Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s remark “liberalism has become obsolete” was headlined in the Financial Times issue dated 27 June, 2019.

The liberalism meant by Putin is the administrative system based on “liberal values” that are defined by the American left and called “constitutional liberal democracy” by the West.

From the perspective of these values, Putin is often accused of a series of things, such as being “authoritarian,” ruling his country with an iron fist, silencing the opposition and condoning the killing of dissident names.

Until recently, it was a common belief that a country could not have an advanced capitalist system that would render it a big player in the global arena without having a democracy based on liberal values.

However, Russia, a country rich in energy resources and not liberal by any means, has been taking on crucial roles in the world scene. In addition, China is ruled by the Communist Party and has lately granted almost lifelong leadership to its new leader Xi Jinping. Despite its gigantic police state and its order that can send millions to concentration camps at the same time and can close big regions at the scale of countries to the world, China has the most rapidly advancing capitalist economy of the past 40 years and its critical position in the world order is obvious.

Turkey and liberal politics

Is Putin right? Has liberalism really gone beyond its purpose and become obsolete? These questions are discussed everywhere in the world nowadays, including Turkey, of course. In Turkey’s case, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been accused of being “authoritarian” and suspending democracy especially as of 2013. And lately, the EU has accused Turkey of going backwards in terms of the rule of law and human rights.

 Has liberalism really gone beyond its purpose and become obsolete? These questions are discussed everywhere in the world nowadays, including Turkey, of course.

The Western media often depicts President Erdogan as “the sultan of Turkey” with a typical orientalist gaze. This is a groundless insolence, because Erdogan’s power is based on popular support. It would be an insult to the Turkish nation if we compare the democracy in Turkey with countries like Russia, Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan. Turkey has always had a very vocal opposition. Turkey’s founding leader Kemal Ataturk had a strong opposition at the time, and Erdogan has a strong opposition today. Besides, the opposition in Turkey is on the rise in the current context.

Although the People’s Alliance, composed of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), has preserved its power by enjoying more than 52 percent of the vote share in the latest local election, the opposition led by the Republican People’s Party (CHP) caught an advantage in terms of morale, since it won critical metropolitan municipalities such as Istanbul and Ankara. The repeat of the Istanbul mayoral election and the victory of the CHP’s Istanbul candidate Ekrem Imamoglu by 54 percent in the re-election amped up the morale of the opposition and caused opponents to see Imamoglu as a strong candidate to run for presidency against Erdogan in the 2023 presidential election.

On June 23, Turkey reached the end of an array of elections and referendums that began in March 2014. We have gone through two local elections, three general elections, two presidential elections and one referendum over the course of the past five years. The latest June 23 election should also be recognized as a separate election. So, the Turkish electorate went to the polls for nine times within this period. And now, the closest election is scheduled to be held on May 2023, at least on paper.

Depicting Erdogan as “the Sultan of Turkey” is typically orientalist. President Erdogan’s power is based on popular support and Turkey has always had a very vocal opposition.

Turkey has been in a great turbulence since the Gezi Park incidents in May 2013. The Gezi Park incidents, which caused a serious political and societal damage, were followed by the December 17 and 25 investigations, a purge attempt by the members of Gulenist Terror Group (FETO), the coup attempt on 15 July, 2016, orchestrated by FETO and the state of emergency declared after the coup attempt.

Throughout this period, the AK Party government turned to polls for the legitimization of the fight against FETO, asked for the people’s approval, and resorted to several extraordinary legal measures as of December 2013.

These measures that were taken as part of the anti-FETO fight form the basis of the criticisms directed to Turkey in terms of going backwards in democracy, human rights and the rule of law.  

The AK Party government and President Erdogan revoked a part of the extraordinary measures on the grounds that they are no longer needed, but Turkey could still not return to its pre-2013 “normal” state. In early 2013, Turkey was seeking to become more liberal and had started announcing judicial reform packages. After several liberating reforms made in 2013, the country entered a long period of stagnation, which is still ongoing.

The judicial reform initiative announced before the June 23 election is the most crucial indicator of the fact that the ruling power in Turkey still wishes to turn back to the pre-2013 route.

Will the liberal order, claimed to be dead by Putin, resuscitate in Turkey in the following months or years?

