From Victimization to Omnipotence: The Pathos of Erdoğan as a Constituent Symbol of the Neo-Ottomanist Narrative

Abstract

This chapter begins with an analysis of the cult of Erdoğan and his journey from victimhood to omnipotence as the basis of the Neo-Ottomanist narrative and the national emotional mood it addresses. The claim of victimhood has dominated Erdoğan’s political discourse and actions for almost the entirety of the first decade of his leadership. To gain insights into Erdoğan’s leadership, it is essential to ask how he became the symbol of this national emotional trait, and how he gained increasing support by embodying and reflecting the emotions of the people in his political discourse, personal style and behaviour.

In order to analyse the emotions that constitute the Neo-Ottomanist narrative—that stick to it, spill from it and spread to the people—I will begin with the leader. Erdoğan has played a key role in the transformation of Neo-Ottomanism into a national habitus through his biography, the tradition from which he emerged and the symbolic language and actions he has enacted as a leader throughout the AKP’s reign. The key to his success lies in his activation of the emotions of the people. Through speeches and symbolic acts, he appeals to the desires, ambitions and needs of his supporters. This chapter aims to reveal through which symbolic sites Erdoğan has become a constituent symbolic figure of Neo-Ottomanism. It takes as its starting assumption that Neo-Ottomanism is, before all else, an alternative narrative of national identity which emerged in opposition to republican history and the narrative of collective identity and history it preached. I will propose that Neo-Ottomanism hails the emotions of a collective Islamic conservative subject, with ontological ressentiment as the basis of this group’s sense of identity. My basic claim is that, throughout the history of the Republic of Turkey, Neo-Ottomanism has appealed to collective subjects on the political right. It addresses their emotions, passions and desires; it enchants them. All of the emotions I will traverse while examining Erdoğan’s exploits correspond to the emotions of a broader base. Ressentiment is a crucial element in the identity formation of not only Islamic conservatives, but of all who have historically adopted, felt or experienced the binary of elites/the people, whose very identities have been constructed upon the loss and forgetting of the imperial past in the republic’s history. In this chapter, I will trace the emotional sources of the remarkable rise of Neo-Ottomanism and Erdoğan and the historical-emotional needs of the people whose size and ideological borders have gradually expanded.

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Leadership is generally taken to be a status shaped by a person’s exceptional intelligence, knowledge, capability and character traits. In fact, what primarily counts is whether there is a collective willing to recognize a leader as such. The support of the people makes a leader the symbol of a certain tradition, group or collective; for this reason, leaders summon emotions and try to mobilize them wherever possible, using the biographical details, personality traits, actions and discursive strategies that make up their public persona (Edelman, 1967, 73–74). In order for a symbolic figure to become a collective’s point of recognition and identification, they must meet the particular psychological and emotional needs of that collective. In order for a leader to become a symbol, a sizable group must be able to see their past, present and future in the leader’s personality, speeches and actions. A sense of collective identity is garnered, and the emotions that are the key components of this identity are fostered by the leader’s presence. Consequently, a leader’s power comes from his ability to respond to particular emotional needs of the people, and the extent to which he is able to ensure their identification with him. Murray Edelman asks, ‘what symbol can be more reassuring than the incumbent of a high position who knows what to do and is willing to act, especially when others are bewildered and alone?’ (1967, 76), underscoring the psychological and emotional needs that a leader addresses.

This brief prologue on how a leader can become a symbol of an idea, a stance, a tradition and an emotional climate paves the way of our enquiry into how Erdoğan was able to secure and build on his popular support by addressing certain emotions. The answer to this question will reveal much about the narratives of the past upon which Neo-Ottomanism has been built.

4.1 Wounds of the Past: The Legacy of Victimization Conveyed Through the Cult of the Leader

Enquiring how Neo-Ottomanism has become an alternative narrative of national identity and a new form of ‘nationalist-conservatism’ (Bora, 2017, 408) first requires us to ask, to what does this narrative represent an alternative? This necessitates, in turn, an analysis of Turkey’s multi-layered political and emotional history. Neo-Ottomanism has been constructed through a transfer to the people, under Erdoğan’s leadership, of (a) a narrative of victimization claimed for nearly a century by the Turkish right more generally and by Islamic conservatives in particular and (b) the emotional sites that accompany this narrative. Erdoğan adopts the narrative of past victimization through his language and actions, which constantly urge the people to remember this past.

Açıkel argues that the narrative of victimization functions in Turkey as an ideological discourse that extends to almost all branches of the Turkish right. This story of the aggrieved is the ‘most important ideological system’, developed as a ‘strategy of defence, resistance, and articulation’ by people who ‘met with social, cultural, and imaginary rootlessness in the face of the violence of late capitalization and rapid modernization’ (1996, 155). The narrative of victimization harbours many varied discursive components, ‘from Turkish nationalism to Islamic motifs, from the glorification of pre-capitalist values to a semi-communitarian social understanding, from anti-cosmopolitan tendencies to an idealized, nostalgic understanding of history, from a skeptical sense of the world to the individual manifestations of oppression’ (Açıkel, 1996, 155). And indeed, the discourse of victimization played a vital role in the establishment of an Islamist narrative and identity. What the AKP did was to revitalize this narrative. Furthermore, as I shall detail below, it is the shared language of the ruling elites with subjugated, traditional, conservative or rural roots, as well as the people who support them (Yılmaz, 2017, 2–4). The logic of pain in this language persists by calling on an archive of oppression, which is flexibly called to service as needed.

The power of the victimization discourse derives from its continuous transmission and dissemination via societal channels of communication and societal institutions (Bar-Tal et al., 2009, 247). By creating emotionally laden narratives around key situations and by repeating these narratives, a leader can ‘set the tone for groups’ to make sense of what has occurred (Matsumoto et al., 2012, 2). Although Erdoğan’s political life appears to be a ‘success’ story, at nearly every step he has turned to a narrative of victimization. The tradition from which he emerged is characterized by a pathos that produces a political and social identity based on the ‘ideology of relentless aggrievement’ (Parlak & Uz, 2016, 69). Erdoğan’s fundamental success has been to use his position of power to spread this mood to the people, like a ‘thickness in the air’ (Ahmed, 2004, 10), thereby creating an ever-expanding source of legitimacy and support. Viewed in a historical light, this narrative appears multi-partite, multi-focal and multi-referential, but rather monolithic in terms of its emotional references. Rather than a paradox, this should be interpreted as a quality, even a prowess, that endows the narrative of victimization with strength and continuity.

When he relays the legacy of the past to people in the present, Erdoğan constructs an ‘us’: an ‘us’ that is foremost recalled as a subject who has been scorned, punished and suppressed because of their religious and cultural identity. The agents of these victimizations constitute the foci of malice, as they are considered tyrants who injure (yet constitute) us. In Erdoğan’s political discourse, this focus has never been singular but is always open to new articulations.¹ In the context of narratives of the past, victimization claims consist of two fundamental and interrelated, yet slippery, transitive and overlapping targets: the experience of encountering the West after the loss of the empire, and the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and its mentality.²

4.2 Distant Past, Chosen Trauma: Humiliation, Envy and Disgust in the Encounter with the West

‘The past is a place of a multiplicity, waiting always to be discovered and rewritten’ (Özmen, 2017, 19). To one who selectively remembers his past as a poetics of oppression, history is viewed ‘from a perspective of dissipation, loss, and painful defeat’. When the oppressed looks back, he sees his own ‘tragic destruction; the decline of imperial ambitions one by one’ (Açıkel, 1996, 165). The feeling of loss is manifold: loss of security, loss of self-confidence, loss of a sense of community and belonging, loss of power, loss of hope (Hoggett et al., 2013, 573). Any experience of loss is embraced, sanctified and symbolized at present: transformed into rigid cultural narratives and the identity assumes a constitutive role. The concept of trauma can serve as a salutary starting point in revealing how this experience of loss has influenced identity construction among Erdoğan’s supporters. Trauma—which in clinical terms refers to ‘an extremely intense and devastating event leading to certain symptoms in the patient’ (Cvetkovich, 2003, 19)—entered social sciences through the experience of the Holocaust. For Maruska Svašek, trauma is not only a medical or psychiatric phenomenon but a social and political one too: the interpretation of culturally and historically specific suffering. Beyond simple recollection, it is a mental representation of an event that has occurred in the past. It contains facts, but also imagined memories, intense emotions and a defence instinct (2005, 195–196). Collective traumas ‘cannot be truly experienced unless situated within a narrative framework’ (Bora, 2010, 224). The remembering and narrating of trauma play a key role in turning experiences of collective victimization into stories and translating these narratives into political discourse. In this way, people who have not experienced trauma directly, can also be traumatized. Moreover, traumatic wounds constitute an emotional mode, ethos and group culture. This is something different from, and greater than, the sum of individual wounds. As a specific form of memory, trauma is also productive of emotion (Yıldız, 2021, 15). A narrative of the traumatic past not only establishes collective identity, it strengthens it (Svašek, 2005, 205). It creates an imaginary sense of togetherness between those who have experienced the same pain, or those who see themselves as heirs to that pain, and those who relive it by remembering it. The language of collective victimization is established and nourished by the transformation of chosen traumas into narratives and always harbours a demand for compensation (Svašek, 2005, 196).

This understanding of chosen trauma can be as misleading as it is salutary. It may prevent us from seeing that the historical sites of Erdoğan’s narrative of victimization are structured in a multi-faceted and at times variable way, and are always open to new articulations. Therefore, in addition to chosen trauma, the idea put forward by Ann Cvetkovich of an archive of emotion (2003, 17) may also prove useful. Central to the story that I will focus on is not so much the fixity, singularity or veracity of traumatic experiences, but the emotions that are evoked when traumatic experiences are narrated and remembered. Rather than drawing on individual traumas, Erdoğan’s politics is about bringing together stories that will feed, strengthen and fill the existing emotional archive and meet contextual needs. Approaching Erdoğan’s narrative of the past in light of this concept of trauma, I will be able to consider the poetics he has relayed as the sum of stories selected from an archive of oppression, as well as to appreciate that the more crowded the archive is, the larger his audience becomes.

