey, Yarar resented not the substance of capitalist market relationships, but to the degenerative effects of the secular culture in which the materialistic obsessions of individuals relegated the family, and social values of traditional Muslim society to the private sphere. In parallel with Islamist cultural critiques, this line of thinking tries to solve problems of economics and politics by establishing a comprehensive moral order, namely an Islamic one, that emphasizes the spiritual harmony among Muslims. So the problem was not in the structural all-encompassing relationships of the mode of production, but in the moral education and degenerate behavior of individuals. Once this homo Islamicus is created, the alleged social conflicts of the society would be tackled easily (Laciner, 1995).

For example, an individual worker would not need to go on a strike in an Islamic society because his/her Muslim boss would do business for the ultimate goal of serving god, which indirectly forces the boss to consider the deserved share of his/her employees. In an interesting twist, the rationality of neo-liberal markets are made the means of serving god, since the accumulation of money was sanctioned as long as it is done for this ultimate holy purpose. However, questions like how a society can be governed until all the people are trained as homo Islamicus or who will objectively define what is compatible with the official Islam within the workplace remained unanswered in MUSIAD’s periodicals (Cinar, 1997).

 

Religious Sects.

One of the most visible religious sects and orders in Turkey is the Naksibendi Order. This particular brand of Sunni tradition generally emphasizes the complete devotion of one’s life to the religious world which encompassing the “purification of soul, pious asceticism, personal integrity as well as self-control in resisting materialistic desires” (Ayata in Eralp, Tunay and Yesilada (eds), 1993:p52). The sects’ members are generally affiliated through “communal hearts” that organized overall relationships of the group under a hierarchical line; in other words the real power and dictates emanated from the religious sheikh. As earlier centuries’ Anatolian religious communes, these groups often demanded complete subordination of individual egos to the orders and teachings of the leader. The group, traditionally renowned among the inhabitants of conservative Anatolian towns, largely organized around and supported the conservative right-wing parties, visibly beginning with the 1950s Menderes governments, and continued with Erbakan’s National Order Party in 1970s. Immediately after the1980 military coup, they threw their support to Turgut Ozal’s ANAP, as he and his brothers were affiliated with Erbakan’s party during 1970s. After 1990, with the Welfare Party’s return to the official scene, the order members also began to separate among different right-wing parties (Ergil, 2000).

However, a striking point about the sect is that they did not aim to topple the secular government of Turkey; it means that they are not so radical in their religious asceticism. Their primary focus was to strengthen the way of Islam and Islam’s visibility in everyday social life. Though there are radical splinters among the members of the sect, most of the religious sheiks that led the movement espoused conciliatory approaches towards questions such as the modernization and westernization of Turkey. For example, they give an affirmative role to science and technology when it is used by the members to increase their wealth and social status. Here, readers can see the parallel among all these Islamic organizations in terms of how they internalized personal enrichment (inevitably a capitalist market concept) as a means to further help the cause of Islam. But what would be the excess in this personal journey for enrichment is an open-ended question since there is no clear religious teaching or verse to specify the thin line between material excess (hedonism) and the accumulation of wealth for the sake of religious virtues (Ayata in Eralp, Tunay and Yesilada (eds), 1993).

The Naksibendi sects’ religious leaders mainly came from the South and Eastern Anatolia where feudal and patriarchic relationships still prevailed despite the modernizing rhetoric of successive republican governments. But the increasing integration of devout Anatolian merchants, craftsmen, and artisans into the capitalist economy through export promotion years made the rules of these religious orders very flexible. Maybe women who work outside their homes could be ostracized by these sects in the 60s or 70s; however, in the face of current industrialization and capital’s quest for cheap (non-unionized) labor, religious fatwas against working women would impede the capitalist accumulation process which in turn cripples the personal enrichment of those devout Muslims.

