A Second Foundation? Constitution, Nation-Building, and the Deepening of Authoritarianism in Turkey
In the aftermath of the June 2015 elections, Turkey entered a new phase, which can be defined as a reemphasis of the default settings of the republic: one state, one nation, one flag, one language. This chapter argues that ethnic homogenization and the (r
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CHAPTER 8
A Second Foundation? Constitution, Nation-Building, and the Deepening of Authoritarianism in Turkey Rosa Burç and Mahir Tokatlı
Construction works for the new complex to replace the Atatürk Cultural ˙ Center (AKM, Atatürk Kültür Merkezi), located right on Istanbul’s Taksim Square, began on February 10, 2019 with a ceremony opened by President Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan himself. During his opening speech, he described protesters against the new building as “ideologically driven” and not different from those “who reject the country’s war on terror” (TRT Haber 2019). He was specifically referring to the thousands of academics who signed a 2016 petition calling for an end to siege politics in the country’s Kurdish-majority southeast after the June 2015 elections
R. Burç Center on Social Movement Studies, Faculty of Political Science and Sociology, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy e-mail: [email protected] M. Tokatlı (B) Institute for Political Science and Sociology, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. Rayner et al. (eds.), Back to the ‘30s?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41586-0_8
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and countless public figures, activists, and journalists, who criticized government measures taken under the state of emergency declared after the controlled 2016 coup d’état. As part of AKP’s (Party for Justice and Development) so-called Urban ˙ Renewal Project for Istanbul, in which many historic buildings and traditional neighborhoods were replaced by high-end housings and/or shopping malls, the demolition of the AKM carried significant symbolic value. The construction of the building was initiated in 1946 but not completed until 1969. It was not only considered an architectural icon of the young and modern Turkish republic, but also indexed Western aspirations of the Kemalist elites, who were devoted to the founding principles of the republic. It was during the Gezi resistance in summer 2013 that the AKM again attracted attention, although it had been out of operation since 2008. Protesters reclaimed the building as a symbol of early republican paradigms such as secular Kemalism and struggled for its preservation by resisting AKP’s neoliberal policies combined with Islamist conservativism since its election to government in 2002 (Karaman 2013; Lelandais ˙ 2014). The case of Istanbul’s AKM exemplifies how the AKP government has consolidated power by destroying, rebuilding, and pacifying the remnants of the old order, as well as responding to counter-hegemonic alternatives. This chapter departs from the aftermath of the June 2015 elections and the controlled coup attempt in 2016, to shed light on measures taken by the AKP government to deepen authoritarianism by transforming state institutions via constitutional amendments that aim at significantly remodeling the constitutional fabric of the country. We argue that these two critical junctures have empowered the Erdo˘gan govern
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