Can Islamists give neoliberalism an egalitarian, economically prosperous, and politically liberal façade? Can neoliberalism be combined with any other ideological outlook and sustain the consequent rapport? Why did the Arab uprisings fail to succeed? Could the middle classes become an agent in which to invest hopes for social change? Cihan Tuğal’s book The Fall of the Turkish Model: How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism revolves around these striking questions and provides an incisive account by tracking the related developments in Middle Eastern countries, focusing specifically on Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, and Iran.
The book takes the experience of Turkey as an allegedly successful model in terms of reconfiguring the existing balances, gaining support from the social base, and ultimately generating consent for a deepening neoliberalization. Following this model, Tuğal compares the cases of Egypt, Iran, and Tunisia, all territorially integrated countries with a strong tradition of Islamist movements working at the level of grassroots politics. He also narrates the stories of the challenges that each Islamic movement has encountered, especially as regards adapting the dictates of a neoliberal regime. The author provides a detailed picture of the Arab Uprisings by offering a refined social and political analysis of the processes involved therein. In comparative terms, the book carefully interrelates each country’s domestic and international developments and elaborates on the reasons why Turkey’s experience—namely, that of liberal Islam—has moved away from the regional agenda as a substantial model.
To construct the Turkish model and analyze Islamic movements in the Middle Eastern region, Tuğal makes use of an influential theoretical framework, developing a sophisticated form of the Gramscian framework initially developed in his previous studyFootnote 1 so as to fashion an actor-oriented analysis. He thus combines this theoretical framework with a closer focus on the processes of the construction and organization of political society, a field of actors and organizations with comprehensive social visions, which, for Tuğal, is associated with civil society—i.e., actors who pursue sectional interests or specific issues—in such a way as to make or unmake the power blocs of hegemonic rule (p. 22, 23, 115–117). As he himself argues, Tuğal’s analysis steers clear of any naïve and essentialist underpinnings of civil society or state-centered, institutionalist interpretations and, by placing political society at its center, invites a thorough understanding of the dynamic nature of the social processes at work (p. 15–18).
The first part of the book, Chapters 1 to 3, engages in economic and political analyses of the relevant cases in the context of corporatism changing into the neoliberal regime. In each case, Tuğal traces these developments’ history, with a focus on the processes of organization of political societies. He ultimately infers that, in terms of form, the performance of Islamic movements in their case-specific circumstances render the accompanying Islamic political society unified (Turkey, Tunisia), fragmented (Egypt), or dispersed (Iran).
The close scrutiny of these cases undertaken by Tuğal reveals the reasons behind these differing forms of political society in the region. Beginning with Turkey, corporatism had come to constitute an exclusionary power bloc up through the 1980s. Then, with the 1980 coup, Islamists who had gained confidence after the Iranian revolution gradually began to emerge as promising candidates for rule. Islamists, through the formation of political parties—which represents the exception of the Turkish case—were able to stay in parliamentary politics. The memorandum of February 28, 1997 expelled the radical Islamic movements from political society, and the subsequent economic crisis in 2001 created a political vacuum. The Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) filled the vacuum by utilizing this structural situation to its advantage, managing to expand the power bloc to newly emerging business actors and the informal working class (p. 67). As the AKP proceeded to implement further its neoliberal policies, it simultaneously appeased export-oriented businesses and readjusted welfare policies so as to garner consent from the urban poor (p. 93, 97). With the help of the entrenched political party and increasing support from the social base, the AKP managed to remain as the only religious and political authority in the country (p. 74). As such, in Turkey, Islamic political society managed to stay unified (p. 115).
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has been the most powerful interlocutor among Islamists, though it limits itself to legalist discussions and has, unlike the Turkish Islamists, refrained from forming a political party. This strategy has hampered the professionalization and liberalization of the movement: without a party at the center of political society, the movement has proven unable to absorb radical challenges, and political society has thus remained fragmented (p. 74–78, 128–129). On the other hand, in Tunisia, the example that most resembles the Turkish model, the Islamists did organize as a political party. However, deficiencies in terms of strategy-making and the incapacity of its members ultimately produced an unequivocal stance that limited the party’s integration with civil society in such a way as to be able to form a power bloc (p. 79, 130). Iran, meanwhile, moved in a much different path following the 1979 revolution, with the state becoming more entrenched. There, liberal Islamists only organized loosely, and were only able to monopolize small sections within the state. Islamic political society thus became dispersed in Iran, and the Islamists there were only able to form frail power blocs (p. 57–59). In each of these cases, the results of the unified, fragmented, or dispersed political society would in the long run create repercussions in terms of reestablishing hegemonic order in the face of insurgencies.
