Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis, Francis Fukuyama are such scholars. Huntington is, of course, famous because of his “clash of civilizations” analysis, which turned from an improbable thesis into a self-fulfilling prophecy after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Lewis is a living example of the “orientalist” approach which looks at Islam as the main source of explanation for social and political behavior in the Middle East. Fukuyama is a more sophisticated Weberian who looks at linkages between culture and political economy.
Marxists, on the other hand, are economic determinists. They believe that economic structure shapes culture. It’s the “mode of production” that determines the political, social and cultural norms of the system. Of course, there is also the influence of Hegel on Marx, most visible in the dialectical materialism of Marxist theory, whereby history is analyzed as the product of class struggles that follows the Hegelian principle of each thesis developing into its antithesis. In the Marxist paradigm, driven by modes of production and class conflicts, the economic evolution is from feudalism to mercantilism, from mercantilism to capitalism and from capitalism to communism. Setting aside Marxism’s questionable ability to predict the end of capitalism, it is the methodology of looking at economic and structural dynamics rather than culture that inspired contemporary Marxist scholars such as Immanuel Wallerstein.
For countries like Turkey where the debate between secularism and modernity, or Islam and democracy is a defining element of daily politics, the relevance of this Weberian versus Marxist dichotomy is profound. The reason is simple. The Kemalist revolution was essentially a cultural revolution, very much influenced by the 19th and early 20th century orientalist norms that saw Islam as the main impediment to modernization, westernization and secularism. There is, therefore, a deeply rooted Weberian culturalist instinct in the mindset of Turkish citizens who analyze the evolution of Turkey through the prism of a struggle between religion and secularism. This emphasis on culture, religion and civilization as the main drivers of westernization has created a distance between the Kemalist elite and the conservative, pious masses of Anatolia. It is in the ironic motto of the 1930s, “For the People, Despite the People,” that one sees this Kemalist elitist disconnect in its starkest form.
Today there is an unmistakable Weberian Kemalist instinct in those who look at culture and religion as the most important political factor for analyzing the Justice and Development Party (AK Party). The same instinct was present in analyses of Turgut Özal in the 1980s. This is not surprising. Weberians will always look at culture and religion as the determining factors of politics. This is what cultural determinism is all about.
A Marxist analysis of Turkey, on the other hand, looks at Özal and his reforms on a completely different level of analysis and methodology. On a Marxist analysis, Özal was important not because of his conservative-pious ideology, but because he greatly contributed to changing Turkey’s economic system by unleashing its capitalist potential. It was under Özal that decades of statist and protectionist semi-capitalism came to an end.
Turkey shifted from an “import substitution industrialization” economic paradigm to one driven by free-market capitalism.
This was achieved by privatizing state-owned enterprises, lowering tariffs and quotas, liberalizing the trade and financial regime, deregulation, devaluation of the currency, export promotion, etc. All these factors contributed to the emergence of a new mode of production. With Özal’s capitalist transformation, a new economic class also emerged: the Anatolian bourgeoisie. Like all bourgeois formations, they are in favor of maximizing profit and quite pragmatic in their approach to democratic politics. With tongue-in-cheek wittiness, some young European analysts have called this new class the “Islamic Calvinists” in order to underline the capitalist nature of social change in Turkey. This is the short tale of Weber and Marx in Turkey. While Weberian cultural determinists shiver at the thought of an Islamic counter-revolution, Marxist economic determinists see behind the AK Party a new bourgeoisie with a strong vested interest in the capitalist/democratic status quo.
