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Ece Temelkuran’s review on Mehmet Gün’s “Turkey’s Middle Democracy Issues and How to Solve Them: Judiciary, Accountability and Fair Representation” The first time I saw a Tunisian taxi driver counting money in French I was puzzled to hear it – it was someone speaking to himself in a foreign language as if it was his mother tongue. Observing mothers talking to their babies in English in Egypt or Lebanese lovers having a passionate fight in French, got me thinking about how deeply colonialism can be encrypted in individuals’ souls and how Turkish people have no clue about such a predicament. It certainly does not mean that citizens of Turkey have a healthy mental and emotional relationship with the West. After all, we all grew up with the same map in our classrooms in which Turkey was standing between the West, with all kinds of colors, rivers and romantic sounding cities and the East, illustrated as a greyish-yellowish void. The map was the portrayal of the Republic’s worldview, which had set the ideological goal for future generations: forget about the East that we once reigned and look towards the West where all the lively colors and the higher ideals of humankind are. Our psyche was and still is as if in a vacuum – constantly pulled and pushed by the either side of the bridge. Thanks to such a problematic in-betweenness, telling the story of this bridge requires the storyteller to wrestle with several moral questions, the most important one of them being “Am I compromising my country’s dignity or my pride by complaining about my land to the West?” This is a conundrum that neither the countries with an imperial past nor the previously colonized countries have to deal with. And the storyteller has to make a fine distinction between the words of pride and dignity when he decides to speak the whole truth. In “Turkey’s Middle Democracy Problem”, Mehmet Gün begins to tell the truth by portraying this question and makes it clear where he stands, “I would not wish the publishing of my book in English in London to be perceived as a call for help, because Turkey is mature enough to identify and analyze its own problems and implement its own solutions.” The book sets out its stance from the very beginning by challenging the dominant idea that the West is the sole pioneer and the patron of such concepts dwelling in the pre-Islamic Turkish state tradition, while providing examples from the ancient understanding of separation of powers and the philosophy of justice in Turkic history. Gün takes one step even further and as a man of law he sets out to offer solutions to the recently globalized problem of the rule of law and authoritarianism with historic references to the shared past of the East and the West. When the book turns to today’s Turkey, Gün focuses on two main problems that recently began to be relevant for Western democracies as well: accountability and transparency. Among his several important suggestions for maintaining accountability and transparency in democracies one might be particularly invigorating not only for Turkey but also for Western countries where rising authoritarianism begins to threaten these two ideals. Gün suggests establishing a Supreme Council of Justice that includes all the participants of the judicial system in order to fortify justice. For those who are used to seeing an increasing number of political science books on Turkey, Gün’s take on the country through the concepts of law, economy and philosophy brings a fresh breath to the literature. In Gün’s view Turkey has fallen into the trap of “middle democracy”. He borrows the economic term “middle income trap” and explains how a country’s democracy can also diminish over time when higher political standards are not pursued by the state and its society. The book elaborates on the problem by covering a wide spectrum of topics, from the economy to the problems of the inner workings of NGOs in Turkish democracy. This wide spectrum provides the reader with a global view of the country rather than digging deeper only in single area. This ambitious and passionate attempt to tell the whole story of Turkey should be regarded not solely as an individual endeavor. Mehmet Gün is a lawyer, and the founder and the president of Better Justice Association, a respected organization composed of lawyers, legal academics, former judges and others which is rapidly attracting interest from young law students, in particular, from across Turkey, and he is in close touch with several NGOs in Anatolia. The executive summary of the book has been adopted as a policy document by Türkonfed – The Confederation of Turkish Entrepreneurs and Business World- which represents small and medium businesses all over Turkey, and received positive feedback and emphatic agreement from a range of business stakeholders when it was put to them. Therefore the book might better be viewed as the total sum of myriad voices from Turkey that are rarely heard. The book should also be regarded as a moral and political stance against the idea that has been dominant in Western political and intellectual circles for the last two decades: that Turkey is an oriental country that can and should be content with less democracy under an authoritarian regime. Gün’s voice should be heard as the voice of Anatolia –not Istanbul, for a change- that as a matter of fact lasted longer than any sultan. A voice coming to London bearing gifts.