So one can argue that these kind of religious orders, which are infamous for their yearnings for social control over their members and more rigid in interpreting the teachings of Sunni Muslim tradition, had chosen to reconcile with the requirements of the prevailing accumulation pattern. The radicals who could not stomach these conciliatory moves by the religious leaders opted to use armed resistance against the state, but their numbers and ideological effects are less effective than left extremist groups (Bulut, 1999), (Cakir, 2002).

A second religious sect that is worth to be discussed is the Nurcu order, whose leader Fettulah Gulen’s name became a household matter in the 1990s due to its enormous media exposure from the order’s educational facilities and the Kemalist reactions to the ultimate intentions of this largely peaceful group. The founder of this sect was Saidi Nursi, who, unlike the Naksibendi, emphasized the divine role of science and technology in his quest to understand god. Nursi’s followers have a different attitude towards science and scientific inquiry because their founder focused more on the allegorical, abstract and spiritual verses in the Koran (Laciner, 1995). This tradition, through this divine linking between scientific inquiry and even the smallest particles and wonders in this world, surpassed the instrumental approach of other Sunni sects in this subject matter. That explains the web of schools, universities, private courses and natural science periodicals that were founded by this group.

Starting from these premises, the Nurcu sect also supported conservative rightwing parties in the country beginning with Menderes and continuing with the Justice Party of Suleyman Demirel. Though they shifted their support to Ozal’s ANAP during the post-coup years, they nevertheless returned to their traditional party of Demirel after 1991 (Ayata in Eralp, Tunay and Yesilada (eds), 1993). This group’s political leaning revealed the fact that, unlike Naksibendis, Nurcus are more comfortable in their dealings with big bourgeoisie. A further indication of the above argument is the ideology of the group, which emphasized the Ottoman rule as the ideal way of governing a society. The multi-cultural nature and the Turkishness of the empire were stressed in their periodicals, which displayed an element of Turkish nationalism within the outlook of the movement. Their leader Fettullah Gulen mostly refrained from criticizing the secular establishment, and in order to refute the accusations that his sect tried to change the political order in Turkey through the graduates of its educational facilities, he proposed to donate all these schools to the Turkish state. However, in the middle of the storm that was created around the Imam Hatip schools and their graduates’ increasing penetration into public administration, secular groups and the military began to question the educational motives of Gulen’s movement in the late 1990s (Turgut,1998).

The Refah Party (Welfare Party) as we have seen was founded in 1983 and first led by Ahmet Tekdal, as one of the loyal friends of Necmettin Erbakan from the 1970s’ MSP.

Throughout the 1980s the party’s share of the vote hovered around 8-9 percent as expected by experts, which was close to the success of MSP before the 1980 military coup. Necmettin Erbakan himself returned to politics after a 1987 referendum removed the ban on former party leaders of the pre-coup era. But the coup’s bans and extensive interrogation of Erbakan and his close associates forced a majority of the party cadres to join Ozal’s ANAP in the first elections of civilian rule in 1983 (Ayata in Eralp, Tunay and Yesilada (eds), 1993).

The real leap forward came with the erosion of ANAP’s votes around 1991 and the rupture between the conservatives and the liberals in ANAP. In the 1991 elections, the Refah Party created an alliance with the nationalist MHP, which critics called the Holy Alliance, and surpassed the 10 percent nation-wide barrier to get parliamentary representation by getting 17 percent of the electorate’s votes. That result also corresponded to a good climate for Islamic politics, since the Welfare activists, with their Islamist identity, used the American war against Iraq in the gulf and the political repression meted out to Bosnians by Serbs and Croats in the Yugoslav civil war. In both events, the victims of the war were portrayed predominantly as Muslims in Turkey, which implicitly referred to the indifference of the West to the predicament of these people (Cinar, 1997).

