Epilogue

Summary

This chapter evaluates the longer-term impact of the people’s politics. The existing literature generally presents the superstructure of Turkey’s modernization by focusing on the state, elite and political organizations. This chapter highlights the alternative view, which this book introduces for the first time, by focusing on the deeper dynamics and bases of modern Turkey’s formation, that is, the infrastructure of Turkey’s modernization. This chapter briefly underlines how each chapter evidences the crucial role of the ordinary people’s views and practices in the implementation of the state’s policies and modernization projects. It argues that Turkey’s socioeconomic and political transformation as envisioned and imposed by republican rulers were limited by the people’s active, daily politics. Underlining how the state and society interacted through hitherto unknown bridges between them, in contrast to widely held theses, it argues the republican regime should not be seen as an elitist or rigid but a flexible and responsive system. One of the main conclusions this study draws is that today’s Turkey was formed by the interaction between state and society rather than top-down creation of the republican elite, and this culminated in today’s upsurge of conservative and Islamist politics. Yet, the book also implies that today’s discontented and disadvantaged individuals could continue to challenge today’s Islamist government in similar ways.