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Islamism, Populism, and Turkish Foreign
Policy
This comprehensive volume analyses the phenomena of populism

and Islamism in Turkey under Justice and Development Party (JDP)
rule since 2002, and its impact on the country’s foreign policy. The
authors seek to identify the meanings of ‘populism’ and ‘Islamism’ in
the Turkish context and their relationship to democracy there,
exploring the extent to which they may explain the apparent rise of
authoritarianism and illiberalism under the JDP and especially under
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and address the tensions between
Turkey’s ‘western’ and ‘Muslim’ discourses and the politicization of
history in the ‘new Turkey’. They examine the implications of these
developments for Turkey’s EU accession prospects and its western
alliances, explore the impact they have had on the country’s
approach to the Arab Spring, and consider their relationship to
Turkey’s status as an emerging economy in an economically
globalizing context. The volume also debates whether Turkish
populism is unique to that country or reflects a growing trend in
world politics, including in the west.
This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of
political science and international relations, especially those with a
focus on Turkey. It was originally published as a special issue of the
journal Turkish Studies.
Burak Bilgehan Özpek is Associate Professor in the Department of

Political Science and International Relations at the TOBB University
of Economics and Technology, Turkey. His main research interests
include the de facto states, Kurdish question, contemporary politics
of the Middle East and Turkish foreign policy.
Bill Park is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Defence Studies
Department at King’s College, London, UK. He is on the editorial
board of Mediterranean Politics and the Council of the British
Institute at Ankara (BIAA), and specialises in Turkish foreign policy
and Kurdish issues.
Islamism, Populism, and
Turkish Foreign Policy
Edited by
Burak Bilgehan Özpek and Bill Park
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa

business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks

or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN13: 978-0-367-18448-3
Typeset in MinionPro
by Newgen Publishing UK
Publisher’s Note
The publisher accepts responsibility for any inconsistencies that may
have arisen during the conversion of this book from journal articles
to book chapters, namely the possible inclusion of journal
terminology.
Disclaimer
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their
permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be
grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here
acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions
in future editions of this book.
Contents
Citation Information
Notes on Contributors
1 Introduction: Populism and Islamism in Turkey

Bill Park
2 Turkey’s ‘Western’ or ‘Muslim’ identity and the AKP’s civilizational

discourse
Menderes Çinar
3 Populism and foreign policy in Turkey under the AKP rule

Burak Bilgehan Özpek and Nebahat Tanriverdi Yaşar
4 Dark taints on the looking glass: Whither ‘New Turkey’?

Mustafa A. Sezal and İhsan Sezal
5 Politicization of recent Turkish history: (ab)use of history as a

political discourse in Turkey
Mustafa Serdar Palabiyik
6 Islamism and Turkey’s foreign policy during the Arab Spring

Birol Başkan
7 Neo-developmentalist turn in the global political economy? The

Turkish case
Mustafa Kutlay and Hüseyin Emrah Karaoğuz
Index
Citation Information
The chapters in this book were originally published in the Turkish

Studies, volume 19, issue 2 (April 2018). When citing this material,
please use the original page numbering for each article, as follows:
Chapter 1
Introduction: Populism and Islamism in Turkey
Bill Park
Turkish Studies, volume 19, issue 2 (April 2018) pp. 169–175
Chapter 2
Turkey’s ‘Western’ or ‘Muslim’ identity and the AKP’s civilizational
discourse
Menderes Çinar
Chapter 3
Populism and foreign policy in Turkey under the AKP rule
Burak Bilgehan Özpek and Nebahat Tanriverdi Yaşar
Chapter 4
Dark taints on the looking glass: Whither ‘New Turkey’?
Mustafa A. Sezal and İhsan Sezal
Chapter 5
Politicization of recent Turkish history: (ab)use of history as a
political discourse in Turkey
Mustafa Serdar Palabiyik
Chapter 6
Islamism and Turkey’s foreign policy during the Arab Spring
Birol Başkan
Chapter 7
Neo-developmentalist turn in the global political economy? The
Turkish case
Mustafa Kutlay and Hüseyin Emrah Karaoğuz
For any permission-related enquiries please visit:

www.tandfonline.com/page/help/permissions
Notes on Contributors
Birol Başkan is Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University School of

Foreign Service in Qatar. His research examines the roles religion, religious institutions,
and grassroots religious groups play in creating, maintaining, undermining, and
destroying political order in the Middle East.
Menderes Çınar is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science and
International Relations at Başkent University, Turkey. His main research interests are
comparative Islamism and Turkish politics.
Hüseyin Emrah Karaoğuz is a lecturer in the Department of International Relations at

Kadir Has University, Turkey. His research interests include international and comparative
political economy, political economy of innovation, and political economy of Turkey.
Mustafa Kutlay is a Lecturer in the Department of International Politics at City, University

of London, UK. He is also affiliated with the Conflict Analysis Research Centre (CARC) at
the University of Kent, UK, as a Research Fellow. His research concentrates on
international/comparative political economy, political economy of Europe, Turkish political
economy, and emerging powers.
Burak Bilgehan Özpek is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and
International Relations at the TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Turkey. His
main research interests include the de facto states, Kurdish question, contemporary
politics of the Middle East and Turkish foreign policy.
Mustafa Serdar Palabiyik is Associate Professor of History at TOBB University of

Economics and Technology, Turkey.
Bill Park is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College,
London, UK. He is on the editorial board of Mediterranean Politics and the Council of the
British Institute at Ankara (BIAA), and specialises in Turkish foreign policy and Kurdish
issues.
İhsan Sezal is Professor of Sociology and the Dean of the Faculty of Economics and
Administrative Science at TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Turkey.
Mustafa A. Sezal is a PhD candidate and Lecturer at the University of Groningen, the
Netherlands. His research interests include Turkish Foreign Policy, Critical Security
Studies, Critical Theory, and Political Theory.
Nebahat Tanriverdi Yaşar is a PhD candidate in the Department of International

