With upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections, one would think that Turkey is awash with excitement and fervour. But the election season has been a rather subdued affair. Turks seem to be suffering from election fatigue. Let’s not forget that this is the sixth big vote in Turkey in just four years. The campaign period also coincides with the holy month of Ramazan – Erdogan apparently ordered electioneering to be somewhat calmer. Hmmm. Let’s not forget just how high the stakes are. If incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wins the presidential race, with the new constitution in place it would mean he will be an elected autocrat with unprecedented power. And if his Justice and Development Party (AKP) gain a majority in parliament, Erdogan will be able to use his powers to their maximum potential. Indeed, this is an election that is worth campaigning for, regardless of which party you sympathise with. Although there is now a little bit of a buzz after the holiday period and ahead of polling day, compared to previous elections, it still remains the pretty calm affair. The candidate and party which seems to be suffering from the most amount of election fatigue is that President Erdogan and his AKP. No doubt, they will almost certainly win, but the AKP needs to fight in order to get 50 per cent of the vote so that it may dominate parliament to rubber stamp the will of the President. Meanwhile, Erdogan will win the presidency but would prefer to do it in the first round rather than in a second round two weeks later. Yet, Erdogan is looking tired and his campaign lacklustre. Some of his rallies have been visibly empty and his tongue lashings against opponents and the international conspiracies against Turkey is less venomous than previous years. The billboard campaign of both Erdogan and the AKP appear duller by the day. Apparently, CHP Presidential candidate Muharrem Ince scored higher ratings than Erdogan not only on television, but also on the internet. No doubt because Erdogan and what he stands for is clear, the other candidates who lack media exposure are, therefore, more interesting especially when they mock Erdogan’s lack of university degree and his use of teleprompter which has been hit by system failure. This leads to the question, is Erdogan’s popularity waning. Has the man who has dominated Turkish politics for the last 15 years, lost his shine? Many have described Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a charismatic leader so it is worth consulting Max Weber, one of the three founding fathers of modern sociology, about this matter. In looking at the world around him in turn of the last century, Weber characterised the nature of societal order and political authority. In other words, why do people obey? Why do we abide by laws rather than rebel or resist? Often this comes down to the question of power – people with more power control us. But the use or threat of force cannot be used all the time. More often than not, people obey political elites because they respect authority, meaning that they recognise that those in power have legitimacy to rule. Weber was interested in different types of authority in political societies and identified three. The first is rational-legal authority, which in basic terms means the presence of rules, laws, institutions and bureaucracies that govern based on consensus, not unlike modern democracies. Secondly, there is traditional authority which is when leaders base their legitimacy on past traditions of patrimony, often this would take the form of a monarchy. Finally, and here comes the interesting bit, Weber identified the phenomenon of Charismatic authority. The term “charisma” is religious in origin, Greek for “divine gift”. Put another way, an individual with a god-like quality or aura. That’s the origin of the word, but Charisma is also a word we use colloquially. We know what it means, but it’s hard to define. We use it to describe celebrities, board room managers, politicians and popular people. For example, George Clooney, Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King, Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Adolf Hitler, Will Smith and Barack Obama have all been described as charismatic. A few things I am sure you have noted from the above list. One, all of the aforementioned are men. Two, it lumps together the good with the evil, the profound with the superficial. Thirdly, charisma is in the eye of the beholder. For example, Obama may be charismatic for me, but not to you. Ditto Steve Jobs and Adolph Hitler. Nevertheless, with all the problems associated with the term charisma, Weber still noted the preponderance of charismatic leaders in some countries. They often emerge in a society which has experienced turmoil or an existential crisis. In this context, an individual appears, perhaps from the ranks of the military or a religious group who has exceptional organisational and oratory skills and manages to unite a society and head them towards a particular direction or vision. This is the basis for his (rarely her) authority. That’s right, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk is an almost ideal example. But in some respects so is Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He emerged at a time when Turkey was experiencing one of its worst economic crises in its history, there was uncertainty about the future direction of Turkey, and from the perspective of the pious and conservative population, a sense of victimhood. In this context Erdogan rose to the fore offering Turkey, or at least the demographic of Turkish society he represented as well as disenchanted liberals and capitalists, a vision of a “New Turkey”, one in which a pious generation would arise. This new Turkey would be economically prosperous, technologically and infrastructural advanced and a world leader. Women could wear headscarves to university and the organs of the state would represent and work for the real Turkish majority, those from the socially conservative Anatolian heartland and the urban poor while also benefitting the economic elite. But that was then and the excitement of the Erdogan years of the past 10-15 years is waning. Weber predicted this would be the case in societies where charismatic authority is the source of legitimacy. Charismatic appeal is only temporary. Indeed, the rhetoric of Erdogan has been heard before. The vision is clear as is the direction. It is no longer novel and what is real can be mundane. Mega projects? The third bridge is open and so is the Marmaray. Despite all the hype, they turned out to be pretty lacklustre (some would say failures). Kanal Istanbul and the third airport now seem less exciting. Yes, Erdogan may get his new powers and promise a stronger Turkey, but what he will do is already known. Simply put, more of the same. Weber argues that at this stage, a process begins which he called the routinization of charisma. This is when charismatic authority shifts to either traditional or legal-rational authority, a result of the need to maintain power and is often facilitated by the group around the charismatic leader. Sometimes this is achieved by building monuments and creating new rituals. To some extent we have seen this routinisation process begin with the narrative and commemoration of the “martyrs” of the attempt coup of 16 July 2016. Regardless, what is clear is that although Erdogan and the AKP will no doubt win the forthcoming elections, we are entering a period of the routinization of Erdogan’s charisma, the process of which will dominate the work of Erdogan and the AKP and be institutionalised through the new powers of the constitution. Not much to get excited about, even if you support him.
