Introduction
Turkey can never be a province of a “United European State.” We are not on the path of being a satellite but on the path of a leading Turkey ideal. We cannot allow our national and moral values and superior traits, which our glorious history left us legacy—in one word our national character—to melt away over time inside the Common Market pot.
Süleyman Arif Emre (first chairman of the NSP) Footnote 1
After Turkey applied for membership in the European Economic Community (EEC) for the first time in July 31, 1959, membership negotiations were officially initiated in September 28 of the same year and resulted in a partnership agreement in September 12, 1963. This agreement was complemented by an Additional Protocol signed in December 31, 1973, which monitored Turkey’s compliance with membership criteria, and has since envisaged the gradual integration of Turkey into the European customs union. The agreement was implemented until the late 1970s, when the then Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit froze relations with the EEC.Footnote 2
Turkey’s EEC membership, an ostensibly economic matter,Footnote 3 however turned out to be an instrument of identity projection in the domestic power struggle of the National Salvation Party (NSP),Footnote 4 the mainstream Islamist partyFootnote 5 against the center-right Justice Party (JP), the dominant political actor of the 1970s, especially on the right of the political spectrum.Footnote 6 This case marks the very beginning of the incarnation of the Islamist tradition in Turkey, in which EEC membership stands out as one of the crucial fault lines within the conservative bloc. The focus here is on how a marginalized subjectivity—the Islamist leadership and base included—seizes political momentum to sustainably emancipate itself from the conservative midst.
While many studies have dealt with clashes between Islamists and secularists or modernists,Footnote 7 and many have focused on the Islamist anti-EU stance,Footnote 8 initial controversies and friction within the conservative spectrum that led to the birth of Turkish Islamism remain underexplored. This study is therefore an attempt to fill this gap. In the context of Turkish Islamism, the politically turbulent 1970s periodFootnote 9 is a watershed given that “newly opened opportunity spaces for articulating formerly prohibited identities and demands”Footnote 10 equipped the Islamist subjectivityFootnote 11 with sufficient political clout to fashion an autonomous self-space. Due to the dwindling of an “earlier consensus on Turkey’s European vocation,”Footnote 12 many in the 1970s, from both the right and the left, challenged Turkey–EEC relations.Footnote 13 However, Islamist opposition had by far been the most vocal and effective,Footnote 14 which culminated in the 1973 and 1977 elections.Footnote 15 Moreover, one can argue that the zeitgeist of the 1970s was in favor of political Islam across the Muslim world as the political visibility of “transnational Islamic movements” was on the rise.Footnote 16 Yavuz finds that the containment of Islamic opposition in forms of “co-optation, repression and power sharing” has finally brought about a “modus vivendi”Footnote 17 paving the way for Islamists to react with discursive counter-strategies.
Hence, this study identifies Turkey’s EEC membership as one important initial controversy facilitating the implementation of following counter-strategies; distinction, delegitimization, and an alternative space/self that have ultimately led to the establishment of the Islamist subjectivity. This subjectivity has brought to the fore an odd novelty as it identified Europe as Turkey’s other, what was a disaffirmation of a long-established Turkish state Weltanschauung deeming Europe the cradle of progress.Footnote 18
In theoretical terms, this study relies on post-structuralist tenets, out of which several analytical frameworks are chosen for better deliberating on the portrayed problematique. Such are explained and embedded in the following sections, which first comprise the theoretical framework and subsequently the data-processing section based on official parliamentary records from the 1970s. The latter is based on a qualitative selection of position-revealing statements made by politicians in parliament, which are believed to represent the standpoints of each political bloc related to the EEC and not necessarily the personal accounts of the politicians articulating them.
