This move is surely a severe attack against democracy, the rule of law and stability in Turkey. It is a shame for the country. The accusations leveled against the AK Party are wholly unjustified and have no legal basis, only an ideological one. It seems that the self-appointed bureaucratic guardians of the state want to punish the AK Party for not only daring to elect Abdullah Gül, whose wife wears the headscarf, as president, but also for trying to lift the headscarf ban at university, which has long been the symbol of authoritarian secularism. One can only hope that the Constitutional Court rejects this provocation against democracy and that Parliament finally moves to adopt the necessary constitutional and legal amendments to bring regulations concerning political parties in line with liberal democratic norms.The chief prosecutor had previously asked the Constitutional Court to ban the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) and now he is moving against the AK Party government, which received 47 percent of the national vote in last summer's general election. These moves by the chief prosecutor indicate that the bureaucratic establishment in Turkey wants to uphold state policies adopted in the 1920s and 1930s under an authoritarian single-party regime. Those policies, drawn in line with the notion of modernity that prevailed in the founding period of the republic, essentially assigned the state the duty of secularizing society. This amounted to isolating society from the influence of Islam, which was regarded as the main source of the country's backwardness. Identity policies adopted at the time were aimed at the forced assimilation of minority cultures into the majority culture.
Turkey, however, is not the place it used to be in the early decades of the 20th century. It is today a socio-economically much more developed, differentiated and globalized society with nearly 40 years of experience in democratic politics. The insistence on imposing policies that truly belong to a past century can only be explained by a dogmatic and authoritarian kind of Kemalist secular nationalism. These policies are compatible neither with democracy nor with the territorial integrity of the country, and cannot even be upheld by a military dictatorship.
The chief prosecutor's recent move, in particular, and the political controversies and conflicts Turkey has witnessed since last April, in general, are surely also related with the power struggle between old and new elites of the country. The transition from a development strategy of state-led import substitution to one of market-led export promotion in the 1980s has had profound consequences for Turkish society, economy and politics. The development of export industries and the spread of higher education institutions in Anatolia gave rise to a new business and professional elite that is culturally conservative and religious but committed to liberal economic and political values. The AK Party is primarily the representative of this new elite. The AK Party, in power since 2002, has in the context of EU accession achieved political and economic reforms that have challenged the power and privileges of the old elite, composed mainly of state bureaucracy and business groups that flourished with state subsidies during the import-substitution period.
The power struggle between the old and new elites in Turkey is perhaps best described by Professor Jenny White, is one of the forerunners in the study of the social basis and ideological transformation of the Turkish Islamist movement, in her book titled "Islamist Mobilization in Turkey." In a recent article, "The Ebbing Power of Turkey's Secularist Elite" (Current History, December 2007), White makes the following observation: "What is most frightening to Turkey's old elite is the AK Party's increasing ability to occupy the political center, where the interests of most Turkish voters lie. A popular and centrist AK Party, devoted to liberal values, is a much greater threat to the secularist, Westernized, but essentially illiberal establishment than an AK Party harboring a secret Islamist agenda. … The establishment's response to the AK Party's success has been to spread the fear that secularist lifestyles are in danger and the nation is being undermined by foreign powers."
