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Selim Koru, "New Turkey and the Far Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country" (I. B. Tauris, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Salim Korou
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- [00:30]
Marshall Poe
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- [01:37]
Ruben Silverman
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network's Middle East Studies Podcast. My name is Ruben Silverman and with me is Salim Korou. Salim Korou is an analyst at the Economic Policy Research foundation of Turkey and a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His writing has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times and Foreign Affairs. He also writes regularly on his well regarded substack Culture Kampf. Today we'll be discussing his book, New Turkey and the Far How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country. It was published in 2025 by Ib Taurus. Now, in these podcasts, we like to start by asking authors to talk a little bit about their background and how it led them to their topic. And conveniently, that's how your book starts as well. So perhaps you can talk a little bit about that, about Yourself, your family background and how it shaped your perspective on Turkey.
- [02:29]
Salim Korou
Yeah, thanks, Ruben, for having me. So I do start the book that way. It made sense to me. I started really thinking about this book in 2017, 2018. I had written an article in the Atlantic on the nature of reactionary politics in Turkey. How right wing politics had become very reactionary and that the reaction was very much one to Western supremacy, Western geopolitical supremacy especially, well, actually during the Cold War, but also especially since the Cold War and how this was really kind of driving the Erdogan movement, how it made the Erdoan movement very resilient. And I thought that I wanted to develop that thought really more in a book. And the place of approaching it was, had to do some things with, with my family background, right, Because I sort of, I, I come from an Islamist family. Actually. Both sides of my, my mother's side and my father's side are, are from like different strands of Islamist politics in Izmir. And anybody who knows about Turkish politics knows that Izmir isn't really a very Islamist place. Right? But, but the Islamists who do, who do live there are, tend to be, I think they tend to be a little more creative and they tend to be a little more stark in their beliefs. Right. And you know, growing up, I, I grew up in that kind of environment, but also my, my father was also in the Foreign Ministry. He was the, as far as we know, the, the first person to become a diplomat who, who also has a background, who's also an Imam Hadeb graduate. And Imam Matib schools are, they were established to train imams, right. But then they, they were kind of expanded and became kind of a conservative school system that ran almost parallel to the regular school system. Right. And it, for a while it, it was kind of difficult from the imam ATP system to enter college and they docked your points and stuff. So it was, those were all sort of controversies. But my dad, he, he had also studied at Angkor University, right, Which is the school that most bureau grads study at, and then joined the Foreign Ministry. And as far as we know, as I said, he was the first one of his background to do so. So I had this sort of double life, you know, living in, in Western countries in Germany and then later on in the United States, but also during the summers sort of visiting my relatives and being in Izmir and being marinated in this more Islamist space. So yeah, I think I was more sensitive probably to sort of the, the, I don't want to say ideological, but the emotional undercurrent of Islamism and how that was important in. In politics, especially in this period, I think in the 2000 and tens, especially after 2013 or so, when Gizi park happened and Islamism just became a lot more paranoid and I think it's fair to say aggressive. So that's the kind of background to the book I wanted to be able to explain. Okay, why is this happening right now and the way it is?
- [05:56]
Ruben Silverman
Well, and so with the book, the subtitle argues that understanding reactionary nationalism is essential to understanding the new Turkey. So what is this nationalism reacting against? And what sort of new order is it hoping to shape? And you're mentioning Islamism. How does Islamism intersect with this reactionary nationalism?
- [06:17]
Salim Korou
Yeah, so I think, I mean, any type of politics is reacting to something in the world, right? I mean, if you're, if you're, I don't know, if you're a leftist, right, you're reacting to supremacy of capital and the way that it's taken over the world. If you're a conservative, you're reacting to progressive ideas attacking you from all sides, whatever. I mean, any, any kind of politics can be put into the language of sort of some. Some kind of reactionary analysis. What I think makes the reactionary, right, especially these days, different is that there is deeper, like a. An existential reactionary element to it, and that involves the way they see history. So if you're going to this as well in the introduction, if you are a liberal in the United States growing up in the 90s, for example, the lesson that you're taught in history class is that your side won, right? You won both world wars. The good guys won, the bad guys lost. And the thing that you now have to do is to be a custodian of that victory, to maintain it, to expand it to perhaps. I mean, the way it's put usually is like, bring other countries into it, right? Into the liberal international order, et cetera. So it's that kind of a view of history where your side has won. Now, if you're reactionary, you see your side as having lost. Now, in Turkey, the official history is much akin to that in the United States, or what it was in the United States, which is that our side had won, right? That Mustafa Kemal Taturk had established the republic, that there were setbacks, but ultimately we had won in history and we were building up on that victory. But there were certain strands of Turkish politics that didn't think so, right? There were strands of Turkish politics that thought, okay, Something has gone terribly wrong and we live really in a catastrophe. Right. And Islamism is one of those. There are strands of Turkism, of Pan Turkic nationalism that think along those lines as well. And I classify, I think those groups as being on the far right. And the way they look at politics is okay, we have to re establish hierarchy, we have to re establish the natural flow of politics in our country and only then will we be able to solve real world problems. That's the way I set up reactionary politics. What it means to be a reactionary, especially of this type, of the Islamist type.
