Why
Erdoğan is like Ataturk
There
are more than a few similarities between the two most influential
modern Turks.
By NICK DANFORTH
12/28/15, 6:00 AM CET
When President
Erdoğan’s party won an unexpected and decisive victory in Turkey’s
November 1 election, many surprised observers concluded that the
Turkish people had voted for stability. A month later, following the
downing of a Russian jet and continued killing in the country’s
southeast, stability seems more elusive than ever. Yet as Erdoğan
leads Turkey into turbulent waters, polls suggest that his popularity
has only risen along with domestic and international tensions.
People continuing to
search for the secret of Erdogan’s popularity might do well to
consider the success of Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk —
particularly the powerful tradition of populist nationalism and
aggrieved egalitarianism that Erdoğan inherited from him.
* * *
Erdoğan and Ataturk
are often seen as opposing figures. For Ataturk’s supporters it is
a contrast between the modernizer and the reactionary, the
pro-Western secularist and the anti-Western Islamist.
Shortly before
November’s elections, Erdoğan presented the contrast somewhat
differently.
Welcoming guests to
his new thousand-room presidential palace to celebrate the founding
of the Turkish Republic, Erdoğan reminded them that the country’s
founders had once celebrated the occasion in Ataturk’s palace “with
frocks, waltzes and champagne” while a “half-starved nation,
struggling to survive without shoes on their feet or jackets on their
backs, looked on from outside the gates in shock.” Today, he went
on, “after a long struggle we have eliminated this division between
the public and the Republic.”
Erdoğan told the
assembled crowd that their presence inside his new residence
symbolized the fact that the building now belonged to the people and
to the nation.
“Erdoğan’s
attacks on Ataturk’s regime bear an uncanny resemblance to
Ataturk’s own attacks on the Ottoman sultans he overthrew in
creating modern Turkey.”
In part, Turkey’s
recent election hinged on whether the citizens believed him. Did they
think Erdogan’s palace truly belonged to them or instead, as
critics claimed, to an increasingly powerful and out-of-touch
autocrat? Most sided with Erdoğan, just as almost a century earlier
most had sided with Ataturk.
Ironically,
Erdoğan’s attacks on Ataturk’s regime bear an uncanny
resemblance to Ataturk’s own attacks on the Ottoman sultans he
overthrew in creating modern Turkey. Erdoğan’s comments sought to
depict his predecessors as an alien elite whose European affectations
marked them as indifferent to the needs and culture of the masses.
Ataturk worked to paint the late Ottoman dynasty in the same light,
saying the Sultans who presided over the Empire’s dissolution were
“foreign usurpers,” “madmen and spendthrifts,” whose
depravity endangered the Turkish nation.
In place of waltzes
and champagne, popular history from Ataturk’s era offered the Mad
Sultan Ibrahim, “taking amber as an aphrodisiac” to “better
busy himself with women” while Turkish soldiers fought and died. To
muster popular support for abolishing first the Ottoman Empire and
then the Caliphate, Ataturk accused the Ottoman Sultans of further
betraying the nation by seeking British support to sustain their
corrupt rule. With undoubted delight, Ataturk noted that the last
Ottoman Sultan, “in his capacity as Caliph of all the Mohamedans,”
had “appealed for English protection” and was conducted out of
Istanbul on an English man-of-war.
Building on this
critique, Ataturk’s rhetoric centered on his regime’s commitment
to the values and well being of the Turkish people. Slogans like
“Turkey belongs to the Turks,” or “the villagers are the
masters of the nation” sought to give ordinary citizens a sense of
ownership over their new nation-state. Ataturk’s government claimed
to celebrate the people and their culture, speaking the plain Turkish
of Anatolian villagers, not the incomprehensible mix of Arabic and
Persian used by the Ottoman court. In place of royal palaces it
promised museums to display the villagers’ costumes and carpets
with pride, and schools to prepare them to take their place among the
country’s governing elite.
* * *
In time, of course,
Ataturk’s regime did create its own elite, but most villagers
remained conscious of their place outside it. The regime’s
authoritarian approach failed to live up to its promises, bringing
rural Turkish voters economic stagnation and one-party rule instead
of empowerment.
Erdoğan’s regime
may well do the same, and in time be remembered in a similar fashion.
But its initial promise and methods are not that different from
Ataturk’s. After November’s election a pro-government columnist
wrote that the people who voted for Erdoğan demanded their rightful
place in “the media, the academy, the arts and the neighborhoods of
the elite.” Now, she declared, with the advent of democracy, “all
these bastions of the great nation will be conquered.” In short,
the villagers were still waiting to become masters of their country,
and they expected Erdoğan to deliver where Ataturk had failed.
A poster of Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the Kasimpasa district
What makes this a
particularly confusing moment in Turkish politics is that many of
Erdogan’s most vocal liberal critics, in Turkey and abroad, share
his critique of Ataturk’s regime. Indeed, this is why many
initially supported Erdoğan’s party, as it fought to overturn the
country’s rigid, even anti-Islamic form of secularism, as well as
the undemocratic military and bureaucratic structures committed to
enforcing it. In fact, where criticism of Ataturk was once forbidden,
Turkey’s liberalization over the past decade allowed a much-needed
conversation about the often oppressive nature of Ataturk’s regime.