The Party program of the Refah Party, continued the tradition of MSP which emphasized anti-Western rhetoric, the development of heavy industry and demands for a more equal distribution of wealth in society. As a representative of the devout Anatolian bourgeoisie, small businessman, artisans and craftsmen, the party’s stress on the equal distribution of wealth primarily targeted the distribution of state resources among the fractions of capital. For example, rather than criticizing the capitalist property relations or private wealth directly, Refah activists espoused the critique of how big business and banks through their corrupt dealings with bureaucracy diverted the crucial resources into their vaults. Their primary focus point was the immorality of the establishment instead of any radical structural critique. Refah spokesmen and Erbakan challenged the establishment by accusing them of imitating the West and distancing the country from its traditional values (Dagi, 2002). Refah Party tried to accomplish not only a moral propaganda offensive but at the same time, in congruence with their root cause, to distinguish modernization from Westernization. That point means that the Islamists do not oppose Western technology, economic development or productive entrepreneurship as long as these innovations or imports are applied within a strict Muslim/national guideline. Moreover, this critique of the excesses and corruption of the neo-liberal era, as they were the mere reflections of the Westernization attempts of secular governments, strengthened the hand of the Islamists against Kemalism, and official secularism since MSP and Erbakan constantly tried to increase the public presence of Islam whose influence in the public sphere was reduced significantly by Mustafa Kemal’s secular reforms (Dagi,1998).

What we encountered in the mid-90s was that the Refah Party gradually influenced the public’s commonsense (what Gramsci identifies as established ways of knowing and doing in a social formation) by mixing an abstract cultural issue (the culture of the West) with the critique of the vicissitudes of everyday life in Turkey under 15 years of neo-liberal economic practice. However, the foremost concern and the slogan of the Refah was social justice not more freedom or more democracy (Gulalp, 2003), (Yenigun, 2003).

As we mentioned earlier, the Islamic concept of social justice has a different connotation as opposed to the conventional social-democratic interpretation. One can argue that Welfare Party activists expropriated the word just as their programs did not include structural changes in the nature of capitalism in Turkey. Refah’s Party program, for example, did not criticize the September 12 military coup and the human rights violations and oppression of leftist and Kurdish activists while they talked about democratic reforms. Their main democratic demand was more freedom for female students with headscarves and the military officers who were expelled from the military due to their religious activities.

Especially when it comes to the issue of Kurds and terror, Refah immediately accepted the main premises of the Turkish state as truth, which was a natural contradiction for a movement whose nationalistic economic outlook greatly resembled the words of the prominent Turkish nationalists Ziya Gokalp, and Yusuf Akcura from the early twentieth century. Most of the time the Refah Party criticized the European Union in the mid 90s for interfering with Turkey’s domestic affairs when Turkey’s human rights record became a subject of criticism in EU circles. They employed the same anti-Western rhetoric against the EU to defend Turkish nationalism’s policies. As an indication of Refah’s democratic credentials neither of its deputies tried to defend HADEP (a small party that represented Kurds in the 1991 parliament) deputies when they were stripped of parliamentary immunity due to the charges of the notorious State security courts (Yavuz, 2000) (Bugra, 2002).

Even though, the Refah Party was not consistent with regards to their democratic demands, their economic and social program found increasing resonance among the urban poor and their traditional conservative bases around central and Eastern Anatolia.

In the face of enormous economic inequalities and the visibly corrupt and excessive life style of the nouveau riches in urban areas, Refah’s call for “just order”was greeted with enthusiasm. First, the Refah activists worked like a Leninist organization around the shantytowns of these urban areas. Unlike other right wing parties that depended on patron-client networks, Refah supporters used door to door persuasion tactics and computer databases to disseminate party literature, in which their female cadres played a big role. How those veiled women or female activists with headscarves accomplished their mission was an intriguing question (Dagi, 2002).

First of all, during those face to face communal gatherings, most of the time people who stayed at their homes are women who traditionally called themselves housewives. Second, Refah’s message of organizing around something for the betterment of their life aroused concern. According to some feminists, these women, generally sit unproductive at home without getting any compensation for their housework (thus serving a crucial function for the reproduction of cheap labor in capitalist society) found a productive outlet for their untapped energy in working for Refah’s communal projects.