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In Erdoğan’s language, the narrative of aggrievement (which began with moves towards modernization and westernization during the Tan-zimat period) is based on a historical experience of loss: the loss of the empire. This loss enables Erdoğan to set up an oppressed ‘us’:

My dear brothers and sisters, since the Tanzimat Reform Era, that is, for the last 200 years, it has not been possible for some matters in this country to be handled freely, confidently and courageously. The subject of religion, which is the subject of almost every issue in Turkey in one way or another, the focal point in some way, could not be put on the agenda in a way that was objective, impartial, free from fear and from social pressure. Far from discussing matters of religion freely, religion and religious people have been systematically subjected to all manner of criticism, insults and contempt for nearly 200 years.³

Here, Erdoğan is complaining that, moves towards Westernization, which were set in motion before the establishment of the republic, were transformed into an attack on Muslimness and on Islam as a religion. By stressing that Westernization opened the door to the expulsion of religion and religious people from the public sphere and to their humiliation, he cites a historical and emotional experience. The turning point of the chosen and perhaps founding trauma of the cultural and political tradition from which he himself comes, lies at this historical juncture. In this sense, the encounter with the West constitutes the first experience of the emotional archive of the oppressed.

However, the experience of Westernization in Turkey is framed not only in terms of attempts to exclude religion from the public sphere—that is, as a trauma experienced by Islamic conservatives—but as a deep wound at the very foundation of Turkish national identity. The Westernization process was, for everyone, ‘wounded from the very beginning’, because the Ottoman elites have historically and to this day ‘compared themselves with the West only when they were already defeated’ (Koçak, 1996, 99). Orhan Koçak is quite right in his objection to how thinkers who have focused on the East–West issue have assumed that it concerns primarily intellectuals. After all, ideas about the experience of Westernization have been processed and received mainly through the emotions that accompany the encounter with the West. It is no coincidence that Peyami Safa regarded the East–West issue as the ‘greatest torture of the Turkish spirit’. Westernization is essentially an acceptance of the modern Turkish subject’s ‘backwardness’; any such attempt towards it was therefore fraught from the outset. This traumatic modal shift manifested itself as a sense of helplessness and inadequacy, and a tendency towards immaturity for both Tanzimat elites who advocated Westernization and the agents of Kemalist modernization processes (Koçak, 1996, 95–100).

The manifestation of the wound of Westernization in a collective that has essentially built its identity upon religion is much deep.⁴ In Erdoğan’s discourse, religion is a superior element that Westernization has excluded from history, though, he argues, religion gives history its meaning (Baştürk, 2014, 130). Religiosity also holds within it a power that reinforces the oppressed subject’s sense of rightfulness in the face of injustice (Parlak & Uz, 2016, 75). This experience, which Erdoğan resorts to as a kind of founding trauma, sets the tone of his discourse. It also reveals a feeling of humiliation that has arisen due to a much broader experience of encounter (Mendible, 2005, 1) and exposure. Erdoğan claims that, for two centuries, political actors have treated religion and religious people with contempt and accused them of ignorance. As a result, the dominant emotion in Erdoğan’s discourse is related to a sense of sociability inclusive of religiosity. Erdoğan does not name being insulted and despised as an experience specific only to clergy or elites. In his discourse, the millet (nation) that was subject to Westernization was also treated the same way, detached from its cultural essence and denigrated as ignorant. This sense of humiliation creates a loss of self-confidence and a sense of inferiority in a collective subject already wounded and defeated by the loss of empire.

Humiliation is among the most difficult emotions to define. It appears when a person or group claiming superiority dehumanizes others or suppresses, excludes and weakens various components of their identity. As such, the emergence of a sense of humiliation depends, first and foremost, on an experience or encounter (Mendible, 2005, 1). Citing dehumanization as the most powerful tool of humiliation, Avishai Margalit argues that one of its effects is the creation of a rift in the self-perception and self-esteem of humiliated people or groups. Those who feel humiliated have to cope with a form of rejection or disregard on the symbolic and social level (1996, 144–146). Humiliation is therefore an act of disempowerment; it renders those exposed to it passive but conscious recipients of the attitude (Frevert, 2020, 3). Humiliation can also be collectively experienced, especially in cases of colonization, cultural imperialism or discrimination.

In his study exploring Muslim societies’ experiences with Westernization, Daryush Shayegan analyses how humiliating encounters splinter the self-perception of the Muslim subject. He thus analytically shifts the framing away from a concern with how such encounters generate a Western outlook in people exposed to the West. The equivalent of this experience—which he terms cultural schizophrenia—in the Islamic world is an obsessive refusal that the subject, aware of his own backwardness develops to protect his essence from the effects of the West, all the while with great astonishment and a sense of admiration that he cannot hide. In both emotional states, the West is an earthly source of evil that will seize us from ourselves, refute the deep-rooted values our history has bestowed upon us and imprison us in a perpetual cultural and political slavery (1992, 3–4). A feeling of alienation, triggered by the appeal of the new and the unknown that radically impacts one’s life, creates a split in the Muslim subject:

It’s something foreign and strange to me, but something I can’t avoid, something that disrupts my habits and holds me back in such a way that I can’t escape. But at the same time, it seems as if there is something hidden inside that seduces me, attracts me, that I think I can’t be without no matter what I do. (Shayegan, 1992, 5)

Behind Erdoğan’s recollection and reminder of the encounter with the West as an experience of humiliation lays a concern with the dignity of autochthony, which has allegedly been humiliated by the ‘grandeur’ of the West. This is a concern that one sees quite clearly in the words of writer Cemil Meriç: ‘Tanzimat is not the conquest of a civilization, it is the surrender of honour (ırz)’ (Gürbilek, 2007, 87). It would be reductive to claim that the humiliation engendered by the encounter with the West is solely reserved for Islamic conservatives; it is a feeling that a broader subject who makes up the remnants of empire, from the elites to the people, experiences to varying degrees. At the same time, Meriç’s emphasis on honour implies that the feeling of inferiority experienced in the encounter with the West leads to a ‘loss of masculinity and dignity’ (Gürbilek, 2016, 78), or, to put it more bluntly, to ‘feminization’. Indeed, humiliation is directly related to a particular gender regime. Especially in cultures where femininity is naturalized as inferior, the feeling of powerlessness that arises from being humiliated is associated with femininity (Mendible, 2005, 10). Meyda Yeğenoğlu is quite right to point out that sexuality has always been an important symbolic tool in encounters between the West and the East: ‘Sexual difference is vital in the establishment of the colonial subject position’ (2003, 10). In Erdoğan’s language, one can certainly sense that he associates Westernization with a kind of castration and loss of masculinity especially in the minds of those who resist it. This ‘narcissistic wound’ (Gürbilek, 2016, 81–82)—which was caused by an encounter with the West, and the feeling of having to define and reconstruct one’s identity in relation to it while simultaneously feeling inadequate before it—seems to be both a motif that Erdoğan never ceases to remember and a spark to the memory of others. In the remnants of the Great Ottoman Empire, dreams of conquering the West have been replaced with the reality of ‘exposure to the cultural colonization of the West’ (Ahıska, 2009, 1049). While the disintegration of the empire was in itself a traumatic experience, the powerlessness, oppression and fear of feminization wrought by the spectre of the West seem to have compounded the trauma of the loss.

The feeling of humiliation is among the most potent and productive emotional sites of both Erdoğan’s personal history and the collective subject he addresses. As I will discuss later, the phrase ‘He can’t even be a muhtar’ (the smallest administrative unit in Turkey), which made headlines after Erdoğan was handed a prison sentence for reading a poem on 28 February,⁵ is a motif of humiliation (and revenge) frequently articulated by his supporters. Indeed, Erdoğan’s periodic hosting of muhtars at the Presidential Palace can be read as a revenge-driven manifestation of this motif.⁶ As the smallest administrative unit, the institution of the muhtar is a potent reference point for the emotions Erdoğan wants to arouse. Erdoğan reflects a particular mood of both the members of the tradition he came from and a millet who feels devalued and humiliated by the West and Westernization. In the speech quoted above, he goes on to say: ‘[…] we have struggled to instil self-confidence in this nation, and we have self-confidence now. We have struggled to instil courage in this nation, and we have courage now. We want to instil self-confidence and courage not only in our nation, but also in our neighbours, our region, and all humanity’.

This mission, which he considers holy, involves re-establishing the honour of a nation that has been trampled, its dignity destroyed and its power lost. The redemptive mission is Erdoğan’s hallmark. Indeed, with the foreign-policy realignment brought about by his Neo-Ottomanist vision, Erdoğan’s frequent ‘defiance’ in the face of the West reveals how feelings of humiliation can be transformed into a desire for compensation and redress. This has ensured Erdoğan a growing cult status among his supporters in Turkey and in the eyes of Muslim countries.

Of course, humiliation is not the only emotional site in this narrative of oppression. I have said that the encounter between Muslim societies and the West creates a schizophrenic Muslim subject, who simultaneously admires and devotedly rejects it’s Western ‘other’. In Wounded Consciousness, Shayegan describes this as an oscillation between fascination and disgust (2002, 27). Thus, another key emotional site in the transformation of the experience of Westernization into a deep wound for both elites and the people is envy—with all its attendant fascination and admiration, anxiety and disgust. Martha Nussbaum defines envy as a painful emotion in which a person focuses on the good fortune and privileges of others and continuously compares one’s own situation to theirs. The envious adopt a hostile attitude towards the envied person or group, because they do not have (or have lost) what they possess. Envy is thus a feeling associated with the lack of a desired status (2013, 339–340). Of course, this deprivation brings with it an irresistible desire to possess. The envious become unable to take their eyes off what they do not have. For this reason, the intensity of their hostility grows over time.

To understand what envy does to us, or what we do out of envy, let me compare it with jealousy, which would seem to be quite similar to envy, but in many respects possesses differences. Both emotions are characterized by hostility, but jealousy is more often described in terms of a fear of possible loss. It is therefore a feeling that functions through an impulse to preserve what already exists, what one already has. The jealous person perceives their opponent as a threat to their own existence or possessions. The jealous subject’s main desire is thus self-protection from the harm an opponent may inflict. Jealousy is a satisfying emotion, whereas envy can hardly ever be satisfied, for the object of envy is superiority itself. The envious person thinks and knows that they will never fully achieve what they envy, and they feel hopeless and helpless in the face of this knowledge (Nussbaum 2013, 340). In terms of the subject identity stoked by Erdoğan’s articulation of Neo-Ottomanism, the envious are fed by the feeling that they have already lost what they once had (the empire); they experience this loss as irreparable.