Relations at Middle East Technical University, Turkey. Her main research interests are on
contemporary politics in the Middle East and North Africa.
1 Introduction
Populism and Islamism in Turkey
Bill Park
Both inside Turkey and beyond, many greeted the election of the
newly formed Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma
Partisi, AKP) single party government in November 2002 with
optimism. It promised a welcome element of stability in the wake of
the succession of fractious and fragile coalitions that it replaced, and
seemed to offer a fresh alternative to the discredited parties and
politicians which the electorate had so emphatically rejected.
Labeling itself as a conservative or Muslim democratic party akin to
Europe’s Christian Democrats, it promised to reform a political and
economic system that had brought the country to its knees during
the national economic crisis of 2000–2001. The new government
moved quickly to assure its European partners that it would prioritize
EU accession, encouraged a settlement of the Cyprus dispute, and
appeared ready to address Turkey’s Kurdish issue as a political rather
than a security problem that required an inclusive and conciliatory
approach. The AKP’s electoral success also encouraged those who
believed that, if Turkish democracy was ever to be consolidated, a
way would have to be found to bring the country’s devout masses in
the more peripheral provinces more fully into the political system. In
and of itself, the AKP’s electoral success suggested a challenge to
the hold of the Kemalist, secular, and largely urban elite over the
country’s economy, its institutions, and its intellectual and cultural
life.
A decade and a half later, the AKP’s political domination of
Turkey’s political life seems complete. It has won a succession of
national and local elections, referenda and, in 2014, its first direct
presidential election, often managing to attract around 50% or more
of the vote, compared with the 34% it achieved in 2002. The secular
elite’s hold over the country’s bureaucracy, military, police, judiciary,
universities and media has been severely weakened, so much so
that it could be argued that the AKP has indeed succeeded in
reconnecting the Turkish state with its hitherto largely alienated
masses. The military appears to have been neutered as a domestic
political actor – at least for the time being – and to have lost the
capacity, legitimacy or even inclination to intervene in the country’s
political processes or set its national security agenda.
Yet there has been no consolidation of Turkish democracy. In fact,
recent years have witnessed an unambiguous reversal of the
country’s political pluralism, intellectual and media diversity,
attachment to the rule of law and the autonomy of institutions.
Instead there has been centralization of power, growing
authoritarianism, a coarsening of the government’s rhetoric, and a
purge of all kinds of political opposition – including the elected
leadership of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party and many of
its locally elected officials, adherents of the Islamic preacher
Fethullah Gülen, liberal, leftist and Kemalist journalists and
academics, including members of the ‘Academics for Peace’ group,
and allegedly pro-Western military officers and other bureaucrats.
Constitutional amendments have increased the power of the
presidency at the expense of the National Assembly, and the war
between the state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party has resumed
and intensified. There has been a crackdown on social media and
civil society groups. Abroad, Turkey’s relations with the European
Union (EU) and some its leading member states are as bad as they
have ever been, or worse, as is its relationship with the United
States. Nor can it be said that Turkey’s regional relationships have
improved. Its military incursions into neighboring Iraq and Syria
have been condemned by the governments of those countries, and
Ankara’s relationships with Israel, Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and
most other Gulf states, Iran, Greece, the Palestinian Authority and
the Kurdistan Regional Government have been volatile and
sometimes dire.
So, what went wrong? The articles in this special issue of Turkish
Studies seek to address that question, albeit largely indirectly. They
each explore the impact of populism and Islamism on both the AKP’s
approach to governance and on its political fortunes. The
contributions from Özpek and Tanrıverdi-Yasar, Sezal and Sezal, and
Başkan highlight elements of continuity in the AKP’s approach from
the outset. For Özpek and Yasar, the AKP exploited the tension
between secularism and democracy in Turkey by deploying both
populism and Islamism to reflect and intensify anti-elitist sentiment
in the country that justified the government’s attacks on the secular
establishment, notably the military. Populism has been the main
driving force throughout the AKP’s period in office, however, which
helps explain some of the fluctuations and turnabouts in government
policies, such as the shift from support for to opposition against the
EU and the West more generally. Eroding the power of the Kemalist
establishment was presented as capturing the country and the state
for the ‘real’ people of Turkey, the devout conservatives that formed
the AKP’s electoral support base. The EU accession project was
especially helpful to the campaign to marginalize the military’s role in
Turkey’s domestic politics. However, the destruction of the Kemalist
order has not been accompanied by the construction of a political
system based on constitutional checks and balances, autonomous
institutions, the rule of law, or a vibrant civil society and media.
Thus, the AKP government can now act with few constraints.
Sezal and Sezal argue that Islamist ideology and objectives have
constituted a central part of the AKP mindset from its inception, and
that it has been applied in both domestic politics and foreign policy.
Their coverage of the roots of the AKP’s Islamic thought argues that
in essence, Islamism stresses the unitarian, communal and
civilizational character of Islam, and enabled the AKP leadership to
stress the alien and ‘foreign’ nature of the Kemalist elite, the
individualistic and materialist civilization of the West and its
corrupting impact on Turkey’s liberals and secularists, and the anti-
populist leadership in the Middle East. They note, however, that the
AKP period can be presented as a chronology, in which
circumstances, opportunities and political victories offered the AKP
ever more scope to stress its civilizational program, until it reached
its current stage, in which liberals, Gülenists, Kemalists, Kurds and
adherents of Shi’ism can all be represented as enemies of true Islam
and of the ‘real’ people of Turkey.
Başkan’s piece centers on the thinking of former foreign minister
and prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, and as such seeks to explain
Turkey’s approach to foreign policy under the AKP. For him, the
Middle East or perhaps the entire Muslim world constitutes a
‘civilization’ which had fallen from grace as a consequence of the
legacy of imperialism, which left behind artificial borders, conflicted
identities and culturally alienated leaderships – including Turkey’s of
course – which left the region prey to foreign ideas and impurities.
Hence the Arab Spring’s popular revolts against the existing order. As
with AKP supporters in Turkey, the ‘people’ should overthrow the
region’s unrepresentative regimes and restore their civilizational
integrity. Such thinking provided the foundations for ‘neo-
Ottomanism’ in Turkish foreign policy, in which the region should be
encouraged to return to a condition that approximated those of
Ottoman times, when, Davutoğlu argued, peoples could freely
interact culturally, economically and politically, thereby reintegrating
a region that had been artificially fragmented. Turkey’s Kemalist
order had been part of a wider and alien regional order which the
AKP and the Arab Spring movements promised to replace with a
‘normality’ in which the ‘people’ would be paramount.
Cinar’s piece perhaps takes the Sezals’ chronological observations
a little further, in that it detects a shift on the part of the AKP from a
moderate and democratic Islam towards a more populist vote
maximization strategy and a progressive erosion of democracy. In
other words, Cinar posits that there has been a degree of
transformation over time in the AKP’s approach to government.
According to this argument, the AKP was as yet ideologically
unformed when it first came to power, and it may have initially and
genuinely believed that it could reconcile Islam and democracy. It
was encouraged in this by its Western friends in the wake of the
9/11 attack, who willed Turkey to play that role and serve as a
‘model’ for the Islamic world as a whole. However, the AKP
leadership did not really understand or internalize Western
democratic norms. Furthermore, as time passed, the AKP’s need to
hold on to power, the lack of progress with EU accession, and the
Arab Spring – which brought with it serious differences of
perspective with its Western allies – led the AKP to place increased
emphasis on its Islamic roots and those of its voters. Furthermore,
EU inspired domestic reforms created resistance at home which
could threaten the AKP’s hold on power, as too might any serious
attempt to address the Cyprus or Kurdish problems. In line with the
contributions discussed above, Cinar notes how the AKP adopted an
attachment to what it saw as an Islamic ‘authenticity,’ defined in
large measure as the binary opposite to Turkey’s Westernizing
Kemalist elite. It applied this logic to the Middle East as well, of
which he argues the AKP leadership had little more understanding
than it did of Western democracy. Hence its support for what it saw
as the authentic Islamic identity politics that fueled popular revolts
throughout the region. In this evolution, the AKP moved towards a
more overtly held conviction that democracy in the Western sense is
a form of colonialism. ‘Real’ democracy was Islamic democracy, as
represented by the AKP, in which the people held sway.
Cinar’s paper raises the important question of whether those who
welcomed the AKP’s emergence were guilty of a poor understanding
of what the party stood for, or whether it is the AKP that shifted
from its initial stance towards the more anti-Western, Islamist and
authoritarian flavor it exhibits today. Like Cinar’s contribution,
Palabıyık’s paper on the politicization of Turkish history also detects a
shift in around 2010. He argues that since that date government
circles have embarked on an intensified attempt to replace
Kemalism’s ‘official’ history with a more ‘nativist,’ neo-Ottoman and
Islamist narrative. In this story, the pre-Republic Committee of Union
and Progress, and its ideological descendent since the inception of
the Republic, the Republican People’s Party, are deemed guilty for
such ills as the overthrow of Abdulhamit II, the Armenian
‘relocation,’ the loss of Aegean and other territories in the Lausanne
Treaty, imposed secularism, and alienating reforms such as the
abolition of the Caliphate, the banning of the Arabic call to prayer,
and the adoption of alphabet reform. The Republican elite’s
Europhile Westernizing ‘obsession’ is also seen as part of this
syndrome. In Palabıyık’s view, the AKP’s adoption of a variant of the
Turkish-Islamic synthesis is intended to reverse or correct these
mistakes, and has led to developments such as the reintroduction of
Ottoman Turkish into the school curricula, a general re-Islamification
of Turkish society, and a revisionist approach in foreign policy. Given
Palabıyık’s observation that this process is not aimed at a pluralized
historical debate but at the replacement of one official narrative with
another, it might be worth asking whether the continuities here are
greater than the discontinuities. The shoe is on the other foot for
sure, but Turkey seems to remain as wedded today to the imposition
of top-down official histories, and to the removal of constraints on
power, as it was for so much of the pre-AKP Republican period.
Neither Cinar nor Palabıyık – nor the other contributions in this
volume – draw attention to the change in the AKP itself after it
assumed power. The AKP was formed by a number of younger exiles
from Necemettin Erbakan’s Welfare Party, such as Abdullah Gül and
Bülent Arinç. It also attracted more liberal conservatives and
technocratic figures whose Islamism was worn more lightly and
whose appreciation of democracy was deeper, such as Yaşar Yakis,
the AKP government’s first foreign minister. These founding fathers,
and the more liberal factions – including Davutoğlu – have long since
been marginalized, have left the party, or have even been expelled.
Today’s AKP has more and more come to reflect the personality,
mindset and ambitions of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has
surrounded himself with family members, business associates and
acolytes. The adoption of a more presidential constitution, and the
state of emergency that has been in force since the failed July 2016
coup, have further concentrated power into Erdoğan’s hands. It is
worth asking whether the AKP in its initial formulation would have
evolved in quite the way it has if Erdoğan had not been able to take
over the reins of both the party and the government. This leads to a
concomitant question – to what extent might any evolution of the
AKP towards Islamism, populism and authoritarianism, be explained
by Erdoğan’s rise as by any foundational character of the party as a
whole?
A disturbing aspect of Turkey’s slide towards a more
authoritarian, coarse, illiberal and, as this volume argues, Islamist
and populist political formulation is that the party and its leader
continue to attract enviable levels of electoral support. This is surely
explained in large measure by the economic successes of the AKP
era, at least from the perspective of its support base. Turkey’s
economic growth figures and the modernization of its infrastructure
have been remarkable. Ordinary Turks now enjoy access to material
goods, health care, education, decent housing and leisure that would
have been unimaginable to them just a couple of decades ago. The
AKP government, largely correctly, gets credit for this transformation
in the lives of the ordinary citizens of Turkey. However, as Kutlay and
Karaoğuz point out, there have been deficiencies too in the country’s
economic management. In their fine-grained piece, they scrutinize
the AKP government’s endeavors to push through a neo-
developmental state driven by improvement in the technological and
value-added profile of the Turkish economy. They note that
autonomous and meritocratic bureaucracy, governmental credibility,
transparency and the free flow of information, are among the
requirements and factors that enable the emergence of such a
system. Research and development and resource allocation should
be free of government interference and instead based on evidence
and objective assessment.
The authors note that this has not been Turkey’s experience
under the AKP. They trace the intense and often arbitrary political
interference in the personnel and the work of TÜBITAK, Turkey’s
scientific and research council, which has led to a number of high
profile resignations from its board; the absence of objective
performance evaluation; duplication of effort and lack of
coordination; poor transparency and other weaknesses that inhibit
Turkey’s shift from a medium-technology, low value-added economy
to a technologically advanced and innovative model such as that
provide by South Korea. Furthermore, the so-called ‘Anatolian Tiger’
companies, that form much of the business community’s AKP
support base, are generally concentrated in the low value-added
sectors such as construction, yet have been disproportionately
favored with government contracts. For all its apparent successes,
the AKP’s economic management might serve to confine Turkey to
the ranks of middle technology economies that never quite manage
to take off. Along with other aspects of poor economic management,
this raises interesting questions about the future electoral fortunes of
the AKP. Is its politicized approach to economic management
sustainable over the longer term?
In retrospect, we can perhaps recognize that the populism that
this collection of papers identifies and explains is an obvious tool for
an anti-establishment party such as the AKP to have adopted. The
unrepresentative, elitist, and top-down nature of Kemalism was
systemic and inevitably alienating for many of Turkey’s marginalized
and more ‘nativist’ citizens. Given Turkish society and culture, and
the very roots of the AKP itself, it is also clear that Islamism would
be married to populism in the challenge to the existing order. The
relative absence in Turkey of a deeply rooted democratic culture, of
autonomous institutions, the rule of law and of a vibrant civil society,
have surely helped ease the AKP’s path, and certainly that of
Erdoğan, and may also have served to leave Turkey hardly better
placed, or perhaps worse off, than was the case in 2002.
Yet the triumph of Donald Trump in the United States, the
successful Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, and the emergence of
anti-establishment parties on both the left and the right throughout
the democratic world, demonstrate that mass popular alienation
from and hostility towards ruling elites is hardly a purely Turkish
phenomenon. In a complex, globalized and interconnected world,
such populist movements might yet become more commonplace still.
It is surely the case that the depth of American and Western
European democratic culture and the strength of their political
institutions will ensure a more robust defense of the existing order
than what we have witnessed in the Turkish case. However, we are
yet to see quite where this explosion of populism throughout the
democratic world will lead, and what might be the consequences if it
is resisted. What if, say, Trump is impeached or otherwise politically
neutered by a rule-bound constitutional order characterized by intact
checks and balances, or the Brexit vote remains unimplemented by a
technocratic political and administrative elite who so universally
opposed it in the first place?
Erdoğan, and the party that he leads, are undoubtedly very
Turkish phenomena, and this volume helps us to better understand
how Turkey has reached its present juncture. But populism,
‘nativism’ and the construction of alternative national narratives have
a much wider currency. In that sense, this volume might also be
useful for those readers who ponder the plight of democracy itself.
Erdoğan might yet prove to be a forerunner of a populist wave that
sweeps – and in some instances even sweeps away – the world’s
more democratic political systems. Where it might lead, and whether
he and others like him will be able to ride the wave, are vital
questions that await us. This collection of papers might help us think
through such questions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Bill Park served as a Senior Lecturer in the Defence Studies
Department at King’s College, London. He is currently a visiting
research fellow at King’s College, University of London, and visiting
scholar at TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Ankara.
2 Turkey’s ‘Western’ or ‘Muslim’ identity and
the AKP’s civilizational discourse
Menderes Çinar
ABSTRACT
This paper reviews the evolution of the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP)’s
civilizational outlook vis-à-vis the West as a discursive instrument that justified its
Muslim democracy practices as well as its nativist authoritarian practices. The
former practice entails that the AKP appear as a Muslim democratic political force,
reconciling Islam and democracy, falsifying the Orientalist essentialism prevalent in
the West and resolving the crisis in Turkey’s Western identity. After relieving the
secular establishment of its guardianship roles in 2010/2011, the AKP’s nativist
practices have aimed at redefining Turkey as a Muslim nation by using a
civilizational discourse. As such, the AKP’s nativism was characterized by an
attempt at resetting the legitimate parameters of Turkish politics to reject the
validity of the universal norms of democracy and the legitimacy of their domestic
and international proponents. This naturally entailed a populist anti-establishment
stance in foreign as well as domestic policy realms.
Introduction: the AKP from Muslim democracy