These projects were also supplemented by the Refah party’s and religious sects’ extensive welfare provisions ranging from food aid, and health care to heating aid during winters. The other official parties could not compete with the Islamists on these matters since they did not have an alternative proposal to the given order and they lacked ideological zeal (Bugra, 2002), (Gole,1996).

Through this extensive networking effort, Refah gradually identified itself with the inhabitants of those poor neighborhoods, which in the words of these people formed a class discourse that replaced the traditional left’s rhetoric. Since the 1970s, those urban shantytowns were the main constituencies of the social-democrats and the socialist left, but with 1980 coup’s relentless repression of socialists, the Soviet Union’s unexpected implosion, coupled with the social-democrats’ awful performance in terms of socioeconomic issues in their coalition with the Demirel’s Party between 1991-95, all of these factors alienated these parts of the population from the left. Their call for a just order ought to be viewed within the framework of 70 years of a Kemalist top-down approach to secularism, in which the ruling elite identified western-style clothing and manners as the symbols of upward mobility in society. In Refah’s case, people who are traditionally conservative and recently immigrated to urban areas, former rural dwellers, saw clear class crystallization between the “Muslims” and “seculars”, although it has a very shaky objective ground as the leader Erbakan himself was renowned for his taste in Versace shirts. At the end, through the votes of these people the Refah Party won two big municipalities in Ankara and Istanbul in the 1994 local elections, which dismayed a plethora of observers (Gulalp, 2003), (Sakallioglu, 1996).

Then what was the substance of the Refah’s “just order”? The answer to this question is that it was an eclectic socio-economic program in which the Islamists envisaged a third-way that can constitute an alternative to both Western capitalism and godless communism. Writing in a plain language that can be understood by an unsophisticated reader, Refah ideologues argued that the current order of capitalism in Turkey began to decay due to the excessive Western cultural and economic influence.

This prevailing order, they claimed, further increased the inequalities and corruption as the biggest monopolies and banks which took advantage of interest based economy enriched themselves at the expense of the poor majority. Also, the alternative of capitalism, socialism succumbed on another kind of materialism which imploded in the 1990s. Then the logical solution to this decaying society was the institution of an economy and social relationships based on the golden days of the Arabian Peninsula under the Prophet Mohammed. In this yearning to re-create ancient Islamic civilization, these pundits expressed that by creating an Islamic just order, in which there is no interest and usury, people will incline to productive investments (Onis,1997).The Refah’s new order will curb the greed of immoral sectors of society since Islamic scholars believe that as people are trained under the guidance of holy book, they themselves change their outlook from the greed of the previous era into a system that respects all others’ labor and dignity. For example, in order to solve the basic problems of people like food and shelter, state resources can be used within the parameters of free markets. I think, the Refah Party wanted to create some kind of state cooperatives that could provide subsidized food and services to the poorer areas. Also, direct state investment on heavy industry in povertystricken areas of Turkey will develop these places gradually. This point reminds us of the old nationalist euphemism of Erbakan. In addition to all these, Refah leaders criticized the Western-oriented foreign policies of the secular republic, which neglected the millions of Muslims and Turkey’s relationship with the Middle East. So they promised a more independent and Eastern-oriented trajectory for Turkey’s foreign policy (Cinar,1997).

A serious examination into the premises of this just order could reveal the internal inconsistencies of the movement. First of all, a new order that abolishes usury and interest within the framework of global capitalism does not look sincere as even the Saudis make their investments through Western commercial banks. Second, how these greedy groups of Western-influenced corrupt capitalists are transformed into persons who respect other people’s labor and dignity was not very clear. As I mentioned earlier, institutions like MUSIAD saw the personal enrichment of the individual believer as some form of a means to reach the ultimate goal of establishing god’s rule on this earth. Then it is unequivocally obvious that the concept of greed has a very subjective meaning for the movement, which discredits the credibility of the reasoning behind this just order project.

Third, the development plans that envisioned state subsidies and investments to the poorer areas and the Refah Party’s general acceptance of massive privatizations of state industries and liberalization of trade plainly created a dilemma for the party activists.