The first condition for envy to emerge is a lack of self-confidence. The (collective) subject, having already suffered a loss, no longer believes in their own worth, nor that they can achieve anything worthwhile. In such circumstances, the envious person does not think that salvation from the situation they are in will produce any constructive alternative other than pure hostility (Nussbaum 2013, 343).

A predominantly negative image of the West and Westernization echoes in the story Erdoğan tells, particularly when it comes to foreign policy. He expresses a feeling of envy born from the experience of encountering the West and adopts the hostile attitude this emotion has created in the Turkish subject. Envy is accompanied by a defensive impulse, because the intense desire for what is foreign and superior to us is accompanied by the wish to demonstrate our difference from it, to avoid it, in order to preserve our essence, our soul. In the tradition in which Erdoğan was raised, the West exists as a kind of object of disgust, if not because of its advancement but because of its spirit and culture, as it threatens to permeate our essence, our quintessence and destroy it.

Disgust stems from experiences of acquaintance and unfamiliarity and is an emotion accompanied by a fear of invasion. We attribute a sort of natural ‘wickedness’ to the object of our disgust (Ahmed, 2014, 107–108). The precondition for its emergence is the physical imminence of the object of disgust. The remote and unfamiliar are rarely objects of disgust; only when the invading objects approach us and threaten to touch and contaminate us do feelings of disgust arise (Ahmed, 2014, 108). Disgust is therefore mainly associated with contact and the uneasiness that this contact might lead to contamination and the loss of our ‘selves’. The fear of being captured, even metaphorically, by the object of our disgust also elicits our anger towards it (Ahmed, 2014, 116). However, like envy, disgust can be accompanied by interest and desire. Even while sickening us, objects of disgust attract our attention. We constantly want a reaffirming second look and often cannot take our eyes off the offending object (Ahmed, 2014, 109).

Sara Ahmed proposes that we think of disgust alongside the notion of abjection, as introduced by Kristeva—a concept that describes the inferior, miserable, excluded and expelled. Quoting Kristeva (1982, 1), Ahmed notes that disgust is the most severe response to a ‘threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable’ (2014, 86). More intriguing still is Kristeva’s idea that anything that threatens us must already be within us. This sense of interiority poses a threat to us precisely because it may eliminate our difference from the other (2014, 112). Indeed, in the Islamic conservative tradition, the nation is constantly assigned the duty of preserving its tradition and roots. According to Tanıl Bora and Necmi Erdoğan (2013), the assumption (on the part of conservative elites) underlying this honourable mission is that the nation is childlike and naive in character, open to outside influence and the contamination of foreign contact. The nation is always perceived by Islamic conservatives as a threat in itself, inherently untrustworthy because of its vulnerability to contamination and corruption. Accordingly, the disgust of Islamic conservative elites towards that which comes from the West and does not belong to ‘us’ has turned into a kind of self-disgust. Conjuring an image of the West as the primordial polluting evil goes hand in hand with the threat of contamination. What makes this threat so close and unbearable to us is its familiarity, its presence and its interiority. Indeed, Erdoğan’s emphasis on the nation and the will of the nation in almost all of his speeches is related to his motivation to eliminate this perpetual threat, and to protect ‘us’ from ourselves.

Of course, one should keep in mind the fictional quality of the West in Erdoğan’s imagination. In the ideological discourse of the AKP, the gap between ‘us’ and ‘the West’ is constantly growing and closing, oscillating between the fear that the West may spoil our essence by encroaching even on our inner worlds, and, at times, the desire echoed in the words ‘we are actually more Western than the West’. Both the scale of this gap and the meanings attributed to the West are constructed entirely within an ideological narrative, to the point where it is scarcely clear whether the trauma in Erdoğan’s retelling is due to the loss of empire, or the experience of encountering the West. The ambiguity regarding the source of the trauma that led to the establishment of an emotional archive of humiliation, envy and disgust, meanwhile, leads Erdoğan to underscore the fundamental source of the apparent historical persecution, the immemorial perpetrator, the real locus of evil that made us who we are, the concrete and ever-present enemy that poses the greatest threat to existence since the Republic of Turkey was founded: the CHP.

4.3 The West Within: The CHP as Eternal Victimizer and an Object of Hatred, Anxiety and Anger

The birth of modern Turkey saw a series of moves to eliminate and suppress Islamic groups. In embracing the West and Westernization, ruling elites abandoned the Ottoman-Islamic past to a kind of collective forgetting. The construction of national identity upon the establishment of the Republic can be read as a ‘war of emplacement’ waged ‘against the Islamic discourse, the building block of Ottoman consciousness’. The loser in this war was ‘a Kemalist unconscious consisting of Tradition/East/Islam/Ottoman’ (Yörük, 2009, 309–315). However much of the primary effort of the Kemalist Westernization process was to address and overcome ‘a feeling of collective oppression and inferiority, a founding trauma experienced as an injury and crush’ by both the elite and the nation during the disintegration of the empire (Yörük, 2009, 314). In Erdoğan’s discourse, the most identifiable source of victimization is the CHP, the political actors of the founding years of the Republic.

During the 1940s, an open war was waged in Turkey against the millet, its values and what the millet held to be sacred. The doors of mosques in the country were locked, or they were converted into barns, warehouses and museums. Learning, teaching and reading the Qur’an were forbidden. The call to prayer was translated in a way that departed from the original. All manner of personal freedoms were restricted. The construction of a standard citizen type was sought, a standard structure of mind, from beards and moustaches to clothing. Some citizens were seen as acceptable, while others were labelled as threats.⁷

In Erdoğan’s discourse, the most identifiable source of feelings of humiliation and disgust is the CHP. In his imagination and language, the CHP, which he calls the West ‘within’ us, is the locus of evil; it purportedly attacked the essence of the millet, suppressed its styles of worship and ways of dress and tried to bring it into line. In many of his speeches, Erdoğan mentions that mosques were turned into barns and warehouses. This claim reveals the extent of the humiliation of the millet’s values and what it holds sacred by using one of the most extreme and hurtful examples to conjure a past oppression. At the same time, Erdoğan’s narrative of victimization stems from a cultural basis. Religion as a component of daily life is mentioned as a part of this culture. It is thus no coincidence that when describing the establishment of the Republic and the construction of national identity, Erdoğan talks about the suppression of forms of dress, the cultural and quotidian equivalent of the suppression of religion and its exclusion from the public sphere. The constant repetition of these examples creates another strong emotional reaction against the agent who alienates, excludes and humiliates the oppressed subject: hatred.

Hatred is an intense emotion, always directed against something or someone. In this sense, hatred has been described as a rather economic emotion; it never resides in a single thing or person, but wanders between objects (Ahmed, 2014, 59–68). Erdoğan’s emphasis on the mentality of the CHP, which has become a buzzword, fits into this economic structure of hatred. According to him, the cause of past and present grievances is not the CHP alone, but all social actors—from elites to bureaucrats, capitalists to ordinary people—who embody the perceptions, thoughts and actions preached by the CHP.

In this country, the elites, those who hold political, military and state power have always taken from the millet, they did not hold the millet in esteem, they never believed in the foresight, prudence, breadth and depth of the millet, they never respected it. But we come from the millet, we are the millet itself.⁸

Elites—to whom Erdoğan has referred as an object of hatred throughout virtually his entire leadership, and whom he blames for humiliating the nation and castigates as ‘foreign’ to its essence—play a crucial role both in drawing the boundaries between us/them⁹ and in determining the direction and prevalence of the hatred. This rhetoric has been described by Tanıl Bora as ‘national will-ist populism’ and is based on the dichotomy of the elites and millet is (Bora, 2017, 479). It derives its strength and staying power from the feeling of hatred that it nurtures and reproduces. After all, the endurance of hatred depends on the fact that there is always someone out there to threaten our existence. Even though hatred wants to destroy its object, it also wants to touch it, to be in contact with it. The dichotomy the elites and millet is, from this perspective, a highly functional device. Elites who have adopted the mentality of the CHP exist both in the past and the present, and therefore pose a threat to the future.

Ahmed notes that the opposite of hatred might not be love but indifference: indifference implies that we do not need that which we are indifferent to, whereas hatred needs its object in order to be sustained. Hatred is caused by the presence of another, but then becomes a feeling that belongs to us and yet, its existence is subject to the constant presence of another person. That is why hatred always appears as an emotion with the capacity to produce its own object as a defense against hurt (2014, 59–70).

Hatred arises during the negotiation of boundaries between us and others. This feeling—which develops when others act in a way that poses a threat to our existence—accordingly contains within it a certain defence instinct. Erdoğan’s frequent self-identification with the millet crucially enables the drawing of a sharp boundary between the millet and those who despise and oppress it, and creates the sense that it needs protection from being ‘occupied’ or ‘contaminated’ (Ahmed, 2014, 70–73).¹⁰

Hatred is most present in Erdoğan’s language when he speaks of Adnan Menderes and his execution, which occurred at a moment when the existential threat of invasion was at its peak. He recalls this memory as an ossified trauma in the minds of the millet. Erdoğan mentions Menderes in every speech wherein he talks about the pains of the past, casting him as a ‘man of the millet’ like himself—though their fates differ—and his service to and the feeling he aroused in the millet.

The late Adnan Menderes ruled this country for ten years, put an end to oppression, put an end to persecution. He put an end to insults, discrimination, and an arrogant state. It is the CHP who banned the original call to prayer, and Menderes restored it to its original. The late Menderes lifted pressures on teachers of the Qur’an. He called for industry and he paved the way for investments; agriculture, he said, and he gave life to agriculture across Turkey. He built cities. He built bridges, dams, roads, schools.¹¹

Menderes’s execution after the 27 May military coup occupies a unique place in Erdoğan’s speeches. It is a burning memory, meant to mobilize hatred and expose the perpetrators: ‘Who looked on,  and encouraged the execution of the deceased Menderes and his friends? CHP, that’s you!’¹² The CHP plays a remarkably functional role here, because in this equation, Menderes is identified with the millet and the millet with Erdoğan. Erdoğan’s ongoing identification with Menderes, especially during the first years of his rule, generates an extremely strong emotional response in his audience. Menderes has been turned into the most potent symbol of oppression, humiliation, suppression and the fear of destruction in Erdoğan’s discourse. He has become a device to transmit and sustain hatred towards those considered the perpetrators of his ill-treatment and execution.

