This paper investigates the role of small and medium economic enterprises (SMEO) in the rise of right-wing authoritarian regimes and subsequent symbiotic relations between the two. We argue that SMEO’s have played a major role in supporting the right-wing populist parties in countries where business dependency on the state is high. Previously excluded from the patronage ties to the state and in demand of favorable policies from the state, SMEOs largely supported right-wing parties’ ascendancy to power. In part, this support was based on the expectation that they would benefit from the government-allocated incentives, tax breaks and other incentives to SMEOs. Additionally, we argue, the ideological similarities between SMEOs and right-wing populist parties have enabled the relationship to last longer. In order to dissect this relationship, we design an original business elite survey in Turkey, targeting high-ranking business leaders of small, medium and large private companies. In addition to the 400 business elite survey responses, we conduct in-depth interviews with 42 business leaders in major business hubs in Turkey (Istanbul, Bursa, Izmir, Konya, Gaziantep) and Ankara. Our findings suggest that the Justice and Development Party (AKP) helped SMEOs grow over time and that this growth is sensitive to government economic policies. These firms have become accustomed to government incentives, such as tax breaks, assisting social security payments of workers, export incentives and others. Their current competitiveness and recent expansion to markets outside Turkey depend on these government programs. The evidence also suggests that this symbiotic relationship persists even under conditions of economic crisis, when SMEOs readily adopt and disseminate the point of view that the crisis can be traced to foreign interests and global geopolitical struggles, absolving the domestic government from responsibility for the onset of the crisis or for diffusing it. This paper fills a gap left by existing research, which mostly focuses on the rise of such parties through social policies or nationalist and anti-elite discourses, catalyzed by rising inequality that increases uncertainties in the social and economic life of ordinary people. In this respect, this project outlines the political economy of right-wing populist parties in developing countries and calls for further studies on business-party relations.

In May 2016, the Turkish government classified the Gülen movement as a terrorist organization, calling it Fethullahç? Terör Örgütü (Fethullah Terror Organization), or FETÖ. This formal acronym for the organization had circulated in Turkish media since early 2015, presumably developing from a common nickname for Fethullah Gülen, “Feto,” the Turkish scholar and imam who has lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999. The acronym FETÖ gained prominence from December 2015 to January 2016 when a Turkish court issued an arrest warrant and began a trial in absentia for Gülen. At the moment of its emergence, not all media outlets chose to use the acronym, as it sounded somewhat like targeted political hyperbole born of a political rift between two former allies, President Erdo?an and Gülen (Tayyip and Feto). After the attempted coup on July 15, 2016, however, avoiding the acronym became impossible since the putsch’s mastermind was immediately named: FETÖ. This essay maps the history of the FETÖ acronym in Turkish media and politics, arguing that the emergence of this proper name produced a political reality and an organization as an object of knowledge. As theorists of language and representation have long shown, proper names uniquely embody the descriptive and constitutive dimension of language simultaneously, relying on the paradox of this simultaneity for the production of authority. The emergence of FETÖ as a political category and its subsequent formal classification as a terrorist organization had a number of strategic political, legal, and social effects, not least of which was the possibility of successfully charging Gülen supporters with terrorism-related crimes after some prominent cases were dismissed. But the acronym also broadly remade the landscape of dissent and control in Turkish politics, solidifying a political imaginary sanctioned by the government as newly hegemonic. In examining the historical production of knowledge and authority that circulates through the FETÖ acronym, this essay does not chase down coup-related conspiracy theories, debunk political arguments, or defend Gülen. The essay argues that to name a terrorist organization is to describe and simultaneously produce it as a category of knowledge, something that can be located, bounded, and policed. Naming FETÖ produces it as a distinct phenomenon, and this phenomenon generated its own unique mechanisms of regulation, discipline, and control. Inability to avoid the acronym after the 2016 coup attempt is a symptom of the way the acronym reshapes political reality.

Published by a university research center, Turkish Cultural Policy Report: A Civil Perspective states that Turkey “never had a written cultural policy, nor a comprehensive primary document providing direction for cultural life” (Ada [eds.] 2011:180), hence culture remained a supporting role at the level of state administration. The report also indicates that the state nevertheless defines the limits of cultural production instead of being responsible not only for the “regulation and infrastructure preparation” but also “preparing the ground for the production and distribution of culture at a national level” (ibid., 280; Siyahbant 2013:8). Though the 1982 constitution guarantees to protect artists and artistic freedom of expression by Articles 27 and 64, it has not been operating properly due to the disconnect from its ideals found in state bureaucrats’ arbitrary practices contingent upon ideology and practices of the given ruling government. All these accumulated and resulted in “members of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) taking an increasingly adversarial stance towards the arts” (Siyahbant, 2-3), with a notable example of the former minister of the interior ?dris Naim ?ahin’s claim that art is “the backyard of terrorism” in 2014. Combining the research on the rationale behind the state’s failure on active advocacy for culture and art with extensive analyses of cinema laws (of 2004 and 2019) and regulations (of 2004 and 2005), I focus on the impacts of state’s cultural policy on Turkish film industry after the 2000s, specifically on practices of filmmaking at stages of production, rating, and circulation of films. Using ethnographic data, i.e. interviews with people from the industry, including directors, producers, festival organizers, and film critics and addressing specific cases, I take another step forward to examine the intricate relationship between state and civil society organizations, the latter being “a sociocultural and sociopolitical construct to be studied in the making” (Kuzmanovic 2012:29). I scrutinize how different webs of coalitions and complicity between state and various non-state actors of civil society are influential in 1) the control, regulation, and cooperation of economic and cultural capitals, 2) how economic resources of the state such as ministry funds are allocated for certain projects based on political tendencies of cultural producers, and 3) how, in many cases, the actors and webs of coalitions can actively “delegitimize and discourage artistic expressions” (Karaca 2011:155) and precipitate multiple forms of film censorship in the name of cultural policies.