- [09:04]
Ruben Silverman
Well, and if I can ask you just one example, you have, I mean several examples of interesting intellectuals who talk about these ideas. One that I found particularly interesting is Kader Misurolu. You describe him and I was just not aware of him and certainly not in detail before reading your book. So maybe you could talk about who he is and how he represents some of this thought that you're describing.
- [09:29]
Salim Korou
Yeah, I mean I chose to talk about two people. Nigel Fazel is the first and he's pretty well established. Like a lot of people have read about him this theses about him, like academic theses. There's now an award that Erdogan gives out, the Nija Fazel Awards. Right. In the era of culture. So that's really well established. But Mussoorlu is different because I think in many ways he characterizes this regime better than Nija Basel because he doesn't have that gloss on him of greater respectability and stuff that Nejfazl sometimes does because Nejfazel was a pretty, I think, I mean I would actually agree with a lot of people saying, you know, his poetry reads well. Certainly very captivating figure. Mussoorollu doesn't really have those things. He was more unapologetic about what he was doing. So Musarolu is. What was this? He recently died just a couple years ago. He was this self taught historian perhaps is a good way of putting it. He went to Istanbul very early on in his life, got himself into the Islamist magazines because at the, at the time in the 60s or so, Islamism was really centered around these magazines. Right. That, that was really the meeting point for a lot of these people. And he wrote a book very early on in his life and that was about the Treaty of Lausanne. And the Treaty of Lausanne is sort of. Many describe it as the foundational stone of the republic. This is the Mustafa Kamal Tatuk and sort of the war of independence comes to an end. Turkey sends an Emissary to Lausanne to meet with the European powers to draft out a treaty and to set the boundaries for modern day Turkey, right? And that's the Treaty of Lausanne. And it's in. In the Republic, it's hailed as a victory. And in, in Turkish textbooks, you know, if you were coming growing up in the 90s and 2000s, this. This is the victory, right, that your country is built on. And Qadr Mussolla Olu wrote this book saying, actually, this is defeat. Ozan, you. You gave away the empire, you gave away all this, all this territory. And you gave it away because the people representing Turkey were culturally overly deferential to the West. They believed in Western supremacy. They didn't actually believe in their own country's sort of metaphysical power. And that's why they gave everything away. And he's basing the book on very scant resources and very scant documentary evidence. So as a work of history, it's very difficult to take seriously, but as a work of propaganda, it's. It's very effective and it has that aspect of shifting your view of history from, you know, the victory perspective to defeat very quickly. And he, he wrote some other books as well throughout his life, but none of them had that kind of resonance, right? That, that was really his most powerful work. And he would always talk about that in, in later years, in time, he had his own magazine. He had a growing following, and he was this strange figure physically as well. He. He wore a fez. One of the last people to wear a fez. He. He had. He used a cane like Abdul Hamid ii. He spoke in this very. With this very Ottoman vocabulary. He made a point. He was actually good at it. He made a point of saying, you know, modern Turkish was effeminate and that Ottoman Turkish was masculine and strong and that you had to be that. That was the language of masters and you had to go back to that language in order to, you know, succeed in politics and geopolitics. And that's really what he was about in his later years, in the 2000s and 2010s, he. He became kind of YouTube famous. A lot of younger people found him through YouTube. He had these, you know, long YouTube videos, a little like Jordan Peterson, I guess, where young people would latch onto and go see him in Istanbul and things like that. And he's in the news sometimes. He was in the news sometimes because Bilal Erdogan, one of Erdogan's sons, would go visit him or, you know, say something nice about him, and then people would get outraged because. Because in the news, especially in the opposition news, he's kind of just known as an enemy of Ataturk because he wasn't very shy about. A lot of Islam, is so shy about this point. But he was very clear that he despised Ataturk and everything that he did. He would sometimes get sued for. For speaking Yellowk, which still happens, but that's the extent of it. And because of how sort of vitriolic and strong his enmity to Ataturk was, Erdogan couldn't really embrace him in public. But I think it's pretty clear, and people who sort of know the ideological environment around the palace know that certainly his ideas have been very influential to people around there, including Erdogan.
