In a world of rising tensions between Russia and the United States, the Middle East and Europe, Sunnis and Shiites, Islamism and liberalism, Turkey is at the epicenter. And at the heart of Turkey is its right-wing populist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Since 2002, Erdogan has consolidated his hold on domestic politics while using military and diplomatic means to solidify Turkey as a regional power. His crackdown has been brutal and consistent - scores of journalists arrested, academics officially banned from leaving the country, university deans fired and many of the highest-ranking military officers arrested. In some senses, the nefarious and failed 2016 coup has given Erdogan the license to make good on his repeated promise to bring order and stability under a 'strongman'. Here, leading Turkish expert Soner Cagaptay will look at Erdogan's roots in Turkish history, what he believes in and how he has cemented his rule, as well as what this means for the world. The book will also unpick the 'threats' Erdogan has worked to combat - from the liberal Turks to the Gulen movement, from coup plotters to Kurdish nationalists - all of which have culminated in the crisis of modern Turkey.
The author provides major turning points that have deeply affected not only Erdogan's political success and Turkish modern history but also Turkish foreign policy. One of the major points was political Islam coming to Turkey in the 1970s as a possible pillar against rising communism within the Cold War context, and the marginalization of Imam Hatip graduates, state-created religious schools used by governments as an instrument to control the religion in the public sphere. While religion has been an important element in Erdogan's personality, with the injection of Islam into politics by the 1980 junta, it has become a crucial factor in Turkish politics as well. Other turning points that shaped Erdogan's political life and modern history stated in the book include dissolution of the Turkish right in the 1990s along with the ten percent threshold that was put into effect after the 1980 coup d'état, 1997 soft coup, 2001 financial crisis, and the European Union (EU) accession process. The author explains, for instance, how the ten percent threshold, implemented to block Kurdish nationalist parties from gaining access to parliament, had backfired so unexpectedly and rather acted as an impediment for center-right and center-left parties entering the parliament in the 2002 elections, which resulted in the AKP's getting the majority of the parliamentary seats and the beginning of the AKP governance.
The New Sultan: Erdogan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey
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