Theoretical framework
Examining the role of foreign policy in the context of a domestic political power struggle, this study departs from Ashley’s concept of foreign policy as a “boundary-producing political performance.”Footnote 19 This is to say that—by transferring Ashley’s concept to the domestic realm—this study views foreign policy as a generator of distinction and thus identityFootnote 20 for political actors. More precisely, it is hypothesized that foreign policy enables domestic political actors to create a discursive (self-)spaceFootnote 21 by pointing out their distinction on foreign policy issues. Built on such a distinction, which feeds into both the political legitimacy of oneself and the delegitimization of the other, political actors hereby gain the competence to produce their identities. These identities on the other hand contribute to the normalization of the domestic power struggle between competing political actors. In this way, the functionality of foreign policy in the production of identity becomes evident as foreign policy works like the backbone of the discursive strategy entailing three interrelated components: the distinction from the perceived other, the other’s delegitimization, and finally the creation of an alternative space/self. As pointed out in the case analysis below, all three components are applied in the NSP’s discursive counter-hegemony strategy against the JP.
The kind of involvement of foreign policy in the competition of domestic political actors is not random, but in Campbell’s sense is reflective of “Foreign Policy” carried out at an interstate level.Footnote 22 In other words, international foreign policy is what informs “domestic foreign policy” because domestic actors relate and position themselves to it in order to challenge each other’s legitimacy. This challenge, in which foreign policy is operationalized to either counter the hegemon or silence the dissident,Footnote 23 holds political otherization, a major instrument of identity production,Footnote 24 as one of its main manifestations contributing to the process of concealed marginalization. This implies the practice of linking a domestic other to an external anchor of otherization through the discourse of foreign policy, as does the NSP by linking the JP to Europe and the West (as a political collective), which it frames as Turkey’s other and so tries to undermine the JP’s domestic legitimacy. Operationalizing foreign policy in this way offers a key discursive benefit as one can overshadow the intended act of the rival’s political marginalization by referring to “Foreign Policy,” which apparently holds domestic neutrality at least within the borders of a domestic power struggle.
Due to the NSP’s power position as a counter-hegemon, this attempt to marginalize the JP implies a practice of double resistance, which conceals the aspiration of the NSP to rule and instead normalizes its identity. Double resistance is the reverse conclusion of what Campbell conceptualized as double exclusion, which terms a hegemon’s otherization of a dissident via foreign policy.Footnote 25 Correspondingly, the reverse conclusion would thus suggest the otherization of a hegemon by a counter-hegemon, what then can likewise be termed a practice of double resistance. The shared functionality in these two practices is the concealing and through it the normalization of political marginalization, which is of significance in exerting influence on public opinion and domestic policy. This study showcases both types of conflictual engagement; the NSP confronts the JP through double resistance and the JP responds with double exclusion, and yet both commonly strive to exclude one another out of norm.
The production and normalization of identity, one output of the practice of double resistance, involves political boundaries, namely the insides and outsides of a self get constructed in this process. Put differently, the self determines what is inside the norm and what stays outside. For this to consolidate, it necessitates a process of accumulation and reiteration until reaching a pervasive nature.Footnote 26 Such is proved, for example, in the longevity of threat triggers such as communism, anarchy, or more contemporary Islamism, and European imperialism in the threat perception of Islamists (here the NSP) is no exception.
Speaking of the self, the concept of subjectivity and its relation to identity need to be illuminated. The theoretical approach of this study holds that identity emerges in the process of otherization—the meaning-making process of the self, whereas subjectivity implies a subject’s position within the power relations in which the subject finds self. Subjectivity is what decides over the particular form of otherization and therefore the subject’s identity. Two concepts, responsibility and danger, are crucial to subjectivity and identity.Footnote 27 Danger is central to the practice of otherization and exclusion and thus the reproduction of identity.Footnote 28 Responsibility, which according to Levinas is “the essential, primary, and fundamental structure of subjectivity,”Footnote 29 creates the blueprint of a subject, who holds the power to be a speaking and acting self-authority. At this point, it can be fruitful to deliberate on Doty’s concept of sociality as she argues that a subjectivity is bound in a social environment.Footnote 30
The NSP is bound in a domestic social environment of a hegemonic pro-Europe discourse, in which the Islamist subjectivity holds a marginal position. However, through the concepts of danger and responsibility in its foreign policy discourse, the NSP has, over time, altered this initially discriminative social environment to the thriving of the Islamist subjectivity it represents. Against this backdrop, this study aims to show how the above-mentioned theoretical assumptions unfold in the case of the NSP versus the JP over Turkey’s EEC membership.
