FETO, a religious criminal cult and led by the US based cleric Fetullah Gülen, is a bizarre political phenomenon. It is ostensibly a religious community located in civil society, yet in reality it is a shady and aggressive organization whose activities and political ambitions can easily be branded as terroristic. It has a definitely Janus-faced structure, which can only be grasped by understanding the context of secular authoritarianism in Turkey. Indeed, FETO has found fertile ground to blossom within a social order where democratic politics had been precluded.
The collapse of an ancient Ottoman regime and traditional socio-political structures in the 1920s precipitated a feeling of identity loss in Turkish society. This trauma was exacerbated with the establishment of an oppressive secular authoritarian regime in the following decades. More specifically, the erection of republican regime in 1923 was to bring a radical change in the symbolic order of the society. The break with the old order created a political situation within which both a democratic and an authoritarian order could take hold.
A democratic regime refers to a political order within which the place of power is kept indefinite and open, which means that power is open to all political actors and none of them can occupy it forever. An authoritarian regime, on the other hand, comprises the closure of the place of power to societal opposition and identifying it with a quasi-transcendental ideological content. This cancels out the contingent nature of power, thus renders democracy obsolete.
The young Turkish Republic took the latter path. The secular bureaucratic elite monopolized power in their hands by pushing aside the political opposition and identify the place of power with secular-nationalist ideology. This authoritarian political order formed around single-party rule with no popular elections. Besides, the bureaucratic elite by deploying the state’s enormous power embarked on a systematic policy of “purifying” the society in line with its secular-nationalist ideology.
The Democratic and Authoritarian Options
In the face of this authoritarian turn, society has reacted in two alternative yet competing forms of political struggle. One of these has taken the path of forcing the authoritarian regime to democratize by dislocating the bureaucratic elite from the state apparatus. This has served to empty the place of power by consolidating and enlarging the sphere of democratic politics, where agonistic political actors can compete freely, vis-à-vis the bureaucracy.
The Democratic Party in the 1950s, the Motherland Party in the 1980s, the Welfare Party in the 1990s and lastly the AK Party in the 2000s have walked thorough this path and struggled to restore the democratic republican ideals of 1923. This democratic option has evolved in three steps. First of all, it has sought to establish and sustain a multi-party political system with free elections. This was achieved in 1950 and despite intermittent suspensions it has been maintained since. Secondly, it has strived to roll back the civil and military bureaucracy’s influence in the political system through democratic reforms. This took place in the 2000s. Lastly, it has struggled to institutionalize a governmental system that assured to materialize the democratic republican ideals. This was carried out in April 2017.
The other strand of political struggle has parted significantly from the democratic option in terms of its ways and political objectives. It has mainly sought to conquer the state from within by infiltrating it thorough various channels. Its course of action has followed the objective of controlling critical state institutions, expanding aggressively in the sphere of civil society and infiltrating into political parties by using whatever means necessary. Thus, its main objective is to replace the secular authoritarianism with a seemingly more society-friendly and conservative one. Instead of keeping the place of power empty, this obscurantist form of politics tends to fill it with other content and block the opposition.
FETO represents this authoritarian option. It has taken advantage of alienation and the widening gap between a relatively conservative society and the oppressive secular regime. It has considerably succeeded in channeling society’s energy and frustration against the authoritarian state. Moreover, society’s resentment has escalated after each incident of military and civil bureaucratic intervention in democratic politics in the second half of the twentieth century. These interventions have weakened some segments of society’s backing for the democratic option in its struggle to bring the oppressive regime down and geared them to shift their loyalty to FETO’s authoritarian option.
Exploiting the Democratization Process
The 2000s witnessed an extensive democratization process. It extended political and cultural rights and freedoms to the ostracized sections of society. It achieved democratization in civil-military relations. It enhanced economic and cultural equality to a degree and thereby boosted the standards of political participation. All these boiled down to the dislocation of secular bureaucratic actors and secular-nationalist ideology from the state.
This was a critical development for Turkish democracy. At last, the essential criterion of a democratic regime was in place: the place of power has grown empty. Yet the occurring vacuum in this transition posed a great danger for it would be abused by political forces that had no respect for democracy. This was what happened in Turkey in the 2000s. FETO took advantage of the displacement of secular-nationalist actors from the state apparatus. Thus, the 2000s testified to two synchronized and opposing developments. The AK Party-led democratic bloc struggled to democratize the political system in the face of the secular-nationalist status quo whereas FETO accelerated its policy of infiltration and invasion of the state institutions and capturing control of civil society.