Historians have
increasingly asserted that Ataturk’s modernizing reforms were not,
as official history once asserted, wildly popular but rather imposed
in a top-down, authoritarian manner on a population that resented
being cut off from their Islamic faith and traditional culture.
In a sense, scholars
and other observers have begun to look beyond the tuxedos and top
hats that once epitomized the modernity of Ataturk’s elite to
notice the unmistakable Hitler mustaches that many proudly wore as
well. Now, as Erdoğan becomes increasingly autocratic, there are
still a few historians willing to join him in implying that Ataturk’s
sins somehow excuse jailing journalists. More common, though, is the
approach of publications like Der Spiegel, which in an article quite
critical of Erdoğan, nonetheless described Atatürk as “a man who
cared little for the pious, conservative majority of the population.”
The result is that
liberal writers in Turkey and abroad have increasingly suggested that
the real comparison between Erdoğan and Ataturk lies in the two
men’s authoritarianism. Some have seen continuities in Turkey’s
authoritarian political culture, or suggest that perhaps the Turkish
people have always wanted a strong leader to rule over them. In
short, if liberal observers cannot understand Erdoğan’s popularity
today, they are also unable to understand Ataturk’s.
* * *
The truth is that
Turkish citizens have displayed a consistent desire for dignity and
equality. Sadly, their leaders have channeled this sense of aggrieved
egalitarianism into dictatorship rather than democracy.
Populist nationalism
can play to people’s best and worst instincts, and Erdoğan, like
Ataturk, has proved a master of making it play to both. After
Erdogan’s victory November 1, some of his supporters have suggested
that Western observers failed to appreciate his appeal because they
live in an elite bubble, cut off from ordinary Turks. Indeed, on the
eve of the election, this Western observer was slightly surprised to
hear one AKP supporter go on at length about Erdogan’s success in
providing health care to the country’s poor. Then, instead of
discussing the election, the next two people I talked to wanted to
tell me about what the Jews were up to instead. Nothing good, it
turns out.
Acting in the name
of the national or popular will, Ataturk helped establish many basic
elements of democratic rule in Turkey, including a parliament,
elections and at least one political party. In the same spirit,
Erdoğan now presides over an improved form of illiberal democracy,
in which carefully managed mass media continues to play the same
supportive role it did in Ataturk’s day. But both men have
consistently shown more respect for the will of the people in the
abstract than for the specific mechanisms — free elections or a
free press, say — through which it might make itself manifest.
Similarly, both men also proved all-too-willing to trample on the
rights of minorities and individuals whose personal will does not fit
with the nation’s.
Not surprisingly,
the idea of the national will is, in different manifestations,
central to democracy, but also fascism. When Ataturk declared that
“sovereignty belongs unconditionally to the nation,” he invoked a
fundamental liberal ideal — while also reminding people that he
saved them from sinister forces who wanted to take their sovereignty
away. In winning Turkey’s war for independence, Ataturk claimed to
have delivered Turks from the hands of European imperialists and
non-Muslim minorities alike. Ataturk secularism may have alienated
many pious Turks, but it was not lost on them that he had just won an
implausible victory against a series of foes – the English, French,
Italians, Greeks and Armenians — who were all Christian. This
victory, in turn, did not just help to consolidate Ataturk’s
one-party rule, but helped make it popular as well.
“Turkey,
it appears, will continue being Turkey. But the similarities between
Ataturk and Erdoğan serve as a reminder that their brand of populist
nationalism and aggrieved egalitarianism is increasingly global.”
Today Erdoğan
presents his and by extension the nation’s enemies as a sinister
kaleidoscope of not dissimilar forces: America and Europe, Jews and
Armenians, followers of the preacher Fetullah Gulen and now possibly
Vladimir Putin. Through his domestic and international grandstanding,
Erdoğan likewise insists that he alone can protect his people from
these powerful foes. The popular appeal of this rhetoric is certainly
part paranoia, but it taps into a deeper tradition as well, one which
cannot be completely disentangled from Erdoğan’s constant if
unconvincing appeal to democratic ideals.
When Erdoğan came
to power, some hoped he would turn Turkey into a liberal democracy
like Germany. Others feared he would turn the country into an Islamic
theocracy like Iran. Turkey, it appears, will continue being Turkey.
But the similarities between Ataturk and Erdoğan serve as a reminder
that their brand of populist nationalism and aggrieved egalitarianism
is neither Western nor Islamic, but increasingly global. The equally
striking similarities with Putin’s Russia, Modi’s India,
Berlusconi’s Italy, Orban’s Hungary or even Donald Trump’s
America reveal that this rhetoric, a crucial part of 20th century
politics, remains potent in the 21st century as well.
Nick Danforth is a
doctoral candidate in Turkish history at Georgetown University. He
writes about Middle Eastern history, politics, and maps at
midafternoonmap.com.
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