Democracy, Islam, and the AKP

Paradoxically, secularization and Islamization went hand in hand in Turkey. The AKP that emerged from Turkey’s Islamist movement was the agent of an ascending entrepreneurial class, which had prospered phenomenally in the course of the past eight years and benefited from patronage and rent distribution. Meanwhile, the losers of the global integration process were taken care of with a series of populist (and popular) measures. Was the picture in Turkey’s domestic and foreign policy a function solely of the AKP governments? Over the course of the last two centuries, Turkey made the historical choices to become a capitalist, secular, and democratic country with a Muslim population. The AKP had to be seen and evaluated as a product of Turkish economic and political history, as hat to be its foreign policy.