- [14:57]
Ruben Silverman
Well, good, Steve. That's the background I'm hoping to start with. So we have this sense of frustration, this sense of resentment, this sense of history having gone the wrong direction. And then, as you're discussing in your book, you began researching, writing the book in 2018, 2023. So during Erdogan's first presidential term, his first term during which the Constitution had been changed and. And giving him expanded powers. So I'd like to talk a little bit about this, as you do in your book. What are some of the features of this new system that's come into being under Erdogan during these years, and how did they contribute to his program of realizing the type of ideas and aims that people like Misirlou were discussing?
- [15:46]
Salim Korou
Right. So when the Erdogan people came to power and this was 2002, 2003, this was the early Ock party, things were very shaky. It was just a regular kind of government trying to get a hold of the institutions of government, trying to govern effectively. They governed largely through this neoliberal paradigm that was very dominant at the time. And they did it well. They had people like Ali Babajan who had the trust of international markets and this stuff. And more and more, the more elections they won, the more they felt like they could influence these institutions and pull them to their side. I discussed the way they think about these institutions. Right. Because they're starting to think about, okay, Erdogan starts talking about what he calls the bureaucratic oligarchy in those years. And the bureaucratic oligarchy is just any kind of procedural thing, any kind of red tape that prevents him from doing things. He becomes very, very upset with this idea that you win elections, but you still can't do all the things you want to do. The stuff in the system resists you. There's there's opposition parties, there's bureaucratic pushback, there's, there's all these kinds of things and he just wants to cut through that. And of course, during this time he's also working with the Gulenists very strongly and working with the Gullenists, for them at the beginning especially is very important because the military is breathing down their neck. And the military is at this time still a very powerful institution. And it's thought that they could stage a coup or you know, just, just make it very difficult for them to push through their agenda. And the Gulenists are very effective at sort of dismantling the, the military's influence in politics and in the bureaucracy. Right. So they, the, the Islamists really have their own kind of bureaucratic oligarchy. But, but it's sort of very stealthy and it's working in the background. And you know, Western observers sometimes at this point in the story, they're kind of in disbelief about the, the influence of the Guillainists. But this was very real. Like in, in the police, in the judiciary, you just knew that, you know, in key positions there were Gillanists and they were extremely effective and they were batting for, for the Erdogan people. And of course they, the Erdoan people had their falling out, et cetera. But what I mean, the argument I end up making in the book, I'll just cut straight to it, is that the Erdogan people don't really have all that much of a unified theory of government. They don't really have a theory of the presidency either. They just call it the Turkish style presidency. Right. Essentially it's a, you know, it's what in the United States, it's the unitary executive theory. Right. Sometimes in far right governments it's called Caesarism as a tendency like accruing all power in the executive. In Turkey, they ended up calling it the Turkish style presidency. Sometimes it's called the neo Ottoman system, et cetera, but it's not very complicated. It's just accruing all power in the presidency and making sure that there are no ways for the, for the bureaucracy to, to push back. Right. And for, also for opposition parties in any way to, to slow down the government's agenda or the, the regime's agenda at that point. Right. That, that's what it's about. And in theory, that's supposed to be sort of extremely orderly. Right. Once you, once you cancel out all these, all these nodes of power within the system and everything is extremely centralized, in theory, that's Supposed to work much better. But what ended up happening in Turkey, I argue, is that they, they just created different oligarchs in place of the old ones. So there's famously the, the religious orders now that they, they killed off the goodness, right? They, they destroyed their, their ability to congregate in Turkey and even abroad. But they have these other religious orders now that are very influential in select ministries and institutions that have different interest groups that can be very effective. I mean, it's been argued, for example, that exporters, medium to large scale exporters, were extremely effective in lobbying the government to increase interest rates and effectively kill off the economy for a really long time between 2018 and 2023 or so. Right. And the Turkish economy still reeling from that damage. So I mean, my argument is that this perfect order that they're trying to establish, it just ends up being just as chaotic as, or at least perhaps more than the one they replaced. And it's less democratically accountable for whatever that's worth.