Before 2010, it was no coincidence that the historical figure with whom Erdoğan most identified was Menderes. The memory of Menderes and his tragic end functioned as a threat that shadowed Erdoğan and his supporters as he attempted to establish and consolidate his power. Thus, the object of hatred he named at every opportunity was also the object of threat. Remembering Menderes kept alive the fear that the past could be repeated in the present. This traumatic experience took root as an insurmountable threat.

As Brian Massumi has noted, the future holds more potential than the past and the present. He claims that the perception of a threat stems from just this excess—the possibility of what may come. A threat always calls to mind uncertainty, because it contains the unprocessed remnants of danger. In this respect, the perception of threat has a unique existence, an ontology unlike any other emotion: it is ‘fear as foreshadowing’, the fear of a non-existent but felt reality (Massumi, 2010, 53–54).

Anxiety, essentially an objectless fear, is inherent in Erdoğan’s every mention of Menderes. Unlike fear itself, which is an emotional response to an identifiable threat, anxiety implies the nervous anticipation of a ‘threatening but uncertain’ event (Ahmed, 2014, 86). What we see or hear here and now, evokes a sense of fear in us. Anxiety, on the other hand, is primarily connected to the expectation of danger (Salecl, 2013, 26–27), and so functions in the body much more insidiously than fear in terms of a possible threat to existence.

In Erdoğan’s discourse, the single-party period (1923–1945) represented a particularly intense legitimacy crisis in Turkish history; introversion and anxiety have prevailed in the Islamic conservative subject ever since. If pain is one outcome of the loss of power, the loss of identity and the loss of an imperial past in the emotional world of the collective subject, another is the ambiguous danger that such losses bring. Philosopher Renata Salecl (2013) defines anxiety as an emotional response to an ambigious danger. The partial self-confidence that developed following the single-party period was replaced by a renewed anxiety following Menderes’s execution. The CHP and its mentality, which occupies such a prominent position as the source and cause of an inherent anxiety in Erdoğan’s narrative of victimization, is also cited as the perpetrator of another persecution of Islamic conservatives: the coup of 28 February. This incident—which ended in 1997 with the forced resignation of Erbakan, the founder of the National Vision tradition and then-prime minister—can be interpreted as a Kemalist restoration of the state (Bora, 2017, 477). For Erdoğan and his supporters, 28 February was important in two ways for transferring the legacy of victimization: unlike other instances of victimization, it occurred in the recent past, so his supporters were personally exposed to it, and it was a milestone in Erdoğan’s journey to power.

The AKP emerged from the 3 November 2002 elections with the authority to form a government on its own. However, because of a political ban, Erdoğan only assumed the office of prime minister after a four-month delay, on 14 March 2003. This fact constitutes the most familiar of the historical grievances Erdoğan embodies and transmits to the people. The well-known reason behind Erdoğan’s ban is a poem he recited at a rally in Siirt in 1997. This act developed into an emotionally intense symbolic political device to which he often resorted during his leadership. Erdoğan frequently recited poetry at rallies,¹³ party congresses, in election propaganda, during awards and opening ceremonies and even in the parliament.¹⁴ The poets whose work he recited were chiefly from the Islamic conservative tradition. The common feature of these poems is a strong sense of victimization and oppression:

We are hoarse voices/Do not leave the minarets without the call to prayer, my God!/Call out to those who make honey there/Do not leave [them] without a hive, my God! […] My God, this homeland kneaded by Islam/do not leave it without Muslims! […] The masses waiting for heroes/Do not leave them without a hero, my God! […] Let us know how to resist the enemy/Don’t leave us dead, my God! […] Without love, without water, without air/And without a homeland, do not leave us, my God!¹⁵

One of Erdoğan’s favorite poems, Dua, is dominated by a clear emphasis on ‘us’. This ‘us’ symbolizes a religious and nationalist collective subject whose voice is muted, left without prayer and without a homeland. At the same time, Erdoğan emerges from the past as a saviour, endeavours to instil hope and self-confidence by relaying the good news that the persecution is over:

Don’t forget!/Every dark night has a morning/Every winter has a spring/There is a supreme hand, a supreme power that turns darkness into light/transforms sadness into relief! [...] When I see a bleeding wound, it burns me inside/To relieve it, I’ll take a whipping, I’ll take it twice/I can’t say, let it go, forget it, I’ll take it up/I trample, I am trampled, I hold up the right!/I’m the enemy of the oppressor, but I love the oppressed.¹⁶

I have said that the vividness of 28 February in the collective memory stems from its unfolding in such a way that it was not only remembered, but experienced—by Erdoğan and by his supporters. Indeed, Erdoğan talks about his own subjective experience and suffering in most of his speeches that reference the events of that process. Parlak and Uz describe this tendency as ‘incorporating personal pain into society’. According to them, the events that led to 28 February constitute the most meaningful, painful experience that enables voters to identify with their leader (2016, 91). Perhaps for this very reason, 28 February is addressed at length by Erdoğan:

I too saw those who were turned away from the doors of our universities just because they wore headscarves, and those who tried to study at imam hatip schools lived in the persecution of 28 February.¹⁷ Hundreds of people have been victimized in this process because of their beliefs, opinions and appearances. A witch hunt was undertaken in the bureaucracy, unlawful dismissals, suspensions, exiles were experienced, profiling and blacklisting took place, and the feelings of believers were exposed to a heavy attack on television screens and the pages of newspapers. [...] The children of the nation were disdained at the gates of the university. [...] This has been done in this country! Will their sighs, their woes go unnoticed? [...] Neither history nor society will ever forgive those who violate the will of the nation for their own personal interests!¹⁸

As a father, I went through this ordeal, too, because my daughters were turned away from the school gate, too. [...] We went through all this, they didn’t go to university in Turkey, I had to send them to America, they studied there wearing a headscarf. Can you imagine? You are a stranger in your country, a pariah in your homeland!¹⁹

What were you concerned with, all this time, with a headscarf? Why did you bother with my covered and uncovered girls? Why did you divide our girls like this? Why did you deprive them of the freedom of education? You take away these rights, yes? Oh CHP, this is what you are, this is you!²⁰

Erdoğan describes 28 February as a moment of victimization among a series of atrocities committed in the recent past. The primary emotion here is anger. Anger has taken on an increasingly dominant role in the political scene, as Erdoğan has consolidated his power over the years while becoming increasingly fragile.²¹ Moreover, anger often manifests not only in his language but also in his gestures and facial expressions, in his performance of power and masculinity.

Anger is a reaction to perceived injustice; it is a sense of being wronged (Lyman, 2004). As with other emotions, it is clearly relational, not internal. It is characterized by the seeking of compensation for perceived injustices, the expectation of restitution and an urge for revenge (Henderson, 2008, 30). The anger arising due to the loss of social recognition is directed towards specific actions or events (Ben-Zeev, 1992, 94). It is triggered by direct or indirect slights such as humiliation, suppression and defamation, which threaten the self-perception, identity or public image of the subject (Schieman, 2006, 495). Anger exists as an emotion that calls, motivates and ignites political action, because it demands the perceived injustice to be compensated (Holmes, 2004, 210).

Mary Holmes notes that while all manner of emotional responses are attributed to oppressed and socially disadvantaged groups including women, anger seems to be the exception (2004, 215). Indeed, anger as an emotion is associated with masculinity; it finds expression either in the demand for or the occupation of a position of power. Thus, anger is key to the passage from victimization to power in Erdoğan’s journey. It allows a previously inaccessible reaction to injustices and oppression to be articulated in the present, and it serves as the impetus for account-settling and reparations.

The desire for compensation and reparation that accompanies anger (with the comfort that comes from occupying a position of power) is, in Erdoğan’s language, primarily deployed as a discourse of resistance, even of war. Indeed, his oft-repeated phrase ‘we will stand up, we will not bow down’ finds its response in crowd chants of ‘Stand up, do not bow down, this millet is with you’. This pledge can be heard at nearly every AKP rally. In this way, Erdoğan’s anger has become the language of the majority (Dindar, 2014, 147). Thus, as much as it is a language of resistance and war driven by anger, the line ‘We set out on this road wearing our shrouds’—a reference to the atrocities suffered during the coup attempt—should be seen as an expression of power, strength and masculinity, a hatred that no longer needs to be suppressed, and an almost insatiable urge for revenge.

[...] In the eyes of the oppressed, who now have become conscious of ‘injustices and grievances’, the conditions for transitioning to the discourse of justice or revenge/compensation are near completion. The subject’s passivity and ill fortune will come to an end once injustices are compensated. The oppressed prepares himself for the day of justice against the oppressor/fate/history/modern state/imperialist invaders and so on. The desire to show the others their place and to make the oppressor pay the price of the past matures. Now he realizes the persecution to which he has been subjected. He is about to reach an important threshold in the way he perceives the world; the time has come to change the discourse, inevitably. He will do so either through the righteous anger of an omnipotent God, or by his own hands. (Açıkel, 1996, 187)

4.4 From Victimization to Omnipotence: Erdoğan Storming Out of Davos and Turkish Self-Identity

Erdoğan’s journey as a leader on the political stage had witnessed one local and two general election victories by January 2009. Erdoğan and his party were successful in the 2007 referendum, when a constitutional amendment to elect the president was put to a vote and 69% voted in favour. Because of the tension stemming from the referendum, 2007 was an intense year in the archive of oppression and victimization for Erdoğan and the AKP. The party’s nomination of Abdullah Gül—deemed by many to be excessively ‘Islamist’—as its presidential candidate, led to a public backlash, dubbed the ‘Republic Protests’, which primarily targeted the government’s anti-secularism. The same year, a warning text (called an e-memorandum) was published on the website of the General Staff of the Turkish Armed Forces, expressing dissatisfaction with the ‘anti-secular’ actions of the government. All of this resulted in an early general election, from which Erdoğan and his party emerged victorious, receiving 46% of the vote. Gül was again nominated for the presidency, this time successfully. In 2008, a lawsuit protesting its anti-secular policies was filed against the AKP, though the Constitutional Court ultimately decided to merely cut state funding to the party (Koyuncu, 2014, 63–64).