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The debate surrounding the decision of US Present Donald J. Trump’s to nix the Iran nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), has been a real eye opener. It seems that some politicians and commentators have lost their moral compasses.
After Trump’s decision, Federica Mogherini, the foreign minister of the EU, stated that “We are determined to keep this deal in place”. Meanwhile, it was reported that Bruno Le Maire, France’s finance minister, commented that the Iran deal highlights the need to defend European economic sovereignty, even putting forward the idea of creating a statute to offset US sanctions on European firms doing business in Iran. Meanwhile, The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall, contends that Britain should join other European nations to impose diplomatic and economic sanctions on the US – make Trump pay for sabotaging the Iran deal, he argues. Wow, that must have been some great deal to advocate that Europe side not with the US, but an autocratic regime which hates the very ideals that Europe stands for (remember when Italy was obliged to cover naked statues so not to offend the visiting so-called moderate Iranian President Hassan Rouhani), an Islamic theocracy that has terrifying resemblances to the dystopian society envisaged in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. First things first, the deal itself was poor. Bret Stephens of the New York Times put it best when he wrote that if the JCPOA was so great then why did leaders from France, Germany and the UK, as well as some of its other supporters, feel the need to accept that it needed fixing? Fix it, not nix it, they begged of Trump. Surely, if it was such a good deal, it wouldn’t need any fixing? In reality, there was much that needed to be mended, so much so that the repair work would have left the deal unrecognizable. Where to start, the sunset clause allowing the Islamic Republic to be a nuclear weapon threshold state within 13 years? And then there’s the fact that the deal ignores Tehran’s ballistic missile programme, the exclusion of which was a grave error because if Iran were to acquire a nuclear weapon, it would have to be compatible with its ballistic projectiles. And what about the inspections themselves? Far from unfettered access on demand, if the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) want access to secret military areas, they can’t just barge it. They would need approval from a committee of which Iran is a member! Moreover, the Israeli seizure of Iranian nuclear documents confirmed the suspicions of the US and the IAEA that Iran had indeed been working on a nuclear weapons programme, which although frozen, was still not disclosed to the IAEA and therefore contrary to the spirit of the JCPOA and perhaps even the letter of the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). It was under President Obama that the JCPOA was signed. Obama twice failed the people of Iran, proud inheritors of an ancient civilization whose erudition and study of their poets such as Saadi and Hafez makes me wish that people in the West would do the same for Shakespeare, Melville, and Cervantes. The first Obama let down was in 2009. As Iranians took to the streets to demand that their votes count in what become known as the Green Movement, Obama’s silence was deafening. Later, Obama did well to spearhead international sanctions which crippled the Iranian economy. Make no mistake, in 2013 the sanctions brought the Mullahs to their knees. However, Obama and the P5 +1 abandoned the prospect of regime change in order to make this terrible nuclear deal. Not only did this hand a lifeline to the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards (the real powers in Iran), but it allowed the regime to continue its support with boots on the ground for Bashar al-Assad, the butcher of Damascus, who deliberately tortures, murders and massacres his own people, sometimes with the additional sadistic twist of chemical nerve agents. Europe needs to be more honest about its Iran policy. The reality is there are billions of euros at stake with companies such as Airbus, Total, British-Dutch Shell, Peugeot, Renault, and Siemens standing to lose out with the nixing of the Iran deal. It just all goes to show that the lofty foreign policy ideals of the EU are nothing more than a bunch of words. To hell with the Iranian people, many critics of the deal are effectively saying, as long as European companies make a profit. Shame. Last Monday, I had to make a difficult television viewing decision, either catch up on Homeland season 7 or watch Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu make a live appearance to make revelations about Iran’s nuclear programme? I chose the latter.