[Re]making Europe a generator of distinction
In the late 1960s, when Necmettin Erbakan was involved in politics through various posts in the Turkish Union of ChambersFootnote 31 but had not yet been the leader of Turkey’s first Islamist party, the National Order Party (NOP),Footnote 32 there was little evidence of his fierce opposition to Turkey’s EEC membership. Quite the contrary, this was brought against him in 1970 after he entered the parliament with two colleagues from the NOP.Footnote 33 Namely, when Erbakan penned a motion of censure against the JP-led government over the ambition to enter the EEC, Erbakan’s intention of depriving the JP of its legitimacy of national representation met a heavy backlash. Cahit Karakaş, a member of parliament for the JP at that time, quoted him as saying in a mutually attended meeting in 1967, “The alliance we have launched with the European Economic Community puts [the] Turkish private sector to the front row.”Footnote 34 If this quote is accurate then such a major contradiction reveals a radical political shift from Erbakan after first entering the parliament as the main representative of an Islamist bloc. Regardless of the accuracy of his quote, Erbakan’s motion of censure over the EEC as a result of a radical contra-Europe discourse is important on several grounds.
First, it creates a space of an intra-paradigm emancipation because both the JP and the NOP claimed Turkey’s conservative electorate. Bearing in mind that Erbakan’s application for a nomination candidacy for the JP was vetoed by its leader, Süleyman Demirel, in 1969, after which Erbakan founded the NOP with defectors from the JP,Footnote 35 the Islamists were—although small in number—elected into parliament as an expression of a distinct religiously conservative subjectivity. Second, by undermining the JP’s legitimacy in this way, the Islamist bloc started building up its own legitimacy. Third, by opening an alternative space in the conservative political spectrum, Erbakan’s motion of censure as one of the Islamist bloc’s first major self-assertions in parliament was a clear attempt to politically establish and normalize an independent Islamist subjectivity.Footnote 36 Given the fact that this motion of censure later became an extensively reproduced and reiterated manifesto for Islamists until the February 28, 1997 coup,Footnote 37 one can refer to it as a cornerstone of the NSP’s discursive body marking the Islamist momentum in Turkey’s political history. At this first attempt to take roots in 1970, Erbakan’s vilification of the EEC and the common market, and his rejection of a pro-Europe Turkish identity, is reflective of the Islamist subjectivity:
In the first place, Turkey’s social structure, worldview, historical development and awareness prevent [Turkey] from unifying with west European countries in a common structure. […] The Common Market is the project of re-establishing Europe’s world hegemony after World War II, and it is established among six European countries whose population is overwhelmingly Catholic. […] The Common Market is the imperial Western European countries’, who have been colonial for centuries, system for developing new colonialism in adjustment to the conditions of our time. The wish to take in many African countries—and by the way Turkey—is for applying the new methods of this colonialism. Colonialism in Western countries stems from their belonging to Jewish, Christian, Greek cultures. […] The Common Market is never a mere economic matter. Those, who want to drag Turkey into this adventure, always strive to hide from the nation’s eye that the Common Market is a social, cultural, political, and ideological matter rather than economic.Footnote 38
As can be clearly understood from Erbakan’s speech, the Islamist subjectivity perceives Europe as its other, and thus as Turkey’s other. Therefore, the JP’s endorsement of Turkey’s EEC membership suggests its alliance with this Islamist other, rendering Erbakan’s defamation of Europe in fact a double resistance practice harboring four major implications. First, the otherization of Europe builds a stable antagonism vis-à-vis Turkey, and produces an existential threat thereof. This is evident when Erbakan suggests that Turkey can only maintain its sovereignty and protect its national identity outside Europe. Second, having “exposed the real intention” of Europe and thus the meaning of the EEC, Erbakan, by accusing the JP-led government of hiding that it works in favor of Europe instead of the Turkish nation, clearly delegitimizes the JP’s hegemonic position. This implies the domestic otherization of the JP as a subjectivity out of norm. Third, and consequently, excluding the JP from the norm equally includes the Islamist subjectivity into the norm, upgrading it as the real guardian of the national interest. The latter is a claim to national responsibility and thus to hegemony. For elevating “colonialist/imperialist Europe” to a metanarrative conceals the counter-hegemonic bloc’s domestic power struggle against the hegemonic bloc, and its ambition to rule. Fourth, the securitization of Turkey’s EEC membership, transcending its economic meaning, contributes to a geopolitical normalization of distinction/boundary between Europe and Turkey.
