ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the transition empire to republic occurred in such a way that the fundamental division between the state class and the masses perpetuated. Keyder suggests that as modernity executed as a project from above in the hands of the state-elite, it led to 'a crisis-ridden trajectory toward fascism'. William Hale and Ergun zbudun argues that the AKP continues the tradition of liberal centre-right in Turkey, that is, attachment to private enterprise, majoritarian democracy, clientelist populism and a Western-oriented foreign policy. In the wider international context, the delegitimation and critique of Kemalism takes place in the age of 're-sacralisation of politics'. Contemporary Kemalist ideology offers its own alternative for describing the socio-political world, with its concomitant values of classical modernism. The adjacent and peripheral concepts of Kemalism enable it to take highly different and even contrasting particular expressions, from those reproducing the values of universal secular-humanism to those of extreme, xenophobic Turkish nationalism.