This process, part of the emotional archive of Erdoğan’s personal story and political journey (though not as a narrative of oppression or defeat but as a claim to victory), marked something of a turning point for the Islamic conservative tradition. Indeed, in an address after the referendum debacle, known as the ‘speech that makes one cry’, Erdoğan called to mind the legacy of past oppression while also evoking a sense of victory:

As poet Ece Ayhan said, they shot, we grew up. We talked, they wanted to silence us, we read poetry, they sentenced us. We thought, they excluded. They wanted to close the roads of politics to us, they made headlines saying he can’t even be a muhtar. They said you cannot elect a president, you cannot change the constitution. They threatened us with the closure of the party. [...] May my people not forget how their national will was mortgaged for decades.²²

Here it is not difficult to feel that the predominant tone of Erdoğan’s speech is triumphant, and that this was a cathartic moment for the Islamic conservatives. Notice that at the end of the speech, Erdoğan extols his supporters to retain their decades-long ‘consciousness of suffering’ (Bora and Erdoğan 2013, 633) and to ‘not forget’ the wounds inflicted on the collective body. This way, he directs the mood of the oppressed towards a collective desire for compensation and revenge.

Indeed, in 2009, an international incident arose that occasioned this new emotional climate. Erdoğan attended the 39th World Economic Forum, held in the Swiss town of Davos and attended by leaders from countries all around the world. These meetings, described by some reporters as a ‘fair of the rich’,²³ provide an insight into the economic and political direction of the world, and accordingly attract the attention of the global press. On 30 January 2009, Erdoğan left a session on Gaza²⁴ after a tense exchange with Israeli President Shimon Peres and a moderator, which was broadcast live before the eyes of the world. During his speech, Erdoğan stated that Israel was using disproportionate force in Gaza while the international community looked on. He demanded a lifting of the blockade. When it was the Israeli president’s turn to speak, Peres said, ‘What would you do if a rocket was fired at your head?’ The moderator of the session, David Ignatius, tried to silence Erdoğan by touching his shoulder. Raising his index finger in anger, Erdoğan argued several times in a row for ‘one minute’, removed his earphones and, turning to Peres, his legs crossed and his finger waving, said the following:

Mr. Peres, you are older than me. Your voice is too loud. I know that it is a necessity of a psychology of guilt that one’s voice is so loud. My voice will not be that loud, so you should know it. When it comes to killing, you know how to kill. I know very well how you shoot and kill children on the beaches. Two people who served as prime minister in your country have important words for me. You have prime ministers who say, ‘When I enter Palestine on tanks, I become a different kind of happy.’…I’ll give you a name too. Maybe you are wondering. I also condemn those who applaud this persecution. Because I think that standing up and applauding those who killed these children, those who killed these people, is a crime against humanity. […] I’m just going to say two words to you here. Don’t interrupt me! One, in the sixth article of the Torah, it says that you will not kill, there is killing here. Two, look, this is also very interesting...

At this point, the moderator tapped Erdoğan on the shoulder once more, asked him not to further stoke the discussion and prevented him from continuing his speech. Trying to lower Ignatus’s hand, Erdoğan said, ‘Thank you very much, thank you very much, Davos is over for me from now on, I will not come to Davos again’, as he angrily got up from his seat and left the session. In a video collage later posted to YouTube by his supporters,²⁵ a slowed down version of the mehter anthem begins to play at the very moment Erdoğan leaves the session: ‘Your ancestor is your grandfather, your generation is your father/Ever heroic Turkish nation/Your armies have given many times/Glory to the world/Turkish nation, Turkish nation/Love with tenderness the nation/Damn the enemy of the homeland/Away with that cursed debased one’.

The mehter anthem which was later added to this video demonstrates why Erdoğan’s Davos outburst was so crucial. Davos represented a moment of compensation and redress for the humiliation, contempt and oppression that the oppressed subject has suffered for almost two hundred years. Indeed, the emotional climate that emerged in Turkey after Davos reveals the significance the event had on the emotional needs of the people: upon his return from Davos, Erdoğan was greeted by thousands of people at the airport.²⁶ To the enthusiastic crowd, he said: ‘This noble stance of yours has made us the voice of the silent people and some of the orphans. I believe that this voice is the voice of all the oppressed in the world. […] It is the voice of the just, not the strong’.²⁷ Erdoğan, who was termed the ‘Conqueror of Davos’ after the incident, is no longer using the language of the oppressed here, but of the powerful. Note his statement to the press at the airport after his historic stand, which caused an international diplomatic crisis and was perceived as a show of self-confidence and gesture of defiance:

I do not speak the language some retired diplomats understand. I am an educated person in politics. I do not know the customs of diplomats, nor do I want to know. I’m not a chieftain! I am the Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey. I do whatever I have to do. I may be nonchalant, but it does not mean I’m submissive. I also told Peres in my speech. I said I don’t speak loudly because of your age. Whatever Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey is there, my millet would expect such an attitude. Sluggishness does not suit our nation. […] It was about the dignity and reputation of my country. My stance had to be clear and unambiguous. I could not let anyone tarnish the honour of my country.²⁸

In newspaper headlines the next day, the mood created by the statements that Erdoğan made to the press is evident: ‘Ottoman Slap to Israel’ (Vakit), ‘Historical Slap’ (Yeni Şafak), ‘Historical Lesson from Erdoğan to Peres’ (Türkiye), ‘Slap to Arrogant Peres’ (Bugün), ‘Kasımpaşa Feel in Davos’ (Radikal), ‘Someone Should Have Said This’ (Posta), ‘The Spirit of Davos Is Dead’ (Hürriyet), ‘Shock in Davos’ (Milliyet), ‘Stake from Erdoğan, Apology from Peres’ (Akşam).²⁹ These sentiments were held not only by Erdoğan’s supporters but by Turkish people in general; even Ece Temelkuran, an oppositional columnist at the time, began her column right after the Davos crisis with this blend of irony and truth:

‘I wish it was someone else who did this.’ Those who liked Prime Minister Erdoğan’s Davos stance but do not like Prime Minister Erdoğan said this often yesterday: ‘It was great, but I wish someone else had done it.’ Some people did not have the language to appreciate it. Or they were ‘confessing’ that they appreciated it. I did too. Appreciation and confession. After all, just like our Prime Minister, I have all the pathologies of being an underdeveloped country child. I have the right to experience an interstate incident with the taste of ‘Anyhow, we did that well’, albeit for at least a few hours. After all, we were not born in Zurich!³⁰

This collective fascination, which made even those who feel distant from Erdoğan, was further reinforced by the shower of praise for Erdoğan beyond the country’s borders, from the media and leaders of the Middle Eastern and Muslim-majority countries. Erdoğan was admired for acting like a ‘knight’ and revealing his ‘noble’ Islamic essence.³¹ During the Friday sermon, Celal bin Yusuf Şerifi praised him for making ‘the Islamic world hold its head high’.³² Hamas leader Khalil al-Haya even described Erdoğan as ‘the continuation of the Ottoman sultans’, and compared him to ‘Mehmed the Conqueror who took Istanbul from the Byzantines’ and to ‘Sultan Abdülhamid II’.³³

***

Erdoğan’s outburst at Davos and the collective euphoria that ensued was a milestone in the creation of a new ‘us’, a new Neo-Ottomanist national identity in Turkey. The Davos incident as a historical moment is innately connected with the pathos of Neo-Ottomanism, and the shared sense of identity between Islamic conservatives and Erdoğan grew after Davos to include a much larger collectivity.

As I argued at the beginning of this chapter, Neo-Ottomanism speaks to the needs and ambitions of the Islamic conservative subject in Turkey, but it also arouses the feelings of people almost from all socio-political backgrounds who adopt oppression and victimization as major aspects of their identity. Seen from this perspective, the Davos incident introduced a wholly new mood to the emotional archive of a very broad audience, encompassing Islamists, conservatives and those of various nationalist stripes, from moderate to radical. Erdoğan’s ‘defiant’ attitude towards the prime minister of Israel—at a meeting of great global political and economic significance, held in one of the richest countries in the world among the leaders of many developed countries—had multiple historical and emotional implications as well.

Let me start with the then-Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, one of the parties to the antagonism in Davos. Erdoğan’s harsh attitude towards Peres should be read in the context of the historical hatred towards Jews in Turkey on the part of Islamic conservatives, nationalist conservatives and even ordinary people. The antisemitism that still exists in Turkey today stems, in particular, from the UN decision to divide Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, and the subsequent establishment of the State of Israel following the World War II. Islamist thinkers especially, those who adhere to the notion of ummah, perceive the conflict as a war between Muslims and Jews. Nationalists have added another dimension to this antisemitism, as they interpret the abdication of Abdülhamid II and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire as the result of a Jewish conspiracy. The reason for this is that Abdülhamid II was dethroned by members of the Committee of Union and Progress, which emerged in Thessaloniki. According to rumours, Abdülhamid was dethroned because he did not cede the land requested from him for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and this instigated the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. One member of the Committee of Union and Progress, which notified the sultan about this decision, was Emmanuel Karaso, a deputy in Thessaloniki of Jewish origin (Bali, 2013, 405–406).

Antisemitism in Turkey thus manifests in the marking of Jewish people as perpetrators of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and in the defence of Muslims/Islam in the context of the Israel-Palestine war (Bora, 2017). The image of Jewish people in Turkey is one of an ‘essential source of mischief’—at times the secret agent behind communist conspiracies (for Marx was also a Jew), at times the scapegoat for all the evils attributed to capitalism (talk of Jewish wealth) and, connected to this, the image of finance capital suffocating the ‘honourable and faithful’ small trader (Bora, 2017, 384). Jewishness, in the various ways it is perceived in Turkey, constitutes a threat, an object of hatred, disgust and envy conditioned to destroy Turkey from inside and out. I have previously mentioned the ontology of the feeling of anxiety created by the perception of threat: the hatred and disgust towards perpetrators who are seen as the crux of evil, and the feelings of envy towards the object of desire. The perception of Jewishness by those who identify as Turkish and Muslim must be examined in relation to these emotions: to the anxiety that arises from the uncertainty posed by the perceived threat; to the intensity and bitterness inherent in the feeling of hatred; to the feeling of contact/interiority that triggers disgust and to the desperate will to power that provokes the feeling of envy. Judaism in Turkey evokes at times the image of an anti-Muslim oppressor embodied by Peres, at others the ‘convert’ who inherited the legacy of the Union and Progress, at others still the traitor associated with the latent Judaism/Zionism of the Republican elites with their Balkan origins, yet it always evokes a deep threat, and as such, inspires religious and racial hatred. At the same time, the Jew is also the object of the Turk’s envy and desire, as he is seen as a locus of power, a model of self-confidence, someone capable of attempting domination over ‘us’.

