ABSTRACT
Since its foundation in August 2001, Turkey’s Justice and Development
Party (JDP) has routinely declared its commitment to the idea of transfor-
mation. Its landslide victory in the November 2002 elections was a huge
success for the new party which has differentiated itself from the rest of the
political parties as regards to its attitude towards reformism. This task of
reformation represents continuity with the earlier Islamist aspirations of
political parties of the same genre to rectify the undemocratic nature of the
Turkish political system. As Abdullah Gu¨l, the Foreign Minister and the second man in the party, argues, the JDP represents the will to transform
fundamentally both itself and Turkey in terms of removing the constraints
within the sphere of domestic politics for it to be able to democratize the
political system. The party seeks to operate in the realm of foreign policy
especially, in order to affect the new restructuring of the Turkish political
system. For this purpose, it has used the area of foreign policy as a secure way
to further democratize the political system while trying to avoid a clash with
secularist circles (Duran 2006: 282). This is the ‘new understanding of politics’ for the party. This discourse on transformation has empowered the party in
the eyes of not only the Turkish electorate but also the economic elites and the
The JDP claims that it has brought a new political style and under-
standing to Turkish political life. The main political priorities behind the
JDP’s discourse of transformation have been a commitment to further the
reforms called for by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and Turkey’s
accession process into the European Union. Since the accession process necessitates the consolidation of Turkish democracy in accordance with the
Copenhagen Criteria,2 the JDP’s attempt to transform the political system
along a reformist course reaffirms its legitimacy in the eyes of the EU and
the Turkish people who wish to join the Union. The JDP has domesticated
the reforms of the EU accession process by declaring that it is in Turkey’s
own interest to proceed with the requirements of the Copenhagen Criteria.
The international conjuncture and developments in the domestic political
scene have strengthened the JDP government’s discourse of transformation
during its five years in office. Since an economic crisis and corruption in domestic politics called for a radical transformation within the system
before the 2002 elections, the JDP has received considerable support in its
agenda of transformation from many fronts. The party has enjoyed a rather
supportive milieu of world politics in which many-particularly in the US
and Europe-believed that if democracy was to be successfully fostered
across the Muslim world, it was vital to strengthen the JDP’s agenda of
transformation. In a sense, for the first time in many years, both the Turkish
people and external players shared the same idea: to transform the Turkish political system.