Will the liberal order, claimed to be dead by Putin, resuscitate in Turkey in the following months or years? Does President Erdogan and his administration wish that new liberties and reforms would determine the agenda of the country in the run up to the 2023 elections? 

Turkey’s economic challenge 

Before scrutinizing this, the economic recession Turkey has been confronting is also worth a brief mention. Turkey is currently facing the economic consequences of the political turbulence ongoing since 2013.

In fact, the economic recession began in 2013, when Turkey entered this political turbulence. The country firstly experienced a slow growth rate, which turned into recession over time. It would not be wrong to suggest that since 2013, Turkish people have been growing poorer whereas their income and wealth levels are on a gradual decline as the Turkish Lira’s value against the U.S. dollar is considered.

There is a correlation between the political turbulence experienced with this recession and the extraordinary legal measures taken.

The Turkish economy has a serious structural weakness. It always needs foreign capital for economic growth. There is no problem as long as this capital comes as direct investment, but not all of what is needed comes as direct investment. Turkey takes loans from abroad to a serious extent. This high level of financial indebtedness makes economic actors very sensitive to the changes in the value of the Turkish Lira while increasing the volatility of the currency. This is unavoidable when the earnings are Turkish Lira-denominated but the debts are in foreign currency.

Even worse, it does not seem very possible to overcome this economic weakness in the short term. Therefore, all the administrations in Turkey need the inflow of foreign sources in order to improve the welfare of the Turkish people. They naturally want to meet this need by drawing direct foreign investment capital instead of taking loans, but as I mentioned above, direct investment does not always satisfy all the needs.

The economic conditions and the no-election period that will last until May 2023 oblige the government to turn back to the pre-2013 Turkey.

The sharp devaluation in the Turkish Lira as of early 2018 alarmed the Western banks lending to Turkey. Turkey can no longer find additional loans. According to the latest figures, Turkish companies have paid debts corresponding to more than $25 billion over the past 12 months, and still cannot find new loans to take.

So, the economic conditions and the no-election period that will last until May 2023 oblige the government to turn back to the pre-2013 Turkey. Adopting policies that will prioritize economic development and promote peace and stability, the rule of law and other liberal values and practices seem unavoidable.

Furthermore, we have seen in the past 5-6 years that Turkish foreign policy directly affects the economy and the welfare of citizens. Turkey’s foreign policy steps always seek to guarantee its own national survival and the peace of its neighborhood in a tough region of the world. In the following period, the government should concentrate on the policy of having fewer foes and more friends.

I think it would be too assertive to refer to them as a “return to liberal policies,” because what Turkey seeks in the first place is “normalization.” Only after the normalization process is completed economic growth is enabled, it will be possible to speak about liberalization.

Entering the long list of false prophets, Francis Fukuyama, in the summer of 1989, emphatically announced the “end of history,” suggesting that the progressive collapse of the Communist bloc and the supposed victory of its erstwhile adversary marked the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution,” and that there existed a “remarkable consensus concerning liberal democracy as a system of government.” Nothing could have been further away from the truth: While history has continued unabated, it is “liberal democracy” that – 30 year’s after its apotheosis as cornerstone of a “New World Order” – seems to approach a premature end. Even in the countries that propagated it at the global level since the end of World Word II, and even more so after the end of the Cold War, its foundations are gradually being eroded and its legitimacy is increasingly questioned as paradigm of a just and equitable political order.

However, this turn of history (unexpected in the eyes of the apologists of the supposedly permanent new order) should not surprise those who analyze the deep structure of politics. From the outset, “liberal” democracy has been a shallow concept. Contrary to Fukuyama’s analysis, it is not “free from fundamental internal contradictions.” In the countries that practiced and propagated it as epitome of dignity and human rights, “democracy” effectively meant élite rule in the form of representation, often in its plutocratic version. Direct participation of the people was in most cases excluded. In the name of freedom, this model of politics – in spite of its internal contradictions – was aggressively enforced worldwide. Under euphemisms such as “humanitarian intervention” or “régime change,” the Western policy of liberal hegemony, under the leadership of the United States, created a number of “failed states,” profoundly destabilized geopolitically sensitive regions such as the Middle East and undermined the very idea of the international rule of law.

