Thank you for joining us, Selim. Your book, New Turkey and the Far Right, was recently published. In it, you provide insight into the intellectual and cultural movements underwriting the worldview of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his supporters as they increasingly shape Turkish foreign policy. You argue that the Turkish far-right, including Erdoğan, subscribe to an ideology of “Competitive Occidentalism.” Can you explain what that means and how it has evolved over Erdoğan’s time in power?
Thanks for having me! I undertake a cultural reading of the Erdoğan movement, arguing that it’s a Nietzschean “revaluation” of the Kemalist republic. This means that I divide republican history into two parts. I describe the dominant value system of the Kemalist era as “Aspirational Occidentalism,” meaning that it upholds Western forms as “good” and non-Western (Islamic, Turkic, Eastern) forms as “bad.” These are aesthetic preferences as much as anything else.
The “New Turkey” system flips these values on its head. The West becomes not a model, but an anti-model. The Islamist elite still emulates the West, but it does so in different ways, and with the goal of competing with Western countries, rather than joining them. I call this “Competitive Occidentalism.” So contrary to Islamist claims of establishing an alternative modernity, it’s still a value system that’s centered around the West, but it’s reacting to Western forms in a particular way.
The shift we’ve seen from “Old” to “New” Turkey isn’t about ideology per se, or about religion vs. secularism, but about one’s orientation towards the West.
I argue that the shift we’ve seen from “Old” to “New” Turkey isn’t about ideology per se, or about religion vs. secularism, but about one’s orientation towards the West, and the value system this engenders. I guess one could write many different books centered on this theme. I could have written a short history of New Turkey’s cultural scene or religious attitudes, but the book is really about how this shift in values relates to the state’s outlook on international politics.
At the end of the second chapter, you say that Turkey “stands out” among illiberal governments in the extent to which the far right has embedded its ideas in the structures of the state. In what ways do Erdoğan’s state-shaping strategies differ from those used by other, similar governments? How difficult would it be for a future Turkish government to undo his institutional legacy?
It’s not a comparative book, but I do think that Turkey’s far-right takeover is farther along than most comparable movements. This is partly because they moved earlier, when the world wasn’t really willing to accept this type of movement.
Turkey’s far-right takeover is farther along than most comparable movements.
Erdoğan was a rising far-right leader at a time when the world really wasn’t familiar or ready for this type of politics. He was mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s and found that if he wanted to succeed in national politics, he had to placate the dominant power structure of the time, which was liberal and centered in Washington and Brussels. The first thing that the young Turkish Islamists tried to do was take over their party (Virtue Party, the successor of Erbakan’s Welfare Party) and rebrand it as a centrist force. Their takeover bid failed, however, so they ended up founding their own party—the AK Party—which actually gave them a cleaner break from their Islamist past. The early AK Party had to look and feel like a European Christian Democratic party, but in time, the far-right bits came out in ever-more prominent ways.
I don’t think that kind of duality exists with many far-right parties in the West today. In Europe, the far-right parties are raiders that are chipping away at the center-right with every election. In the United States, Donald Trump is a one-man far-right bulldozer who has taken over the Republican party by storm and is reshaping it in the image of MAGA. So, you don’t really have a single far-right movement moving to the center, then jerking back to the extreme, with people getting lost along the way. Perhaps there are comparisons to be made with Hungary and India, where you have similar arcs.
You place Turkey “among a league of revisionist powers,” comparing it to far-right governments in the US and Russia. Yet, whereas these governments have explicitly attacked the post-Cold War order, Erdoğan has pursued his revisionist goals both inside and outside of the norms of the liberal international system. This kind of dual strategy emerges in curiously different guises throughout your book. Could you describe some of these examples? How do you think this strategy will evolve with Trump in the White House?
Yes exactly. I think what Turkish Islamism under Erdogan’s leadership has done immensely well is develop a sense for timing. They have an image of what they want power relations to be like in the future, and they have a realistic assessment of what power relations are like in the present, and they’re very good at navigating the chasms on the way.
Necmettin Erbakan, who is the founder of modern Turkish Islamism and the biggest example to the founders of the AK Party, had the same goals, but he didn’t have that sense of timing and navigational skill. He’d conduct an almost Iranian-style politics, where he’d talk about how Turkey shouldn’t be in NATO, and build its own Islamic defense alliance, or that it should build an EU-style Islamic unit with its own currency, etc.
Erdoğan’s party plays the position of a “geopolitical double agent.”
The AK Party shared those opinions, but they also understood that the world was a dangerous place for Islamists and that they needed to ride out the liberal system to get to a place where they could build these things. So, they work within the system. They’re very good at earning trust in Washington by working on sensitive issues like the war in Ukraine. I argue that this puts them into the position of a “geopolitical double agent.” It’s never clear whether they’re working for the West or “the Rest,” and that creates its own kind of energy.
Artistic and historiographical movements play a significant role in your discussion of Turkish far-right ideology. Indeed, you compare it to the European romantic nationalisms of the 19th century. By contrast, today’s Western far-right movements do not seem to have the same links to poets and historians. Do you agree with that characterization? Do you think these links give the Turkish far-right a clearer vision for the cultural change they wish to bring about compared to their European and American equivalents?
That’s interesting to think about.