And the most striking irony in Refah’s just order discourse was that their state-led solutions for the economy and the nationalistic connotations of their anti-Western attitude blurred the real political position of the movement since at the same time this group vehemently condemned the state’s secular cultural and educational policies (Laciner,1995). I assume they see the state as a mere instrument that can be manipulated according to the interests of the government party, which ignores the general context of social relationships that historically condition the Turkish state. As a result most coolheaded pundits argued that a Refah government in Turkey would inevitably confront enormous tensions due to the above-mentioned dilemmas and contradictions.

At the end after the victory in the 1994 local elections and the popularity of the elected mayor of Istanbul, the Refah Party won almost 21 percent of the national vote in the 1995 national parliamentary elections which made them the winner, albeit without a majority in the Turkish parliament. Two other center right parties, ANAP and Demirel’s DYP (True Path Party) followed Refah closely in the elections. However, both the secular military and the civil institutions like universities, chamber of commerce, TUSIAD and left-wing parties immediately warned the public about the consequences of a potential Refah Party-led government. That was a point where the secular establishment, especially the military, began to understand the ramifications of two decades of constant religious and nationalistic propaganda for the Turkish polity. Those civil and military circles forced the two right-wing parties ANAP and DYP to reconcile their differences and form a viable coalition against the Islamist danger. Their understanding of the Islamist danger came from the activities of radical Islamic groups within Turkey, especially in the mid 90s. Starting from the assassination of some secular intellectuals by bombs by groups like IBDA-C (Islamic Great Eastern Warriors Front) to the activities of Hezbollah within the South East of the country, and to the headscarves wars in universities, Turkish public opinion began to pay attention to the rising tide of Islamic oppositional discourse. Bahriye Ucok, Muammer Aksoy, and Ugur Mumcu, who were once prominent secular intellectuals and vocal critiques of Islamic movements, were all assassinated during those chaotic years (Narli, in Rubin(ed), 2003).

In the southeast, the Kurdish separatist PKK intensified its operations against the Turkish army as they benefited largely from the power vacuum that was created by the U.S in northern Iraq’s Kurdish region in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. As an old reflex, the Turkish state used Hezbollah against PKK as long as the Islamic militants destroyed the Kurdish nationalists’ infrastructure in southeast Turkey. However, Hezbollah aimed to create an Islamic Kurdish state in that region and ended its cooperation with the Turkish government in 1993, after which the public started to see negative news about Hezbollah’s activities in the media. In one of the most brazen attempts of showing its strength Turkey’s radical Islamists burned alive 37 people (mostly leftist intellectuals) in a hotel in the central Anatolian town of Sivas in July 1993 on the pretext that Turkish writer Aziz Nesin criticized the holy book Koran, an event which was watched silently by the army, police and the government ministers of the social-democratic party. These developments not only displayed the strength of the Islamic movement at the time but also signaled the fact that Islamists had achieved, at least in certain respects, their aim of penetrating into the Turkish bureaucracy (Narli,in Rubin(ed),2003),( Aras and Caha, in Rubin (ed), 2003).

With such events in the background, the two right-wing parties’ coalition government, riddled with corruption charges, economic crisis and high inflation and unemployment rates, ended with a parliamentary show-down between their two respective leaders. President Demirel, in order to create some sense of normalcy, appointed Necmettin Erbakan as prime minister to arrange the next cabinet, which resulted in the creation of Turkey’s first Islamist-led government in June1996. Ironically, the first policy initiative of Refah’s just order was shelving the corruption charges about Tansu Ciller (the DYP leader) in order to smooth the relationships in the new coalition government (Dagi, 2002).