Disqualifying dissent via the Kemalist metanarrative
The subsequent response of the JP to Erbakan’s motion of censure is also telling. By arguing that it was Turkey’s free will to apply for EEC membership, it is emphasized that no external forces are taking over Turkish sovereignty. Moreover, the fact that not only the JP as the actual government supported EEC membership, but former governments (e.g. under the Republican People’s Party (RPP)) did the same, qualifies the matter as a “national policy.”Footnote 39 Finally, Cahit Karakaş links the JP-led government’s position to the Kemalist metanarrative:
Honourable members of parliament, as all of you accept and the overwhelming part of us accept wholeheartedly the fact [that]; Turkey’s progress, the condition of elevating Turkey’s civilizational level to the civilizational level of Europe, as Great Atatürk indicated during the first build-up of the Republic, takes aim through establishing relationship with the West, [which] represents the source of the meaning and spirit of the Common Market, and Turkey’s entrance into the Common Market.Footnote 40
By evoking Atatürk’s legacy of Western orientation, Karakaş counters the idea of the formation of any possible niche for an Islamist metanarrative, and unseals the incompatibility of Erbakan’s demands with the pervasive Kemalist metanarrative,Footnote 41 which had been the ultimate policy rationale accounting for traditional domestic and foreign policy parameters. This exclusion becomes manifest when Karakaş implies that Erbakan and his party are not included in the “overwhelming part of [those who] accept [Kemalism] wholeheartedly.” Depicting the Islamist subjectivity as incompatible with the state’s most profound identificatory tenet—Kemalism—is of great blow-back effect, as Çalış writes, “all decision makers, sympathetic or not to the state’s self-identity, have to play their roles within the boundaries of a Kemalist interpretation of the world.”Footnote 42 This disciplining practice, which implies that the Islamist subjectivity fails to represent the Turkish nation also beyond the EEC issue, reveals the power relations in which the JP has the upper hand.
Another output of Karakaş’s remark is that according to Kemalism, economic and technical progress and civilization accommodate each other. Heper, for instance, writes that Atatürk viewed science as a “civilized religion” and envisaged a “cognitive revolution” for Turks to enable them to compete with Western modernity.Footnote 43 Taking this into consideration, the low level of material progress of Eastern countries compared to Western countries would automatically mean that their civilization remained backward. Indeed, this is one core Kemalist perception of the East, and Karakaş reaffirms this standpoint vis-à-vis Erbakan’s suggestion of a common market with the Muslim Middle East in lieu of Europe.Footnote 44 As a result, the JP is upvalued as a progressive force loyal to the traditionalist state identity, while the Islamist subjectivity is ridiculed as a backwardness-loving disloyal dissident.
