7.1 The Centenary of the Republic of Turkey: A National Identity Crisis?

I set out in this book to question the relationship between emotions and politics, starting from the claim that an analysis of the style of politics practised by the AKP in Turkey, would be incomplete unless emotions are taken into account. Criticizing the emotion-blindness of studies focused on ‘reason’ and ‘interest’, I have shown that emotions are not individual or psychological, nor internal or private phenomena. Rather, emotions permeate the capillaries of the social and political sphere and are inherent to—even determine—processes of policy-making and political participation. In order to re-conceptualize emotions as collective, relational, dynamic phenomena, I have drawn on Sara Ahmed’s perspective to reveal the nature of emotions that move among bodies, stick, contact and surround them like a ‘thickness in the air’.

To analyse Turkey’s recent experience of AKP rule solely through emotions, it was necessary to focus on certain symbolic sites in which collective emotions circulate most intensely. Political symbols are a reservoir of emotions; they mobilize people to make emotional investments and subsequently act in the political and social sphere. Emphasizing the unifying and distinguishing nature of symbols allowed me to conceptualize them as narratives, images, objects, actions, events and relations, rich in meanings and emotions. I have demonstrated that symbolic politics constitute a powerful tool of expression and performance and play a vital role in mobilizing, impelling to action, uniting and dividing both political actors and the people. As a means of approaching political experience through emotions, I have drawn on the idea that political symbols and symbolic politics provide a dynamic, reciprocal and productive relationship between the ruling elites and the people.

To address the emotional manifestations of symbolic politics in Turkey, it was important to explore the symbolic discourses and actions of political actors, their behaviours and attitudes, the narratives they rely on and the emotional motives through which collectives participate in the practices of meaning-making. Such a line of questioning primarily led me to a powerful political narrative, a symbolic political engagement that has dominated the AKP era. Neo-Ottomanism mobilized certain emotions among the people and aimed at the restoration of national identity. Perhaps more than anything else, it appealed to emotions and paved the way for the creation of a new national mood. Characterized by an emphasis on the grandeur, might and majesty of the Ottoman past, this narrative found a strong resonance with the public. Turkey began to embrace it across a range of widespread symbolic manifestations.

Previous governments in Turkey’s political history had resorted to invoking the narrative of Neo-Ottomanism and attempted to secure its adoption into political discourse. What distinguishes the AKP experience from them, however, is that for the first time Neo-Ottomanism was not only put forward by a ruling elite, but also found its way into many aspects of daily life; it has been embraced by the people. In other words, although Neo-Ottomanism was born in the field of political discourse, it became a banal element of everyday life and a new form of nationalism for a broader population.

The approach taken here to analyse the AKP experience through emotions has been to concentrate on the most powerful symbolic political sites, where the emotions that underpin, adhere to and emanate from the Neo-Ottomanist narrative came into being. I have analysed the Neo-Ottomanist narrative by way of the intersection of leader, space and myth. Each of these sites contains powerful reservoirs of meaning and emotion that permeate not only politics, but also many other aspects of society. Each symbolic site became a potent tool of symbolic politics, produced by the ruling elite and emotionally invested in by the people themselves. Consequently, the analytical focus of this study was determined in a manner that might account for the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between the ruling elites and the people.

The most powerful symbolic site of the Neo-Ottomanist narrative is undoubtedly Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, first as the leader of the AKP and then as the president of Turkey. His political background, character traits and actions throughout his rule have been in perfect harmony with both the motives behind the emergence of the Neo-Ottomanist narrative and the emotional needs of his supporters. In the two decades since the AKP came to power, Erdoğan, as a political symbol, has been the most visible subject and object of investment for the emotions that have accompanied and transformed the party’s political path. As a political symbol in his own right, Erdoğan has managed to embody and mobilize various emotions at every step of his leadership journey. Beginning from a narrative of victimization suffused with strong historical references, he transformed it into one of triumph, glory and greatness. Neo-Ottomanism has been built upon a sense of ressentiment invoked through the discourse of victimization that dominates Erdoğan’s personal history and the history of the Islamic conservative tradition, fundamentally grounded in an archive of oppression. This constituent feeling has festered in the wound of humiliation that emerged in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the experience of its already defeated encounter with the West. In addition to the sense of loss and humiliation, for the Islamic conservative subjectivity, the experience of exposure to the West and Westernization is recalled as a kind of trauma, intensely impacting their collective narrative of the past.

The experience of the encounter with the West entered Erdoğan’s narrative of victimization not only as humiliation and the loss of self-confidence, but also as an accompanying sense of envy. In other words, this mood was partly characterized by an admiration and emulation of the power, might and influence of what was encountered. Indeed, envy, as an emotion of deep unease and hostile despair, also contains an intense desire for its object. However, the sense of the impossibility of this desire in reaching its object facilitated its transformation into another emotional response: disgust. An imaginary of the West, which found a strong place in Erdoğan’s narrative of victimization, was thus given substance by a multi-layered, transitive movement of feelings of humiliation, envy and disgust. Erdoğan has been extremely successful in mobilizing this archive of emotions in the people and, across his leadership, has ably made use of opportunities to compensate for these emotions.

