ABSTRACT
Throughout the pages of this book, I have told the story of competing centres attempting to shape the central value system of modern and contemporary Turkey. During the first decades of the modern republic, it was Kemalism – with its ‘six arrows’ principles, its homogenous view of social space and its assertive view of secularism – that left its strong imprint on the cultural, social and political life in the country. In the 1950s a process of partial and contradictory democratization began, which received strong impetus in the 1980s with Turgut Özal’s reforms and the opening of ‘opportunity spaces’ for social and cultural actors previously outcast. However, it was not until the rise of the post-Islamist political party, the AK Party, that the process could start to become hegemonic. For a decade or so, a new reformist centre seemed to be competing with the Kemalist centre to become hegemonic, profoundly reforming the Kemalist central value system. At the same time, the process did not come to fruition, and the AK Party lost its initial reformist stamina. As I write this conclusion, we are left once again with more competing centres: the old Kemalist centre, weakened but not completely overcome, and a new hybrid centre, the outcome of an overlapping between old and new forms of nationalism, secular and religious, that find in the statist Turkish political culture their authoritarian and anti-pluralistic lowest common denominator.