Another facet of the Kemalist metanarrative is that it is similar to the Islamist subjectivity that helps give Turkey’s EEC membership political meaning. Diametrically opposed to the Islamist bloc’s revisionist approach, the JP’s minister of finance argues that the meaning of the common market reaches far beyond economic terms, and bears a “political character” in accordance with “the line Atatürk has drawn and all governments of the Republic have maintained.”Footnote 45 The politicization of the EEC takes place on both sides, and the Islamist bloc as well as the JP frame Europe as a boundary-producing referent but with opposite functionalities. While the former excludes Europe as a political subjectivity in favor of delinking Turkey from its Western orientation and aligning it with the Muslim Middle East, the JP counters such alignment by staying loyal to the traditionalist Kemalist approach, which at that time rules out any alternative to Turkey’s integration with the West. In other words, the JP (re)produces Europe as a geopolitical boundary to the Middle East, of which Turkey should not be part. In the latter’s framing by the JP, Europe is an ideal for the Turkish state identity, and its “civilizational supremacy” is approved. Bridging to theory, the JP double-excludes the NSP through the discourse of European civilization and progress. More powerfully so, as it makes it seem that the NSP willingly catapults itself out of norm by refusing Turkey’s EEC membership, which in turn conceals the JP’s intention of political marginalization. In other words, the JP’s counter-discourse suggests a self-exclusion of the NSP aimed at persuading the public of domestic neutrality.
This micro picture of domestic identity politics between the Islamist bloc and the JP also corresponds to the global power relations throughout the 1970s, in which Turkey had been highly dependent on Western alliances, to which it largely remained loyal despite some great disappointments.Footnote 46 Thus, the JP’s pro-Europe identity clearly complied with this loyalty, which was also reflected by the state’s main institutions such as the Republican Senate. The NSP, on the other hand, was yet to break out of its political marginalization. In this sense, the 1970s depict the Islamist subjectivity’s process of self-establishment while seeking both alternatives to the status quo of the pro-Europe identity within the domestic realm and Turkey’s Western orientation.
In sum, to disqualify dissent or counter-hegemony, both sides’ discourses join well-known historical discursive patterns about Europe. As shown in this study’s case, this feeds on the one hand into the sedimentation of Islamist views regarding the inherent evil in the European subjectivity,Footnote 47 and on the other hand into the liberal conservatives’ sedimentation of an ever civilized and advanced Europe.
The danger of Turkey’s “cultural liquidation within the European pot”
Despite the fact that the Islamist NSP considered Turkey’s EEC membership partly an economic matter,Footnote 48 the fear of religious and cultural liquidation nonetheless made up most of its anti-EEC discourse. The fear of cultural liquidation has been a steadily repeated and disseminated identificatory concern appealing to the Muslim identity of the Turkish nation, which had been uttered to the extent that it was later transferred on the Turkish diaspora in Europe.Footnote 49 Yet, this fear’s primary target had always been the domestic Turkish-Muslim psyche, as the following 1977 statement from Ali Acar (NSP) demonstrates:
In these battles, in which Europe and its collaborator, the Jew, could not defeat the Muslim, discovered the secret [why the Turk was undefeatable] and made their decision. That decision was as follows: The only way to defeat the Muslim Turkish nation was to abolish its faith in God, and all moral values related to it. […] The minds, which brewed this work, did not have difficulties to find the way [to do so]. They found a door and a servant to open it through which—apart from Europe’s technology and wisdom—anything but contrary to the roots of our soul would enter without inspection and control. This door being up to brew our situation today is the Tanzimat door, [through] which the European set foot on the sacred virtue of the faithful Turkish nation living on the untouched shoulders of Anatolia. As soon as [the European] made his step, he started to wither our yeast, and apply the principle of annihilating from within. After World War I, aside from [already] taken strict measures in our borders, our spiritual, mental, and moral fields were left without warden and control, and everywhere was armed with foreign bodies.Footnote 50
According to this historiography, Europeans can undermine Turkish sovereignty whenever they wish, interfering in Turkey due to the Tanzimat reforms,Footnote 51 which is equal to undermining Islam because Turks are overwhelmingly Muslim. The Tanzimat reforms implied inter alia the late Ottoman Empire’s opening to secularism, which was a rapprochement with Europe at the expense of Islamist traditionalists. Thus, linking the EEC to Tanzimat is an expression of the Islamist suspicion of European interventionism. Heper et al. argue that the Islamist bloc saw in “the Turkish application to the EC (European Community) the final triumph of the Tanzimat ethos which will inevitably transform the Turks into ‘servants’ of the Westerners, and assimilate Islamic identity into the Christian world.”Footnote 52