Antisemitism in Turkey also functions as a fixed and favoured element in the narrative of cultural corruption and ‘de-identification’ in nationalist conservative discourse. In the imagination of the Islamic conservative, the Jew exists as a figure capable of penetrating us, destroying our essence and polluting us. Indeed, they believe that the aim of Israel or Zionists is to make Turkey think of itself as Western, to alienate it from itself and from the Islamic world. The Westernization process itself is seen by some antisemitic writers as a Jewish conspiracy (Bora, 2017, 386). Of course, this conspiratorial mentality is not unique to Islamic conservatives. It is a hallmark of the Turkish right. Bora, who suggests focusing on the structuring effect of antisemitism on mentality and patterns of perception in Turkey rather than on its concrete content, has noted that the image created by the notion of the powerful, widespread, secret and covert influence of ‘the Jews’ inspires a certain tension of desire/resentment in ‘us’ (2017, 389). Özman and Dede, meanwhile, have argued that the perception of the growing power of Jewish people leads to a serious crisis of self-confidence in the Turkish subject (2014, 180).

Erdoğan’s Davos outburst carried the weight of these historical-emotional perceptions. After all, the enthusiasm and growth in support of Erdoğan generated by rejecting a nearly two-century-long narrative of oppression along with his cathartic display of self-confidence, met the emotional needs noted above. In Turkey, one can encounter hatred of Jewish people in citizens of varying socio-economic status, across many sects and races, whether in a village coffee house or an academic meeting. Furthermore, no one is surprised by such attitudes. Viewed with this context, the emotional basis of the enthusiastic reception Erdoğan received from people in Turkey after Davos becomes more apparent.

However, the Davos incident is too multi-layered to be seen simply as a manifestation of historical antisemitic feelings. What I am interested in specifically is how the contextual and spatial dimensions of the event created a near-perfect integration of the emotional world of nationalist and Islamic conservative bases. The attitude that Erdoğan presented as the prime minister of Turkey in Davos symbolized the resurrection, revolt and rise of the East against the West, underdeveloped against developed countries, the colony against the exploiter, the poor against the rich, the weak against the strong, the oppressed against the oppressor. The traumatic mood that has haunted the Turkish subject in various ways for almost two centuries was produced by a relationship with the West that left it a ‘shackled self’ (Bora and Erdoğan 2013, 634). For this reason, Erdoğan’s Davos display has been interpreted and embraced as the resurrection of an oppressed subject who feels the West has subjected him to an ‘imaginary castration’.

In a social media caption that went viral at the time, a powerful image of Erdoğan is juxtaposed with photos of Western leaders, the Pope and Shimon Peres. Behind Erdoğan’s defiant body, we see crowds of people carrying a giant Turkish flag. The text added to the caption reads: ‘The war of the crescent against the cross! Resistance is not having the world behind you and challenging Anatolia. Resistance is having Anatolia behind you and challenging the world’. The caption implies that the experience of humiliation in the encounter with the West has been reversed under Erdoğan’s leadership. Here, the relationship with the West and the locus of evil that it represents is conceived of as a ‘war of the Cross and the Crescent’. If we recall, Erdoğan narrated the encounter with the West as an experience of victimization and humiliation for Turkish Muslims. The people behind him and the image of the Turkish flag represent a collective subject, one who has had its national identity wounded through this humiliation but will no longer hold its tongue against the West and all evil that it represents. This collective now appears to be resisting, fuelled by self-confidence. Another implication is hidden in the Anatolian emphasis in the text within the image. After all, the consciousness of the conservative subject has always been characterized by an anti-elitism, because the ‘elites who are alienated from the essence of the nation’ have cast ‘the children of Anatolia’ as ‘ignorant and backward’ (Bora & Erdoğan, 2013, 636). From the outset of the Westernization process, and especially during the single-party period following the establishment of the Republic, the main perpetrators of the humiliation suffered by the conservative subject were ‘the people who challenged Anatolia with the backing of the world’, Kemalist elites (the ‘public enemy’), Westernized intellectuals and ‘monşerler’ or ‘white Turks’.

Immediately after the Davos incident, Erdoğan responded to former ambassadors who found his diplomatic stance unacceptable and criticized him for ‘playing the protectorate of Hamas’: ‘the old monşer could not understand what we did. They came as monşers, they will go as monşers’, he snapped.³⁴ Among the diplomats who reacted in this way was Onur Öymen, the then-deputy chairman of the CHP. After Davos, Öymen sent Erdoğan some books he had authored, so that he could ‘learn’ about diplomacy and made the following statement to the press: ‘It is not a shame not to know, it is a shame not to learn’.³⁵ These jabs are far from isolated events but rather are manifestations of the historical and emotional experiences this book discusses. One could argue that the ‘white Turkish ressentiment’ of the Islamic conservative subject gave way to ‘white Turkish cynicism’ as Erdoğan gained the upper hand (Bora & Erdoğan, 2013).

Another social media caption that went viral at the time featured a photo of Erdoğan and Peres at the Davos summit. The text attached to the image reads as follows: ‘It doesn’t matter whether you can speak five languages, if you can’t say “one minute”’. In this image, qualities attributed to the Republican elites—receiving a good education, speaking multiple languages and understanding diplomacy—are mocked. When merely saying ‘one minute’ denotes a show of strength and masculinity, it is not difficult to glean the implication that those who speak five languages are ‘impotent’, ‘cowardly’ and even ‘feminine’. Behind rendering multilingualism a subject of ridicule and humiliation, lies a sense of victory created by the weakening and defeat of the White Turk.

‘The psycho-political conflict surrounding White Turkishness is also a struggle around the definition of national identity’ (Bora, 2016). Seen in this way, it is clear that mocking White Turks is not only a manifestation of resentment, but also an expression of a wish for compensation by a subject with self-confidence, power, and superiority, qualities imparted by a new narrative of national identity. Indeed, after Davos, as the distinctions between old and new, past and present and ‘us’ and ‘them’ became clearer, the emotional investment in the new, in the present and in us increased dramatically.

Let me repeat my claim: Erdoğan’s conduct in Davos in 2009 was crucial in the transition to a new definition of national identity. The multi-layeredness of the incident made it possible for people to transition to an entirely new emotional phase in terms of relations with both the West abroad and the ‘West within us’. In short, the Davos incident enabled Islamic conservatives, nationalists of all stripes, the children of rural Anatolia and the Turkish subject who tries to emulate the Westerner but always feels incomplete or lost before the West, to identify with Erdoğan in some way. It was a symbolic event that prompted the question, who the Turks really are, and provided a new answer. The legacy of Davos has carried Erdoğan, who had set out identifying with Menderes, towards another identification. With the rise of Neo-Ottomanism, Sultan Abdülhamid II would come to be reborn in Erdoğan’s body.

4.5 Rising from the Ashes, Straddling the Urge for Revenge and the Perception of Threat: Erdoğan as Sultan Abdülhamid II

2009 was a historical moment, one consonant with the AKP’s discourse of resurrection and resurgence, both because of the Davos incident and the appointment of Ahmet Davutoğlu as minister of foreign affairs, who advanced Neo-Ottomanism as a foreign policy. Beginning in this year, prevails a political climate that gradually turns its foreign-policy focus away from the West and to the Middle East, setting in motion a domestic political mood of absolute self-confidence.

Of course, Erdoğan was the strongest symbol and the most critical actor in this shift. He initially made his presence felt on the political stage as the bearer of an ossified discourse of victimization by identifying with Menderes. Yet in and after 2010, when his power was to a large extent consolidated, he began to summon the spirit of Abdülhamid II. Identifying with Abdülhamid II would turn out to be very useful, as it suited the emotional needs of the Islamic conservative tradition from which Erdoğan emerged, becoming a powerful tool for the establishment, reproduction and expansion of the Neo-Ottomanist narrative and a source of legitimacy in internal politics.

Abdülhamid II ascended to the throne in 1876. At the end of his thirty-three-year rule, he was deposed by ‘secular forces’. His rule was so severe and so ideologically loaded that he is known by some as the ‘Great Hakan’ and the ‘Red Sultan’. In fact, while the incoming republican regime characterized him as ‘despotic’ and a ‘failure’, in the eyes of those who view the Kemalist legacy critically, he is a hero who was able to ‘stave off the decline and collapse of the state for 33 years’.³⁶

With the introduction of the Neo-Ottomanist narrative, strong connections and analogies began to be established between Erdoğan and Abdülhamid II, both in terms of the dynamics of the periods and as leaders.³⁷ It should be noted that this tendency exists not only among Erdoğan’s supporters but also his opponents, due to the two different perceptions I mentioned above. However, for our purposes, focusing on the ‘positive’ components of the identification established between Erdoğan and Abdülhamid II facilitates a discussion about the urge for an act of revenge—the dominant emotion underpinning this identification.

In the imagination of Erdoğan and his supporters, Abdülhamid II is a figure worthy of admiration because of his cultural and economic achievements, his reintroduction of Islamic identity as a glue to prevent the collapse of the empire and his way of Westernization while simultaneously rejecting its yoke. The period of his rule is perceived as the empire’s ‘restoration’ era, though it was described by the West as ‘sick’. Abdülhamid II is foremost praised for his efforts to re-establish Sunni Muslim-Turkish identity in the form of milleti hakime (the dominant nation). On account of the political moves he was induced to make, which might be considered ‘progressive’, such as declaring the first Ottoman Constitution and convening the first parliament, commentators draw parallels between Abdülhamid II and Erdoğan’s promise to create a ‘civic constitution’. Similarly, Abdülhamid’s breakthroughs in education—efforts to build a school in every village, create teacher training institutions and Islamize the curriculum in the process—have been compared to education policies spearheaded by Erdoğan. The fact that today, almost all secondary education institutions have been given the status of imam hatip (religious vocational schools) is demonstrative of this similarity. Again, ‘giant projects’ (railways, highways), with their attendant advances in economic development, facilitate comparisons of Abdülhamid and Erdoğan, in the spirit of ‘taking the technology of the West and rejecting its morality’.³⁸

Zafer Yörük argues that, in presenting themselves as the ‘final closure of the parenthesis of Kemalism’, Erdoğan and the AKP government rely on a discourse of ‘restoration’ similar to Abdülhamid’s, particularly in his later era, especially in their shared ‘passion for symbolism’. Indeed, the similarities become even more apparent considering Abdülhamid’s attempt to ‘reinvent tradition’ through symbolic political devices such as monuments, architecture, insignia and state ceremonies alongside Erdoğan’s war on the symbols of the Republican regime. During 2010s, Neo-Ottoman interventions were made to any political and social element that symbolized the Republican regime, from ceremonies and monuments to spaces and institutions. For Erdoğan, the most successful manifestation of this war on symbols came in three parts: with his election to president in 2014 by direct popular vote for the first time in history; with the transition to the presidential system as a result of a constitutional amendment referendum in 2017 and finally, with his acquisition of the title of first president of the new regime after winning the June 2018 elections.