The values of the self-proclaimed liberal order were enforced on the basis of the national interests of its dominant actors. For the sake of realpolitik, the legitimate rights and interests of weaker states “on the periphery,” i.e. in the developing world, were subordinated to those of the guarantors of that order. Free trade was propagated as cornerstone of a free world – as long as it suited the interests of the major player. If this was not the case, punitive (unilateral) sanctions made the slogan of free trade – and, with it, economic freedom – virtually meaningless. The practice of double standards has become the rule, rather than the exception, of this essentially imperial strategy.

Under euphemisms such as “humanitarian intervention” or “régime change,” the Western policy of liberal hegemony, under the leadership of the United States, created a number of “failed states,” profoundly destabilized geopolitically sensitive regions such as the Middle East and undermined the very idea of the international rule of law.

The “rule-based international order” that was portrayed as the essence of a liberal world was not in any way liberal either. From the outset, since the foundation of the United Nations Organization after World War II, it has meant a system of power sharing among five states, the permanent members of the Security Council. Because of their veto right, the norms of international law, including the prohibition of the use of force, did effectively not apply to those countries. However, granting a special privilege to a small number of states, and on a permanent basis, is in no way compatible with democracy and fairness among nations. The much-regretted policy of double standards was systemic. When, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the power balance among the five veto-wielding powers in the Security Council collapsed, it was ultimately the military power of the United States and its Western allies that shaped the contours of world order and that determined when and under what circumstances the values of freedom and democracy would be enforced.

This “liberal order” is now unraveling. The consequences are felt domestically as well as globally. They are related to the unrestrained exercise of power, including resort to military force, by the hegemon who tried to exploit the power vacuum – after the end of global bipolarity – in order to make its new order permanent. The aggressive assertion of supremacy, in the name of an ill-defined idea, not only undermined the very notion of liberty, but also triggered a blowback effect. An increasing number of states realized that this “liberal order” was in fact a realm of hegemony, and began to organize themselves in new groupings and alliances in order to avoid marginalization. (The formation of BRICS, including Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a case in point.)

The rule-based international order that was portrayed as the essence of a liberal world was not in any way liberal. From the outset, it has meant a system of power sharing among five states, the permanent members of the Security Council.

The imperial instrumentalization of the liberal idea discredited the concept in the eyes of the large majority of nations. Instead of a rule-based order in which the norms are set – and violated – by the dominant player, it is now again understood that more than international law it is the laws of realpolitik which determine the fate of nations – and that relations between states are unavoidably conducted within a system of self-help.

Realpolitik trumps a false idealism that has become a tool of power politics and has undermined the very idea of the rule of law between nations. Thus, inadvertently, the dominant West, paying lip service to democracy and human rights, has triggered a development towards a new multi-polar architecture of the globe that may be essentially different from that after World War II.

Domestically, the liberal interventionism of the West has undermined the very fabric of society and eroded the normative foundations of the state system not only in the targeted countries (particularly in the Middle East), but also in the regions where it originated, namely the United States and Europe. An arrogant and shortsighted policy of “régime change,” implemented under humanitarian pretext, produced a number of failed states. This, in turn, triggered long-term destabilization in the targeted and neighboring regions, including Europe. What has become known as “migration crisis” is a direct result of these policies. Causing a split not only among member states, but also among civil society in each state, it has profoundly weakened the political system of the European Union and undermined its very legitimacy.

Instead of a commitment to the co-operative European project, European society has witnessed a return to identity politics that puts at risk Europe’s role as a global actor.

In tandem with the liberalization of the labor market as result of unfettered globalization (that has eroded social standards in the industrialized world and created a feeling of insecurity also among the middle class), the European Union’s inability to manage mass migration has caused a major backlash in terms of social cohesion and political stability in Europe itself. The idea of a liberal world order has become discredited in the eyes of the public.

Instead of a commitment to the co-operative European project – as basis of dialogue with other regions including the Muslim world, European society has witnessed a return to identity politics that puts at risk Europe’s role as a global actor. The most acute expression of this trend is the wave of Islamophobia, in fact anti-Islamic hatred, which is fast entering the political mainstream in key countries of the continent, but also in the United States and other countries. These developments, accompanying the West’s “liberal” interventionism, have effectively undermined the politics of multiculturalism and seem to have made Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” a self-fulfilling prophecy. The rise of what is described as populist nationalism has become a major challenge to the West’s propagation of and commitment to liberal values such as human rights and democracy. In view of increasingly arrogant claims to civilizational superiority, this commitment has lost all credibility.