- [21:13]
Ruben Silverman
And, you know, if I can just ask you a follow up about this. It occurs to me, do you think there's been a change in. Since 2023, when Erdogan started his second presidential administration, or is the chaos that you're describing still there?
- [21:27]
Salim Korou
So financially, in terms of economic governance, 2017, 18 up until 2023 was the sort of unorthodox period, the most chaotic period. And really, in another piece I wrote, I extended that to 2013 as well. So the first era of AK Party governance, 2002 to 2013, and then 2013, really 2023. Right. Because after they won the 2023 elections, I think you're absolutely right, they kind of cleaned up their actual. They reverted to the neoliberal paradigm in economics, certainly, and in foreign policy, they switched out Mehbnut Chabusholu, who was extraordinarily weak foreign minister, and replaced them with Hakan Fidan became foreign Minister and a very powerful foreign minister, Ibrahim Cullen, became head of meat. So in terms of foreign policy, all of a sudden it wasn't just the presidential palace. You had these two very powerful institutions mediating between policy and the palace. So all of a sudden the system was working a little more the way that it should. So, yeah, since 2023, I think they've cleaned up their act quite a bit. Con las grandes of hertas the prime big deal days Este siete yoche de octobre la grandes estentus manos a si que si 10 can Hola approve in prime big deal days Sie te hiocho de octobre.
- [23:26]
Ruben Silverman
Well, but what you just said brings me to the. Actually, the next question I wanted to ask, which is that in this book you do a great job of talking about different key officials, some more famous than others. Hakan Fidon, people may know his name from the news, Ibrahim Kalan maybe as well. But you also talk about people like Feridin Sineriliolu, who I certainly had not heard of before. So I wanted to ask you how you picked some of these people and what aspects of the emerging regime do you feel that they represent or exemplify?
- [24:05]
Salim Korou
I didn't really have very established way of, like a systematic way of picking these people. I mean, especially during these years, I was floating around Ankara policy circles and these were the names that were very important at one point, actually, in writing this, this book, I thought maybe I should just turn this into like a string of mini biographies that would be fun to do. And I actually had a few more of these characters lined up, but ended up cutting some. I mean, this is especially from my third chapter, which is where I discuss the way that New Turkey starts to think about the policy making process. Because a lot of these things originated from their close interaction with the United States and with the American system. Like the, the way that it looked. I mean, this is why also I make a thing about calling them occidentalists in the way that they're very much America focused. They're very much about the United States because they see that the United States is this great geopolitical power and they want that. They want the geopolitical power rather than the, for example, they could have gone, you know, looking at the Europeans much more closely, oh, regulatory power, you know, the welfare state, really think about the way that Europe works and adjust to that. But they weren't really about that. They were about generating geopolitical power. How do you do that? Well, you look very closely at the United States. You look at what they do and you kind of do what you think they do. That that leads to that kind of power. And that's why there were like a kabillion think tanks popping up all over the place in the 2000s and 2010s, and all these figures around the think tanks, I don't think those ended up being all that influential except like one or two. But when it comes to Ferdinand Sinolo, he was the kind of person, and still is, who just feels very different from his peers because of his kind of level of political understanding. And Erdoan very quickly understood that about him and wanted to work with him. And it didn't really matter that Sunil wasn't an Islamist. I mean, he doesn't even have anything. You know, he's very far removed from. From that kind of a life. And that certainly didn't matter. He was just good at his job. And all these other guys who were very good at the power of politics were working with him. And Ibrahim Cullen was from the world of think tanks. I mean, he has a PhD in like, Islamic political. Islamic theology and political thought. And he came into the Ankara scene interacting with all these. With all these diplomats and working in the policy space. He was this ferocious reader who had a very strong instinct, I think, for politics. And these guys just attracted each other. I think this is how it works in these circles. Like, most of the people at that level of kind of political skill, most of the people they meet aren't very impressive, but when they see each other, they're like, okay, this is a guy who's a lot different from the others, and I can work with him. And these guys certainly, I think, recognized that in each other and started working together.