Perhaps the most striking point in this analysis of emotions tied to a Western imaginary was the realization that the emotions explored in this chapter are not unique to the Islamic conservative subjects. The feeling of impotence and humiliation vis-à-vis the West could also be attributed to a broader Turkish subject as well. That is, the encounter with the West, even for those who admired it, even for those who embraced Westernization, was a wounded contact. Perhaps the reason Erdoğan’s audience grew larger and larger for so long is tied to how his discourse and actions satisfy the emotional needs of a broader Turkish subject.

In Erdoğan’s narrative of oppression, the perpetrator that constitutes the main source of victimization, constructed with reference to concrete historical instances, is undoubtedly CHP. Indeed, CHP is rendered the object of the emotions Erdoğan appeals to when conveying the encounter with the West as a constituent site of victimization. Ultimately, he has created a caustic narrative about the founding years of the Republic and the single-party era. Here, the motif of oppression predominates, and hatred stands out as the chief emotion that he addresses and mobilizes. Framed as the perpetrator of the Islamic conservative collective subject’s feelings of suppression, exclusion and humiliation, CHP becomes both the longstanding agent of victimization and a persistent object of hatred. Moreover, and rather conveniently for the ontology of the emotion of hatred, Erdoğan’s discourse has been dominated by the propagation of hatred against CHP and its mentality; in other words, against everyone who embodies principles represented by CHP.

The emotions evoked by the narrative of victimization are not limited to those I have mentioned. For the Islamic conservative collective subject, CHP and its mentality have led to another traumatic experience: the execution of Adnan Menderes. In every period of Erdoğan’s leadership, Menderes was a site of trauma and a tool of identification, one that Erdoğan never ceased to recall and remind the people of. Particularly before strongly consolidating his power, he often identified himself with Menderes as a symbol of victimization called up from the past, keeping alive an intense hatred of those who caused Menderes’s tragic end. The other emotional outlet of this identification, which goes hand in hand with hatred, is anxiety. For Islamic conservative subjectivity, anxiety constitutes one of the strongest emotional sites, permeating the experience of a past shaped by coups, party closures and even the perception of threats to existence. While anxiety triggers a cautious attitude, it is also rich in anger and ressentiment, as it harbours the threat of the unknown. Indeed, regarding CHP and its mentality, one of the major emotions permeating Erdoğan’s narrative of victimization is anger. Anger finds its expression either in the demand for or the position of power, and this emotion was particularly prominent in Erdoğan’s speeches and demeanour when referring to 28 February 1997. 28 February was often repeated, remembered and recalled as a site of victimization. Such repetition made it possible to keep anger alive at all times, both because 28 February took place in the recent past and because of its impact on Erdoğan’s personal and political life. As such, anger has become more and more embodied in Erdoğan and his supporters with the consolidation of power and authority.

The Neo-Ottomanist narrative was built on this emotional reservoir. It made compensation and redress possible while keeping alive this narrative of the past and the feelings that accompanied it. Until 2009, Erdoğan had constructed his political and collective identity through references to a legacy of oppression. In this respect, the Davos incident has a highly symbolic and historical character. It filled Erdoğan and his supporters—even the Turkish subject more generally—with emotions that engendered a major rupture with and transformation of the narrative of victimization, to the extent that this incident reverberated not only in Turkey but across the world, idolizing Erdoğan in the eyes of the Middle East. Thus, Davos incident served to compensate for the emotions of the encounter with the West.

Following Davos, Erdoğan gradually assumed the mood of the powerful, rather than the victimized. Indeed, after this incident, Erdoğan came to be identified with Abdülhamid—even, in a sense, becoming Abdülhamid himself. Congruous with the slogan of ‘Resurrection and Resurgence’, Abdülhamid was reborn in Erdoğan’s body. He was selectively remembered and recalled as a tool of revenge to compensate for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, for his dethronement, for the persecution of the Islamic conservative subjects by the Republican regime and for the destruction of national honour and pride. As a radical form of rehabilitating the past in the present, revenge was enacted through the revival of Abdülhamid at the level of symbolic politics, as well as at the level of real politics, through a political style that substituted and restored the Ottoman past by destroying many of the values of the Republican regime.

The Neo-Ottomanist narrative was established against a backdrop of feelings of humiliation, envy, disgust, hatred, anxiety, anger and revenge. The cumulative nature of these emotions and the fact that they can only be expressed from a position of power enabled me to see the centrality of ressentiment to Neo-Ottomanism. Ressentiment is a state of mind that is more than the sum of the emotions mentioned above. It stems from the fact that, for so long all these emotions could not be expressed outwardly, and were taken to heart. However, even though the narrative of victimization, remembered in the past as pain, persecution and injustice, was largely compensated for by Erdoğan’s rise to power, the emotional manifestations of ressentiment have yet to fade. On the contrary, their expression continues, and with greater intensity, through a wide variety of symbolic acts by both Erdoğan and his supporters. Ontological ressentiment is the sentiment that best describes the emotional state of the subject who clings to ressentiment even though all their demands for compensation have been met, who keeps the wounds of the past alive by fetishizing them and who surrenders to an irreparable desire for revenge. Therefore, Neo-Ottomanism was not built on mere ressentiment, but on ontological ressentiment; that is, it became embodied in the very fabric of identity. Whether this state of mind is unique to Islamic conservative subjectivity in Turkey remains an open question.

