Some researchers tended to read the post-2001 experiment in Turkey as the successful political integration of an Islamic movement within a democracy. The Adalet ve Kalkmma Partisi (the Justice and Development Party; JDP) also called AK Parti, meaning the "uncontaminated" or "pure" party, indeed was victorious in the 2002 national elections and remains, the most powerful political party in Turkey to date.

In order to understand the JDP, its development, and its political identity, concepts such as Islamism and political Islam must be discussed. However, it is impossible to properly portray the Justice and Development Party's political identity without first evaluating its previous relationship with Erbakan's National Outlook Movement.

The JDP was born from the ashes of a banned political party (the Virtue Party) by a leader who was imprisoned for "inciting hatred and enmity" and barred from running for a parliamentary seat in the November 2002 elections. In these elections the JDP captured 34 percent of the votes and 363 seats in Parliament, a landslide victory, while its nearest contender, the Republican People's Party, could only get 178 seats with 19 percent of the votes, and the pro-Islamic Felicity Party received an all-time low of 2 percent.

The JDP's sudden appearance occurred in a political context shaped by two massive crises that shook Turkey's conventional political and economic alliances: the 1997 political crisis and the 2001 economic crisis.

Some writers have alleged that it is impossible for the JDP to cut its ties with the Islamism of the National Outlook Movement simply because of its history. These arguments however focus largely  on the past histories of the JDP's political leaders, rather than on their current attitudes and actions. Through their political dialogue and projects today, the Justice and Development Party's leaders are in fact attempting to demonstrate that they walk on a different political path than that of their predecessors. Yet according to Ali Yapr Sanbay, "If the party founders' cultural-ideological background is taken into account and its history considered by itself, then the most suitable definition of the JDP's political identity would be that of an 'Islamic Party.' The administration and government of the present-day JDP includes members who have come from the True Path Party, but also the Nationalist Action Party, and the Motherland Party. Thus it is over simplistic to merely portray the JDP as a reflection of the former ‘Refahyol’ period, characterized by conflicts and crisis.

On the other hand some supporters may seek to legitimize the JDP by claiming that it is the Muslim equivalent of a Christian democrat party, but the outline history of Christian democracy in the earlier part of this chapter suggests that it should not be taken as a model for Turkey. In France, the MRP had a relatively short life as an effective political movement, mainly because of the unique role of Charles de Gaulle in French postwar politics. In Italy, DC flourished for almost five decades, but then perished in the systemic collapse of the early 1990S. In Germany, the CDU-CSU continues to exist as a powerful center-right party, but the "Christian" part of its intellectual inheritance is nowadays diluted, or distorted into conventional conservatism. The JDP will clearly need to avoid these pitfalls. In particular, if it achieves long-term dominance in Turkish politics, as DC did in postwar Italy, it runs the risk of internal factional divisions and the corruptive influences of unchallenged long-run power.

Differences appear to derive from those inherent in the Christian and Muslim religions, and in the historical circumstances of their birth and development. The most striking contrast is that while Christian democrat movements in Western Europe generally developed in a conservative, pro-status quo direction, the JDP, while culturally conservative, also projects itself as an anti establishment force in Turkish politics, opposing the state-centered authoritarian secularists who have, it is argued, become Turkey's new conservatives. Tayyip Erdogan is taken as a fitting symbol of this resurgence-as a "man of the people" who moved up from a humble position in society, suffered imprisonment for his political principles, and then successfully challenged the old state establishment. He uses this biography as a parallel narrative of his political beliefs. As he wrote shortly before the elections of 2002,

 

Animosity toward the West?

Despite its electoral victory the JDP has remained vulnerable to secularist opposition directed not only by the main opposition party, the Republican People's Party, but also by the military and some civil sectors that see the JDP as a pro-Islamic movement with a secret agenda. Thus since its formation in 2001 under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the former mayor of Istanbul elected in 1995 from the pro-Islamic Welfare Party, the Justice and Development Party (JDP) has been seen as an outsider, an intruder, and even an anomaly by many secularists to date.