- [27:34]
Ruben Silverman
That makes a lot of sense. It brings me to another character who my favorite to have seen in the book in some ways, which was Ibrahim Karagul. This is a journalist who. I've been reading his writing for three years now, and he has a very interesting, some would say grandiose, writing style, but he's also very well connected, and you'll see him on. On the plane with the president and things like this. So he's a serious person in a real sense, and you take what he's writing seriously. So I hope you could talk a little bit about him because he does articulate a vision of foreign policy. And again, now this vision of foreign policy has some institutional framework to it. So perhaps you could talk about him first and then we can talk a little bit more about those policies in action.
- [28:25]
Salim Korou
Yeah, so to kind of introduce him to people. Ibrahim Kargul is this writer who started his career in the 90s as a. As a sort of a young college graduate. And he was an Islamist and he wanted to write about geopolitics. And he especially early on had an interest in Asia, traveling a little bit in Asia as well, which not all these guys do, but he was traveling and meeting some people and. And writing about things and. Yeah, absolutely. He wrote in this very grandiose style even back then. And as we got into the Arc party years, it became more and more grandiose, and it became very Aggressive in a way that others didn't really want to be. He was very aggressive in his sort of what's called anti Westernism, right, or anti Americanism or whatever. And if you have a caricature in your mind of the anti American Islamist writing about geopolitics, that's kind of Ibrahim Khodagul. He writes about how nothing's going to be ever the same again. Turkey is now a great power and we're going to destroy our enemies, which is sort of Israel and the west in general. And some of the stuff I quote about him is like, I, I, I go into my Asia chapter with him about Russia and China, about how early on he saw Russia and China as a threat. But then he sort of writes about into the Erdogan News. He writes about how the only threat to Turkey is from the west and Russia and China can only be friends in that kind of a scenario. And he writes in that very uncompromising way that foreign diplomats and other people usually see that kind of stuff and they find it very, very difficult to take seriously. Right. And then they, they see that as, as you said, he's on the presidential plane, he's financially well off, he's, you know, interacting with all these elite figures. And for a long time, I think they've been kind of shrugging that off as saying, well, this is like, maybe he's entertaining or something. But the, the point I try to make in the book is actually the bombastic that, that style. It's kind of the point. The point is that he's not very realistic in his assessment a lot of times. But that doesn't mean that it's not a real expression of this political movement. Not everything, all the time has to be super realistic and make sense from a policy perspective. Things can make sense in a more broadly historical sense. They can make sense on an emotional register and be an expression of a political movement. They don't really have to be, you know, you have to raise taxes to this degree or that degree, or you have to make that kind of a deal with this kind of a country. Not every serious political piece of writing looks like that. And I think Karagul is a really strong expression of the Erdogan movement and their view of the world. And it's. Just because it's uncompromising doesn't mean that it's not a real, an enduring aspect of it. And I think on quite a few things, he's been proven to be right.
- [31:42]
Ruben Silverman
Well, so like you say, you talk about him at first as you Go into your chapter about China and Russia relations. So let's look at those and talk about them a little bit as examples. So in the case of Russia, how did he see Turkey maybe relating to Russia? And how has that or has it not developed as he would have hoped it would?
- [32:06]
Salim Korou
So his fear in the 90s was actually that Turkey at the time dominated by the establishment elite, which was sort of Kemalist, but also not Kemalists. They were kind of liberal. They were also moving post Kemalism. Right. They were moving beyond Kemalism. So kind of queasy calling them Kemalists, but they were, they were old Turkey elites and they didn't have a very favorable view of Islam and Islamism. And Kargil was afraid that Turkey would move away from the west and ally itself with and become dependent on Russia and China and thereby suppress the Islamists. And by staying close to the west, he thought the Islamists had a chance of resisting and democratically taking over, you know, precisely what they've done. So he was afraid of that kind of thing. And in time, he saw in Putin, I think, an adversary to the west, which he also welcomed. Right. This wasn't sort of blanket favorable view of the West. Turkey's Western orientation was sort of a convenient thing rather than something that he wanted to endure. But in Putin, I think he saw his own kind of politics, his own kind of reaction, reactionary politics. And I think there's now a lot of the new nationalists across the world, India as the BJP and Russia. Obviously you have Putin and his movement. You know, in the United States and in Europe you have different kinds of far right movements. But I think the one in Russia resembles Turkey in some ways. I don't want to quite say the closest, but it is very close in the sense that both of these countries are former empires that were very close, you know, on Europe's doorstep. And the, the way they feel about the Europeans. Right. And the way that they feel excluded from the European experience and from the continent in general, especially that generation, the, the Erdogan generation overlaps strongly. And I think that Kygu saw that in the Russians and still like, they haven't really been able to connect to the Chinese very well that China is just too big, it's, it's too impenetrable. But Russia, the Erdogan elite can connect to, especially the sort of second tier elite, people like Karagur and people like them who like businessmen who go there, who sort of conduct their business, second tier journalists, I think they connect to Russia very strongly. Whereas the first tier, I think they still connect to the US I think most strongly. But the second tier guys, they're very gung ho in Russia.