to Muslim nationalism
Established in 2001 by the younger generation of the Islamist
National Outlook Movement (Milli Görüş Hareketi), Turkey’s Justice
and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) won
successive general elections since 2002 (with the exception of one in
June 2015) with overwhelming majorities and has achieved an ever-
deepening grip on power. In Turkish political history before the AKP,
no political party could govern for more than a decade without
having to share power with the military-led secular establishment.1
The AKP broke that cycle.
Throughout its rule, the AKP has given two diametrically opposing
signals regarding its adopted position on Muslim democracy: during
the first period, which roughly lasted until 2010/2011,2 the AKP
represented a gradually fading hope for a genuinely moderate
Muslim political force, advocating a non-authoritarian practice of
secularism, furthering Turkey’s alignment with the political norms of
the European Union and pursuing a pro-Western foreign policy while
maintaining an Islam-sensitive identity. At least since 2011 elections,
however, the AKP has turned away from further democratization and
undermined the existing electoral democracy in Turkey.3 It has
adopted a populist vote-maximization strategy that does not make
room for other gray shades in the socio-political realm. It has
dismissed critics and opponents by disqualifying them as self-
interested, ill-intended, illegitimate, unnecessary, redundant and
manipulative. This was accompanied by a unilateralist, imposing,
moralistic and combative political style that denigrated, if not
interfered with, secular lifestyles.
In so doing, the AKP has employed a civilizational discourse that
aimed to redefine Turkey as a ‘Muslim nation’4 that is supposedly
freed from the contaminating [sic] effects of the hundreds of years
of Westernization. This project reproduced the basic tenets of
populist nativism in domestic and foreign policy realms.5 In fact, the
AKP has portrayed itself and its constituents as the one and only
‘native and national’ (yerli ve milli) political force. It has categorized
all the rest of the political classes and their constituents as ‘non-
native’ by virtue of the allegedly ‘alien’ Western paradigms they
upheld. These non-natives, in the AKP’s civilizational discourse,
essentially represented the Islamophobic, Eurocentric, Orientalist,
elitist and tutelary threats to the ‘independence and democracy’ that
the AKP claimed to vanguard. Thereby, the AKP made adherence to
their constructed concept of ‘our civilization’ a precondition to being
a full member of the political community and, in that sense, a
‘democrat’ in Turkey. As such, the AKP’s populist nativism provided it
with a pretext to reject the legitimacy of identity and interest
differences, and power-sharing with them. It has also signified a lack
of commitment to universal democratic norms such as pluralism,
individual rights, freedom of expression, tolerance and compromise.
The AKP, for example, has shirked away from transparency and
accountability by instructing the judiciary to serve the ‘national
interest.’6 It has moreover shown a very strong resolve to
monopolize power by practically rejecting the results of the June
2015 elections, which dictated power-sharing in a coalition
government,7 and by introducing a presidential system that vests all
powers in the seat of the presidency.
The AKP’s populist, nativist, civilizational discourse involves a
significant foreign policy dimension geared to redefine Turkey’s
international identity.8 An ever-increasing dose of anti-Westernism,
denouncing the EU/West for undermining the alleged rise of Turkey
under the AKP rule9 as well as the outright rejection of the EU
Progress Reports, calling for an inclusive and pluralistic democracy
where all citizens felt represented10 have been natural companions to
the AKP’s populist nativist ‘Muslim nation’ project. This was coupled
with an Islamist foreign policy discourse and practice aiming at
underlining Turkey’s new ‘Muslim’ identity by challenging Western
hegemony in international affairs.
In the following sections, this paper reviews the evolution of the
AKP’s civilizational outlook vis-à-vis the West as a discursive
instrument justifying its Muslim democracy practices as well as its
nativist authoritarian practices. To provide a background, the paper
starts with an overview of the nature of Turkish Westernism as a
case of controlled and limited Westernization. It then turns to the
Islamist perspective on Turkey’s Western orientation to reveal why
and how this orientation had become a window of opportunity for
them in their engagement with Turkey’s pro-Western secular
establishment. In the last section, it demonstrates how the West and
Turkey’s Western-oriented values have become sources of insecurity
and constraint for the AKP, helping it promote its anti-Westernist and
illiberal politics. The paper argues that the Arab Spring that brought
Islamists to power in the Middle East, coupled with the AKP’s vague
political identity and power-driven opportunism, has facilitated the
degeneration of the AKP’s civilizational outlook into a populist
nativism, portraying the Western-rooted universal political norms and
their domestic and international proponents as fundamental threats
to Muslim identity and ‘democracy.’11
Turkish Westernism: limits, crisis and

opportunities
The founders of the modern Turkish Republic were products of a
century-long Ottoman modernization. However, unlike the Ottoman
modernized/modernizing bureaucrats, whose main concern was
arresting the Ottoman decline/disintegration by reorganizing the
state on the basis of European models, the founders of the Republic
approached the Western civilization from ‘the position of a nation,
which claimed equality with other European nations.’12 The founder
of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was ‘concerned with
making Turkey a full and equal member of Western community of
nations and his nation-state program was aimed at this goal.’13 This
project inevitably entailed the construction of the Turkish nation as a
Western nation. Henceforth, the logic of catching up with the West
has been an integral part of the modern Turkish national identity.14
The Republican nationalism, in other words, did not entail a project
for restoring or retaining the traditional culture, but a top-down
construction of the Turkish identity. This was probably not a matter
of choice for two reasons. First, the pioneers of Turkish nationalism
were the already Westernized intelligentsia, isolated within the ranks
of the modernizing state, and not those who might be expected to
want to preserve ‘their’ culture, that is the intellectuals originating in
the populace.15 Second, the choice for a Westernist identity had also
to do with the security concerns of the founding elite. Having
observed the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire by the Great
European Powers, who formally recognized the territorial integrity of
the Empire as a member of the European state system, the founders
of the Republic thought that winning formal international recognition
for the newly established republic was not really enough for its
survival. Achievement of full sovereignty and survival as an
independent nation, the founders believed, necessitated equal
recognition and respect by European powers that Turks are no less
civilized than Europeans.16
Turkey’s Westernization/Westernism, however, entailed neither a
consistently pro-Western foreign policy nor a full commitment to all
aspects of Western modernity in its modernization. Until the end of
World War II, the young Republic under the Westernizing single-
party regime pursued an isolationist, neutral foreign policy line, but
then the West itself was not synonymous with liberal democracy.17
The end of the War signified the defeat of Western totalitarianism as
well as the emergence of the West as the democratic front in the
bloc politics of the Cold War. Consequently, the contours of Turkey’s
Western orientation in domestic and international affairs have
become clearer. During the Cold War, Turkey chose to side with the
West, joined the Council of Europe (1950) and the NATO alliance
(1952), signed the Association Agreement with the EEC (1963) and
stayed ‘Western’ as long as the West was defined in anti-communist,
anti-Soviet Union terms. Turkey’s decision to end the single-party
regime (1946) and the first ever transfer of power through free and
fair elections (1950) were at least partially seen as steps to qualify
for being in the Western bloc.18 However, a statist/tutelary
understanding of Westernization, subordinating citizen to the state,
suspecting autonomous dynamics originating in society, taking
diversity and social pluralism as obstacles to the emergence of the
modern state, and thereby setting limits to Turkey’s Westernization
were also part of Turkish Westernism.19
The end of Cold War rendered Turkey’s statist/tutelary or
controlled Westernization difficult to maintain. With the erosion of
blocs, anti-communism was no longer as much relevant to Western
identity as it used to be. The global rise of democracy, human rights,
neoliberal market economy and identity politics posed challenges to
Turkey’s statist tutelary Westernization that needed to be revised, if
Turkey was to remain Western. Moreover, regions from Central Asia
to the Balkans and the Middle East were opened up and some of the
ex-Soviet Republics in the Central and Eastern Europe were put on a
rapid track for integration with the EU. In the meantime, the
sluggish process of Turkey’s full membership in the EC, a flare-up of
Kurdish demands for cultural rights and the rise of Islamism further
exacerbated Turkey’s national identity problems in the aftermath of
the Cold War.
Although a redefinition in Turkey’s Westernism was due, centrist
political traditions that dominated politics in the 1990s failed to
update their policies to cope with new challenges and Turkey ended
up ‘being a “headache zone country’ whose identity still lack clarity.20
Only for a brief period, under the leadership of Turgut Özal (first as
Prime Minister, then as President between 1983 and 1993) Turkey
seemed to have generated a semblance of a more liberal-looking
‘Western’ identity in accordance with the changing circumstances.
Özal had broken some taboos regarding Turkey’s official secular and
national identity, and thereby softened their rigidity. For example, he
introduced the possibility of a reconciliation of Islam and
modernity/secularism, and Kurdish identity and nationalism. But, as
in other areas of Özal’s ‘reformism,’ this was done more in the form
of undermining the ‘old’ identity via by-passing the existing
structures, institutions and norms without generating new ones. In
other words, Özal introduced important changes but he did not
establish a new rule-based infrastructure, present a new value
system and thereby clarify Turkey’s ‘Western’ identity.21
With these shortcomings, Özalian liberalism was an ‘anarchic’
one, opening the way for the rise of anti-Western Islamism.22 He saw
the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the newly
independent ex-Soviet Republics as an opportunity to pursue an
active foreign policy. Despite being referred to as Neo-Ottomanist for
his references to glorious Ottoman/Islamic past in explaining
Turkey’s international standing,23 Özal’s foreign policy activism aimed
at demonstrating Turkey’s geopolitical importance and vitality to
Western interests.24 He was, in this respect, Western oriented and
took foreign policy activism in the Middle East and Central Asia as
complementary activities, not as alternatives, to the Western-
oriented focus. On the contrary, Özal believed that Turkey’s vitality
stemmed from its capacity to spread European ideas and institutions
in its neighborhood. This was complemented by a bridge metaphor
in defining Turkey’s identity. Accordingly, Turkey was a bridge
between Asia and Europe, belonging to both but mostly carrying
Western values because of centuries of Western orientation. In
effect, the bridge metaphor meant a settlement for liminality, an
ambiguous and disoriented identity.25
The gap between Turkey’s ‘Western’ identity and political
practices/system has increased throughout the 1990s. This was best
illustrated in the decline of Turkey’s pro-Western centrist tradition
represented by center-right political parties; the rise of the Islamist
Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP) as a major coalition partner; and
the secular bloc’s reaction to it in the latter half of the 1990s.
Defined as ‘a quest for a new paradigm that includes rejection of
Western civilization and the secular nationalist identity in favour of
an Islamic identity and civilization,’26 the rise of Islamism to power
had triggered Turkey’s military-led secular establishment to embark
on restoring Turkey’s pro-Western state orientation which entailed a
heavy-handed military/state crackdown on Islamic politics and what
it stood for. Islamic identity was disqualified from enjoying the
benefits of universal human rights and democracy on the basis of its
failure to meet the standards of Turkey’s official modernism and
secularism.27 In the process, Islamist parties were closed, Islamist
political leaders were banned from political activity and the life-
sphere of Islamic identity was restricted.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Turkey’s statist
Western identity was visibly strained and its internal contradictions
were crystallized in the top-down attempt to protect pro-Western
secular orientation. Turkey’s professed commitment to
Westernization at the beginning of Republic was still unbroken
though: West was still a reference point and an ultimate target in
terms of Western-rooted universal norms like human rights,
individual autonomy, and democracy floating around. Moreover,
Western world and Western norms provided an
opportunity/constraint structure for its political actors. Even the
military’s semi-coup on 28 February 1997 to bring down Refah-led
coalition government was justified by a concern to maintain Turkey’s
Western orientation and save Turkish democracy from being
trampled by Islamic radicalism. This ‘argumentative rationality’ took
the validity of European norms for granted.28 Towards the end of the
late 1990s, Mesut Yılmaz, Özal’s successor as the leader of
Motherland Party and Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister
between 1999 and 2002, embraced Turkey’s Westernization project
to expand the restricted political sphere of tutelary democracy, to
show some positive political performance and to claim leadership of
the Turkish center right. Although culminated in the granting of
candidate status in 1999, Yılmaz’s Europeanization bid was perhaps
too late and too little because he, along with other centrist political
leaders, was sent to oblivion by the electorate in Turkey’s landmark
2002 elections, marking the beginning of the predominance of an
entirely new political creature: the Islam-sensitive AKP.
Islamist discovery of democracy and contra-