At any rate, it can be argued that Tanzimat and Westernization in modern Turkey’s Islamist historiography are primary sources of revisionism,Footnote 53 which are repeatedly used in the reproduction of the Islamist identity. As Acar’s remark above clearly shows, the Tanzimat ethos not only harbors the external enemy but reproduces the domestic traitor, who is described as the “door opening servant.” Concerning the latter, Ahmad writes that during the time in opposition, the NSP viewed the JP as “the party of freemasons, Zionists, and cosmopolitans,”Footnote 54 a radical framing linking the domestic rival with external enemies. In coalition times this framing takes a softer tone;Footnote 55 however, it never fades to the extent that Islamists would lose their fixed other, which in fact comprises all secular parties. Sunar and Toprak note that, “Insofar as the cultural component of its outlook was concerned, the NSP condemned both the JP and RPP as incurable ‘materialists’ afflicted with ‘imitation of the West’.”Footnote 56
Against this backdrop, it becomes evident that not only “the existence of hegemonic representation is confined to reiteration,”Footnote 57 but also any challenging alternative to it. For, any alternative is the de facto hegemon of its worldview, in which the rival is repeatedly otherized to frequently reproduce the alternative self. Thus, any serious identity-suggesting discourse in politics has to be repeated and disseminated in broad and regular circulation, what Kaliber terms “discursive economy”Footnote 58 in order to cope with its self-requirement of being hegemonic.
Imagining the NSP’s Great Turkey
After the NSP joined the government in a coalition, Deputy Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan declared in parliament that the Turkish nation is the “most honorable nation in history,” which had been the NSP’s “prior starting point” and now its creed as a coalition force.Footnote 59 He emphasized that a new glorious age for Turks is yet to come. For in Erbakan’s words, having lived through four different eras, beginning with the war-torn start of the twentieth century, followed by “bandaging the wounds of war,” Turkey was ushering in the third phase, “which had been the seeking of means to re-establish Great Turkey and to find the nation’s glorious place in history,” and finally the year 1975 marked the start of “the restoration of Great Turkey and a new era.”Footnote 60 In a somewhat apocalyptical fashion, Erbakan communicates the Islamist subjectivity’s historiography, in which the Islamist bloc had been awaited by the Turkish nation as its leader in the resurgence of Turkey to greatness. This was partly because 1975 also marked the third year of the NSP as a coalition partner. In this way, Erbakan’s speech is a showcase for how a previously marginalized discourse, and through it the subjectivity of an alternative hegemon, invaded the center of power, in which the alternative hegemon gained more competence for identity production and historiography.
On another occasion in 1976, Erbakan presented the NSP’s geopolitical imagination of Turkey, which he depicted as “one of the world’s richest countries” holding “a unique geopolitical location, where Asia, Africa, and Europe intersect, which makes it an exceptional country.”Footnote 61 In exegesis, Turkey with its unique location, fertile lands, and in particular its adherence to Islam was—as the Islamist subjectivity had spotted—predestined to become the greatest nation of mankind, which the Ottoman Empire embodied.Footnote 62 Given the empire’s refusal by the Kemalist state identity, to which the JP appeared to have sworn allegiance, the coalition government with the NSP could not be a “follow-up of previous governments.”Footnote 63 Instead, the Islamist subjectivity of the NSP identifies itself and thus its imagination of a Turkish state with the era prior to the decay of the Ottoman Empire. Idealizing the golden ages of Ottoman history for modern Turkey’s future outlook attests to a deeply revisionist worldview, in which anything less than ascribing leadership to Turkey could not do justice to the “honorable and most hardworking nation” that “has built empires and sciences,” “raised great statemen and great people of morality and virtue,” and today inhabits “the richest country in the world.”Footnote 64
In this revisionist worldview, in which Turkey can now righteously claim leadership thanks to the NSP’s entrance into the center of power, the Islamist subjectivity cannot tolerate any submission to Europe, and therefore Erbakan makes clear that “the Common Market’s implication of a political unification with Europe does no longer exist today,” reiterating that a leading country such as Turkey cannot become a “province of Europe.”Footnote 65
Overall, the reiteration of the anti-EEC discourse throughout the 1970s reproduced and consolidated Europe as the external anchor of various domestic subjectivities. For example, MP Fehmi Cumalıoğlu makes this point evident when he says in 1977 that, “The leftists and the liberals find it—as a requirement of their mindset—advantageous and necessary to put our country, and may it be at the cost of its colonization, into the EEC. Turkey’s entrance into the Common Market in 1964 was accepted by a bill, which the leftist and liberal mindset supported in consensus.”Footnote 66 Linking the left, liberal, and conservative subjectivities with Europe is in fact a flashback to a core idea of the Islamist bloc, which had early on claimed to embody the third path—the real conservative subjectivity—as it rejected leftism and liberalism, both of which it frames as imported products from Europe. In doing so, the Islamist NSP rebranded itself as the nation’s only original, loyal, and legitimate power.
