By Rimon Tanvir Hossain

Turkey Under Erdoğan: How a Country Turned From Democracy and the West

Written by Dimitar Bechev

United Kingdom: Yale University Press, 2022, 280 pp.

2023 will mark the centennial of the founding of the Turkish Republic and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. In just the past two decades, one party led from its inception by one leader (excluding the period between August 2014 and May 2017), the Justice and Development Party (AKP) under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has made Turkey reverse course from the eight-decade order sustained by secular Kemalists who founded Turkey.

Dimitar Bechev, a Lecturer at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies who is of Bulgarian descent with a specialty in the Balkans, Turkey, and Russia, has produced a masterful and balanced long view of how Turkey “succumbed to authoritarianism, took to nationalism and turned away from the West” in his recent book, Turkey Under Erdoğan: How a Country Turned from Democracy & the West. 

In 2004, then-Prime Minister Erdoğan pledged to an audience of Western academics, students and journalists gathered at St. John’s College, Oxford, “to make European Values Ankara’s Values.” This was the era of Old Turkey, when, in 2002, the ruling AKP had just won their first of four consecutive elections in the past two decades, marketed themselves as “Muslim Democrats” for leading democratic reforms at home, retained an isolationist foreign policy, and participated in accession talks to join the European Union (EU) starting in 1999.[1] 

Fast forward to October 2016: after having won three consecutive elections, expanded the judiciary, deployed military interventions in three continents, and consolidated draconian control over the media, law enforcement, and national institutions, Erdoğan invited Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and Russian President Vladimir Putin to his recently finished Beștepe Mansion complex—the lavish, new, Ottoman and Seljuk-style residence of the President of Turkey.[2] The Beștepe Mansion represents New Turkey and is built on Atatürk Forest Farms, land held sacred to secular Kemalists who led the prior “eight-decade order” and now find themselves uprooted by the AKP and living in a Turkey that is richer and more influential, but whose citizens enjoy less freedoms and whose foreign policy is increasingly confrontational.[3]

Bechev provides a chronological assessment of Erdoğan’s rise to power—from the AKP’s early economic successes in the 2000s to its later muscular foreign policy that allowed Turkey to re-emerge as a considerable power broker in the region. As a power vacuum in the Middle East opened up with the United States’ gradual retreat from policing the region, Erdoğan’s AKP decided that Turkey would fill in the void, having accumulated a robust economic base from its perfection of the market economy and multi-party politics, earning Western support in the process. While Western criticism of how Erdoğan “duped the United States and EU” during this period is commonplace in explaining Turkey’s later democratic backsliding, Bechev explains how the West crying foul play on Turkey evades accountability.[4] He further elaborates that “Western allies are seen as complicit in the molding of Turkey in Erdoğan’s image,” for having encouraged  Turkey to join the EU before eventually ceasing the talks.[5]

Bechev narrates the rise of the AKP as long-coming and Erdoğan as the exceptional leader who installed a one-man regime using the AKP’s profound electoral success. The AKP’s predecessor, the Motherland Party (ANAP), and Erdoğan’s predecessor, former Turkish President Turgut Özal, assured Turkey served a strategic role for the West as a “poster boy for the benefits of the market economy.”[6] ANAP, the first departure from the Kemalist-dominated establishment, provided the formula for the successful combination of domestic prosperity and more holistic neighborhood policy prioritizing engagement with the Middle East, the Balkans and post-Soviet Central Asia. A technocrat who had previously worked at the World Bank and Turkish State Planning Board, Özal spearheaded Turkey’s transition to a neoliberal development state through structural reforms such as privatizing state-owned enterprises, abolishing quotas, cutting import tariffs and opening financial flows from Western countries, which expanded the Turkish GDP by 7% in 1986 and then 9.5 % in 1987.[7]

During this period, what stood out domestically was ANAP’s practice of “big tent politics” that “captured the center ground” in the country’s electorate, attracting a wide array of the Turkish polity including conservatives, nationalists, and liberals. In its foreign policy, Turkey under Özal approached both the East and Europe for trade and cooperation, much like Erdoğan’s Turkey.[8] Özal’s reign coinciding with the collapse of the Soviet Union brought ANAP and the West a window of opportunity to sell Turkey as a model to the rest of the Islamic world. Post-Soviet Central Asian states saw Turkey as agabey (“big brother” in Turkish) and as a “model of political and economic development of other Muslim majority countries” since the 1920s.[9] While Özal himself assured that, “we have a free market, pluralistic democracy, a secular state and provide a good example for the rest of the Islamic World,” Gorbachev lauded Turkey’s “balancing effect” and Kissinger stressed Turkey’s role as a “bridge.”[10] 

Bechev explains Turkey as a “double gravity state”, using this formulation to describe its predicament of being anchored in the Middle East whilst waiting at the gates of the EU.[11] In Bechev’s analysis of the AKP’s first election victory in 2002, the AKP “perfected the formula” in retaining a voting bloc of Islamist Conservatives while being welcomed by the United States  and the EU. Western think-tanks praised the AKP as “Islamic Calvinists” for their integration of Islam and industriousness, while the Western intelligentsia living in Turkey saw the AKP as a “vehicle to Turkey’s liberalization, integration with Europe, and ability to come to terms with the past.”[12] In only the first decade of AKP rule, Turkey witnessed unprecedented economic growth as GDP per capita tripled from $3,600 in 2002 to $12,600 in 2013, and the GDP growth rate increased from 8% to 11% from 2010 to 2011 while the United States dealt with the aftershock of the financial crisis.[13] 