However, identifying the similarities between Abdülhamid and Erdoğan’s activities and confining the discussion to them is both reductionist and fruitless. After all, Erdoğan’s decision to identify with Abdülhamid at a certain stage of his rule, summoning his spirit, gives us the opportunity for a productive discussion about emotional responses: the identification with Abdülhamid is, foremost, an indication that the time has come for Erdoğan and his supporters to take revenge on the West, on foreign militaries, on the Westerners among ‘us’, on the perpetrators who persecuted ‘us’ and overthrown all the values that make ‘us’ who we are.

The urge for revenge is first and foremost an emotion associated with the past. It is a result of feeling injured and wronged by a past experience of humiliation (Lapsley, 1998, 257). The main motivation for revenge is to inflict suffering on those seen as the perpetrators of the humiliation; seeing them suffer creates a sense of pleasure and satisfaction in the avenger, easing the pain caused by the original humiliation. Even if the origin of the urge for revenge has passed, the time for revenge will (still) come. The main motive of revenge is to demonstrate cruelty to those who have made the avenger suffer in the past and to convey a clear message that they cannot do it again, thereby preventing future suffering. The main motivation of the avenger is to rehabilitate in the present the feelings they have experienced in the past. The recipient of the revenge is therefore of secondary importance to the avenger. The issue is rather the avenger’s own feelings, their own identity and their own existence (Löwenheim & Heimann, 2008, 691–96). From this point of view, the root of the urge for revenge lies primarily in the aim of restoring and ameliorating a damaged self-perception (Crombag et al., 2010, 342).

Let me consider the urge for revenge alongside the concept of narcissistic rage. The sense of humiliation that comes after a defeat or loss brings with it a narcissistic rage that drives retaliation and payback. This rage is strong enough to evolve into symbolic and real irredentism, expansionism and invasion if the possibility of compensation for loss of dignity or land arises. Since those who experience narcissistic rage ‘[S]how total lack of empathy towards the defender’, their personalities are characterized by aggression, anger and destructiveness (Harkavy, 2000, 350–357). On the other hand, transforming an urge for revenge into action is primarily reliant on power (Bakken, 2008, 169). ‘The desire to repay injuries by inflicting hurt in return’ is only activated in a meaningful sense when one holds power. There is thus a gap between the urge and action (Connolly, 2007, 93). When the urge for revenge is able to be put into action, the actor first suppresses the enemy to show them that they are not respected. For this reason, act of revenge deliberately includes excess. Those who resort to revenge often turn to symbolic targets and will go to extraordinary lengths to harm them. Monuments, national or political icons, signs of military and economic superiority and political leaders are the most vulnerable of such symbols.

An act of revenge is legitimized by constantly recalling the suffering of the past and by consecrating the vengeful act by dedicating it to heroes or martyrs. Avengers are proud of their actions, and they want the people or groups they target to witness the revenge, because the visibility increases the pain of the target. The avenger must keep their wounds alive, because forgetting them would mean curing their thirst for vengeance. The urge for revenge may therefore never be satisfied and may become a key trait of a person’s very existence (Löwenheim & Heimann, 2008, 692–693).

William E. Connolly’s distinction between episodic and generic revenge is very apt in this case. While the episodic urge for revenge is satisfied when the revenge is taken, a generic urge for revenge is permanent. Those with a generic urge for revenge constantly seek legitimate objects to attack, creating a culture of revenge; they are aided in this by moral codes, religion, doctrines, legal punishment and economic sanctions. ‘The bell of revenge now sounds twice, in the acts that express it and in the doctrines that vindicate it’ (2007, 93).

Erdoğan’s Abdülhamid-ization should be interpreted in connection with the transition of the aforementioned urge for revenge to the action phase. The revenge I am discussing here is, first and foremost, in the name of Abdülhamid. After all, his dethronement appears as another traumatic moment in the Neo-Ottomanist narrative; summoning the spirit of Abdülhamid is primarily a means of restoring the destroyed pride of an empire. During Erdoğan’s rule, marches have been held in Abdülhamid’s name, in addition to commemorations orchestrated, exhibitions organized and hospitals, universities, airports and bridges named after him.³⁹ At an international symposium commemorating Abdülhamid, held at Dolmabahçe Palace in 2016, the act of revenge took the form of spatial ‘capture’ and invasion; the lost pride of the Ottoman Empire was compensated by the revival of Abdülhamid through the symbolic use of the state’s official institutions and places.

Erdoğan’s identification with Abdülhamid allows for the reinforcement of another emotion: the perception of threat. The motif of ‘foreign militias’ and ‘collaborator traitors’ who were rumoured to have played a role in the dethronement of Abdülhamid was quickly incorporated into political discourse through such events as the Gezi Park Resistance, which took place during Erdoğan’s term of office, the 17–25 December operation,⁴⁰ and the 15 July coup attempt. While Erdoğan skilfully equates his own power with the survival of the state, he turns all manner of opposition to him into a conspiracy against Turkey. In this respect, by identifying with Abdülhamid, Erdoğan not only offers a project of survival for the new state elites, but also a new project of survival to the millet. Tying his own political future to the dichotomy of the millet’s existence or demise, he fosters a collective paranoia. The collective paranoia that emerged with the loss of the Balkans and the military weakness that emerged during Abdülhamid’s reign is thereby triggered anew by this identification in the present.⁴¹

At this point, I want to look at how Erdoğan’s identification with Abdülhamid, the urge for revenge and the perception of threat that underlies this identification relate to the grassroots. In daily life, one often comes across wristwatches, prayer beads, rings, royal cyphers and necklaces bearing Abdülhamid’s image. The royal cyphers of him are stuck on car windows. The removal of the portrait of Atatürk and the hanging instead of the portraits of Erdoğan and Abdülhamid in a state-owned university dormitory is yet another example of the revenge-motivated actions I have been discussing.⁴² The admiration of ancestors and the revival of the Ottoman Empire are manifested in daily life primarily through the symbolic recollection of Abdülhamid. The smallest action that could be perceived as devaluing him, provokes a violent reaction at the grassroots. For example, when the image of Abdülhamid in a swimsuit on the statue of a naked woman was exhibited in a show held at Contemporary Istanbul in 2016, Turkey’s most important contemporary art fair, a group of twenty men who defined themselves as nationalist conservatives shouted the name of God and raiding the exhibition, declared: ‘There is a picture of our grandfather and ancestor on a swimsuit, and we are offended by it’. They said they would not leave until the statue was removed. Eventually, the artwork was placed in storage.⁴³

To summarize, as the preeminent symbol of the Neo-Ottomanist narrative, Erdoğan has successfully called upon emotions including humiliation, envy, disgust, hatred, anxiety, anger, the urge for revenge and the perception of threat. He channelled these emotions by identifying with the past through historical figures, acts and grievances, which not only fuelled his spirit but also strengthened the political journey of both the AKP and Erdoğan himself.

In his march to power, which he initially set out on as a victim, Erdoğan stoked his desire for revenge after consolidating his power using emotions he summoned by linking himself—at first—to Menderes. He then invoked the spirit of Abdülhamid to legitimate the policies he implemented, a move that enabled the urge for revenge to turn into an act of revenge. In this way, Erdoğan showed both the West and the ‘West within us’ that Abdülhamid had been resurrected, and that the Ottoman Empire was resurgent, restoring prestige, pride and self-confidence in the national identity. The Neo-Ottomanist narrative and the spirit that accompanies it were nurtured by such an archive of emotions.

4.6 Ontological Ressentiment as the Founding Emotion of the Neo-Ottomanist Narrative

What founding emotion can help us to interpret Erdoğan’s leadership journey, from the entire narrative of victimization he conveyed as a legacy of the past to the emotional climate of oppression and humiliation which he made his hallmark, and which gradually gave way to an urge for revenge and a cry for victory? How can one identify both the dominant emotional site of the poetics of oppression, whose perpetrators are, in Erdoğan’s discourse, so obvious, whose memories are so intense, so vivid and alive? In this section, I will argue that ressentiment is the most powerful of all the emotions upon which the new narrative of national identity known as Neo-Ottomanism has been built. Properly putting forward this claim first requires a description of ressentiment.

Ressentiment, a founding emotion of collective identities based on victimization, comes from French. Its Latin origin is the verb re-sentire, to feel again (Ure, 2015, 603). Although the concept is more or less synonymous with the English word resentment (discontent, offence, anger), ressentiment differs from resentment both in terms of the meanings it contains and its uses in the nineteenth century (namely, by Nietzsche). Resentment is a feeling of displeasure, anger and offence that results from humiliation and deprivation. It functions both as a reaction against perceived injustice and humiliation, and as a defence mechanism against attacks on one’s self-perception (Meltzer & Musolf, 2002, 241). On the other hand, Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, treats resentment as an emotion with positive social consequences. For him, resentment seeks for the restoration of the wounded dignity of a person or a group, and it demands recognition and respect. Therefore, it is the guardian of justice, the heart of democracy. This feeling, which is essentially characterized by the demand for restitution, is linked to morality in that the victims of injustice call on others to take responsibility, which does not necessarily open the door to an urge for revenge (Ure, 2015, 601). Thus, resentment is a temporary emotion as it disappears once the demand for reparation is met.