The second part of the book, Chapters 4 to 6, presents the dynamics of the revolts in each case, describing their class characteristics and discussing the aftermath of passive revolution and subsequent restoration, combined with analysis of the case-specific organization of political society. As these revolts unfolded, the responses of the respective political societies in each country closed off the possibility of a liberal Islam congruent with the neoliberal regime. In the end, the book calls for a consideration, or reconsideration, of the wave of regional upheavals and their future prospects as the global order continues to tighten its authoritarian grip.
According to Tuğal, the common dynamic that prevented these revolts from becoming successful was that the revolutionaries could neither formulate all-encompassing demands nor unify the various social groups involved under strong political leadership. As a result, these leaderless attempts at revolution were unable to last long or become broad enough to disintegrate the existing order.
In Egypt, the working and middle classes were disassociated from one another both spatially and politically. The Muslim Brotherhood, as the most organized actor, hijacked the insurgency’s energy and attempted a passive revolution such as the one in Turkey (p. 159–160). However, the ongoing protests, economic imbalance, international pressures, and internal tensions within the movement all continued in the meantime. The fragmented political society of Egypt proved unable to balance the turmoil, and when the military intervened, the passive revolution turned into a process of restoration (p. 200–211). In Tunisia, Al-Nahda made alliances with radical Islamic currents and seized power. The party remained disinterested toward the demands of the organized labor and middle classes. The process of reestablishing hegemonic order, coupled with increasing neoliberalization, was then brought to a halt when the regime tried to repress street protests violently, thereby displaying a lack of capacity to resonate with widespread demands, and ultimately the regime lost its power (p. 219–221). In Iran, while the middle classes demanded a more liberal country, the political society was dispersed in form and so could not formulate a program substantial enough to substitute for the conservatives’ hegemonic order. Eventually, the upheaval there was scattered by the well-entrenched Iranian state (p. 191–193).
In Turkey, the 2013 Gezi protests were massive in size, but again suffered from a strategic mistake: a middle-class character came to monopolize the movement, and thus the unified political society, under strong leadership, managed to suppress the movement. In subsequent months, a second attack came from within the political society itself: Gülenists attacked the government’s legitimacy by unearthing evidence of corruption within the government, although this attack eventually backfired (p. 263–266). The consequences of this put significant strain on the Turkish model: the regime began to slowly depart from its already weakly applied democratic tendencies, and it became less professionalized and more authoritarian at the expense of a reconsolidation of power. This domestic turbulence, coupled with problematic international maneuvers—such as the government’s engagement in Syria, its intricate political stance as the Arab uprisings unfolded, and its firmly entrenched Saudi-Salafi—then brought even further isolation (p. 187–189). All these developments disclosed the deficiencies of the Turkish experience, leading it to be gradually disregarded as a substantial political model to be emulated in the region.
Where Tuğal applies the political society approach to the historical development of particular cases in which actors sought to establish a hegemonic order, there appears to be a gap in his explanation of the interactions between civil and political society. The Islamic movements in the region, regardless of their failed attempts, were indeed involved in political society for a time, an involvement that was only made possible via integration with certain classes and organizations in civil society. There is an assumed relationality between the two fields. However, in Tuğal’s account, there is little room in the overall analysis given over to the conditions and capacities of civil society, how these address their interlocutor, and through what political and social mechanisms any links were constructed by political society. Thus, in the book’s actor-oriented analysis, the top-down elite-driven struggle predominates, with the bottom-up explanation only being thinly tied to the overall picture. Despite this shortcoming, the author’s meticulous endeavor to articulate his theoretical framework through empirical data and his careful historical comparative analysis, coupled with his refined analyses, have produced a commendable study that would be helpful for the understanding of and further inquiry into the dynamics of mobilization, the capacities of actors, and the process of regime building in the countries examined.
