7 - Life after Populism?

Summary

Standing on Precarious Divides

At a time when the term ‘populism’ is used indiscriminately to describe an array of phenomena that characterise contemporary politics, from authoritarianism to nativist politics and charismatic leadership, to forms of collective action such as the Occupy movement, or the Tahrir Square and the Gezi protests, developing an understanding of the concept that retains its theoretical and analytical utility and that provides us with the tools to demarcate populism from other forms of mobilisations and politics is paramount. In this book I attempted to ground the particular case of Turkey in socialhistorical terms as I have argued that current sociopolitical constellations also have a historical dimension in social memory, historically conditioned emotional economies and repertoires of action and discourse.

In the preceding pages I suggested that ‘the Turkish nation’ and ‘the people’ were born in response to a state of ontological insecurity. The diverse population of an imploding homeland whose territory was coveted by numerous suitors was forced literally to make up its mind on fundamental issues of identity that would determine the future, wellbeing and security of generations, and often go against the grain of vernacular traditions, profane and sacred alike. I used the term ‘forced’, as becoming Turkish was not a matter of a long-durée process that might entail encounters with relative strangers, cultural and political convergences or less abrupt and violent processes of assimilation. It was also forced as the population was made to ‘choose’, to support an unclear project, by a humiliated yet ambitious elite believing it had a mission to build a new nation. Although the nation-building enterprise was by no means planned in detail, it was nevertheless inspired by the project of Turkism espoused by the CUP, which steered the Ottoman Empire to its defeat. The imperative of building and consolidating a strong modern nation state and the negative experience of Ottoman experiments with parliamentary politics tilted the balance decisively to a project of selective modernisation from above. This envisaged the establishment of formally democratic, but in essence authoritarian, political institutions that would safeguard the unity and modernisation of Turkey.