History has not come to an end, however. The self-appointed enforcers of the existing order have triggered a chain of unintended consequences, which are increasingly beyond their control. After the failure of Western liberalism, a multipolar balance of power seems to emerge with new centers of gravity on all continents that will not anymore accept ideological hegemony by whichever global player.

It has been long argued that the world is coming out of the age of liberal world order. While this is a common argument nowadays, many also acknowledge that the liberal world order was just another utopia, which we never reached anyway. As put by Richard Haas, the system we lived in “was neither liberal nor worldwide nor orderly.” It is hard to disagree with Haas. The liberal world order was not liberal domestically or internationally as states continued to commit vast human rights violations against their citizens or the citizens of other countries. Not only were resources, but the order was also distributed unevenly across the globe. And, the so-called order had multiple phases and cases of disorder, instability, anarchy, and war, which left many, quoting from Hobbes, with nasty, brutish and short lives.

Human rights were a key issue of the liberal world order. Its relevance increased with greater stress on the responsibility to protect and humanitarian interventions to prevent crimes against humanity. Nevertheless, despite its increasingly more central role in discourse, many countries have ignored the question of human rights. Not only the rogue states or the states in the periphery of the system but key U.S. allies and main pillars of the UN Security Council have been responsible for vast human rights violations from Saudi Arabia to Israel, China and so on. The U.S., the system’s central country and key player, has also not cared about human rights in places where it embraced a civilizing and democratizing mission. The country not only targeted multiple wedding parties with lots of civilian casualties from Afghanistan to Iraq and Yemen in its “surgical” strikes, but also erected torture centers from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib. Beyond these direct killing and torture cases, the U.S. has also been the primary sponsor of human rights violations committed by countries like Israel, where it has become a regular practice to shoot unarmed crowds whether they protest or play football on the beach.

Why do we have this recent haze and craze then if the liberal world order that we mourn for now has never been born? I believe the primary reason for this is that we have lost not the system (which was unborn anyway) but our faith in it. We believed in its existence so much that we tried our best not to see how phony it was. Many simply looked the other way and pretended not to see genocides from Bosnia to Rwanda, all happening at a time when the liberal world order was uncontested by systemic powers. Why it took so long to notice that the liberal world order was a huge scam. The answer is twofold I believe.

Before giving the answer, just a reminder, some people never believed in its existence. Go ask a Palestinian to see how this liberal order has affected him/her. Many in the West believed its existence though, until it ended in the West as well. It ended in the West in two ways. Trump, the leader of the leading country of this order, dropped the language of the liberal world order altogether. Under his leadership, the U.S. no longer propagates a global human rights discourse. In fact, in one of the recent cases, Israel killed 58 Palestinians and wounded over 1200 over the U.S. decision to recognize the contested city of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Israeli troops killed 16 unarmed Palestinians –including a 14-year-old boy and a man in a wheelchair- the very same day when Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were opening the embassy. In other words, the U.S. perhaps has not changed the way it acts but it now speaks more irresponsibly in the speeches (and tweets) of its leader and in the symbolic steps it takes.

A second reason why the West dropped its faith in the liberal world order is the anti-migration measures being taken in Europe and the U.S. As the irregular immigrants end up in detention camps and cages (literally cages), the Western audience has slowly started to figure out the fact that the age of human rights was not so much about the tanned humans.

The liberal world order, was not a liberal order but it was still more orderly than the critics assume. I believe this is the main contrast with the pre-Trump era. What shocks people now is not the killings or tortures around the world but simply the unpredictability of the system and the impolite attitudes of Trump. The so-called liberal world order can handle cruel political leaders who can lead to vast human rights abuses, but it should be done in a “polite” way. This was how the system worked and this is how it will work after Trump. We will not have a bright future in the post-Trump era, the miseries will not end, but we will have a more polite president. As for other issues with regard to the liberal character of the order from international trade to international institutions, that’s the place where we should look for the real change under the Trump administration.