Discursive flexibility: Submission to “objective truths” without destabilizing the own identity
Interestingly, while delegitimizing the hegemonic bloc over its apparent alliance with Europe, the NSP often accuses the pro-Europe government of not complying with its self-imposed pro-European identity. This can be observed in particular when debating the freedom of religion in Turkey. Statements from Islamists like, “Don’t we have the right to request freedom of thought and faith from our governments inasmuch the European states grant to their nations? Or is our nation not worthy of freedom as much as a European is?”Footnote 67 are exemplary for this converse form of double resistance practice. This actually implies the confession that the “Turkey in Europe” discourseFootnote 68 is not only hegemonic at the hands of the current power bloc, but has in Kaliber’s sense been “bureaucratized” over time and “depoliticized” through the practice of “objective geopoliticism.”Footnote 69
When the extent of normalization lends a social truth the power of being an objective truth, a dissident or counter-hegemonic discourse must seek equilibrium between itself and the objective truth. Thus, the NSP can only resort to discursive flexibility when required. More precisely, the “Turkey in Europe” discourse’s hegemony is the answer to why the NSP refers to Europe as an external anchor when debating freedom of religion in Turkey. This also reveals power relations on the systemic level, and underpins the possibilities of confinement for discourse making. Given the Islamist subjectivity’s marginal position in a domestic social environment of a hegemonic pro-Europe discourse, which is embedded in Europe dominating Turkish–European relations, it becomes meaningful for the NSP to fight for freedom of religion by making use of the rationale of European liberalism. This has several implications.
First, the Islamist subjectivity confines the challenging capacity of its rival, and in turn secures its existence. Second, it successfully undermines the rival’s identity by an objective truth from the rival’s own repertoire. Third, by emphasizing the religious cause embedded in the objective truth, it downplays its submission to the hegemon and revamps its own legitimacy.
Nevertheless, the management of discursive flexibility depends on the borders of one’s subjectivity. A vivid example is Erbakan’s claim of Atatürk for his party, suggesting that he would be a member thereof.Footnote 70 This seems at odds with the fact that Erbakan in the 1970s, due to his adherence to the Islamist subjectivity, refused to attend ceremonies held at Atatürk’s tomb.Footnote 71 Consequently, it can be anticipated that Erbakan’s claim regarding Atatürk did not reverberate with either political bloc.
