Turkish Politics and ‘The People’

Spyros A. Sofos is a political scientist based at the Middle East Centre of the London School of Economics and Political Science and is founder and lead editor of openDemocracy’s #rethinkingpopulism. He has a PhD in Regional and Cross-Cultural Studies from the University of Copenhagen and has previously worked as a Researcher and Lecturer at the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) of Lund University, Senior Research Fellow in Politics at Kingston University and Senior Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Politics at Portsmouth University. His other books include Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe (1996, Routledge), Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey (2008, Hurst and Oxford University Press), Islam in Europe: Public Spaces and Civic Networks (2013, Palgrave). He was also co-editor of the ‘Islam and Nationalism’ Palgrave Macmillan book series (2013-18).

In this excellent book, Sofos critically explores the ways the notion of the people, and the allied notions of the national and the plebeian/vernacular have been shaped by the history of the Turkish republic. He elegantly shows us how these very notions have informed ways of envisaging society and politics in Turkey by taking us on a journey through Turkish political history from the end of the Ottoman era to the reign of the AKP. He meticulously elucidates the transformations of the people during one hundred years of republican politics and gauges the ramifications of the populist turn in Turkey’s political trajectories. The book situates Turkey’s experience with populism in broader literatures by showing its unique aspects as well as commonalities with other cases all around the world. No one has shown us the continuities and changes in Turkish populism from this perspective before.

• Chapter 1: The people: Legitimacy and mobilization in Turkish politics The notion of the peopleThe Popular and the PopulistStructure of this volumeChapter 2: Situating the people in the foundational narratives of the early Turkish republicBetween empire and republicBringing the people centre-stageAnticolonialism, injustice and the people’s enemiesA populist state without a peopleSecularism: The impassable route from the Anatolian masses to the sovereign peopleA state in motion and the ‘normalization’ of exceptionChapter 3: The sovereign people in anxious timesOthering and TurkishnessAnxiety, ontological insecurity and nationalist desire The republican people under the shadow of the nationNoble savages and the infant peopleGoverning the wildernessChapter 4: Sovereignty, legitimacy and the voice of the peopleThe people as an empty signifierClashing sovereignties; conflicting legitimaciesLove, fear and legitimacy: the infant people and the fatherChapter 5: The politics of the repressed"Rekindling" a flame long gone The 1960 coup: Kemalism resurrected or reinterpreted?Kemalism and its challengers: Leftism, Nationalism Islamism The multiple iterations of the people in the 1960s and 1970sThe 1980 coup and the transformation of Turkey’s political and social topographyChapter 6: A difficult democracy: populism and the people in Turkish politicsIslam: between pacification and mobilizationHegemony beyond Islamism The politics of indignation and the moment of the peopleChapter 7: Life after populism?Standing on precarious dividesFull circleConclusion: Life after Populism?