Westernism
The issues related to the West and Westernization have been the
main ‘catalyst for Islamist identity formation, public discourse and
policies,’29 and perhaps more so than the questions about
constructing an Islamic alternative in modern life. Islamist attempt at
dealing with Western modernity and Turkish Westernization has
therefore been centered on a rejectionist and negativist discourse
aiming at purifying the society from the ‘contaminating’ effects of
Westernization and challenging the Western dominance in world
politics. Underlying this was a dichotomic worldview, narrating
history as a struggle between two essentially different and inherently
incompatible civilizations: West and Islam. The Western civilization,
the Islamist discourse claims, is morally degenerate, materialist and
imperialist due to its secular character, which causes it to reduce
everything to ‘might’ and therefore fails to produce a just society.
Turkey’s Westernization since the Tanzimat era (1839–1876) during
the Ottoman Empire, Islamists argued, has been the work of an
alienated elite, disconnected from the real culture and values of their
own Muslim society. Acting as internal colonizers, this Westernizing
elite betrayed ‘our’ civilization, culture and history by imitating and
imposing an alien culture/civilization on the Muslims. This betrayal
has been the main cause of a long list of ailments of Turkey that
include disintegration of the Empire, Turkey’s underdevelopment, its
moral degeneration, its Kurdish issue, its unjust society and cultural
impoverishment. Restoring the allegedly original Islamic identity at
the levels of state and society has therefore represented a panacea.
The Turkish Islamists attitude towards the West and the EU has
begun to change qualitatively in the latter part of the 1990s, when
the above-mentioned military-led secularist crackdown was still in
progress. The campaign to undermine Islamists has not only
revealed the defects of Turkey’s illiberal democracy but also the
weaknesses of the Islamists’ equally illiberal dichotomic worldview.
With its mutually exclusive categories, absolutist and exclusionary
discourses, poor respect for individual autonomy and pluralism,
Islamism as represented by the RP could not really enjoy a strong
democratic legitimacy to stand up against Turkey’s all-powerful
secular establishment. The Islamists’ poor understanding and
acceptance of democracy, in other words, hindered their ability to
engage with the secular establishment and challenge the
authoritarian practices of secularism.
By the end of the 1990s, and after their devastating defeat by the
secular establishment, the Islamists seemed to have finally
developed an appreciation for the value of a true democracy on par
with Western democracies.30 The Islamist criticism of Turkey’s
authoritarian practice of secularism and defective democracy started
to uphold the universal human rights and democracy discourse,31
calling for a liberal practice of secularism rather than any categorical
rejection of it. The EU –as the land of religious freedoms-- was
pointed at as the best antidote to Turkey’s secularism that
disparaged Turkey’s Muslim’s and excluded them from the enjoyment
of expressing their religion in public life. Hence, the previous
portrayal of the EU as a Christian Club was dropped. As such, the
new Islamist criticism of the late 1990s seemed to have embraced
the Western liberal norms and deployed them against the
statist/tutelary Westernizing regime, responsible for the authoritarian
practices of secularism. The founding father of the National Outlook
Movement, Necmettin Erbakan, expressed the nature of this change
of heart as follows: ‘Now we have become Westernists. We want
secularism as it is implemented in the West. We became pro-
Western because we do not want Turkey to go back to a repressive
regime.’32 In so doing, however, Islamists appeared to be concerned
more with the benefits of ‘being in Europe’ than the nature and
meaning of ‘being/becoming part of Europe’ and the problems or
issues it would pose to their ‘Islamist’ identity.33 This unthoughtful
and purely instrumentalist perception of the vitality of European
democracy, which was without any self-reflection and self-criticism,
reduced the credibility of Turkish Islamists’ so-called sympathy for
the EU in the 1990s. That is why the message of this new-found
affinity with the EU ideals was lost on the already skeptical secular
bloc.
The distinctiveness of the AKP’s European