Power relations: From radical opposition to dissident in coalition
As already mentioned, the production of Islamist identity as the third path against leftism and liberalism enabled it to fight both at the same time,Footnote 72 and to crystallize its own subjectivity. While the NSP made a radical entrance into Turkish political life, the autochthonous conservatives under the banner of the JP were occupied with striking “a balance between the requirements of electoral success and the exigencies of elite politics”Footnote 73 during the 1970s, which marked an intercoup interval (1960, 1971, 1980). What made the JP the hegemonic bloc was its ability to gain mass representation based on a cross-sectional electorate combined with compromises with military elites.Footnote 74 Despite stable success, the JP’s appeasement policy toward the military opened a space for the NSP, which it skillfully exploited for sedimenting identity and discourse production. This had been approved by the Turkish electorate, which after 1970 no longer granted the JP single-power status.Footnote 75
The NSP, which was on the rise as the only Islamist party, enjoyed 11.9 percent of the vote on October 14, 1973,Footnote 76 and joined a short-lived coalition with the social democratic RPP.Footnote 77 Yet, the NSP continued its existence in another coalition that has been called the First National Front (I. Milliyetçi Cephe) and was led by the JP from March 31, 1975 until June 21, 1977. Despite the fall of its votes to 8.6 percent in 1977,Footnote 78 the NSP stayed as a coalition party within the Second National Front, which persisted until January 5, 1978. Nonetheless, the NSP’s coalition existence loosened its identity as an Islamist protest party, and mended the JP’s loss of votes to itself.Footnote 79 As an expression of this loosening, the NSP from 1973 onwards, compared to its predecessor in 1970–1, lessened the radical tone concerning relations with the EECFootnote 80 without really dismissing Europe as its external other. This suggests an identificatory shift, which the Islamist subjectivity has undergone in the transition process from opposition to coalition force. To understand the NSP’s invasion of the center of power, Sunar and Toprak sketch the 1970s power relations as follows:
the old centre was not the cohesive and closed seat of power that it once was: the bureaucracy was fragmented and the intelligentsia divided; the RPP had deserted the centre and the military was caught in the precarious position of being out of step with the old allies and unable to rely on new ones.Footnote 81
All in all, tracing the Islamist bloc’s development from a politically marginalized protest movement to a respectable political party able to form governments despite having faced military-led suspensions, Göle’s evaluation of 1997 harbors a legitimate point. Acknowledging that Turkish identity was contested by Islamists and secularists, she argues that “socially and politically accepted Islamism, both in its ideological formulations and sociological practices, has created new hybridizations between tradition and modernity, religion and secularism, community and religion.”Footnote 82 This suggests that the Islamist bloc’s skillful maneuvering throughout the changes to power relations during the 1970s helped consolidating the Islamist subjectivity in the domestic social environment as well as over the long term in Turkish political life.
Conclusion
Treating identity production through the instrumentalization of foreign policy as opportunistic, temporary, power challenging, and/or power consolidating, but at any rate dependent on power relations, this study has tried to provide a power diagnosis of both blocs, particularly the alternative bloc. In this power diagnosis encompassing Turkey in the 1970s, the Islamist subjectivity’s counter-hegemonic struggle through operationalizing the EEC issue has been detected as a cyclical identity production, which helped shift the balance of domestic power to the advantage of the NSP. The latter triggered off the transformation of the social environment, in which the Islamist subjectivity found ground to thrive for the first time in Republican history. Having examined Turkey’s Islamist thriving from its discursive beginning, this study has presented the historical background and political value of anti-European sentiment in the Islamist subjectivity. Although there are continuities and discontinuities within the Islamist discourse over time, this study has dealt with how the Islamist tradition initially took roots as it focused on the discursive momentum of Turkish Islamism. Further studies may scrutinize reverberations of this momentum in subsequent periods, including today.
This study has also pointed out that an alternative or a counter-hegemon is made up by distinction, which generates the discursive space and identity for a political subjectivity to challenge the position of its hegemonic adversary. Given that distinction to the hegemon is the raison d’être of an alternative, a counter-identity always claims, whether explicitly or inconspicuously, the position of the hegemon. This means an alternative hegemon lies dormant until its resistance rises to dominance, and the NSP’s trajectory in the 1970s is a historical model for proving the applicability of this theoretical approach to similar cases.
Moreover, this study has highlighted that identity is not a by-product of any policy but a mandatory companion to any policy. There is no foreign policy or local policy that would not inhabit identificatory elements, and therefore this study concludes that reading identity out of political cases helps us to understand the power relations in which they are embedded.
