ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the articulation of Islamic cultural politics with neoliberal capitalism in order to understand state transformation in Turkey. It focuses on a particular kind of Islamic politics that has emerged as the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and other Islamic groups cultivate a ‘public ethos of engagement’ (Connelly 1999: 5) between European and Islamic ways of thought, morality, and norm creation. Conflicts over how Islamic sensibilities interact with conceptions of secular modernity, the rule of the state in Turkey, and the supranational polity of the EU, offer important insights into the specific meanings of an Islamic ‘marriage’ with neoliberalism. My analysis of the cultural-political process reveals a context in which the general material and discursive conditions of global capitalism are incorporated into particular cultural frames of action that steer state transformation in certain directions. In pushing the question of a re-articulated discourse of state transformation further, this chapter aims to re-conceptualize Islamic politics from a perspective that takes seriously the importance of ideas, culture, and public narratives in relation to their complex entanglements with market capitalism. Accordingly, I will first examine current political conflicts.
After winning the July 22, 2007 national election in Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) secured another 5-year term in government. The AKP increased its popular vote to 46.7 per cent, up from 34.28 per cent in the 2002 election when it formed the first ever ‘pro-Islamic’ majority government in Turkish history. During the 2007 elections, the notoriously ‘secular’ Republican People’s Party (CHP) formed an alliance with the Democratic Leftist Party (DSP) in an effort to unite the centre-left. They received a combined 20.87 per cent of the vote. The far-right National Action Party (MHP) gained 14.3 per cent of the popular vote. The AKP adopted a more ‘liberal’ ideological orientation in its election platform, while the centre-left CHPDSP coalition and the far-right MHP took a statist, nationalist stance. The position of the CHP-DSP and the MHP reflected their opposition to AKP policy on Turkey’s accession to the European Union (EU). They perceived