- [34:45]
Ruben Silverman
And what about China? As you say, there's, there's not so much of a connection between the, the political elites, the journalistic elites. But is there any sense of common cause? Or do, or do issues like China's treatment of its, you know, Turkic minorities, the Uyghurs, do those get in the way or do they not?
- [35:05]
Salim Korou
They used to get in the way. I think my conclusion from sort of researching the China angle and looking at it was that Turkey has, I mean, the, the highest levels of government, you know, Aron and, and the people around him have always been China curious. And they have kind of fantasized about what if we did this and that with China? And th. Those were sometimes very contradictory things that were like, oh, what if we did a lot more business with China? What if we closed our trade deficit with China? What if we sold this good or that good to China? Or what if we joined the Shanghai Cooperation Council, the Silk Road initiative, right? What if the middle corridor of goods flowing from China to Europe went through Turkey? What would that do to our economy? All these sort of ideas floating around the palace and at the ministries, my God, the ministries. They had all these different nodes of China curiosity, but none of it ever stuck, at least not into 2000 and tens. It just wouldn't work. And I came away thinking that these things weren't working because actually if you want to do business with China, you have to do something like what the Germans did, which is develop real expertise and then have a very strong presence in the country, a very strong sort of state presence that directs your focus, that creates a strategy and actually implements the strategy, that sort of thing. And Turkey hasn't ever really been in a country that does that very well. There are no, like, if you know, the Turkish bureaucracy, for example, the diplomats, they'll like write a lot of wires and stuff, but a lot of it is just like translations and things like that. There is no real culture of like thinking aloud on paper. There was some in the central bank and the planning agency, there were some nodes of. But those have kind of broken down and those were kind of effective in the way that like, you know, you, you'd have people train in like economics at major European universities or major American universities rather, and then transfer that, that know how and that, the way of doing business to the Turkish institutions and they'd like go hand in hand. There wasn't Really a lot of independent strategy making capacity. And I think China was kept and ended up being like an afterthought to all these people. None of them learned Mandarin, none of them actually were curious enough to go. I think that kind of thing is changing now. There's a lot of Islamists, young people, Islamists that I see who like go to China. They study in Chinese universities. There's also a thirst for learning Hebrew, going to Israel, that kind of thing. Not just studying Turkey and some kind of discipline, but also going into area studies and doing that sort of thing. So those two things, the strategy making capacity and area studies capacity, those just didn't exist. And that meant that the political will that kept materializing but never really being put down into, into policy, that, that it never could exert itself into, into policy. So that's what that chapter was about. And obviously the issue of the Uyghur was a strong factor in the, on both sides. I mean, in Turkey it meant that the public would always be distrustful of any overt moves towards China. And on the Chinese side it meant that Turkey could never be trusted. Right. Because it was just too chaotic of a country. It must have been very difficult for the Chinese to make sense of like what Turkey wants because there is no strategy documents. There's really no strategy to speak of. There's just like these people going in and out and you know, saying crazy things all the time without it being directed anywhere really. But those things seem to be shifting a little bit now. It, it has taken on a little more of a market focus since I wrote this book. There's, there's now BYD deals that might be made in Turkey that, that China might see Turkey as a gateway to the European EV market. So if that kind of market rationale comes in, things might sort of clunk into place in the Turkey, China relationship as well. So we'll see how that goes.