vocation and beyond
The AKP, composed of a younger generation of the Islamist National
Outlook Movement, used Western-rooted norms in a more credible
and effective way. First, the AKP, from inception disassociated itself
from the Islamist tradition and adopted a Conservative Democratic
identity. Arguably, this new identity indicated a willingness to
internalize international norms of human rights, democracy and rule
of law as universal values while remaining committed to conservative
Islamic roots.34 Second, unlike its predecessors, the AKP was able to
demonstrate some commitment to European political norms by
embarking on a rapid and intensive reform program to fulfill the EU
requirements immediately after being elected to office in 2002.
Further aligning Turkey with European norms, this reformist drive
enabled Turkey to meet ‘sufficiently’ with the Copenhagen Criteria
and start accession negotiations with the EU in 2005. Perhaps more
significantly, the AKP leaders pledged that they will rename the
Copenhagen Criteria the Ankara Criteria and continue with the
reform process even if the EU failed to complete accession
negotiations or if the negotiations stalled. The AKP, thereby, claimed
a substantive commitment to liberal democratic norms of the EU and
generated hope for a fully fledged democracy in Turkey.
With this, the AKP seemed to have taken over the Republican
task of reaching the level of contemporary (Western) civilizations
from the hands of Turkey’s increasingly conservative secular elites.
More importantly, the AKP represented the hope for a possible and
final resolution of the crisis of Turkey’s Western identity. After all
these years of limited Westernization, Turkey seemed to have
produced a political force, exhibiting a greater understanding and
acceptance of democracy than both the pro-Western centrist political
traditions and their anti-Western Islamist opponents. Coupled with
its willingness and capacity to democratic reform, the AKP was
euphemistically credited for representing the real possibility of a
liberal secular democracy in a Muslim majority country. And, as such,
the AKP assumed a very high international significance via its
falsification of the Orientalist denial of democracy in Muslim
countries and the concomitant Huntingtonian claim that Turkey is a
‘torn country’ between the Islamic and Westernized sectors.35
Moreover, by virtue of representing the possibility of a Muslim
democracy reconciling Islam and democracy, a much needed and
very rare commodity especially in the aftermath of the 9/11, the AKP
has also generated a ‘strategic value’ and started to become a ‘soft
power,’ inspiring all those who want more democracy and freedom in
the rest of the Muslim world.
Still, the ‘strategic value’ the AKP created for Turkey rested on a
quite specific emphasis on the AKP’s (and by extension Turkey’s)
Muslim identity married with European values. The emphasis on the
AKP’s Muslim identity in turn facilitated the maintenance of a
‘civilizational outlook’ as an element of Islamism. The AKP thereby
defined Turkey as a member of a different civilization and portrayed
Turkey’s EU membership as meeting or reconciliation of civilizations.
Turkey’s membership to another civilization was reaffirmed later on
by the United Nations’ Alliance of Civilizations Initiative launched in
2005 by Spain and Turkey as the leading representatives of two
distinct civilizations. Although it heightened the role of Muslimhood
in defining Turkish identity, the categorization of Turkey as a
member of another civilization did not matter, or mattered only
positively for the purposes of making a case for a Muslim democracy
as long as the AKP cooperated with the West, acknowledged the
universal validity of Western-rooted liberal norms and values and
committed itself to them. This is so because commitment to
Western-rooted universal values, while claiming a distinct
civilizational identity, signified only an act of inculturation,
incorporating ‘Western’ values and norms as part of ‘our own’
civilization as well.
After Ahmet Davutoğlu was appointed as the Minister of Foreign
Affairs in 2009, the categorization of Turkey as a member of another
civilization had shifted the sense of Turkey’s integration with the EU
from ‘joining’ to the ‘acceptance’ and ‘respect’ of Turkey by the
European civilization. Davutoğlu believed that ‘[t]he uniformist
character of Western civilization is perhaps the most significant
problem of our age.’36 For him, Western civilization tolerates
pluralism ‘only if it serves [its own] monopoly of supreme civilization
which aim to destroy and peripheralize the authentic cultures and
civilizations.’37 Turkey’s EU membership could only mean Europe’s
agreement to a reconsideration and revision of its norms and values
as a result of a genuine civilizational interaction on equal terms. With
this, the normative superiority of the West could no longer be taken
for granted. The definition of Turkey as a member of another
civilization provided the ground for seeking exemptions from some of
the binding universal norms on the basis of ‘different’ civilizational
identity.38 In fact, as time went by, the AKP has increased its
emphasis on Turkey’s distinct civilizational identity in tandem with
the decline in its reformist momentum to free itself from democratic
criticism, to dismiss the domestic and international critics and to
justify its monopolization of power at the expense of rule of law and
pluralism.
There is probably a risk of over-intellectualizing in attributing too
much ideological meaning to the AKP’s early Europeanizing drive and
later emphasis on Turkey’s distinct civilizational identity. Neither the
former phase indicated a turn to Muslim democracy, nor the latter
phase indicated a return to Islamism, except as instruments of
justifying its extreme power orientation. This is so for two reasons.
First, the AKP assumed power only 14 months after its establishment
by a younger generation of Islamists who claimed to be Conservative
Democrats. But, Conservative Democracy was a vaguely defined
political identity, generated to prevent others from categorizing, and
delegitimizing the AKP as Islamist. The AKP’s political identity, in
other words, was still in making when it has assumed power in
2002. This meant that its political practice would define its political
identity, not vice versa. Second, the prime motive shaping the AKP’s
political practice was to survive in power. The founders of the AKP
were neither part of the established elite, nor welcomed by them.
This outsider status as well as the Islamist pedigree of the AKP
leaders meant that they have little affinity to the Republican
Westernism and Westernization, which they blamed for their
suffering and legitimacy deficit. The AKP needed to overcome this
legitimacy deficit by showing a positive governmental performance,
if they were to survive in government.
The AKP was thus driven by power, as opposed to ideological,
concerns, and it has sought and exploited whatever opportunity was
there to boost its governmental performance and legitimacy. The EU
membership project was one such readily available area of
opportunity the AKP has exploited for purposes of survival and
empowerment. But, as soon as the accession negotiations have
started in 2005, the EU stopped being a performance area and lost
relevance. And this is not just because the EU has turned itself into
an unfruitful and infertile policy area for the AKP. It is true that as
Turkey got closer to the EU, the resistance to Turkey’s full
membership from within the EU has gained a momentum and
hardened. The accession negotiations started only with the half-
hearted political will on the part of the EU for Turkey’s full
membership. The leaders of many European countries, including
Germany and France, have either openly opposed to or registered
deep concerns about Turkey’s possible membership, even after the
start of accession negotiations with the unanimous decision of EU
members. Moreover, the Framework of Accession Negotiations for
Turkey is perceived to be negatively discriminating against Turkey
especially when compared to the Framework for Croatia.39 All these
meant that the light at the end of the European tunnel has been
very dim indeed. The relative cost of staying on the European track
was increased for the AKP also because further progress on Turkey’s
Europeanization necessitated taking some risky/bold decisions on
Cyprus and Kurdish issues which might result in a statist backlash or
in the loss the nationalist vote in the AKP’s electoral base.
As the Europeanization project got thorny and costly, the AKP
could no longer combine reformism with a de-emphasis on
ideology.40 Furthering reforms required some sort of ideological
commitment to European norms and values. However, the tragedy of
the career of Ahmet Davutoğlu as the chief proponent of a
civilizational discourse was that the more the AKP empowered itself,
the more it has referred to a civilizational perspective to mask its
extreme power-orientation. In this respect, the AKP’s Fourth
Congress in 2012 marked a turning point that replaced ‘conservative
democracy’ with ‘civilizational discourse’ as the AKP’s new ideological
outlook. In reality, however, this civilizational outlook added little to
the essentialist dichotomic framework advanced by the AKP’s
Islamist predecessors. It has therefore boiled down to a rejection of
the Western hegemony in world politics and the legacy of
Westernization, including the pro-Western secular societal sectors, in
domestic politics. Beyond this rejectionism, the AKP’s civilizational
outlook served only as a framework for managing ideological
ambiguity.41 Overall, the AKP’s foreign policy with regard to the EU
continued to be driven by exploiting the opportunities for self-
empowerment without articulating a coherent position of its own.
Still the AKP has maintained some sort of credibility and soft power
until it reached the limits of opportunism during the Arab Spring.
The Arab Spring and the following stark winter
of the AKP’s foreign policy
Once the EU stopped being a policy area in which it can positively
perform with little cost, the AKP has turned to Turkey’s neighboring
regions, particularly to the Middle East to improve its regional
standing and express its paradigmatic difference from Turkey’s
traditional Westernist political class and Western-oriented foreign
policy design. Dubbed as ‘zero problems with neighbors,’ this foreign
policy activism, centered on improving economic ties and trade in
the region, emphasized Turkey’s role as a mediator and facilitator for
example, in the conflicts between Israel and Palestine, Hamas and
Fatah, Syria and Israel, or Serbia and Bosnia, and employed a
holistic approach based on equal distance to all parties.42 In so
doing, the AKP wanted to increase and demonstrate its capacity to
make an influence in global politics via its regional impact. In fact,
Ahmet Davutoğlu, the AKP’s foreign policy guru, believed that ‘the
more influential Turkey becomes in the Middle East, the more
bargaining power it will possess vis-à-vis the other powers.’43 With
this policy, the AKP/Turkey assumed a heightened international
profile and standing and emerged as a rising (soft) power in its
region.
Although ‘the Western-rooted ideals and liberal economic model
have undeniably become a catalyst for Turkey’s gradual rise’44 and
although the AKP’s foreign policy represented a continuity with that
of the social democrat İsmail Cem in the late 1990s, the AKP leaders
credited themselves for achieving Turkey’s rise by way revitalizing
Turkey’s ‘civilizational geopolitics’ and ‘strategic depth,’ which the
traditional Westernist elite could not achieve for the obvious reason
that they were not true to ‘our own civilization.’ As theorized by
Davutoğlu, the AKP’s foreign policy discourse rested on a criticism of
the traditional Turkish foreign policy as being Eurocentric, non-
visionary, defensive, passive, securitized and state-centered.45 This
was because, the AKP argued that the Turkish foreign policy had
been the work of an alienated Westernizing/Westernist elite, who
believed in the possibility of a successful civilizational shift towards
the West, who lacked interest and knowledge about the native
geography and culture, and who therefore could not grasp Turkey’s
potentials stemming from its geopolitical and historical depths in the
region. The Westernizing elite’s impossible project of civilizational
transformation, Davutoğlu claimed, cannot but result in legitimacy
and identity crises and undermine the self-confidence necessary for
the development of a strategic mentality that would recognize and
realize Turkey’s potentials.46 Turkey’s disdain and disregard for the
Middle East was therefore the work of this elite, who focused on the
West and Western approval in foreign policy and who thereby failed
to see Turkey’s capacity to become, in its own right, a central power
in world politics. This claim with regards to the Westernizing elite
took a more accusatory tone in Erdoğan’s populist nativist language:
‘after the World War I, the status quo in Turkey was assigned with
the task of turning its [Turkey’s] back to the Middle East, and the
status quo carried out this task without any question.’47 With this,
the AKP tried to show that it is not one of the pro-establishment
parties but a new anti-establishment force reflecting the true will of
the native people.
The AKP’s has also demonstrated its distance to Turkey’s
Westernist elite also by taking some initiatives that would indicate its
‘autonomous’ foreign policy would be aimed at diminishing the
Western hegemony in world affairs. This took first the form of
challenging Israel in the international arena, etched in the public’s
mind by Erdoğan’s infamous ‘one-minute’ démarche, openly blaming
Israel for the murder of innocent Palestinians during Davos World
Economic Forum in 2009. With the combined effect of the AKP’s
support for the Blue Marmara Flotilla incident,48 Erdoğan openly
challenged Israel and gained popularity in the Arab Street. The AKP
further differentiated itself from Turkey’s traditional foreign policy
elite by devising an alternative resolution with Brazil on Iran’s
nuclear program and voting against the proposal to impose sanctions
on Iran in the UN Security Council. With these, the AKP’s domestic
anti-establishment stance started took a somewhat Islamist
character in resisting the Western hegemony in the international
arena.
Because the uprisings were against the very regimes that the AKP
aimed to have zero problems with, the Arab Spring posed a very
serious challenge to its foreign policy, requiring revision in its policies
and policy instruments.49 At the same time, the AKP leaders thought,
the Arab Spring created a greater opportunity to play a regional
leadership role, akin to that of the Ottoman Empire’s one as
protector-of-the-Middle-East. In fact, having argued that the
establishment of an alternative world system rather than
Islamization of individual states is the proper realm of Islamist
activism,50 Davutoğlu took the Arab Spring as a perfect opportunity,
indeed a ‘heavenly coincidence’ at the centenary of the Ottoman
withdrawal from the Middle East, to change the Western-imposed
(Sykes–Picot) order consisting of artificial borders and nation-states
in the Middle East.51 Claiming that ‘the Middle East and the Balkans
has not seen peace and prosperity since the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire’ and that ‘people in these regions are waiting in great
