AKP Party in Turkey

AKP Party in Turkey

Describe the AKP's Rise to Political Power

Survey research on the social composition of supporters of different parties, conducted both before and after the elections of November 2002, confirms the overwhelming popularity of AKP among the working class, particularly in Istanbul and other large cities. A situation in which the urban working class not only retains an Islamic identity, but also expresses its political demands in terms of it, presents a challenge to the standard theories of modernization and secularization. The popularity of political parties such as Welfare or AKP in urban centers is then indiscriminately explained in terms of massive immigration from the countryside. They falsely assume that immigrants reproduce rural conditions in these urban centers and lead an isolated, self-subsistent lifestyle in their poor neighborhoods. Because in conventional wisdom Islam is opposed to modernity, and Islamic identity is a traditionalist reaction to modernization, they argue that these Islamic parties supported by provincial people living in the margins of the large cities. It is true that much of the success of these political parties is due to recent immigration from the countryside; but the fact remains that the urbanization of these people, who now form the modern working class in Turkey, did not take the form of de-Islamization, as predicted by secularization theories. It is at this point that the Eurocentric assumption about the unique characteristics of Islam becomes useful. The argument then made that, surely, Islam constitutes an exception to the rule about secularization.

There is, however, an alternative mode of explanation, one that specifically addresses the role played by Euro centrism itself. The Eurocentric assumptions of modernization internalized by the Kemalist founders of the Turkish Republic and made the building blocks of the regime. Turkey's modernization project aimed at a state-led emulation of Western social structures and cultural practices. The Kemalist leadership declared the national goal to be the 'achievement of contemporary civilization', a formula that equated modernization with Westernization. In this perspective, Islam considered representing a set of traditions, values, legal rules, and norms which were intrinsically non-Western in character and hence inherent obstacles to be overcome.

Although Erdogan sometimes compared to Özal, Erdogan's AKP defines its political ideology quite differently, as 'conservative democracy', which appears to express a deliberate attempt to combine a specific cultural identity with a universal political regime. In so far as 'conservative' implies the preservation of Muslim cultural identity, the aim of combining it with 'democracy' expresses the claim that the two are not incompatible. It further expresses the claim that Islam does not prescribe a particular bureaucratic model, and, therefore, does not need to be shed in order to achieve democracy. Indeed, numerous times Erdogan and other leaders of the party have stated that they are out to disprove Huntington's theory of the 'clash of civilizations'.

'Conservative democracy', then, has been interpreted by many observers as a code for 'Muslim democracy' and AKP has been likened to the 'Christian democrats' of Europe. Still, there is an ambiguity in the ...