At the end of the nineteenth century, in The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche set about interrogating the worth of moral values, and conceptualized ressentiment as something negative, even pathological (1967). He described ressentiment as an emotion characteristic of modern Western European culture and focused on the particularities of this culture’s dominant moral values (Christian ethics), which, he argued, created ressentiment and resentment. According to Nietzsche, with the rise of these values, which he terms ‘slave morality’, the notions of good and bad were redefined. What was now considered good were not Aristocratic values (‘good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God’), but rather the wretched, the poor, impotent, lowly, the suffering’ (1967, 34):

The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is ‘outside,’ what is ‘different,’ what is ‘not itself’; and this No is its creative deed. (1967, 369)

Nietzsche thinks that turning outwards rather than looking inwards and affirming oneself is intrinsic to ressentiment. This is because the person experiencing ressentiment always needs an opposite, the external world, for the slave morality he possesses to emerge. The actions of such people are therefore fundamentally a reaction. In Nietzsche’s view, people with a slave morality suffer and instinctively seek a cause, an agent for their suffering:

[…] they scour the entrails of their past and present for obscure and questionable occurrences that offer them the opportunity to revel in tormenting suspicions and to intoxicate themselves with the poison of their own malice: they tear open their oldest wounds, they bleed from long-healed scars, they make evildoers out of their friends, wives, children, and whoever else stands closest to them. (1967, 127–128)

In Nietzsche’s polemical and incisive language, ressentiment is contextualized as a symptom of the modern self: the feeling of the powerless and the impotent, of the slave against the master. It is completely detached from the positive aspects of resentment. He perceives it as a form of self-expression among individuals or groups who transform their inner pain into a revenge plot (Fantini et al., 2013, 7–8). Ressentiment, which Nietzsche describes as a widespread disease or poison, is a constant need to relieve the pain of the past, to cling to old wounds; there is a kind of pleasure in this. Contrary to Smith’s conception of resentment, according to Nietzsche, ressentiment persists even after social recognition, as it does not arise from a lack of recognition, but is a symptom of an incurable biological weakness (Ure 2015, 603).

The most comprehensive discussion on the sociological dimensions of ressentiment can be found in Max Scheler’s work. Scheler rejects Nietzsche’s conclusions about religious morality (2004, 32) and proposes to proceed by ignoring the relationship of the concept to Christian values (2004, 7). He thus disagrees with Nietzsche about the genealogical origins of ressentiment (Christian morality), arguing that it is a typical modern phenomenon, rooted in the unequal structure of society and should therefore be considered a consequence of the disparities in modern democratic societies in power, property, right to education and so forth (Minkkinen, 2007, 522).

Scheler states that the French equivalent of the concept of ressentiment essentially implies two characteristics: one occurs when a particular emotional reaction to another person, experienced over and over again, moves beyond the sphere of action and expression and settles into one’s personality, and the other is the hostility contained in the term itself (2004, 2–3). To Scheler, ressentiment is the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature. The main emotional manifestations of ressentiment are the urge for revenge, hatred, maliciousness, envy, the urge to slander and a devaluing enmity. Beneath all of these feelings, according to Scheler, lies the experience of being attacked or injured (2004, 7).

Vengefulness, which Scheler considers one of the most important sources of ressentiment, arises from experiences of anger and resentment. The most important characteristic of these emotional reactions, however, is that they are momentary, temporary and controllable. Anger is an emotion that can be blocked and suppressed. Behind this inhibition is the idea that an immediate reaction may lead to defeat and the sense of helplessness and impotence this would bring. Therefore, vangefulness is based on an experience of impotence; its emergence is related to weakness.

The urge for revenge, the most potent source for the formation of ressentiment, is accompanied by envy. Envy arises from the feeling of powerlessness we experience when someone else possesses something we covet. ‘This tension between desire and nonfulfillment does not lead to envy until it flares up into hatred against the owner, until the latter is falsely considered to be the cause of our privation’ (Scheler 2004, 13). Revenge and envy both have their own objects, they arise in specific situations and are directed at specific objects. But neither of these feelings ‘overstep their intentions’. When revenge is taken, the urge for revenge disappears; when the object of envy is ours, the feeling of envy disappears (Scheler 2004, 7). However, if the urge for revenge persists even after revenge has been sought, and is accompanied by a strong sense of ‘righteousness’, it will never be satisfied and will turn instead to other objects, thus transforming into ressentiment. Similarly, envy weakens rather than stimulates the will to acquire: if the unattainability of something envied is proven (in other words, if the power of the desire to obtain it comes with a feeling of impotence), envy turns into ressentiment. The transformation of envy into ressentiment brings with it a hostile attitude towards the coveted thing, since its mere presence is felt as a pressure, a condemnation, an intolerable humiliation (Scheler 2004, 9–14).

The urge to slander and vilify, which is another emotional site on the way to ressentiment, is not directed at particular objects and does not arise for particular reasons, unlike vengeance and envy. As a result, it does not disappear easily. On the contrary, the subject who wishes to release internal tension or to experience a sense of equality satisfies this longing by devaluing the qualities of other subjects. When these impulses turn into ressentiment, the subject will deny themselves all the values that lend the possible object of comparison superiority (Scheler 2004, 8–19).

Scheler warns us that none of these feelings that predispose one to ressentiment corresponds to ressentiment, but merely to a stage in its development. Only when these feelings are especially strong and yet cannot be expressed due to weakness, impotence or fear, do they become insurmountable, and ressentiment arises. Therefore, ressentiment is predominantly the feeling of the oppressed (2004, 9–10). When the expression or discharge of the emotions that create the conditions for ressentiment is hindered by repressive forces or authorities, anxiety emerges. The subject who is constantly suppressed arrives at such a state that they do not know why they are afraid or what they are lacking; their feelings remain objectless. However, their effects remain (Scheler 2004, 24).

Below is one of Scheler’s important remarks regarding the desire for revenge and ressentiment:

A slave who has a slavish nature and accepts his status does not desire revenge when he is injured by his master; nor does a servile servant who is reprimanded or a child that is slapped. Conversely, feelings of revenge are favored by strong pretensions which remain concealed, or by great pride coupled with an inadequate social position. There follows the important sociological law that this psychological dynamite will spread with the discrepancy between the political, constitutional, or traditional status of a group and its factual power. It is the difference between these two factors which is decisive, not one of them alone. (2004, 11)

Scheler’s emphasis on arrogance and the gap between social power and political and social status as a key motif in the formation of ressentiment is striking: it reveals the possibility that this gap itself may open the door to an inherent wound. When wounds are experienced, perceived and felt as if they were destiny, it is only a matter of time before the desire for revenge turns into ressentiment. He claims that a lack of social recognition inversely proportional to an ‘arrogant’ self-perception causes serious damage to the self-confidence of individuals and collectives (2004, 12).

In sum, ressentiment in the Schelerian sense is an emotion that occurs when the expression of emotions such as humiliation, envy, hatred, anxiety and anger is prevented. For this reason, ressentiment can neither be acted upon nor forgotten. Moreover, the suppression of all the emotions that cause ressentiment changes even the person’s perception of time, imprisoning him in an eternal/permanent past. The subject’s sole vision of the future, which relies on the obsessive repetition of negative memories, is fixated on a desire for revenge on all potential enemies (Fantini et al., 2013, 2–5). The time period between the initial perception of the wound and the inability to respond not only reinforces the desire for revenge, but also increases the feeling of ressentiment.

Ressentiment is such a contagious emotion that it sometimes spreads collectively, determining the characteristics and actions of a group (Meltzer & Musolf, 2002, 244); the possessor of the wound that creates the basis of ressentiment may, then, also be a social group. In this case, collective ressentiment emerges (Stockdale, 2013, 507), which is greater than the ressentiment of individual injured subjects.

Both Nietzsche and Scheler are criticized for seeing ressentiment as a form of passivity or resignation, when in fact, the expression of ressentiment is closely related to power. Fantini et al. claim that ressentiment is not unique to ‘poor victims’; those in power can also partake in it (2013, 4). Indeed, Scheler also referred to this feature of ressentiment, claiming that it is a contagious and sticky feeling and that once it is in the body, it can persist even after it has been expressed or externalized. If suppressed for too long, this emotion can be activated and ‘sour’ and ‘poison’ the personality, even when the conditions that created it disappear (2004, 9–10). As a result, the feeling of ressentiment has strong political consequences. It can become the main thrust of collective political movements, especially ideological, reactionary forms of populism such as extreme nationalism (Hoggett, 2013, 571).

Michael Ure notes three basic forms of resentment, as it is used today. The first is moral resentment. It is positively defined, a sentiment that can be used to ensure justice. The second is socio-political resentment, which is, again, developed in the face of perceived injustices. It emerges with the demand to correct the mistakes of the past, and is, in this respect, a legitimate demand for reparation. Socio-political resentment is directed not only at the perpetrators of past victimization, but it also invites actors to take responsibility and meet demands for reparation in the present. Ultimately, at the core of both moral and socio-political resentment is the demand for justice. However, socio-political resentment always risks turning into ontological ressentiment, which Ure describes as the third form. Ontological ressentiment is defined as a deep hatred of existence itself: it is the feeling of transitioning from amor fati (love your destiny) to odium fati (hate your destiny). Ontological ressentiment, which marks the mood of the subject who clings to the feeling of ressentiment even when all demands for compensation have been met, can usher in various kinds of totalitarian politics. Ure claims that this form of ressentiment sticks to identity struggles and to the agents of contemporary social movements because collective political agents, who craft their identities with reference to stories of victimization and powerlessness, almost attribute virtue to this weakness (2015, 608). Wendy Brown offers a similar critique, suggesting that in subaltern politics, where grievances are recognized and verified, and where attempts at compensation are made, pain experienced in the past may not always be externalized and may turn into an eternal reality—then the wounds are fetishized. This is problematic because it reduces the subject’s existence to these wounds (Bora, 2010, 228; Brown, 1995, 72).

So what do these characteristics of ressentiment tell us about the example at hand? Might the emotions that cling to the language that Erdoğan employs as a leader to convey a legacy of past victimization to the people—emotions that spread and contaminate, and become enduring—be manifestations of an ontological ressentiment particular to the wounded Turkish subject? Or does the ontologizing element derive from Erdoğan transmitting—through a range of symbolic discourses and actions—a moral and socio-political resentment long present in the collective identity? Examining the emotional journey of both Islamic conservatives and the Turkish subject whose identity was born of a wound inflicted by the loss of empire, it is clear that ontological ressentiment has played a key role in the rise of the Neo-Ottomanist narrative.