- [39:34]
Ruben Silverman
Well, so that's, and that's where I wanted to kind of bring our conversation back at the end here, which is closer to home, and just conclude by talking a little bit about how some of these visions of reactionary nationalism, competitive occidentalism. However, we might want to talk about how have those visions been realized at home? How have domestic politics changed under this regime?
- [40:00]
Salim Korou
Right. I mean, to, to go back to the Occidentalism points, Turkish politics is often described as being a contest between the secular and the Islamist nodes of the country. And you know, academics like to take issue with that. But I think there's, there's a reason why that framing has stuck around for so long. It does reflect some aspect of reality. And in my framing I hope to distill from that what people find so appealing and what actually is going on behind the scenes, which is that these, these different forms of Occidentalism I call aspirational Occidentalism, which is sort of can be aligned with Kemalism, is that, okay, we just replicate Western forms and Western norms until we become Western, right. And join the West. And then there's competitive Occidentalism which is we actually have to compete with the west in order to beat it down and to win and become non Western, right? Become what we ourselves are. And only that way can we move forward and generate real geopolitical power. And obviously my argument is that this competitive Occidentalism has taken hold with the Erdogan regime. That yes, this is based on Islamism, but it can also be Kemalis. I mean they've shifted the identity of Mustafa Kemal from a Westernizer into anti colonial type of military hero, right? Shifting the emphasis away from his post 1923 to pre1923, right? Where, where he's a military general and he's fighting against the west rather than trying to become Western. So that's the whole thing that they're doing. And, and what that has done, I think to the country is I think they have been successful in generating geopolitical power to some extent. I mean I, in, in the last chapter I go into three areas really. Geography, sort of territorial expansion and territorial presence. The second is population and how the population is being sort of reconfigured to generate power as well. And then three is alliance structure and indigenous technology and defense technology creation. And in these ways I argue that the regime is kind of reconfiguring the country to generate a lot of geopolitical power. Be that, you know, raw military power or industrial output, or just growing the population in a way that makes the country more formidable. Right? Those are the lines along which they think. But of course that's not really the promise of a republic. I think, you know, part of the reason people elected Erdogan and people elected the YOKK Party was because of the promise that life would be better. Not just that they'd be more proud of the country, right? But that the country would develop, that life would be easier, that, that it would, that that individual citizens would be able to pursue some sort of self actualization, that they would have more control over their lives rather than the, the more geopolitical thinking, which is just to generate collective power. Right. Which, which entails not just individual sacrifice, but actually sort of sublimating your own sense of worth. I think I, I, I'm not a supporter of this. Even, even party voters are getting a very raw deal out of this. But yeah, that, that's, that's the way I think that this movement is reshaping the country and, and grinding it towards being something completely different.
- [43:51]
Ruben Silverman
No, and this book I think is a really good look, look into that, look into the origins of the sort of thinking on which current government policies are based or attempting to be based, as we've discussed. So I really hope people will go and find the book, buy the book, read the book. Certainly. And brings me to my last question, which is in addition to this book, you keep a substack that you publish on frequently. Maybe if you could tell me a little bit about that. So your kind of, your ongoing projects, your ongoing writing that you're doing now, the things you're focusing on now before we come to an end.
- [44:30]
Salim Korou
Yeah, I mean I've been writing this book since 2018 or 19 and then at the same time I was doing a PhD on Nietzsche's politics, which is completely separate. Well, like 90% separate. Right. Because there I was looking at sort of reactive politics in Nietzsche's sandbox, shall we say, and theorizing how Nietzsche saw this unfold across histories. And I was looking at the history of Christianity as Nietzsche saw it and looking at reactive politics there. So I had those twin projects, those two big projects going on for, for six plus years and now that they're both done, they're both over. I'm now free, I think, to sort of, I, what I'm, what I'm planning on doing is take a few months of just writing the substack and, and really focusing on that and perhaps a year or more and then see where things go. Like academia is interesting, but also just writing for, I think public facing writing, I think right now is very interesting to me. So see what I can do in that space and feel my way forward.
- [45:47]
Ruben Silverman
That's good. Well, so like I said, I recommend people find this book and read your substack because your writing I find to be some of the most incisive, clear writing about events in Turkey, developments in Turkey and how to think about it. So I hope listeners will go out and engage with your writing in all these different forms they can find it. Thank you very much for taking the time today to talk.
- [46:13]
Salim Korou
Thank you Ruben really appreciate it.