I have further aimed to read the real political manifestations of ontological ressentiment through Istanbul as a symbolic space. With an ontological rage and urge for revenge and an imperial appetite carried over from the Ottoman past to the present, Istanbul has been the site of the most ‘savage’ practice of Neo-Ottomanist symbolic politics. It has served a great many purposes in terms of the meanings attributed to Istanbul in reference to the Ottoman conquest of the city, evoking a sense of Islamic triumph and superiority and functioning as the most effective medium of revenge against the Republican regime. The desire to reconquer Istanbul, which was essentially born out of ontological ressentiment, was clothed in nostalgic recollection and the romanticization of the city’s Ottoman past. The vengeful and aggressive symbolic politics carried out around Istanbul was justified with reference to the feelings of nostalgia and romanticism. Hagia Sophia and Çamlıca Mosque are the most prominent locations in this symbolic politics and have been examined as sites of an Islamic desire for homecoming, while how the Atatürk Cultural Center and the Ottoman Military Barracks function as the sites of two culture wars, suggesting a clash of Kemalist and Islamic conservative values, has also been discussed. Gigantomanic fantasies such as huge bridges, airports and buildings have been established as manifestations of Neo-Ottomanism and a greed for power, an imperial appetite and a symbolic display of superiority over the West. The lust for construction, as a medium of desire for material superiority and enrichment, serves the goal of expansion and empowerment that Neo-Ottomanism implies. Finally, the Panorama 1453 Conquest Museum and the Yenikapı Square Conquest Festivities have been explored as spaces designed for conquest for everyone, with the aim of making the desire for reconquest and a sense of triumph a national one. While analysing each of these sites, I have argued that the emotions that surface in Istanbul are nostalgia, romanticism and an imperial appetite, though with ontological ressentiment always operating as an undercurrent. I concluded the chapter by asking whether such a longing for a golden age, such a will to power and such a need to establish national pride and self-confidence are unique to an Islamic conservative collective subjectivity.

In the final chapter, I have tried to address the 15 July 2016 coup attempt—which took place during the writing of this book, and whose symbolic meanings and consequences cannot be ignored for what they say about the progression of AKP rule and the history of Turkey—in terms of national narcissism, which I approach as a state of mind whose creation was sought in the aftermath of the coup attempt. At the rally held in Yenikapı Square less than a month after the coup attempt, its traumatic impact still fresh, the mood was one of national narcissism. From the speeches by political elites to the general atmosphere, the idea they sought to establish was rich in mythic content and based on the impression of victory. Perhaps because the emotion to be derived from this tragic event—which was almost ‘celebrated’ through an emphasis on the might, greatness, heroism and courage of the Turkish nation as the heir to the great Ottoman Empire—was inclusive narcissism, the event initially had a certain grassroots appeal. However, soon thereafter, it became easier to see whose narrative, or legend, it actually was. In the aftermath of the coup attempt, the AKP reintroduced a rigid dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and resorted to policies that excluded and penalized large segments of society. As a milestone of the AKP’s rule, marked by feelings of triumph and collective narcissism, the ‘Legend of 15 July’ has transformed into a divisive myth that only Erdoğan and his supporters can embrace. In other words, far from gaining credibility as an appealing form of national narcissism, the events of 15 July caused the AKP government to once again, this time irrevocably, close in on itself and lose its political and social legitimacy in the eyes of a large segment of society.

So, what does this book tell us today, in 2023, which marks the centenary of the foundation of the Turkish Republic? Indisputably, the AKP’s politics of emotions has been a central factor in the party’s longevity. As a result of the AKP’s Neo-Ottomanist symbolic politics, it seems that ‘Turks have remembered the Ottomans again’. The emphasis on Islam, so prominent in the reconstruction of the Ottoman past and a key determinant of AKP politics, is today embedded in the state as ‘the return of the repressed’, and has carved out a wide space for itself within the official ideological framework. In this context, the AKP’s Neo-Ottomanist politics of emotion has been decisive in stretching, disrupting and even breaking the truisms and moulds of the Republican regime’s imagination of national identity. From this perspective, one could conclude that the AKP has emerged victorious from its battle with the Republican regime, or that, given the polarization of the nation today, Turkey is experiencing an identity crisis under Erdoğan’s autocratic regime. The future fate of the Neo-Ottomanist narrative seems to be closely tied to how Erdoğan will fall and how his Islamic conservative rule will be remembered in the Turkish political history.