ABSTRACT
Why does the dominant party initiate Kurdish opening even though it takes an adversarial approach to the Kurdish issue? The qualitative text analysis of parliamentary speeches reveals that although the AKP accepts the Kurdish issue as an identity issue, it takes controversial positions on two sub-ethnic issues, that is, granting collective rights and redefining the identity of the Turkish nation. As the dominant party, the AKP’s position slides from the pro-Kurdish to the Turkishnationalist on the issue dimension, because the party aims for the votes of both parties’ moderate voters. With a strategic twist, the dominant party creates a new dimension, which can be labeled as further democratization, integrating the ethnic dimension to the secular versus pro-Islamist dimension. Riker’s concept of heresthetics explains this strategy as an attempt to upset the existing equilibrium in party competition in order to reach the objectives. That is the reason why the dominant party called this process Kurdish opening but stayed closer to the Turkish nationalist’s position via rhetoric. Therefore, this chapter indicates that heresthetics and rhetoric can also be used to explain the dominant party’s behavior on the ethnic dimension.
