Democracy, identity and foreign policy in Turkey
William Armstrong - william.armstrong@hdn.com.tr
After 12 years of Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule, plenty of earnest ruminations have been written about the direction of Turkey’s democracy. These 10 chapters co-written by Turkish academics Fuat Keyman and Şebnem Gümüşçü share the variable quality of most reflections on the issue, oscillating between the insightful and the confused. The two authors, both at Sabancı University’s Istanbul Policy Center, are doves when it comes to the AKP, taking the long view and generally subscribing to a “two-stage” reading of its time in power: The party started out as a genuinely conservative-democratic force restrained from its Islamist inclinations by a host of external factors, but has since exploited and exacerbated Turkey’s lack of checks and balances to establish itself in uncontestable power at the center of the state. That’s a defendable position, but the arguments in this book generally fail to weigh Turkey’s (un)democratic crisis heavily enough. As a result, Keyman and Gümüşçü have some crucial blind spots that often leave their book feeling rather thin.
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