After a three month honeymoon in that coalition, Refah leader Erbakan planned to test the waters with some policy initiatives that sent signals to its constituencies. First, the Refah government decided to significantly cut government subsidies to the media sector and increase agricultural subsidy prices, coupled with more government aid allocation to the municipalities under Refah party mayors. Also, the Party began to divert the resources of state banks from big businesses to small businessmen under the banner of government support to a small and middle class business program. Meanwhile in foreign policy, Erbakan criticized the European Union as a Christian club that wants to impose its values on the Turkish people. Immediately afterwards, he declared that he would go on a tour of numerous Muslim countries such as Iran, Libya, and Malaysia to seek support for his D-7 (against the G-7) Muslim countries economic cooperation organization project. With their subsidies cut, the national media groups gradually increased their dose of criticism of Refah’s policies. All of a sudden T.V. watchers saw video cassettes of Erbakan and some Refah deputies in which they were criticizing secularism, Mustafa Kemal and discussing whether or not they need to shed blood for their eventual goal of the creation of an Islamic state.

The disrespectful treatment of Erbakan by Libyan leader Qaddafi and Erbakan’s silence in the face of Iranian criticism of Turkish foreign policy raised eyebrows among the establishment. At the end of 1996, the Party had gained many civilian enemies who were increasingly impatient with its “radical agenda” (Narli,in Rubin(ed), 2003).

But Refah’s eventual confrontation with the military came after Erbakan’s proposals to cut defense expenditures. As one of the countries which allocates more than 10 percent of its GDP to military contracts, Turkey’s generals did not like to see any cuts that would affect their economic power. In those days Erbakan’s reception of prominent Islamic leaders, such as representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas at his official residence, exacerbated the tensions. Moreover, declarations by the prominent deputies of Refah on subjects like constructing a big mosque in the heart of Istanbul, the immoralities of secular individuals, and finally a poem read by Istanbul’s Refah mayor, Tayyip Erdogan, which depicted the minarets of mosques as their bayonets and the mosques as their barracks, inflamed public opinion and the army enough that the military started a major nationwide initiative to investigate Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey. In a further aggravation of tensions, on February 1997 in the small county of Sincan near Ankara, Refah Party supporters and the mayor organized a Jerusalem night in which Iranian and Refah Party speakers condemned the Israeli occupation and expressed anti-Semitic messages.

However, the mayor of Sincan made a closing speech that called for the restoration of sharia in Turkey which gave the military the excuse it had looked for since the beginning of Refah government in 1996. Several days later the Turkish 2nd Army’s tank units rolled through the streets of Sincan in a demonstrative fashion that the military called “balancing the democracy in Turkey” (Bugra, 2002) (Onis,1997).

If one looked at some of the emphasis of the military on cracking down on Islamic finance, and the main business organization TUSIAD’s support to them, one sees an interesting constellation of interest around the official state ideology. First of all, liberalization of trade and exchange rate parities increasingly made the Turkish economy crisis-prone, as speculative attacks on the Turkish currency and the central bank’s reserves created three big economic crisis from 1994-2001. In 1997 within the conditions of an unproductive and narrow domestic market plagued with monopoly pricing among big groups and foreign currency and investment shortage, the coalescence of civilian and military interests against the Islamic threat removed other critical issues like corruption, unemployment, and high inflation from the eyes of the public in precisely the fashion that the dominant classes wanted. Not only did they strike at the newly developing MUSIAD’s small and middle-scale member businesses by cutting down their financial freedoms, they also managed to get the public behind bourgeois values in the republic. Some leftist unions who supported the military’s initiatives for the sake of secularism forgot the protagonists of the September 12, 1980 coup and its repressive anti-labor and anti-left repressive policies (Bugra,2002), (Yalman, in Savran and Balkan (eds), 2002).

In Turkey, with orders from the military, police started to investigate Islamic business practices and financial houses. The issue of money laundering by founding Islamic investment holdings in Turkey came to the fore. In that story, the remittances of the Turkish workers in Europe who contributed to the Muslim holdings with the promises of profit-sharing in an Islamic way (a motto which attracted the attention of those workers who either could not accommodate to European culture or who faced racism in one way or another in their host country) became the focal point of investigators. After the crackdown on some of the Islamic holdings’ ambiguous operations these holdings began to declare bankruptcy, and the media carried these victims’ stories to the TVs every night. However, not only Islamic groups with shady dealings were damaged: the MUSIAD’s legitimate partnerships with religious media and civil associations were also investigated, which resulted in the indictment of its president Erol Yarar in the late 90s.

