Secular Populism and the Semiotics of the Crowd in Turkey
Over the past several decades, commentators on Middle Eastern politics have been alternately surprised, scandalized, and seduced by the seemingly unexpected and contradictory relationship between secularism and popular politics. The secularizing projects of the region’s various states have often proceeded through the coercive mechanisms of modernizing schemes. By contrast, social movements committed to the (re)introduction of religion into public and political life have frequently made use of the vehicles of popular politics, including mass demonstrations and the vote. In Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iran, self-described Islamic movements have asserted political demands against a secularizing or secularized elite by claiming the will of the people, often through democratic channels. To the chagrin of many observers of the Middle East, secularism seems to have constituted an impediment to popular political movements that claim the mantle of democracy.
Turkish political history provides arguably the most extreme case of this antagonistic relationship between secularism and popular politics. The national republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923 emerged on the heels of the dramatic demise of the Ottoman Empire. During the ensuing fifteen years the Kemalist regime would pursue secularizing reforms not only in legal and bureaucratic domains but also in quotidian spheres of civility, dress, language, and public sociability. Yet as numerous scholars have shown, reforms that intervened into social domains could not achieve hegemonic status (e.g., Mardin 1989). With the introduction of multiparty politics in 1946 — what many view as a democratic opening — oppositional groups successfully challenged the Kemalist regime precisely by contesting many of its secular reforms. Since the democratization of the electorate, Turkey has witnessed four military coups, which have unseated democratically elected regimes.1 On at least two of these occasions (1960 and 1997), the military justified its intervention on the grounds that the regime in power threatened the secular foundation of the republican state. For several decades the military has taken on the role of defending secularism against democratically expressed populism.
Recent political events in Turkey present a striking contrast in relation to this history. In the spring of 2007 a series of mass demonstrations against the elected regime were organized in several of Turkey’s major urban centers. The elected parliamentary regime was headed by the Justice and Development Party (JDP), which Kemalist secularists often consider in the political lineage of previously banned Islamist parties.2 In 2002 the JDP had achieved a parliamentary majority in national elections. The rallies of 2007 were organized against perceived threats posed by the JDP to secular Turkey. A common refrain was “Turkey is secular, and it will remain secular” (Türkiye laiktir, laik kalacak). What is striking is not the anxiety that secularism had come under attack but the manifestation of this anxiety in the shape of crowded, popular demonstrations. The secularist military was not absent from this voicing of anxiety, but the crowds that organized against the JDP created, or sought to create, an image of Turkish secularism that ran against the sedimented historical narratives of democratic populism in Turkey. Such crowds constituted — or, again, sought to constitute — an entirely new beast: a secular populism.
There is a further historical irony here. Partly as a result of the public pressure these mass demonstrations exerted in the name of secularism, the JDP called for parliamentary elections sooner than it had intended. Several months after the secularist crowds had taken to the streets, the electorate went to the polls. Far from translating into electoral success, however, the secularist crowds had not precipitated the demise of the JDP; on the contrary, the ruling party came away from the elections with a parliamentary majority even larger than it had previously enjoyed.
In this essay I interrogate two unexpected juxtapositions: a secular populism posited against an Islamist ruling elite, and the efficacy of crowds versus that of the vote. The secular crowds reveal as they contest a narrative of popular politics that underpins the conventional binary of secularists and Islamists. What gives political charge to the cleavage between the secular and the religious in Turkey is a narrative that maps this division onto a distinction between a statist elite and the popular Anatolian masses. The secular crowds have not simply put forward arguments about the necessity of secularism for a democratic Turkey, but in their very form, as a crowd, have challenged a field of political intelligibility predicated on the often-narrated fissure that distances secularism from a popular base of support.
This effort at refashioning secularism, as a form of popular rather than elitist politics, has not proceeded primarily through the self-conscious, critical discourses of public intellectuals or politicians.3 The arguments and reflections of the latter frequently reinscribe the demonstrations in the regnant narrative of popular politics in Turkey. Rather than privilege the deliberative dimensions of disputes about secularism, I explore how the crowd events unsettle and potentially reconfigure the discursive field that has rendered secularism an interpretable topic of political argument. The refashioning pursued by the crowds functions through social and material transformations in secularism’s representative forms, including its principal actors (from state officials to demonstrators), sites of manifestation (from formal ceremonies in stadiums to crowd events in the streets), and sociolinguistic forms (from military pronouncements to protest slogans). More than a mere vehicle by means of which an already constituted secularist subject expresses its political will, the crowd events consolidate the material forms through which the secularist is being constituted as a political subject anew.
End of Excerpt | Access Full Version
Notes
I thank the following individuals for critical engagements with earlier versions of this article: Amahl Bishara, Yazan Doughan, Elizabeth Frierson, Susan Gal, Joseph Hankins, Kelda Jamison, William Mazzarella, Sarah Muir, and Elizabeth Povinelli.
- The coups occurred in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997. I include the so-called soft coup of 1997, in which the military did not install a temporary state of emergency but nonetheless initiated a process that unseated the democratically elected, ruling regime.
- The question of whether the JDP is an Islamist party has been contentious. Political parties and actors who identify as Kemalists view the JDP as the latest incarnation of preceding Islamist parties. As evidence of the threat posed to secularism, Kemalists often point to JDP efforts at criminalizing adultery, restricting the sale of alcohol, and challenging legal restrictions on wearing head scarves. For their part, members of the JDP have consistently repudiated the claim that their party is “religious” or Islamist.
- I borrow the phrase refashioning secularism from the political philosopher William Connolly (1999), who employs it in an effort to rethink the historical formation and normative force of secularism. However, if Connolly’s interrogation of political theory yields the conceptual outlines of a refashioned secularism, my analysis emphasizes the dialectical tension between the intellectual yield of such interrogations and the social practices that constitute the act of refashioning.