expectation from Turkey [as the heir to the Ottoman Empire],’ he
continued
reunification between 2011and 2023 with our brothers in those territories we have
lost between 1911 and 1923 and thereby the establishment of a new Middle East
would mean the rise of not only Turkey but also the Middle East. While all this
geography is taking a new shape, we will re-establish the international order. We
are working to shape the next hundred years.52
In reality, however, the AKP was caught unprepared for the Arab
Spring. It lacked the capacity/identity to understand, manage and
lead the changing region, which it claimed to be its natural region of
influence and leadership. The essentialist and dichotomic nature of
its civilizational outlook did not provide the AKP with an
understanding to produce a grand vision to craft a well-grounded
foreign policy blueprint for a changing region, except the ‘strategy’
of exploiting opportunities for ‘leadership.’ Moreover, the AKP leaders
believed that the capacity to recognize and exploit the opportunities
for regional leadership was a matter of self-confidence, which was
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Sense, therefore, and not intelligence, is the regulatory principle of
instinct. To recognize causal and telic relationships is the prerogative
of a superorganic intelligence. The transcendental link by which a
useful means is referred to an ulterior end is something that cannot
be sensed, but only understood. An animal, therefore, acts toward
an end, not on account of an end. Nature, however, has
compensated for this ignorance by implanting in each species of
animal a special teleological disposition, by reason of which objects
and actions, which are, under normal conditions, objectively useful to
the individual, or the species, become invested for the animal with a
subjective aspect of agreeableness, while objects and actions, which
are normally harmful, are invested with a subjective aspect of
repulsiveness. The qualities of serviceableness and pleasantness
happen, so far as the animal is concerned, to be united in one and
the same concrete object or action, but the animal is only aware of
the pleasantness, which appeals to its senses, and not of the
serviceableness, which does not. Thus, in the example already cited,
the dog suffering from tapeworms eats the herb known as Common
Wormwood, not because it is aware of the remedial efficacy of the
herb, but simply because the odor and flavor of the plant appeal to
the animal in its actual morbid condition, ceasing to do so, however,
when the latter regains the state of health. How different is the action
of the man whose blood is infected with malarial parasites and who
takes quinine, not because the bitter taste of the alkaloid appeals to
his palate, but solely because he has his future cure explicitly in
view! “Finally,” says Weld, “the more we learn about instincts the
more apparent it becomes that the situations from which they
proceed are meaningful, but we need not suppose that the organism
is aware of the meaning. The chick in the egg feels (we may only
guess as to its nature) a vague discomfort, and the complicated
reaction by which it makes its egress from the shell is released.”
(Encycl. Am., v. 15, p. 169.)
Recapitulating, then, we may define instinct as a psycho-organic
propensity, not acquired by education or experience, but congenital
by inheritance and identical in all members of the same zoölogical
species, having as its physical basis the specific nervous
organization of the animal and as its psychic basis a teleological
coördination of the cognitive, emotional, and motor functions, in
virtue of which, given the proper physiological state of the organism
and the presence of an appropriate environmental stimulus, an
animal, without consciousness of purpose, is impelled to the
inception, and regulated in the performance, of complicated behavior
which is sensually gratifying and, under normal circumstances,
simultaneously beneficial to the individual, or the race.
Instinctive acts are performed without previous experience or
training on the part of the animal, and are, nevertheless, at least in
the majority of cases, perfect in their first performance. A few, like the
pecking-instinct of young chickens, are slightly improvable through
sentient experience, e.g. the young chick, at first undiscriminating in
the choice of the particles which it picks up, learns later by
associative memory to distinguish what is tasty and edible from what
is disagreeable and inedible, but, for the most part, the perfection of
instinctive acts is independent of prior experience. Hence instinct is
entirely different from human reason, which, in the solution of
problems, is compelled to begin with reflection upon the data
furnished by previous experience, or education. The animal,
however, in its instinctive operations, without pausing to investigate,
deliberate, or calculate, proceeds unhesitatingly on the very first
occasion to a prompt and perfect solution of its problems. Hence,
without study, consultation, planning, or previous apprenticeship of
any sort, and in the complete absence of experimental knowledge,
that might serve as matter for reflection or as a basis for inference,
the animal is able to solve intricate problems in engineering,
geometry, anatomy, pharmaceutics, etc., which the combined
intelligence of mankind required centuries upon centuries of
schooling, research, and reflection in order to solve. Of two things,
therefore, one: either these actions do not proceed from an
intelligent principle inherent in the animal; or they do, and in that
case we are compelled to recognize in brute animals an intelligence
superior to our own, because they accomplish deftly and without
effort ingenious feats that human reason cannot duplicate, save
clumsily and at the price of prolonged discipline and incessant
drudgery. “Perhaps the strongest reason,” says an anonymous
writer, “for not regarding the activities of instinct as intelligent is that
in such enormously complex sequences of action as, for instance,
the emperor moth carries out in the preparing of an escape-opening
for itself on its completing the larval and passing into the imago
state, the intelligence needed would be so great that it could not be
limited to this single activity, and yet it is so limited.”[15]
Intelligence is essentially a generalizing and abstracting power;
hence, from its very nature, it could not be limited to a single activity.
Bestial instincts, however, though frequently so amazingly complex
and ingeniously purposive as to seem the fruit of profound
meditation, are, nevertheless, confined exclusively to this or that
determinate ability. They operate within narrow and preëstablished
grooves, from which they never swerve to any appreciable degree,
being but little modifiable or perfectible by experience. Bees always
construct hexagonal cells, spiders stick to the logarithmic spiral, and
beavers never attempt to put their engineering skill to new uses.
Instincts have but little pliancy, their regularity and uniformity being
such as to make the instinctive abilities definitely predictable in the
case of any given species of animal. Now, the distinctive mark of
intelligence is versatility, that is, aptitude for many things without
determinate restriction to this or that. A man who is expert in one art
may, by reason of his intelligence, be equally proficient in a dozen
others. The biologist may be a competent chemist, and the
astronomer an excellent physicist. Michel Angelo was a sculptor, a
frescoer, a painter, an anatomist, an engineer, and an architect, while
Leonardo da Vinci had even more arts to his credit. To predict before
birth the precise form that a man’s ability will take is an impossibility.
Certain aptitudes, such as a musical gift, are no doubt inherited, but
it is an inheritance which imposes no rigid necessity upon inheriter;
since he is free to neglect this native talent, and to develop others for
which he has no special innate aptitude. With man, the fashion in
clothing and the styles of architecture vary from day to day. The
brute, however, never emerges from the rut of instinct, and each
generation of a given animal species monotonously reproduces the
history of the previous generation. Man, on the contrary, is capable
of indefinite progress, as the march of human cultures and
civilizations shows. Gregarious animals are restricted by their
instincts to determinate types of aggregation, as we see in the case
of ants and bees. Hence these insect communities are unacquainted
with our sanguinary revolutions which overturn monarchies in favor
of republics, or set up dictatorships in place of democracies; for,
fortunately or unfortunately, as one may choose to regard it, man is
not limited to one form of government rather than another.
Animals, then, notwithstanding their wonderful instincts, are
deficient in precisely that quality which is the unique criterion of
intelligence, namely, versatility. Each species has but one
stereotyped ability, outside of which it is woefully stupid and
inefficient. “So long,” says Fabre, “as its circumstances are normal
the insect’s actions are calculated most rationally in view of the
object to be attained” (“The Mason-Bees,” p. 167), but let the
circumstances cease to be normal, let them vary never so little from
those which ordinarily obtain, and the animal is helpless, while its
instinctive predisposition becomes, not merely futile, but often
positively detrimental. Thus the instinct, which should, in the normal
course of events, guide night-flying moths to the white flowers that
contain the life-sustaining nectar of their nocturnal banquets, proves
their undoing, when they come into contact with the white lights of
artificial illumination. In fact, the fatal fondness of the moth for the
candle flame has become in all languages a proverb for the folly of
courting one’s own destruction.
The animal may employ an exquisitely efficient method in
accomplishing its instinctive work, but is absolutely impotent to apply
this ingenious method to more than one determinate purpose. Man,
however, is not so restricted. He varies at will both his aims and his
methods. He can adapt the same means (a pocketknife, for
instance) to different ends, and, conversely, he can obtain the same
end by the use of different means (e.g. communicate by mail, or
telegraph, or radio). Man, in a word, is emancipated from limitation to
the singular and the concrete by virtue of his unique prerogative,
reason, or intelligence, the power that enables him to generalize
from the particular and to abstract from the concrete. This is the
secret of his unlimited versatility. This is the basis of his capacity for
progress. This is the root of his freedom; for his will seeks happiness
in general, happiness in the abstract, and is not, therefore,
compelled to choose any particular form or concrete embodiment of
happiness, such as this or that style of architecture, this or that form
of government, this or that kind of clothing, etc., etc. Teleology is but
a material expression of intelligence, and may, therefore, occur in
things destitute of intelligence, but versatility is the inseparable
concomitant and infallible sign of an inherent and autonomous
intelligence. Lacking this quality, instinct, however telic, is obviously
not intelligence.
Another indication of the fact that no intelligence lies behind the
instinctive behavior of brutes is manifest from their evident
unconsciousness of purpose. That the animal is ignorant of the
purpose implied in its own instinctive actions appears from the fact
that it will carry out these operations with futile diligence and
exactitude, even when, through accident, the purpose is
conspicuously absent. Thus the hen deprived of her eggs will,
nevertheless, continue the now futile process of incubation for
twenty-one days, or longer, despite the fact that her obstinacy in
maintaining the straw of the empty nest at a temperature of 104° F.
serves no useful purpose whatever. She cannot but sense the
absence of the eggs; she has not, however, the intelligence to
realize that incubation without eggs is vain. The connection between
the latter and the former is something that mere sense cannot
apprehend. Hence the hen is not troubled by the purposelessness of
her performance. Fabre gives many examples of this futile
persistence in instinctive operations, despite their complete
frustration. Alluding to the outcome of his experiments on the Mason-
wasp Pelapaeus, he says: “The Mason bees, the Caterpillar of the
Great Peacock Moth, and many others, when subjected to similar
tests, are guilty of the same illogical behaviour: they continue, in the
normal order, their series of industrious actions, though accident has
now rendered them all useless. Just like millstones unable to cease
revolving though there be no corn left to grind, let them once be
given the compelling power and they will continue to perform their
task despite its futility.” (“Bramble Bees,” pp. 192, 193.)
The instance cited by Dr. H. D. Schmidt is an excellent illustration
of this inability of an animal to appreciate either the utility or futility of
its instinctive behavior. Having described the instinct of squirrels to
bury nuts by ramming them into the ground with their teeth, and then
using their paws to cover them with earth, he continues as follows:
“Now, as regards the young squirrel, which, of course, never had
been present at the burial of a nut, I observed that, after having
eaten a number of hickory nuts to appease its appetite, it would take
one between its teeth, then sit upright and listen in all directions.
Finding all right, it would scratch upon the smooth blanket on which I
was playing with it as if to make a hole, then hammer with the nut
between its teeth upon the blanket, and finally perform all the
motions required to fill up a hole—in the air; after which it would jump
away, leaving the nut, of course, uncovered.” (Transactions of the
Am. Neurological Ass’n, 1875, vol. I, p. 129—italics his.) This whole
pantomime of purposeless gesticulations, from the useless “Stop,
look and listen!” down to the final desertion of the uncovered nut, is
overwhelming evidence of the fact that the brute is destitute of any
rational faculty capable of recognizing the telic aspect of its own
instinctive conduct.
The claim is sometimes made that certain forms of animal
behavior are not unconsciously, but consciously, telic. Bouvier, for
example, claims that in the rare cases of the use of tools among the
Arthropoda, we have evidence of the existence of intelligent
inventiveness of a rudimentary kind. Thus the crab Melia carries a
sea-anemone in its chela as a weapon wherewith to sting its prey
into a condition of paralysis. The leaf-cutting ants of India and Brazil
use their own thread-spinning larvæ as tools for cementing together
the materials out of which their nests are constructed. The predatory
wasp Ammophila urnaria uses a pebble to tamp the filling of its
burrow. According to the Wheelers (cf. Science, May 30, 1924, p.
486), the hunting wasp Sphex (Ammophila) gryphus (Sm.) makes
similar use of a pebble. As Bouvier notes, however, this use of tools
appears “to be rather exceptional ..., showing itself only in the
primitive state consisting of the use of foreign bodies as
implements.” (Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1918, p. 456.) Moreover, the
animals in question are limited to a concretely determinate kind of