These broad-based and nationwide attacks on the Refah government finally forced Erbakan to resign from the government on 18 June 1997. In a quick manner, state prosecutors immediately indicted the Refah Party before the Turkish Constitutional Court with the demand of closure of the Party as it became the center of the anti-state and antisecular activities. This trial resulted in the banning of Erbakan, his officials and his party from political activities in early 1998. They tried to close MUSIAD also, but a potential warning to the Islamic businesses was deemed to be enough for the time being (Narli, in Rubin(ed), 2003).

Case Study P.2:

As we have seen, after the closure of the Refah Party, its non-prosecuted members founded the Virtue Party under the leadership of Recai Kutan, an old friend of the Erbakan family. As expected, the years of civilian and military offensive against the Islamists took its toll on the Virtue Party when in 1999 its votes were reduced to 15 percent of the general electorate. The religious voters actually thought they were better off before the Welfare government since it attracted the military’s enormous campaign against the Islamic life style. The Virtue Party’s modernizer wing, led by Abdullah Gul and former mayor of Istanbul Tayyip Erdogan on the basis of that background decided to create an organization that would be almost independent from Erbakan and the old guard, through which they could alleviate the pressure on their political movement. That decision greatly resembled the AP’s (Justice Party) decision to reapproach the urban bourgeoisie after the 1960 military coup in order to capture the votes of the urban classes, thus transforming its perennial image as a peasant party in the mid 1960s (Dagi,2002).

In the May 2001 congress of the Virtue Party, Abdullah Gul became a candidate for the leadership of the party despite the fact that his candidacy was disapproved by Erbakan when he recommended the young generation to wait longer. The Party choice of Recai Kutan, and the constitutional court decision to ban the Virtue Party from politics sharpened the split. Abdullah Gul, with the tacit approval of Tayyip Erdogan (who had been from politics because of his provocative poem), formed the AKP (Justice and Development Party) and the old guard chose the Saadet Party (Felicity Party) as their main organization (Dagi, 2002).

In the aftermath of this split, the new generation stressed their difference from the old Erbakan tradition by insisting on the implementation of Copenhagen criteria of the EU for further democratization of Turkey. They increased their ties with EU officials and began to lobby the EU’s officer responsible for Turkey, Gunther Verhaugen, about the EU’s help in reducing the influence of the military over politics in Turkey. Erdogan and Gul chose to take a low profile on issues like Imam Hatip High Schools, headscarves, or pressures on Islamic financial houses as they argued that first the country needed to tackle its more urgent economic problems. They were keen to emphasize that their new party is not a religious party but more like the Christian Democratic parties of the West.

In AKP’s platform we saw that the old guard’s traditional reference to social equality in the context of Islamic economy was dropped. Suddenly the old Welfare deputies discovered that “economy has its own laws” so we should not tamper with them. That also signaled a tacit approval of IMF structural adjustment prescriptions for the nation.

We can understand it from the party’s positive references to globalization and to opening up the Turkish economy further to global capitalism, which indicated that the AKP leaders opted for a very pragmatic approach in order to capture the center-right and big bourgeoisie’s support in the 2002 election.

Their election promises identified their party with problem solving and as a servant of the general public rather than expressing the dichotomies of Islamists such as “Muslims” and “others”. This development was further consolidated by the joining of other prominent conservative and nationalist names from the center-right to the party before the elections. In the November 2002 elections, AKP won 34 percent of the votes and 363 of 550 deputies which was a very clear majority (Dagi, 2002).

Evolving Turkey P.1

Evolving Turkey P.2

Evolving Turkey P.3

Evolving Turkey P.4

Conclusion and Bibliography

 

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