However more recently the EU's demands for reforms today seem to be overlapping with the JOP's search for consolidating its power and acquiring wider legitimacy within the system vis-a.-vis the army and other radical secularist forces through a policy of enhancing democracy, human rights, and civilian supremacy over the military.

So it seems that the JDP would be willing to instrumentalize both human rights and EU membership in its search for systemic legitimacy and security. Instrumentalization of human rights does highlight the need for a human rights regime. The recognized utility of human rights is the social and political base on which a sustainable regime can be built. The search in human rights for protection constitutes the practical, if not moral, ground on which a human rights regime can be established. Intrumentalization in the sense of recognizing its utility may therefore serve to institutionalize a human rights regime. (Ahmet Insel, "The AKP and Normalizing Democracy in Turkey," South Atlantic Quarterly 102, 2003: 293-308.)

Given the historical hesitation of the conservative periphery about the West and Westernization, the JDP's quest for EU membership has also contributed to overcoming the fear of the West and Westernization traditionally prevalent among center-right voters. According to Pollmark, in 2004, the EU support among the JDP voters reached 80 percent, the National average of 73 percent, and the lead for EU support was held by DEHAP voters with 89 percent.

Islamism in Turkey, as in the Middle East proper, is traditionally constructed and legitimated by a strong anti-Westernism. The NOM, too, regarded the West as the "mother of all evils": corrupting, degenerating, and destroying the "national" identity and indigenous civilization that is Islam. However pro-Islamic politicians of the late 1990’s (most of whom have joined the JDP) realized that they needed the West and modern/Western values of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in order to build a broader front against the Kemalist/secularist center, and to acquire legitimacy through this new discourse in their confrontation with the Kemalist/secularist center. Based on such a "rethinking" in recent years, the policies of the JDP in seeking integration with the EU indicate that historical animosity toward the West might come to an end.

 

Today’s Challenge.

A liberal democracy requires more than an institutional framework. The main ingredients of democracy and the function of politics in a liberal democracy include active participants, and the opportunity for contestation and negotiation in areas where conflicts are present. What makes the JDP's reforms and its practice of politics uncertain is that the party forgoes important democratic processes. It is the crucial process of public debate, the involvement of individuals and civil society organizations that are absent from the formulation of these new institutions and rules. Furthermore, when we look beyond the JDP's effective reforms, we see a complicated picture.

As a political party and an agent of social transformation, the JDP reveals ambivalence. In its current form, the party's anchor, conservative democracy, appears to be an ideological marker chosen to define the party's ideology for others rather than to guide its policies. Its sufficiently ambiguous content serves to preserve the broad coalition of supporters brought together by the centrifugal forces of Turkish politics. Nevertheless, the second phase of JDP rule, the implementation of reforms, makes clarification of the JDP's ideas and the presence of a coherent map of its ideas more critical than ever. Addressing the concerns regarding the elusive nature of conservative democracy, Akdogan contends that the JDP has not completed its evolution yet, and it is still an ongoing process. While this statement at first suggests that the party will clarify some of its paradoxical positions, we are immediately warned that " the JDP could not define the final form of this evolution by its own will. With the belief that an Islamic movement cannot be pursued in the political sphere, the party seeks to define itself to the center right." (Yalylll Akdogan, "Adalet ve Kalklllma Partisi" in lslamczlzk, ed. Yasin Aktay, 2004, p. 629.)

Who defines the direction of the party's 'change, the context or the collective efforts of party elite, activists, and supporters raises an important question. The party's transformation so far has revealed the emergence of a narrow hierarchical party structure and the lack of well-defined ideological foundations and political direction. On the one hand, the European Union's progress reports often define the policy agendas of the party. On the other hand, the elusive idea of "traditional values," when coupled with the party's claim to have innate knowledge of them, justifies the party's policies. This ideological hollowness together with the party's transformation toward a leader-centered party limits the JDP's capacity to address and successfully resolve conflicts.