I think there’s a time lag here. I’m writing about the generation of Islamists who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s and built themselves up from an ideological movement into a full bureaucratic, political, and business establishment. At that time, poetry was a very powerful medium, and it brought these people together. The current generation of millennial Islamists isn’t as bound up with poetry and history anymore. They’re too busy scrolling through their phones to engage seriously with poetry. They do have ideas about history, but it largely comes from non-historians (TV scriptwriters, YouTube videos, etc.)
In the West, that Cold War generation of far-right figures didn’t really break out into the scene in the late 1990s or 2000s. There’s a bubbling up of that (John Ganz’s recent book is excellent on this in the U.S.), but they don’t really take over. There are places like Italy, where Silvio Berlusconi takes over, but that’s really a hybrid figure, and doesn’t reflect the general trend. Leadership is arguably in the process of skipping a generation now: Marine Le Pen is yielding to Jordan Bardella, Trump will probably yield to someone like J.D. Vance, etc. The millennial base there is also not really connected to poetry, and is very much online.
Having said that, there are still plenty of cultural references on the Western right, perhaps more so than in Turkey. The religious wing is rediscovering the Bible and bringing it into online culture. People like Jordan Peterson make all kinds of Jungian references. There’s a rediscovery of Catholic thinkers and aesthetes, like C.S. Lewis. The intellectuals are reading Strauss and Heidegger; the secular types are reading Schmitt and Rand. Everybody is reading Nietzsche, or rather, is pretending to read him. It all gets fed into algorithms and makes it into people’s heads in fragmented form.
So, I think the difference we see is more about the generational shift, rather than anything inherently different about these movements.
You mention briefly that state-sponsored television has reflected changes to Turkey’s geopolitical strategy, most notably through shows that glorify the Ottoman and Seleukid militaries. Could you expand on this point? How popular are these types of programs?
Historical shows have become very popular for several reasons. First, they are a very effective way to revise the sense of collective history, perhaps more effective than revising the official history curriculum. They allow the government to raise new questions and answer them. For instance, why did the Ottoman Empire decline and get broken up? How did the West create modernity and dominate world politics? Is Turkey a powerful state or a weak one?
The Turkish state creates a metanarrative that the West “won” because it was treacherous and evil, and Turkey (or the Muslim world, depending on the program) fell behind because the West divided it against itself.
As a governing elite, you can write narratives that are very loosely based on historical facts and bend perceptions towards the direction you want, creating a metanarrative that validates your rule. People do this all the time. Progressives and liberals have their own mechanisms in Hollywood, and more recently in technology firms like Netflix. The Turkish state is very explicit about the fact that it sees these places as direct competitors and wants to offer alternative narratives to them. Usually, the metanarrative they create is that the West “won” because it was treacherous and evil, and Turkey (or the Muslim world, depending on the program) fell behind because the West divided it against itself. This kind of story is very typical of romantic movements in European history. It’s not the kind of thing that has immediate, or even medium-term political consequences, but I believe that it builds up and really determines the direction of the country.
How powerful is this kind of culture, especially in TV? It’s hard to say. The production value is getting better, but perhaps the population isn’t as enthusiastic about it as it was in the 2010s.
In March, you wrote an article about the large protest movement gathering steam across Turkey, which arose in response to the arrest of Istanbul mayor and presidential candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu. What do you think this uprising says about the popularity and future of Erdoğan’s “New Turkey”?
Even in 2019, Istanbul’s mayoral election signaled the limits of Erdogan’s form of politics. In some ways, it hasn’t succeeded in expanding beyond half of the population. They’re now experimenting with cracking down on the opposition far beyond anything they’ve done before. I think this is dangerous for them. Turkey is a country with deep democratic experience. We have a long history of standing up to autocracy and more than 150 years of parliamentary elections. I think Erdoğan’s people are operating on a very faulty set of assumptions.
Either way, they can no longer claim that they’re just very popular and successful at politics. Any election they win is going to be seen as illegitimate. That problem is going to keep growing, making it increasingly difficult for them to govern.
Lastly, I wanted to ask you about “illiberalism”, the focus of our program. You raise some doubts about the term in your book, suggesting that, in the Turkish context, its use has often obfuscated the far-right goals of the government. Do you believe it is analytically useful for describing Erdoğan’s actions in power? What do you think its limits are?
I write in the book that there are some words like “illiberal” or “anti-Western” that give a negative description of Erdoğan’s movement, meaning that they describe it in terms of what it isn’t. I write that I’d like to provide a positive description, meaning one that describes it for what it is. That’s how I get into the discussion of romantic nationalism.
I think it’s clear at this point that “New Turkey” is illiberal. The Erdoğan palace still pays lip service to liberal concepts like individual freedom and the rule of law, but looking at their conduct, there can’t be any doubt that they don’t take these seriously. It’s telling that among Ankara’s ruling elite, the term “liberal” is often used derisively. It denotes someone who is soft, who can’t think politically, maybe someone who’s stuck in the past, and isn’t strong enough to be part of the country’s future.
There are actually very few who describe themselves as liberals in Turkey these days. During the AK Party’s rise, it received strong support from the liberal establishment, and many of those elites ended up regretting that. So even people who are pretty clearly liberals have been eschewing the label.
There are actually very few who describe themselves as liberals in Turkey these days.
Selim Koru is a non-resident analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV) and author of the Kültürkampf substack newsletter. He has written on Turkish politics for publications such as the New York Times, War on the Rocks, and The Atlantic, and is the author of New Turkey and the Far Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country, published in February 2025.