tool, which their environment supplies ready-made. Such a use of
implements does not presuppose any power of abstraction and
generalization. In fact, the presence of such a power is expressly
excluded by the consideration that the animal’s so-called
“inventiveness” is confined exclusively to one particularized
manifestation.
At times the behavior of animals so closely simulates the
consciously telic or intelligent conduct of men, that only severely
critical methods enable us to discriminate between them. An
experiment, which Erich Wasmann, S.J., performed upon ants will
serve to illustrate this point. In one of his glass nests, Father
Wasmann constructed an island of sand surrounded by a moat filled
with water. He then removed from their “nursery” a certain number of
the ant larvæ and placed them on the island. Thereupon the ants
were observed to build a bridge of sand across the moat “for the
purpose,” apparently, of rescuing the marooned larvæ. Such
behavior seemed to imply an intelligent ordination of a means to an
end. Wasmann’s second experiment, however, proved this inference
to be wholly unwarranted; for, when he excavated a hole in the sand
of the nest and filled it with water, the ants, stimulated by what to
them was the disagreeable dampness of the marginal sand, were
impelled to perform the reflex act of kicking about in the sand. This
impulse persisted until all traces of the hole, the dampness and the
water had been buried under a carpet of drier sand. Then, and then
only, was the aforesaid impulse inhibited. Applying these results to
the interpretation of the first experiment, we see that the “building of
a bridge” in the first experiment was not intentional, but merely an
accidental result of a kicking-reflex, with damp sand acting as a
stimulator. Once the moat was bridged, however, the ants happened
to find the larvæ, and were then impelled by instinct to carry the
larvæ to their proper place in the nest. To see in such an incident a
planned and premeditated rescue of the marooned larvæ would be
grossly anthropomorphic. Nevertheless, had only the first experiment
been performed, such an anthropomorphic interpretation would have
seemed fully justified, and it was only by an appropriate variation of
the conditions of the original experiment that this false interpretation
could be definitively excluded.
Consciously telic behavior is distinguishable from unconsciously
telic conduct only to the extent that it implies an agent endowed with
the power of abstraction. Unless an agent can vary radically the
specificity of the procedure, whereby it attains a given end, the
purposiveness of its behavior is no evidence of its intelligence.
“Among animals,” says Bergson, “invention is never more than a
variation on the theme of routine. Locked up as it is within the habits
of its species, the animal succeeds no doubt in broadening these by
individual initiative; but its escape from automatism is momentary
only, just long enough to create a new automatism; the gates of its
prison close as soon as they are opened; dragging the chain merely
lengthens it. Only with man does consciousness break the chain.”
(Cf. Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1918, p. 457.)
In vain, then, do our Darwinian humanizers of the brute exalt
instinct at the expense of intelligence. Their attempt to reduce to a
difference of degree the difference of kind that separates the
irrational from the rational, fails all along the line. Indeed, far from
being able to account for the appearance of intelligence in the world,
transformistic theories are impotent to account for so much as the
development of instinct, all forms of the evolutionary theory, the
Lamarckian, the Darwinian, the De-Vriesian, etc., being equally
inadequate to the task of explaining the origin of animal instincts.
The complex instinctive behavior of predatory wasps, for example,
is absolutely essential for the preservation of their respective races,
and yet these indispensable instincts are completely useless in any
other than the perfect state. From their very nature, therefore, they
do not admit of gradual development. The law of all, or none, holds
here. “Instinct developed by degrees,” says Fabre, “is flagrantly
impossible. The art of preparing the larva’s provisions allows none
but masters, and suffers no apprentices; the Wasp must excel in it
from the outset or leave the thing alone.” (“The Hunting Wasps,” p.
403.) To be useful at all, the instinctive operation must possess an
indivisible perfection, which cannot be partitioned into degrees. The
Pompilius (Calicurgus), for instance, must, under penalty of instant
death, take the preliminary precaution to sting into inaction the
ganglion that controls the poison forceps of her formidable prey, the
Black Tarantula (Lycosa), before she proceeds to paralyze it by
stabbing its thoracic ganglion. The slightest imperfection or
shortcoming in her surgery would be irretrievably disastrous. Such
an instinct never existed in an imperfect form. The first wasp to
possess it must have been an expert, or she would never have lived
to serve the limp body of the huge spider as living provender for her
tiny grub. “The first to come to grips with the Tarantula,” says Fabre,
“had an unerring knowledge of her dangerous surgery. The least
hesitation, the slightest speculation, and she was lost. The first
teacher would also have been the last, with no disciples to take up
her art and perfect it.” (“Bramble Bees,” p. 354.)
Another hunting wasp, the Hairy Ammophila, subdues a large
caterpillar into a state of coma by pricking with its sting nine of the
ventral ganglia, while it spares the cervical ganglion, merely
compressing the latter with its mandibles, so as not to destroy life
altogether. This nice discrimination rules out Loeb’s hypothesis of a
so-called “chemotaxis.” As a result of this elaborate surgical
operation, the power of movement is suppressed in every segment,
and the tiny larva of the wasp emerging from the egg laid on the
ventral surface of the caterpillar can devour this huge living, but
motionless, victim in peace and safety. Dead meat would not agree
with the larva, and any movement of the caterpillar would be fatal to
the delicate grub. To eliminate these contingencies, the Wasp’s
surgery must be perfect from the very outset. “There is,” says Fabre,
“no via media, no half success. Either the caterpillar is treated
according to rule and the Wasp and its family is perpetuated; or else
the victim is only partially paralyzed and the Wasp’s offspring dies in
the egg. Yielding to the inexorable logic of things, we will have to
admit that the first Hairy Ammophila, after capturing a Grey Worm to
feed her larva, operated on the patient by the exact method in use
today.” (“The Hunting Wasps,” pp. 403, 404.)
Certain meticulous critics of our day cite the fact of the diffusion of
the poison as indicating that the surgery of the hunting wasps need
not be so perfectly accommodated to the nervous system of their
prey, and they attempt in this way to discredit Fabre as having failed
to take the occurrence of diffusion into account. A careful reading of
his works, however, will serve to vindicate him in this respect. In a
chapter on the poison of the bee, for instance, we read: “The local
effect is diffused. This diffusion, which might well take place in the
victims of the predatory insects, plays no part in the latter’s method
of operation. The egg, which will be laid immediately afterwards,
demands the complete inertia of the prey from the outset. Hence all
the nerve-centers that govern locomotion must be numbed
instantaneously by the virus.” (“Bramble Bees,” p. 347.) Bouvier,
therefore, very justly remarks: “After all, when Fabre’s work is
examined there is no trouble in seeing that none of these details
escaped him. He never disputed the paralytic action of the poison
inoculated by the insect, and the wonderful researches by the
Peckhams on the Pompilids, which hunt Lycosids, have clearly
established the fact that the thrusts of the sting given by the
predatory insect produce two different kinds of paralysis, one
functional, and often temporary, resulting from the action of the
venom, the other structural and persistent, produced by the dart
which more or less injures the nervous centers.” (Smithson. Inst.
Rpt. for 1916, p. 594.)
In the case of predatory insects, therefore, the instinct must be
perfect at the outset, or survival is impossible. For the origin of such
instincts, Darwinism, which stresses the gradualness of evolutionary
progress, has no explanation that will hold water. Lamarckism, which
sees in acquired habits transmitted by inheritance, the origin of
instinct, the “memory of the race,” is equally at a loss to account for
these instincts. The formation of habits requires practice and
repetition. The predatory insect must be perfect at the start, and yet
it only exercises its remarkable instinct once a year. Where is the
practice and reiteration requisite for canalizing its nervous system
into the conduction-paths of habit? How did one particular set of
rarely performed acts happen to gain precedence over all others,
and to be alone successful in stamping themselves indelibly upon
the nerve plasm as habits, and upon the germ plasm as instincts?
De-Vriesianism, which would make the acquisition and perfecting of
instinct dependent upon the rare and accidental contingency of a
fortuitous mutation, is even more objectionable. These instincts are
vital to the insect. If their acquisition and improvement depend upon
the lucky chance of a series of favorable mutations, its prospects of
survival are nil; for it cannot afford to wait at all. “In order to live,”
says Fabre, “we all require the conditions that enable us to live: this
is a truth worthy of the famous axioms of La Palice. The predatory
insects live by their talent. If they do not possess it to perfection, their
race is lost.” (“Bramble Bees,” p. 364.)
Recently, there has been a revival of Lamarckism hitherto
regarded as defunct. Guyer, Kammerer, and Pawlow profess to find
factual justification for it, and Bouvier adopts it in his “La vie
psychique des insectes” (1918), to account for the origin of instinct.
Of the alleged facts of Kammerer and Guyer, we have spoken in a
previous chapter. Here we shall content ourselves with few remarks
on the experiments of Ivan Pawlow, as being especially relevant to
the subject under consideration. The Russian physiologist has
experimented on white mice, and claims that the mice of the fifth
generation learned to answer a dinner bell in the space of five
lessons, whereas their ancestors of the first generation had required
a hundred lessons to answer the same signal. Hence he concludes:
“The latest experiments ... show that conditioned reflexes, i.e., the
highest nervous activity, are inherited.” (Science, Nov. 9, 1923, p.
360.) His results, however, do not tally with those recently obtained
by E. C. MacDowell of the Carnegie Institution, by H. G. Bragg, and
by E. M. Vicari of Columbia. MacDowell found that white rats trained
in a circular maze did not improve in their susceptibility to training
from generation to generation. “Children from trained parents,” he
says, “or from trained parents and grandparents, take as long to
learn the maze habit as the first generation used.” (Science, March
28, 1924, p. 303.) Having cited the similar results of Bragg, who
experimented with white mice, he concludes: “The results are in full
accord with those given above; they indicate that the training of the
ancestors did not facilitate the learning of the descendants.”
(Ibidem.) E. M. Vicari, using a simple maze and white rats, obtained
the same results. “It seems clear,” she says, “that the latter
generations have not been aided by the training of their ancestors.”
(Ibidem.)
Bouvier’s conception, then, that the automatisms of instinct
originate as automatisms of acquired habit, the latter being
appropriated by inheritance, still stands in need of reliable
experimental confirmation. Moreover, a theory of this sort could
never account, as Weismann points out, for such phenomena as the
specific instincts of worker bees, which are excluded from
propagation. Nor can the theory explain, as originating in acquired
habit, those instinctive operations of enormous complexity, like the
complicated method of emergence employed by the larva of the
emperor moth, which only occur once in a lifetime, and could not,
therefore, fasten themselves on the organism as a habit.
An evolutionary origin of instinct, however, though extremely
improbable, is, at any rate, not absolutely inconceivable. Its
teleology, as we have seen, does not imply inherent intelligence, but
is explicable as an innate law involving appropriate coördination of
the sensory, emotional, and motor functions, all of which are
intrinsically dependent on the organism. But intelligence, as we have
seen, is a superorganic power, having its source in a spiritual
principle, that, from the very nature of things, cannot be evolved from
matter. Human reason, therefore, owes its origin, not to any
evolution of the human body, but to the creation of the human soul,
which is the source and subject of that unique prerogative of man,
namely: the power of abstract thought.
CHAPTER III
THE ORIGIN OF THE HUMAN BODY
In an article published August 31, 1895, in the New York
Freeman’s Journal, the late Rev. J. A. Zahm gave expression to the
following opinion: “The evolution of the body of man from some
inferior animal and its subsequent endowment in this body by God of
a rational soul is antagonistic to no dogma of faith and may be
shown to be in harmony with the teachings of St. Thomas.” The
scriptural and theological aspect of this view need not concern us
here, our sole purpose being to evaluate it from a purely scientific
standpoint. Once evolutionary thought takes cognizance of the fact
that the human soul is a spiritual principle underivable from mere
matter, once it acknowledges the immediate creation of the human
soul, and professes to do no more than account for the origin of
man’s animal body, that moment is it shorn of its materialistic
implications; but what, we may ask, are the foundations of such an
hypothesis in the realm of scientific fact?
The writer must confess that he cannot fathom the mentality of
those who accept the evolutionary explanation, so far as plant and
animal organisms are concerned, but proceed to draw the line when
it comes to applying it to the human body. For if one (to borrow Du
Bois-Reymond’s expression) “gives so much as his little finger to”
the evolutional argument from organic homology, he must end, in so
far as he is consistent, in acknowledging as incontestable its obvious
application to man. The only choice which sound logic can sanction
is between fixism and a thoroughgoing system of transformism,
which does not exempt the human body from the scope of the
evolutionary explanation. Indeed, the theory of evolution itself stands
or falls upon this issue; for, if structures so strikingly similar as the
skeletons of a man and an ape, respectively, have originated from
two distinct ancestral stocks, then in no case at all is the inference of
common descent from structural resemblance a legitimate
procedure. In other words, if the homologies existent between the
human and simian organisms are explicable on some other basis
than that of common ancestry, then all organic homologies are so
explicable, and the whole evolutionary argument collapses.
§ 1. Two Theories of Descent