Behind the increasing disconnect between its initial promise and its current practices lies the party's ambivalent approach to Islam. The absence of a straightforward discussion of Islam in conservative democracy suggests that despite its clear Islamic roots, the centrality of Islam to its overall rhetoric, and the dominance of Islamic groups in its constituency, the party shies away from addressing issues pertaining to Islam. In a paradoxical way, the party's policies attempt to reinstate Islam in the public sphere without addressing the public role of religion explicitly. One might interpret the JDP's current approach to Islam as a strategy that seeks to ensure the restitution of Islam's political power in the long run by first relegating Islam to the private sphere. This approach requires that the party focus on strengthening individual rights in the expectation that this will resolve Islam-related issues. It is this teleological approach that further consolidates today's ongoing process of decoupling politics and Islam. The party seems to avoid the question of whether the public and individual aspects of Islam can be separated from each other. More important, by reducing the role of Islam in the public sphere to the question of better representation of traditional values, the party creates a crucial ideological vacuum in its political discourse that reifies Islam as an ambiguous set of values.

This politics of Islam without Islam suggests that unless the party clearly addresses the public role of Islam, its silence on Islam cannot be taken for a reconciliation of Islam and democracy. In other words, the party has established itself as a pro-Islamic party without any overt association to, or discussion of, Islam. This ironical relationship reminds us of the JDP's predecessors' relationship to Islam and the state's secularist ideology, Kemalism. Despite their overt opposition to Kemalist nationalism, the National Outlook parties went through a political secularization by limiting the role of Nakiibendis, a prominent religious sect in Turkey under their shelter, and acquiring an increasingly nationalist and developmentalist tone in their political ideology. Borrowing M. Hakan Yavuz's term, the Nationalist-view parties eventually became advocates of a form of "Green Kemalism."41 Despite their efforts to revise the narrow definition of Kemalist secularism, these parties gradually transformed their agenda, mirroring the premises of Kemalism by attributing a central role to the state and its redistributive policies, not only in the economic but also in the cultural sphere, thereby failing to offer a novel political project that addresses the public role of Islam in a democratic polity.

Despite the critical juncture at which it is located, the JDP's current policies do not seem to resolve the long-standing, intricate, and paradoxical relationship between Islam, the state, and secularism. Rather than repositioning Islam as a novel political force, the JDP seems to replicate the Kemalists' mode of politics and approach to Islam. Like Kemalist secularists before, the JDP elite has adopted a Jacobean, top-to-bottom reform project to liberalize the public at the expense of the public's contribution. Islamic values have been reified and their reflections in politics have been subsumed under a highly precarious notion of "collective values and reasoning"-resonating with the Kemalist idea of national will, milli irade. In the JDP's practice and rhetoric, Islam's role is reduced to a role at the individual level. The JDP elite's feeble efforts to formulate novel policies to advance the position of observant women specifically, and Turkish women in general, point out another underlying paradox. The party's rhetorical commitment to advancing the political status of women, its consent to maintaining the status quo, and, more important, its acceptance of the symbolic association between women with headscarves and one's commitment to Islamic values, contradicts the party's initial promises to resolve the conflicts that marginalize women. Perhaps more striking, the JDP's policies regarding women's representation in general show that it avoids challenging the lingering effect of the republican tradition that reduced the image of women to a political symbol instead of an important political agent of transformation. Finally, the JDP's core view, conservative democracy, assumes the role of redefining Turkey's local values against the foil of a universal conservative framework and justifies its political reform agenda by this global political stance. Nevertheless, given that conservatism is far from being a coherent political program, the party seems to be repeating the cardinal sin of the republican elite by failing to define how the public role of Islam can be incorporated into Turkish politics without relying on an externally defined model of political transformation.

Thus, the JDP's policies have proved very successful in the short term, but the party seems to be increasingly undermining its own power and long-term contribution to Turkey's democracy as a pro-Islamic my by its politics of avoidance. The absence of open debates on the 1blic role of Islam manifests itself in dual policies that are rather precarils. These dual policies maximize the party's immediate political appeal, while they carry the risk of dissatisfying the expectations of the party's [0- Islamic constituency as well as those of the secular public in the long term. In fact, the lack of clarity in the JDP's policies generates high criticism undermining the party's image both as a pro-Islamist and as a democratic party. The increasingly visible detachment between the party's commitment and its practices places the party at the very crossroads that it has striven to avoid.

For updates click homepage here