Bibi, as Netanyahu is known in Israel, is ever the showman. While delivering a Ted Talk style presentation, he announced to viewers that Israeli intelligence operatives managed to seize tens of thousands of top-secret Iranian documents from a previously unknown nuclear archive located in an unassuming neighbourhood in Tehran (wow!). A sprinkle of these documents was shown in Bibi’s presentation which the Israeli prime minister claimed was evidence that Iran’s top officials, from supreme leader to president and foreign minister, had lied to the international community when they insisted that Iran was not seeking a nuclear bomb. This trove of information, argued Netanyahu, casts doubt on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) which was concluded between Iran, the US, Russia, China and Europe in 2015 under the leadership of Barack Obama, the most fickle president in the history of US foreign policy until the election of Donald Trump, to reduce and monitor Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for the easing of sanctions. In other words, save the Islamic Republic in return for a nuclear deal. President Trump along with a slew of conservative politicians, academics and commentators have termed the agreement a bad deal, a “terrible” deal or the “worst deal ever”. It now looks that they have a point. Some commentators, eager to save the JCPOA, and by extension Obama’s legacy, insist that there is nothing particularly new in these seized documents. They say that it is all hyperbole, rehashed information and that the deal is still a good one. They add that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was already aware of Iran’s attempt to weaponise its nuclear programme, and the documents are dated before the signing of the 2015 JCPOA. Moreover, the IAEA, as well as Europe and the United States all confirmed that Iran has been in full compliance of the deal and, so far, none of the captured documents seems to have contradicted these assessments. Move along, there’s nothing to see here. Not so fast. Why such faith in an autocratic regime which has incessantly lied to its people from Ayatollah Khomeini’s hijacking the 1979 revolution with his hidden plan to install a constitution based on his political interpretation of the Shia concept of the velayat-e faqih with himself as supreme leader, to the stealing of the 2009 elections and the perpetual corruption which led many across the country to protest the regime a few months ago? Why is it so hard to believe that the same clerical regime that murders, steals, plunders, executes, tortures and imprisons its own people also lied to the international community and broke agreements, pledges and declarations? And yes indeed, there is actually something to this cache of documents. Consider the following: It is true that the IAEA, the CIA and other agencies had their suspicions that Iran was actively seeking to weaponise its nuclear programme and was conducting research into the design and construction of a warhead capable of delivering a nuclear payload, but ceased this project in 2003. But throughout this period and continuously until this very day, Iran’s political leaders denied that there was ever such a programme. However, the IAEA and CIA’s suspicions are now facts. Not only do we now know that Iranian officials had been lying, but they were also negotiating in bad faith, including their declaration before the 2015 agreement that Iran would reveal the full extent of its past nuclear work. The documents show that they have done no such thing. Furthermore, the existence of this nuclear archive seems to have been unknown to the international community. Iran did not declare its existence to the IAEA either before the 2015 nuclear deal or after. Nor did Iran hand over its research into making a nuclear bomb. Instead it hid it. This in itself is a breach of the spirit of the JCPOA and may even be a violation of Articles II and/or III of the Non Proliferation Treaty. If Iran is indeed in breach of the NPT, then the JCPOA as it currently stands is not worth the paper it’s printed on. Finally, Bibi’s revelations create the very real suspicion that having negotiated the JCPOA in bad faith, Iran was essentially putting its nuclear weapon programme aside only to come back to it a later. Of course, defenders of the deal have countered that the P5+1 negotiated it with the assumption that Iran was lying, and in the words of President Obama it was based on “unprecedented verification”. But when negotiating the deal, the international powers did not have such concrete proof that their Iranian interlocutors were brazenly lying. How can anyone now defend the laxity in regulating Iran’s ballistic missile programme or the JCPOA’s ridiculously naïve sunset clause which would allow Iran to enrich again after 15 years? No way Jose! Although tougher than its critics like to admit, the flaws in the JCPOA are real. Obama did an excellent job in forming and executing a stringent sanctions regime which really crippled the Iranian economy and brought the regime to its knees. But the Obama administration underestimated just how successful it was. In 2012 and 2013 there were rumblings of protests in Iran’s major cities, alleviated with the 2013 election of President Rohani, a regime loyalist disguised as a reformer. While negotiating the deal, Iran was in a situation where it could not afford to be in Syria and Yemen, develop a nuclear programme and placate its restless population angered by corruption, inflation and unemployment. The very future of the regime was at stake. Obama and Kerry could have done better and should have done better French and German heads of state have tried to convince Trump to fix not nix the deal and make additional supplementary agreements instead. These new documents give him leverage to do just that. He should take it. |
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