Born out of Özal’s economic and diplomatic embrace of Turkey’s immediate neighborhood, the AKP’s foreign policy under Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu envisioned Turkey “as the center of the universe,” rather than a Western periphery.[14] A former professor of international relations elevated to the Foreign Ministry by Erdoğan, Davutoğlu stressed that Turkey “did not have to choose” between EU membership and engagement with the East.[15] As outlined in his visionary book, Strategic Depth, Turkey enjoys multiple identities and the unique combination of their history and geography brings a sense of responsibility to contribute actively toward peace and security. The “Zero Problems with Neighbors” policy created by Davutoğlu showed how the “flag followed trade”, as between 1999 and 2008, trade with the Middle East grew tenfold, trade with Iran grew thirteen fold, trade with Russia grew twelve fold, and Turkish exports to the Balkans and the Middle East outpaced imports.[16]

However, Turkey’s foreign policy after the Arab Spring failed to achieve the country’s hegemonic goals that had seen some progress in the Balkans, as regime change efforts in the Middle East and North Africa brought limited success. After nearly a decade of exponential trade and mobility gains in the early 2000s, Egypt, Syria, and Libya became realms for power competition. Davutoğlu decided at this moment that Turkey would be on the right side of history as the revolution’s standard bearer by supporting the masses against their authoritarian leaders. In refusing to maintain ties with the oppressive rulers and supporting popular uprisings to secure basic democratic rights, Erdoğan declared that the “Turkish state is in its core a state of freedoms and secularism.”[17]

Despite these professed values, in the decade following the Arab Spring Turkish democracy itself proved to be eroding from internal factors under Erdoğan’s watch. The expansion of the judiciary in 2010, the Gezi Park protests in 2013, the 2016 failed coup attempt, and finally, the abolishment of the Office of Prime Minister in 2017 all marked important steps in the decline of democracy in Turkey. In the meanwhile, the Turkish state also cracked down on the media based on allegations of ties to the plotters of the 2016 coup. This dropped Turkey’s media freedom ranking from 101 in 2007 to 157 in 2019. Even worse, as a result of Erdoğan’s abolishment of the Prime Minister, Freedom House to designate Turkey as “not free.”[18] The effects of rolling back institutions will undermine Turkey’s practice of multi-party politics, which to Bechev is the one thing that keeps Turkish democracy from devolving into autocracy like its neighbors Azerbaijan and Russia.

Turkey Under Erdoğan does an admirable job overall describing Erdoğan’s political rise and consolidation of power, but it neglects one important aspect—the development of its defense industry into one of the most powerful players in the region. While Bechev explains how internal factors such as Turkish nationalism and a strong market economy fueled military interventions in three continents over the course of two decades, he does not describe how the Turkish state became a regime with an indispensable capacity for hard power. From proxy forces to drone capacity, how exactly the Turkish defense industry prepared itself for its military forays abroad deserves attention. This question is even more important considering Erdogan’s declaration in October 2020 that Turkey has reduced their external dependency in the defense industry from around 70% to around 30%.[19]

Ultimately, Turkey Under Erdoğan illustrates the shift in domestic and foreign policy to the “new Sultan’s imperial designs” as well as external challenges.[20] “Neo-Ottomanism” is a label of increasingly common use in the Western media for Turkey’s foreign policy whether in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea or Syria.[21] While Erdoğan’s claim to global leadership of Muslims is acknowledged by Bechev, irredentism, pan-Turkism and Ottoman nostalgia are all actively present in AKP rhetoric as well as in Western and Kemalist media outlets. The AKP’s decision to increase Turkey’s regional stature rests on a larger narrative to rise in the region built upon Turkish nationalism and demolition of checks and balances, with much socioeconomic and political risk. 

Turkey's role in the global response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier this year has underlined its status as a regional superpower: with the eyes of the world now on Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Bechev's book provides an essential crash course to the politics of one of the region's most complex, ambitious and influential actors.

About the Author

Rimon Tanvir Hossain is a second-year Masters of Public Policy candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is Editor-in-Chief of the UCLA Journal on World Affairs. He did his undergraduate in Economics & Legal Studies at UC Berkeley, where he founded the Bengal Gazette, which is the first South Asian student-run publication at UC Berkeley. His interests lie in the intersection of international security, development and immigration policy, having policy experience as a Staffer in the United States Senate. 

Endnotes:

1. Dimitar Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan: How a Country turned from Democracy and the West (United Kingdom: Yale University Press, 2022), pg. 2.

2. Abramowitz, Morton, and Henri J. Barkey. “Turkey’s Transformers: The AKP Sees Big.” Foreign Affairs 88, no. 6 (2009): 118–28. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20699720.

3. Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan, pg. 50.

4. Waldman, Simon A., and Emre Caliskan, “The Irresistible Rise of the AKP”, The New Turkey and Its Discontents (2017; online edn, Oxford Academic, 20 July 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190668372.003.0003.

5. Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan, pg. 3.

6. Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan, pg. 17

7. Ziya Onis, “Turgut Ozal and his Economic Legacy: Turkish Neoliberalism in Critical Perspective,” Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 4 (July 2004): 113; Data from World Bank. 

8. Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan, pg. 18.

9. Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan, pg. 37-38.

10. Ibid.

11. Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan, pg. 48.

12. Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan, pg. 52.

13. Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan, pg. 4, pg. 73. Data from World Bank.

14. Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan, pg. 9.

15. Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan, pg. 72.

16. Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan, pg. 73.

17. Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan, pg. 95.

18. Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan, pg. 138.

19. Ferhat Gurini, “Turkey’s Unpromising Defense Industry,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 9, 2020, https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/82936.

20. Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan, pg. 193.

21. Soner Cagaptay, “The AKP’s Foreign Policy: The Misnomer of Neo-Ottomanism,” Turkey Analyst 2, no. 8 (April 2009): 1-3.