Neo-Ottomanism
An Alt-Right Formation from the South
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4904469 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Banu Bargu (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 88 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 299-333 |
| Publication date | 2021-06-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0037-783X • E-ISSN: 1944-768X |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/sor.2021.0016 |
| OpenAlex | W4293166692 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
Neo-Ottomanism:An Alt-Right Formation from the South? Banu Bargu (bio) as the radical and transformative uprisings in north africa and the Middle East have subsided or been defeated, they have been supplanted by increasing tendencies toward authoritarianism. However, the new authoritarian formations in the region are different from those of the past, whose political effectivity was challenged by the rebelling masses and the more gradual sea change taking place in dominant political culture. In this process of transformation, previously stable and hegemonic ideologies, often promulgated and disseminated by state institutions and used as props for the authoritarianisms of the past, have been attenuated and supplanted with new ones. What are the new ideological formations that support and express the turn toward authoritarianism in the Middle East today? I approach this question by focusing on Turkey, where the role of Kemalism as official ideology has been significantly weakened and put on the defensive by a collection of institutions, practices, and policies that focus on the revival of the Ottoman past. Neo-Ottomanism, as this ideological formation has come to be called, takes an idealized construction of Ottoman society as a multireligious, multiethnic, and multicultural formation, where different communities lived together in peace and prosperity, as its normative and political model to address the problems of Kemalist Turkey. Supporters of the Ottoman dynasty and the Caliphate who opposed the Kemalist regime, which abolished both, have existed [End Page 299] throughout the republic's history, but this highly marginal current found new life in the 1980s when certain conservatives with varying Islamist, traditionalist, anti-occidentalist, and anticommunist orientations proposed drawing on the Ottoman past to deal with the shortcomings of Kemalism. These critics suggested that the plural and diverse structure of Ottoman society presented a better social model than Kemalism's nationalist and homogenizing logic, which has repressed Kurdish demands for recognition, affirmed the marginalization of religious minorities, and persistently exhibited intolerance for public expressions of piety, following an authoritarian tradition of laicité. They further argued that a neo-Ottoman identity, with its postnational and multicultural orientation, at peace with political Islamism, could be an alternative identity that fosters social harmony in the "new Turkey" while also facilitating an embrace of its traditional culture and ethical values that they considered to have been repudiated by the westernizing project of modernization. At the same time, on the international front, the advocates of neo-Ottomanism critiqued the Kemalist focus on an isolationist paradigm of state sovereignty. They sought in the revival of Ottoman identity a redefinition of Turkey as a vibrant "Muslim democracy" that could be a role model for countries that used to be under Ottoman rule or influence and were now transitioning out of the Cold War in the Balkans, Middle East, and Caucasus regions. Thus, coined as a more liberal alternative that would be more pluralistic and inclusive than Kemalism, and commended for an attitude of openness to the world with its willingness to go beyond a narrow nationalism, neo-Ottomanism gained popularity throughout the 1980s and '90s, especially as the violent conflict between the regime and the Kurdish insurgency raged; growing demands for inclusion and influence articulated by Islamist conservatives were met with the military's intervention into civilian politics (known as the "soft coup" of February 28, 1997); and Turkey faced depreciating global importance as its strategic location in the Cold War order became largely irrelevant. Neo-Ottomanism, thus touted as a potential [End Page 300] ideological framework to move beyond the impasses of Kemalism, experienced increasing fortunes with the rise of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) to power and its successive electoral victories. In turn, the AKP, or certain factions within it, promoted neo-Ottomanism as a way to counter the cultural hegemony of the secular elite it has sought to replace. Swiftly rising to prominence in the first decade of the AKP, neo-Ottomanism was considered to constitute the crucial ingredient for Turkey's "advanced democracy." Meanwhile, the relationship between neo-Ottomanism and Turkey's increasing authoritarianism, concretized most sharply in the constitutional change that transformed the republic into an "executive presidentialism" in 2017 but has been longer in the making, has largely gone unnoticed
Authoritarianism · Democracy · Hegemony · Ideology · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Turkey's Politics and Society
| Citations per year | 1.75 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2026 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |