Download PDF | Meral Uğur-Çınar - Memory, Patriarchy and Economy in Turkey_ Narratives of Political Power (Edinburgh Studies on Modern Turkey)-Edinburgh University Press (2024).
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is a product of years of thinking, research and writing. But equally, it is a product of the conversations I had with so many great minds over the years. Acknowledgements are one of my favorite parts to read in the books of others, and it is a pleasure to write one for this book. Yet at the same time, I know that I will not be able to do justice to all those who contributed to what has now become this book. Over the years, I have presented parts of this research and have gotten feedback for it at various talks, workshops and conferences.
I presented different parts of my work that culminated in the chapters of this book at several Annual Meetings on the following panels: ‘Gezi Park Protests: Debating the Terms of Politics, Democracy and Participation’ (2014 Middle East Studies Association), ‘Patriarchy, State and Legitimacy in Turkey’ (2015 Middle East Studies Association), ‘Revolutions and Counterrevolutions’ (2016 American Political Science Association Annual Conference), ‘Historical Memory and Remembering in Democratic and Authoritarian Politics’ (2021 American Political Science Association), ‘Populism and Populist Discourse: National Cases and Comparative Perspective’ (2021 International Political Science Association) and ‘Populist Practices in Comparative Perspectives’ (2021 Canadian Political Science Association). I deeply appreciate the contributions of the participants of these events.
I would particularly like to thank the discussants of my papers, John Vanderlippe, Ӧzlem Altıok, Isaac Kamola, Dovile Budryte, Mark Farha and Isabelle Cote for their insightful comments and their engagement with my works in progress. I would also like to thank the participants of the Turkish–German Frontiers of Social Science Symposium (TUGFOSS), which was held in Potsdam in 2018, for their feedback. I am especially grateful to Erdem Aytaç and Selin Akyüz, who invited me to present my early ideas on populism and political narratives at the symposium and provided me with invaluable feedback. At the Middle Technical University, I received very insightful feedback from the participants of the Political Science and Public Administration Departmental Seminar in 2021, especially from Ayşe Ayata, Aslı Çırakman and Başak Alpan with regard to populism and collective memory in Turkey. Also, I would like to extend my gratitude to the participants of the 2022 European Consortium of Political Research Joint Sessions Workshop ‘Gender and the Rise of Authoritarianism’, Cristina Chiva, Petra Guasti, Pär Zetterberg, İrem Tuncer-Ebetürk, Berfin Çakın, Lynda Gilby, Natalia Kovyliaeva and Alexandros Tokhi, especially Cristina and Petra, who not only organised the panel, but also provided impeccable feedback on my work as discussants.
I would also like to thank Luca Manucci, who, as the editor of Populism Interviews: A Dialogue with Leading Experts (Routledge, 2022), not only made me part of that project, but also gave me reasons to think deeply about the relationship between populism and collective memory with his thoughtful questions. More recently, I was fortunate enough to be part of a panel at the University of Pennsylvania titled ‘The Construction of National Citizenships: Competing Paradigms’ organised in honour of Rogers Smith’s retirement. I am thankful for the participants of this panel, particularly Ian Lustick, Jeff Green, Nancy Hirschmann, Elspeth Wilson, Sarah Song and Harris Mylonas for inspiring me to reflect on some of the most pressing domestic and global issues regarding narratives and politics. Ian Lustick, my dissertation supervisor more than a decade ago, still continues to have a lasting effect on what and how I write thanks to his sharp intellect and conscientious approach to politics. Likewise, my conversations with Rogers Smith, and his work on stories of peoplehood, have been a constant source of inspiration and intellectual development for me over the years.
I would also like to thank the editors at the Edinburgh University Press, Gillian Leslie, Ersev Ersoy, Emma House and Louise Hutton for all their efforts along the way. They were the best editors one could hope for. I am truly grateful. The series editors, Alpaslan Özerdem and Ahmet Erdi Öztürk, also provided invaluable, constructive insights that improved the book tremendously. Of course, I am also extremely grateful to the anonymous reviewers for providing the most helpful, intellectually stimulating, and knowledgeable feedback possible. Parts of Chapter 3 have appeared in The Political Quarterly (2015, 86 (3): 359–63) and METU Studies in Development (2017, 44 (April): 47–67). I would like to thank the journals, their editors and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback. I am also grateful to Koç University-VEKAM for letting me use images from their archive. I would like to thank my friends and colleagues Tekin Köse, Senem Yıldırım Özdem, Alev Çınar, İlker Aytürk, Bülent Batuman and Daniel Just for their insights, support, encouragement and wisdom. Our graduate students, and my co-authors on other projects of collective memory, historical narratives, and narratives of the Left, Ali Açıkgöz, Berat Uygar Altınok and Gökhan Şensönmez: it has been a source of joy and pride to see how you have become the wonderful thinkers and scholars you are.
I am thankful to my mother Sıdıka Uğur, my father Behzat Uğur, my sister Emel and my niece Nehir for being my family and making life more meaningful for me. My husband, Kürşat Çınar, who has witnessed all the stages of this work and contributed to it with his insights and endless support, deserves a special ‘thank you’. I would also like to thank my daughter Bahar so much, for the hope in her eyes, for her kindness and warmth, and for motivating me along the way, by saying, ‘yaz, anne, yaz’.
INTRODUCTION: NARRATIVES AND POLITICS
This book is written in an effort to understand the multifaceted and dynamic role narratives play in politics in general, and in Turkish politics in particular. Narratives play crucial roles in politics and open fruitful areas of research. Narratives help us comprehend separate phenomena by weaving them into a comprehensible web of relationships. They turn ‘temporally distributed events into interpretable wholes’ (Wertsch 2000, 515). Narratives also reduce the number of possible interpretations of events by emplotting them in a certain way (Ewick and Silbey 1995, 213; Wertsch 2000, 515), and they give stories a sense of reality due to the common-sense properties of their truth claims (Bridger and Maines 1998).
Narratives do not only help us comprehend the world but also our place within it. As Somers (1994, 625) maintains, identity formation takes shape within ‘relational settings of contested but patterned relations among narratives, people, and institutions’. In addition to making sense of our lives and ourselves in narrative form (Taylor 1989; Brockmeier 2002), we also express and transmit our ideas through narratives. Political narratives are key to our understanding of the role of ideas in politics as they are the vessels through which ideas are carried. As Polletta (1998) points out, narratives can serve us better in understanding political communication than other discursive communication units such as frames or discourses for a number of reasons. Narratives have a temporarily configurative capacity, they rely on emplotment rather than explanation and they tend to be more vague, leaving room for personal interpretation and actually requiring our interpretative participation to ‘fill the gaps and resolve the ambiguities’. Relatedly, while the success of frames depends on how credible, logical and explanatory they are, narratives rely on ‘emotional identification and familiar plots rather than on testing or adjudication of truth claims’ (Polletta 1998).
The temporal dimension and sense of movement also distinguishes narrative from discourse and frame (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Roselle 2013, 7). As Ewick and Silbey (1995, 200) argue, the temporal and structural ordering inherent in narratives ‘ensure both “narrative closure” and “narrative causality”: in other words, a statement about how and why the recounted events occurred’. In this sense, narratives are not only descriptive but also evaluative (Brockmeier 2000, 60) and prescriptive. While narratives are studied extensively in fields such as literary criticism, health sciences, social work and psychology, there are only a few studies that are concerned with the influence of narratives on political outcomes.1 In addition to attempting to start filling this gap, with this study, I also hope to respond to the call in the political science literature to enhance our understanding of ideational and discursive political phenomena (Béland and Cox 2010; Berman 2010; Blyth 1997; Rueschemeyer 2006) and to study the interaction between ideas and institutions through discursive constructs (Schmidt 2010). In Chapter 2, I analyse the role historical narratives play in hegemonic power struggles among political parties. In Chapter 3, I trace how economic development narratives affect prospects of democratic practices and institutions.
In Chapter 4, I delve into the narrative resources upon which populist regimes draw. In Chapter 5, I analyse how protesters subvert dominant notions of citizenship through their engagement with dominant narratives, including patriarchal narratives. In Chapter 6, I look at the relationship between political narratives and political regimes, particularly visions of citizenship regimes and nationhood in a global perspective, focusing on the political implications of exclusionary narratives such as the Replacement Theory and on the prospects to counter far-right politics with narratives. As will be discussed further in Chapter 5, this book also responds to the call to bring together state theories and theories of gender and feminism (Adams 2005; Ugur-Cinar 2017). While state theories have so far not made sufficient use of the findings of the feminist literature, feminist theory has not sufficiently incorporated theories of state formation (Adams 2005, 32–3). What is more, as the chapter will try to demonstrate, with the study of gendered narratives, we can go beyond the conceptualisation of patriarchy as solely ‘male domination’ and we can provide a novel approach to patriarchy that exposes its use as a political legitimisation tool.
The empirical focus of the book is primarily Turkey but I also discuss the broader theoretical and empirical implications of the findings. In Chapter 4, I discuss the Turkish case in conjunction with the Austrian and Hungarian cases in the context of populism and, in Chapter 6, I combine my theoretical discussion with illustrative examples particularly focusing on the US, German speaking countries, and France. The Turkish case is useful in tracing continuity and change in the views of collective memory, development and patriarchy of those who hold power and those who challenge the incumbents. Turkey is a case of deep divisions and harsh hegemonic struggles and also a place in which there are actors who are motivated to transcend such cleavages and form a more inclusive, pluralist society against all odds. Narratives provide a useful lens through which to analyse these competing notions and their interaction with the institutional setting in which they operate.
Conceptual and Methodological Framework
Based on the existing definitions of a narrative (e.g. Brockmeier and Harre 1997, 266; Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Roselle 2013, 5; Somers 1994, 616), we can count actors, events, a plot, temporal dimension, a setting and space as key elements of narratives. Sometimes one or more of these elements are fully fleshed out and sometimes only hinted at. Following Andrews (2004), Patterson and Monroe (1998), Polletta (1998), Polletta and Callahan (2017) and Polletta and Chen (2012), among others, I use the terms narrative and story interchangeably. Narrative analysis is concerned with the ways in which perceptions of the world are mediated and transmitted through narratives and aspires to understand how different actors ‘make use of stories to interpret and bolster their arguments, and how they integrate narrative as strategy’ (Groth 2019, 5, 11). As Lueg, Bager and Lundholt (2021, 4) argue, narrative inquiry is both a theoretical and a methodological approach. In this line, the methodology of this book is closely linked to the theoretical approach followed.
The data for this research is derived from texts such as public speeches of political leaders, official statements found in museums, as well as visual texts such as graffiti and posters from protests. To analyse the selected material, I mainly follow a thematic narrative analysis in order to identify and analyse patterns in the data (Riessman 2008). In order to provide a coherent and compelling interpretation, which is grounded in the data (Braun et al. 2019), I follow an iterative process. I first develop initial themes in light of ‘prior and emergent theory’ and then go back and forth between primary data and existing scholarship in an attempt to analyse data and provide novel theoretical insights from the data (Riessman 2008, 54, 66, 74). The data analysis method of this book is thus abductive, as it moves ‘back and forth between theory and empirical data’ (Wodak 2004, 200). As is typical in narrative analysis, the sampling in this study is purposeful and the selection of the texts analysed also depends on how exemplary they are, and on the richness of the data (Ewick and Silbey 2003, 1138; Riessman 2008, 60).
In the process of familiarising myself with the data, I initially went over some exemplary speeches of the leaders, whom I have been following for a decent amount of time now, given my research interests. I read these texts in light of the theoretical background in fields such as feminist theory and collective memory studies. Initial texts included, for example, Erdoğan’s speeches on the Gezi movement, on the 17–25 December 2013 corruption investigations, the presidentialism debate, constitutional referenda, and commemorative events. In addition, ethnographic material from museums and landmark places, old and new, such as brochures and exhibits were also selected for narrative analysis. In the case of Gezi, available graffiti and banners were also included. Once the themes started to emerge and I began to identity certain narrative patterns in the speeches, I utilised quotes from the texts in order to provide illustrative examples that substantiate my argument (Riessman 2008, 55). In addition to thematic analysis that is focused on content, the book also draws on structural analysis to the extent that it looks at how the stories are told, what the specific starting points of stories are, where they end, what is selected and what is left out in the narratives that are told. As the book will demonstrate, such choices are not trivial but instead have important implications in terms of moral judgments and issues of identity. The narrative configuration, such as the selection of the beginning of a story, also makes claims to power and authority and the transformation of actors into characters within a plot imply moral judgment (Freistein and Gadinger 2020, 222; Opperman and Spencer 2018, 275). Accordingly, I pay close attention to the beginning, the ending and sequencing of the stories as well as the implications, hints, inferences, assumptions of the storylines. My analysis is also attentive to the temporality of the storyline. While studies in developmental psychology, for example, have shown us the role temporality plays in individuals’ reconstruction of developmental processes (Demuth and Mey 2015), this book analyses the ways in which temporality is instrumentalised for political ends in the narratives told. In addition to the content and structure of the narrative, the context of the narrative is also significant (Esin 2011, 97). The interactional-performative model (Riessman 1993; Mishler 1995) is attuned to the role of the storyteller as one who tells the story in co-construction with the listener. This approach necessitates attention to the ‘contexts, including the influence of researcher, audience, setting and social circumstances on the constitution and performance of the narrative’ (Esin 2011, 109). While the work in the interactionalperformative model is mostly focused on the immediate audience, like in an interview setting (Mishler 1995), in this book, I focus more on the dialogical character between the narratives and the addressee of these narratives at the collective level. A case in point will be the Gezi protest slogans that engage with the patriarchal narrative of the government and the citizenship model such narratives envision.
Narratives, Power and Culture
As the title suggests, power is a central concept for the book. This is the case because first, in addition to forming the basis of solidarity, consent and coherence of identity (Taylor 1989), narratives play key roles in power struggles (Özyürek 2006; Shohat 1999; Zerubavel 1995) and second, when multiple narratives compete for public meaning (Bridger and Maines 1998), those who are in power, especially for a long time, have the advantage of institutionalising certain stories through resources such as textbooks, commemorations and museums (Wertsch 2004, 50; Hayward 2010). These resources, along with public utterances, TV series, media, landscape design, architecture and archaeology make dominant stories asymmetrically more powerful compared to counterhegemonic ones.2 Political entrepreneurs are also more likely to get their stories heard because of their financial resources and political connections as well as because they are seen as better suited to tell stories than, for example, marginalised groups (Polletta et al. 2011). As such, the book is attentive to understanding how power interacts with narratives in the process of reinforcing political projects and in the struggles for hegemony. Against all odds, narratives can also serve counter movements in creative ways. The discussion of the changing force of certain historical, developmental and patriarchal narratives in Turkey in the last century gives us a chance to delve deeply into how dominant narratives are counteracted and to what effect. As I demonstrate in Chapter 5, even if counter movements do not always get the chance to tell a full-blown alternative story, they can nevertheless destabilise the main tenets of dominant power structures. The dialogical nature of narratives (Bakhtin 2013; Wertsch 2000), discussed further in the respective chapter, is a focal point of the analysis as I try to show how new stories engage with the old ones rather than being told from scratch. In light of the criticism against internally homogenising essentialist uses of the concept of culture (Abu-Lughod 1991; Abu-Lughod 1997; Appadurai 1988; Clifford 1988; among others) and in line with the call for a more dynamic, semiotic and non-essentialist approach to culture (Wedeen 2002), such a dialogical approach helps us steer away from cultural accounts that risk turning the cultural field into a closed one and treating it as a timeless reality. Following the journey of narratives in the Turkish political context maps the cultural terrain while being attentive to power, resistance and dynamism. This helps us avoid an essentialised depiction of the culture– politics nexus. Though narrative analysis, I am thus able to take a set of pictures over Turkey’s recent history and contemporary politics without ossifying the findings in a timeless cultural domain. Beyond the Turkish case, such an analysis also advances our understanding of how tension and coherence, continuity and change play out within the cultural and societal realm through the distinct role narratives play. I want to show that it is through narratives that we bring the cultural into the political repertoire and it is again through narratives that we engage with culture in order to fight political battles.
Narratives of Collective Memory, Economy and Patriarchy
The book focuses particularly on how narratives of economic development, collective memory and gender influence politics while at the same time being influenced by it. These three types of narratives are deeply embedded in the cultural terrain that contains global as well as local elements as I will discuss briefly below and elaborate on in the respective chapters. Gendered narratives are deeply embedded in patriarchy. Economic development narratives are bound by capitalism, particularly neoliberalism, as well as the drive for modernisation. Historical narratives are closely tied to the predominance of nation states and nationalism. We can best understand these three types of narratives in relation to the discussion of broadly conceived master narratives3 or deeply running schematic narratives.4 Somers’ discussion of meta-narratives is particularly useful in this regard. Meta-narratives, or master narratives, refer to narratives in which we are embedded historically and socially (Somers 1994, 619) so deeply that they are difficult to recognise and are often uncritically adopted (Patterson and Monroe 1998, 325). Master narratives ‘permeate the petit narratives of our everyday talk’ (Bamberg 2004, 361) and these are also the narratives that politicians rely on when they speak in narrative form, as will be demonstrated in this book. In addition to, and in conjunction with, global narratives regarding capitalism, progress and the like mentioned by Somers (1994), or security narratives which are discussed by Wibben (2010, 43) as grand narratives, local contexts also provide centres for gravity for deeply embedded unique meta stories. Somers (1994, 630) herself notes that ‘the extent and nature of any given repertoire of narratives available for appropriation is always historically and culturally specific; the particular plots that give meanings to those narratives cannot be determined in advance’. Localising such deeply running narratives, Wertsch (2004, 56) talks about ‘a generalized narrative form’ that ‘underlies a range of specific narratives in a cultural tradition’. Hence, globally and locally embedded narratives play an important role in shaping the parameters of politics as this book will try to demonstrate. Relatedly, when we talk about narratives, we do not simply mean the narration of singular events but we refer to ‘narrative networks’ that provide meaning to particular narratives within this network (Andrews, Kinnvall and Monroe 2015, 142; Somers 1995). Similarly, Polletta and Chen (2012, 495, 501) argue that hegemony operates not by the identical repetition of a single story over and over again but rather by the ‘promotion of stories that thematize familiar oppositions’. As such, in the Turkish case, narratives related to gender, economic development and collective memory are anchored in narrative networks in which they resonate. This is not to say that they evoke the same sentiment across all listeners but they resonate in the sense that they provide intelligibility and common understanding across the community. In Wedeen’s (2002) words, they became the hub of a ‘system of signification’. It is around this understanding that consent and contention are built as will be explicated in the book. Patriarchal stories, which rely on assumed gender and familial roles, normalise hierarchies among the ruler and the ruled. Given the highly hegemonic standing of patriarchal narratives in Turkey and beyond, they can be conceptualised as meta-narratives (Somers 1994) or grand narratives (Wibben 2010). While patriarchal narratives provide the basis of political allegiance, compliance and legitimacy across the political spectrum, they can also sometimes serve to unsettle the political system and question its legitimacy when mobilised in narrative form, which is a point so far left unexplored in the literature. In other words, patriarchal narratives can also be engaged with in multiple ways and some of these engagements can challenge the entire order these narratives represent as will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5. Existing studies on grand narratives of patriarchy mostly focus on individual level stories. For instance, Squire et al. (2014) focuses on sexual narratives of educated young women and their mothers in relation to Turkish modernisation. This book, on the other hand, tries to move the analysis further into the realm of collective political action. To do so, it will trace gendered narratives and the interaction between them in relation to hegemonic struggles, state-citizenship debates and prospects for democratisation. Patterson and Monroe (1998, 325) point at narratives of mastery and progress, including economic development narratives as part of meta-narratives, or grand narratives. Narratives of development play a central role, particularly in countries such as Turkey, which are eager to catch up with more economically developed countries. In fact, the literature on Turkey has pointed at the central role of development and state-led developmentalism (Adaman and Arsel 2012; Keyman and Gümüșçü 2014). Modernity and development have come to mean different things to different groups in the history of the Turkish Republic (Özyürek 2006, 19) ranging from cultural modernity and Westernisation, particularly before the 1980s (Buğra and Savașkan 2014, 30; Kasaba 2008, 2), to visions of modernity based on economic development and industrialisation (Göle 1993, 201) and even full-blown neoliberalism (Cinar and Ugur Cinar 2018, 20) Thus, one needs to account for multiple stories of development that accumulate over time in a dialogical fashion. To that end, Chapter 3 traces the history of changing notions of development in Turkey, observing the implications of such narratives for the political field, particularly for the prospect of and threats against democracy and democratic institutions. It does so by tracing the political speeches of high-ranking Turkish government officials and journalists close to them to show how these people use narratives of economic development as a tool to politically legitimise interventions to liberal democracy. Finally, collective memory, with its strong ties to the nation-building effort is another deeply running narrative field in which we can observe varying narratives competing for hegemony. As Wertsch (2008) argues, collective memory is deep because narrative tools that organise it are largely inaccessible to conscious reflection. To this end, this book takes stock of such varying narratives, always trying to pay attention to how power, through institutions and organisations, interacts with political actors in the context of competition for domination over the memory of the nation. Chapter 2 traces the historical narrative–political identity nexus by focusing on struggles over (re)defining a nation through historical narratives. It concentrates on the Ulus district of Ankara to compare how the secularist and Islamist versions of Turkish nationalism turned this place into an epicentre of hegemonic struggle by writing different historical narratives thorough different museums, ‘pilgrimage’ sites, monuments and ceremonies. Chapter 4 brings together all three types of narratives, namely economic, historical and patriarchal, to show how these stories co-constitute populism and provide legitimacy for it. Using contemporary Turkey, Hungary and Austria as cases studies, it will show how stories of history, development and patriarchy are deployed by populist leaders, Erdoğan (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi: AKP), Orban (Fidesz), and Strache (Freedom Party) to (re)define the people and justify inclusion and exclusion based on historical, economic or patriarchal grounds. A narrative approach to populism allows us to better make sense of how populism is politically constructed and how its appeal is widened and deepened. By approaching populism from this angle, the book also hopes to address another gap in the literature, namely the lack of attention to the relationship between political narratives, particularly historical ones, and populism.5 Chapter 6 demonstrates how the relationship between political narratives and populism plays itself out at the global level and reflects on the potential to use stories in the struggle against authoritarian, exclusionary and monist political movements and political leaders. With this point, we are back to the motivation of this book, mainly providing a well-rounded look at political narratives embedded in their cultural and institutional context. The main purpose of this book is to utilise narrative analysis in order to understand the political. I believe that such a multifaceted and dynamic approach to the topic at hand provides a welcome addition to the literature, hopefully paving the way for more studies to come.
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