Two theories have been formulated regarding the alleged bestial
origin of the human body: (1) the theory of lineal descent from some
known species (living or fossil) of ape or monkey; (2) the theory of
collateral descent from a hypothetical bestial ancestor common to
apes and men. The theory of lineal descent is that to which Darwin
himself stands committed. This theory, however, soon fell into
disrepute among scientists, who came to prefer the theory of
collateral descent, although signs of a return to the older theory are
not wanting in our day. At all events, Darwin came out flatly in favor
of the monkey origin of man. This, it is true, has been indignantly
denied by loyal partisans anxious to exonerate their idol from the
reproach of having advanced a crude and now obsolete theory of
human descent. But Darwin’s own words speak for themselves: “The
Simiadae,” he says, “then branched off into two great stems, the
New World and Old World monkeys; and from the latter, at a remote
period of time, Man, the wonder and glory of the Universe,
proceeded.” (“Descent of Man,” 2nd ed., ch. VI, pp. 220, 221.) Note
that he does not say “probably”; his language is not the language of
hypothesis, but of categorical affirmation.
The theory, however, which is most generally favored at the
present time holds that, assuming the universality of the evolutionary
process, all existing types must be of equal antiquity, and none prior
or ancestral to any other. Hence it regards man, not as the direct
descendant of any known type of ape, but as the offspring of an as
yet undiscovered Tertiary ancestor, from which men and apes have
diverged in two distinct lines of descent. “Monkeys, apes, and men,”
says Conklin, “have descended from some common but at present
extinct ancestor. Existing apes and monkeys are collateral relatives
of man but not his ancestors; his cousins but not his parents.... The
human branch diverged from the anthropoid stock not less than two
million years ago, and since that time man has been evolving in the
direction represented by existing human races, while the apes have
been evolving in the direction represented by existing anthropoids.
During all this time men and apes have been growing more and
more unlike and conversely the farther back we go, the more we
should find them converging until they meet in a common stock
which should be intermediate between these two stocks.” (“Evolution
and the Bible,” pp. 12, 13—italics his.)
Barnum Brown’s recent discovery of three jaws of the fossil ape
Dryopithecus in the Siwalik Hills of India has, as previously
intimated, resulted in a return on the part of certain scientists, e.g.
Wm. K. Gregory and Dudley J. Morton, to views that more nearly
approximate those of Charles Darwin. According to these men, the
fossil anthropoid Dryopithecus is to be regarded as the common
ancestor of men, chimpanzees, and gorillas. (Cf. Science, April 25,
1924, Suppl. XII.)
Many considerations, however, militate against the direct
derivation of man’s bodily frame from any known species of ape,
whether living or fossil. Dana has pointed out that, as regards the
mechanism of locomotion, man belongs to a more primitive type than
the ape. The earliest and lowest type of vertebrates are the fish, and
these, according to the above-mentioned author, are urosthenic (tail-
strong), inasmuch as they propel themselves by means of their tails.
Next in point of organization and time came the merosthenic
vertebrates, which have their strength concentrated in the hind-
limbs, e.g. reptiles like the dinosaurs. In the last place come the
prosthenic vertebrates, whose strength is concentrated in the fore-
limbs, e.g. the carnivora and apes. Now man belongs to the
merosthenic type, and his mode of progression, therefore, is more
primitive than that of apes, which are prosthenic, all anthropoid apes,
such as the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-utan and the gibbon
having longer fore-limbs than hind-limbs.
The striking anatomical differences between apes and men,
though not of sufficient importance to exclude the possibility of
collateral relationship, are so many solid arguments against the
theory of direct descent. We will content ourselves with a mere
enumeration of these differences. In the ape, the cranium has a
protruding muzzle and powerful jaws equipped with projecting canine
teeth, but the brain-case is comparatively small; in man, on the
contrary, the facial development is insignificant and the teeth are
small and vertical, while the brain-case is enormous in size, having
at least twice the capacity of that of an ape. “The face of man,” to
quote Ranke, “slides, as it were, down from the forehead and
appears as an appendix to the front half of the skull. But the gorilla’s
face, on the contrary, protrudes from the skull, which in turn slides
almost entirely backward from the face. By a cross-cut one may
sever the whole face from the skull, except a very small part near the
sockets, without being forced to open up the interior of the skull. It is
only on account of its protruding, strongly developed lower parts that
the skull-cap of the animal can simulate a kind of human face.” (“Der
Mensch,” vol. II, p. 401.) These differences may be summarized by
saying that the head of the ape is specialized for mastication and
defense, whereas the head of man is specialized for psychic
functions. Again, as we have seen, the fore-limbs of the ape are
long, and its hind-limbs short, the extremities of both the latter and
the former being specialized primarily for prehension and only
secondarily for progression. This is due to the ape’s adaptation to
arboreal life. In man, however, the arms are short and specialized for
prehension alone, while the legs are long and terminate in broad
plantigrade feet specialized for progression alone. Man,
consequently, is not adapted to arboreal life. In the ape, the spine
has a single curve, and the occipital foramen (the aperture through
which the spinal cord enters the brain-case) is eccentrically located
in the floor of the cranial box; in man, the spine has a double curve,
and the occipital foramen is centrally located, both features being in
adaptation to the upright posture peculiar to man—“die zentralle
Lage dieser Oeffnung,” says Ranke alluding to the occipital foramen
of man, “in der Schädelbasis ist für den Menschenschädel im
Unterschied gegen den Tierschädel eine in hohem Masse typische.”
(“Der Mensch,” vol. I, p. 378.) In the ape, therefore, the vertebræ
have an adaptation producing convexity of the back, precluding a
normal upright posture, and enforcing progression on all fours. It
has, moreover, powerful muscles at the back of the neck to carry the
head in the horizontal position necessitated by this mode of
progression. In man “the skull has the occipital condyles placed
within the middle fifth, in adaptation to the vertical position of the
spine” (Nicholson), the spinal cord enters the cranial box at a
perpendicular, and the head balances on the spinal column as on a
pivot, all of which ensures the erect posture and bipedal progression
in man. There are, moreover, no neck muscles to support the head
in any other than the vertical position. There are many other
differences, besides: the ape, for example, has no chin, while in man
there is a marked mental protuberance; man has a slender waist, but
the ape has a barrel-like torso without any waist; the ape has huge
bony ridges for the attachment of muscles, e.g. the sagittal crest, the
superciliary ridges, etc., while in man such features are practically
absent.
Ranke has given a very good summary of the chief anatomical
differences between man and the anthropoid apes: “The gorilla’s
head leaning forward, hangs down from the spinal column, and his
chinless snout, equipped with powerful teeth, touches the
breastbone. Man’s head is round, and resting on a free neck,
balances unrestrained upon the spinal column. The gorilla’s body,
without a waist, swells out barrel-shaped, and when straightened up
finds no sufficient support on the pelvis; the back-bone, tailless as in
man, but almost straight, loses itself without nape or neck formation
properly so-called in the rear part of the head and without
protuberance of the gluteal region in the flat thighs. Man’s body is
slightly molded, like an hour-glass, the chest and abdomen meeting
to form a waist where they are narrowest; the abdominal viscera are
perfectly supported in the pelvis as in a plate; and elegance is
decidedly gained by the double S-line, which, curving alternately
convex and concave, passes from the crown through the neck and
nape, down the back to the base of the spine and the gluteal region.
The normal position of the gorilla shows us a plump, bear-like trunk,
carried by short, crooked legs and by arms which serve as crutches
and touch the ground with the knuckles of the turned-in fingers. The
posture of the body is perfectly straight in man, it rests on the legs as
on columns when he stands upright, and his hands hang down on
both sides always ready for use. The gorilla is thickly covered with
hair, while man’s body on the whole is naked.” (Op. cit., vol. II, p.
213.)
In conclusion, we may say that, while there is a general
resemblance between the human body and that of an anthropoid
ape, there is, likewise, a particular divergence—“there is no bone, be
it ever so small, nay, not even the smallest particle of a bone, in
which the general agreement in structure and function would pass
over into real identity.” (Ranke, op. cit., vol. I, p. 437.) Hence Virchow
declares that “the differences between man and monkey are so wide
that almost any fragment is sufficient to diagnose them.” (Smithson.
Inst. Rpt. for 1889, p. 566.) These differences are so considerable as
to preclude the possibility of a direct genealogical connection
between man and any known type of ape or monkey—“The
testimony of comparative anatomy,” to quote Bumüller, “is decidedly
against the theory of man’s descent from the ape.” (“Mensch oder
Affe?” p. 59.) Ranke has somewhere called man a brain-animal, and
this sums up the chief difference, which marks off the human body
from all bestial organisms. In the ape the brain weighs only 100th
part of the weight of its body, whereas in man the brain has a weight
equivalent to the 37th part of the weight of the human body. The
cranial capacity of the largest apes ranges from 500 to 600 c.cm.,
while the average cranial capacity in man is 1500 c.cm. Moreover,
the human brain is far more extensively convoluted within the brain-
case than that of an ape, so much so that the surface or cortical area
of the human brain is four times as great as that of the ape’s brain.
Thus Wundt, in his “Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie,”
cites H. Wagner as assigning to man a brain surface of from 2,196 to
1,877 sq. cm., but a cortical area of only 535 sq. cm. in the case of
an orang-outang. (Cf. English Translation by Titchener, vol. I, p.
286.)
Another difficulty in the way of the Darwinian theory of direct
descent is the fact that the best counterparts of human anatomy are
not found united in any one species of ape or monkey, but are
scattered throughout a large number of species. “Returning to the
old discussion,” says Thomas Dwight, “as to which ape can boast of
the closest resemblance to man, Kohlbrugge brings before us Aeby’s
forgotten book on the skull of man and apes. His measurements
show that the form nearest to man among apes is the gibbon, or
long-armed ape, but that the South American monkey Crysothrix is
nearer still. Aeby recognized what modern anatomists have forgotten
or wilfully ignored: that any system of descent is inadequate which
does not recognize that the type of man is not in any one organ, but
in all the physical and psychological features. He declared that while
we are far from having this universal knowledge, we have learned
enough about the various parts of the body to make it impossible for
us to sketch any plan of descent. ‘It almost seems as if every part
had its own line of descent, different from that of others.’ ...
Kohlbrugge now introduces Haacke, who denies any relationship
between man and apes, the latter being instances of one-sided
development. He even dares to declare anyone who speaks of an
intermediate form between man and apes to be ignorant of the laws
of development governing the race history of mammals. He believes
man came from some lemuroid form, which may have descended
from the insectivora.” (“Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist,” pp. 188-
190.)
All known types, then, of apes and monkeys are too specialized to
have been in the direct line of human descent. Man, as Kohlbrugge
ironically remarks, appears to have come from an ancestor much
more like himself than any species of ape we know of. Moreover, no
species of apes or monkeys monopolizes the honors of closest
resemblance to man. In many points, the South American monkeys,
though more primitive than the anthropoid apes, are more similar to
man than the latter.
§ 2. Embryological Resemblances
Much has been made of the so-called biogenetic law as an
argument for the bestial origin of mankind. This theory of the
embryological recapitulation of racial history was first formulated by
Fritz Müller. Haeckel, however, was the one who exploited it most
extensively, and who exalted it to the status of “the fundamental law
of biogenesis.”[16] The latter’s statement of the principle is as follows:
“Die Ontogenesis ist die Palingenesis der Phylogenesis.”—Ontogeny
(the development of the individual) is a recapitulation of phylogeny
(the development of the race). For a long time this law was received
with uncritical credulity by the scientific world, but enthusiasm
diminished when more careful studies made it clear that the line of
descent suggested by embryology did not agree with what was
inferred from comparative anatomy and the sequence of fossil forms.
Besides, it was manifest that certain organs in embryos were
distinctively embryonic and could never have functioned in adult
forms, e.g. the yolk sac and the amnion. “It was recognized,” says T.
H. Morgan, “that many embryonic stages could not possibly
represent ancestral animals. A young fish with a huge yolk sac
attached could scarcely ever have led a happy, free life as an adult
individual. Such stages were interpreted, however, as embryonic
additions to the original ancestral type. The embryo had done
something on its own account. In some animals the young have
structures that attach them to the mother, as does the placenta of
mammals. In other cases the young develop membranes about
themselves—like the amnion of the chick and the mammal—that
would have shut off an adult animal from all intercourse with the
outside world. Hundreds of such embryonic structures are known to
embryologists. These were explained as adaptations and as
falsifications of the ancestral records.” (“Critique of the Theory of
Evolution,” pp. 16, 17.)
The result has been that this so-called law has fallen into general
disrepute among scientists, especially as a means of reconstructing
the phylogeny of modern organisms. It is recognized, of course, that
comparative embryology can furnish embryological homologies
analogous to the homologies of comparative anatomy, but it is now
generally acknowledged that the view, which regards the

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Islamism Populism and Turkish Foreign

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1 Introduction: Populism and Islamism in Turkey

2 Turkey’s ‘Western’ or ‘Muslim’ identity and the AKP’s civilizational

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4 Dark taints on the looking glass: Whither ‘New Turkey’?

5 Politicization of recent Turkish history: (ab)use of history as a

6 Islamism and Turkey’s foreign policy during the Arab Spring

7 Neo-developmentalist turn in the global political economy? The

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Nebahat Tanriverdi Yaşar is a PhD candidate in the Department of International

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§ 1. Two Theories of Descent

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