While Turkey has made major strides in democratic reforms in the late 1990s and early 2000s, progress has, in many ways, stalled. Turkey remains "democratic" in the sense that attaining political power depends upon winning votes, but in recent years its leadership has taken a majoritarian view of democracy and the country has faced problems on issues such as rule of law, freedom of speech, and increased polarization. This book explores the understanding and practice of democracy in Turkey since the early 2000s, analyzing its evolution in light of the parliamentary elections held in 2015. Adopting a more holistic approach in line with the writing of Wolfgang Merkel, it recognizes that a successful, consolidated democracy has various micro and macro-level foundations. The former includes factors such as political values, tolerance, identity, and civil society, while the latter includes political economy, party competition, and institutional development. This volume rejects purely descriptive assessments and instead employs theoretical perspectives to analyze a dynamic political environment. It brings together a range of noted specialists on Turkish politics and society, who employ different methodological approaches and frameworks to offer a distinct scholarly work on democratization in Turkey. A thorough analysis of the problems of democratic consolidation, alongside an awareness of the theoretical and methodological debates in the discipline, make this book essential reading for students, scholars and policymakers interested in Turkish politics, as well as democratization and democratic transitions more generally.
Turkey's Difficult Journey to Democracy provides a thorough examination of the evolution of Turkey's democracy to the present day. After the Second World War, Turkey was considered to have made a highly successful transition from a single party authoritarian state to political competition. Yet, within ten years, Turkey had experienced its first military intervention. During the next forty years, the country vacillated between democratic openings and direct or indirect military interventions. The ascendance in the importance of questions of economic prosperity has helped the deepening and maturing of Turkish democracy, but some impediments persist to produce malfunctions in the operation of a fully democratic system. Through studying the Turkish experience of democratization, Turkey's Difficult Journey to Democracy seeks to provide understanding of the challenges countries that are trying to become democracies encounter in this process. Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The series editor is Laurence Whitehead, Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
Although Turkey began its transition to democracy as early as the 1950s, it is still far from having reached a level of consolidated democracy with the country's sixty-year history of democratic politics being punctuated by numerous breakdowns and restorations of democracy. In an attempt to examine why consolidation of Turkish democracy has taken so long, this book aims at analyzing various factors including state, political parties, civil society, civil-military relations, socio-economic development, the EU as an international actor and the rise of internal threats (political Islam and separatist Kurdish nationalism) that both hinder and enhance democratic consolidation in Turkey. By highlighting the strengths and shortcomings of the Turkish experience from these perspectives, this book suggests the optimal policy priorities for current and future Turkish governments to establish a consolidated democracy in Turkey. Contributors: Muge Aknur, Canan Aslan-Akman, Filiz Baskan, Gulgun Erdogan-Tosun, Siret Hursoy, Aysegul Komsuoglu, Gul M. Kurtoglu-Eskisar, Yesim Kustepeli, Nazif Mandaci, Ibrahim Saylan, & Ugur Burc Yildiz.
Since the end of the 1980 coup d’état Turkey has been in the midst of a complex process of democratization. Applying methodological pluralism in order to provide a comprehensive analysis of this process in a Turkish context, this book brings together contributions from prominent, Turkish, English, French, and Spanish scholars. Turkey’s Democratization Process utilises the theoretical framework of J.J. Linz and A.C. Stepan in order to assess the complex process of democratization in Turkey. This framework takes into account five interacting features of Turkey’s polity when making this assessment, namely: whether the underlying legal and socioeconomic conditions are conducive for the development of a free and participant society; if a relatively autonomous political society exists; whether there are legal guarantees for citizens’ freedoms; if there exists a state bureaucracy which can be used by a democratic government; and whether the type and pace of Turkish economic development contributes to this process. Examining the Turkish case in light of this framework, this book seeks to combine analyses that will help assess the process of democratization in Turkey to date and will be of interest to scholars and researchers interested in Turkish Politics, Democratization and Middle Eastern Studies more broadly.
Through critical analysis of Turkey's transformation under the AKP, this book explores the relationship between domestic transformations and global/regional dynamics. It also discusses the relationship between the Turkish transformation and the Arab uprisings and the implications of the Turkish case for regime transitions in the Arab world.
Since the establishment in 1945 of a constitutional democracy, political parties have figured prominently in Turkish politics. This book, first published in 1991, examines the role they have played. Key features of the political culture of the Turkish republic have created dilemmas for multi-party democracy: Atatürkism still exerts a powerful influence on the country’s bureaucratic and military elites. With their notion of ‘responsible leadership’ and of democracy as rational intellectual debate in pursuit of the ‘best’ policy, they have expected an unrealistic degree of idealism and statesmanlike behaviour from the leaders of political parties. Three times, in 1960, 1971 and 1980, the military has intervened in politics – on the third occasion to undertake wholesale constitutional and legal restructuring aimed at producing ‘sensible’ politicians. Given these ambiguous circumstances, what role have the political parties themselves played in the promotion and functioning of democracy in Turkey, and what are their attitudes to the issues involved? This collection of essays discusses political parties since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 until the 1990s. With contributions from leading political scientists and historians of modern Turkey, it is indispensable reading for all those concerned with the country.