In the 1920s and 1930s, Turkey played a prominent role on the international stage. Its domestic transformations and the evolution of the Kemalist system of ideological and political principles were closely observed in Germany, France, Britain, the USA, and beyond, including several nations farther East. In recent years, scholarly interest in the transnational history of Kemalism has expanded. Some scholars have focused on the interwar period in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Albania, Yugoslavia, and Egypt to reveal how, as a practical tool, Kemalism was relocated as a global movement, whose influence is still felt today. Some scholars have examined the impact of Atatürk’s reforms and his image on the Jewish community in British-ruled Palestine before the establishment of Israel, some went farther East—to Persia, Afghanistan, China, India, and other parts of the Muslim world—to assess the influence wielded by Mustafa Kemal and his modernization project. These works explore perceptions of Kemalism that are mostly positive in their respective countries providing few critical insights into Kemalism’s evolution and its reception as an ideological project. Against this background, it is worth examining how Atatürk’s reform and radical modernization project, as well as the ideological transformation, was perceived by one of the critical partners of Turkey in the interwar period – the Soviet Union. How Kemalism was interpreted and understood in the Soviet Union has not been an object of scholarly analysis. Instead, most researchers have concentrated on the complexities of bilateral relations between Turkey and the Soviet Union, their patterns of modernization, and geopolitical rivalry during the Cold War. Both Kemalism and the Kemalists, initially – in the 1920s and mid-1930s - viewed as an ally in the struggle against the West, were later treated negatively by the Communist regime. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet position returned to normalization. Looking at these shifts through the lenses of Soviet leaders, diplomats, Communist party functionaries, and scholars helps us grasp the underlying dynamics behind these changing attitudes. Placing them in the larger context of republican history—delineating phases in the Kemalist paradigm of development and discerning its various rises and falls—will enrich our knowledge of the transnational history of Kemalism.

The core idea of party moderation implies a party's embracement of open worldviews that do not contradict democratic principles and compromise with other actors. While much has been written on the factors leading to the moderation of Islamist parties, little is known why such moderation does not sustain or why de-moderation is likely to follow afterwards. In this paper, I re-evaluate the existing theories of moderation and apply the method of process-tracing to establish a new causal mechanism that explains the transitions between the stages of pre-moderation, moderation and de-moderation of an Islamist party. I argue that the party's ownership of a specific issue, which is the issue of ‘insubordination to state repression', is the main causal trigger for the transition to the stage of moderation. The ownership of this issue in electoral campaigns helps the party to attract a heterogeneous group of supporters who have either been the victims or the critics of state repression. When the repressive acts of the state, yet, vanish from the political stage, the Islamist party also loses the ownership of this salient issue that unites this diverse body of supporters. The party instead starts using reward and punishment mechanisms to sustain the loyalty of its electoral supporters. This depicts the transition from the stage of moderation to the stage of de-moderation. To illustrate the proposed explanation, I focus on the case of the AKP in Turkey and bridge interview data conducted with the AKP and opposition party activists in the years of 2007, 2011 and 2018. Interview evidence is complemented with the media statements of public opinion leaders in the moderation and de-moderation stages of the AKP.

The Society for the Ottoman Navy was set up in the aftermath of the 1908 coup that brought the Young Turks of the Committee of Union and Progress to power in the Ottoman Empire. Faced with imperial encroachment and nationalist competition, a significant injection of cash was needed to transform the Ottoman Navy into a force capable of meeting its many commitments and yet, within this unity of purpose, there was a plurality of motivation, direction, and signification. The Society for the Ottoman Navy established committees across the Ottoman heartland and into eastern Anatolia. From Edirne to Trabzon it worked alongside CUP governors and often within state structures to raise large amounts of money for the cause, primarily identified as the ongoing struggles against Greece in the Aegean Sea. Outside of Thrace and Anatolia, however, the messaging was different. Across broad swathes of the Islamic world from South-east Asia to the Indian subcontinent to Sudan and the east coast of Africa, the Society for the Ottoman Navy presented itself as the defender of the Red Sea, of the Hijaz, of the Holy Cities. The message of national defense in a struggle between nations changed to one of religious duty in a struggle between religions. I shall use the example of the Society for the Ottoman Navy to complicate our understanding of what the Ottoman Empire was. Viewed from the centre, the Ottoman Empire in its final decades resembles the nascent nation-state that we recognize from modernization theory. Viewed from the fringes, however, the scene is quite different. The Ottoman Empire is more imperial, colonial even, and gesturing towards a pan-Islamic solidarity that fits poorly with modern ideologies of nationalism. By consulting the archives and publications of the Society for the Ottoman Navy, the Cumhurba?kanl??? Osmanl? Ar?ivi, and the various praiseworthy accounts of the society in Ottoman newspapers alongside records kept by the British India Office, who assiduously monitored the actions of Ottoman agents in India, and the writings of Indian Muslims themselves, I shall reconstruct the various political communities imagined, animated, and then exploited by the Society for the Ottoman Navy to argue that the Ottoman Empire cannot be understood either at its center or at its periphery but instead in dialogue between the two.

Turkish democracy fell from grace. Not a long time ago, western circles celebrated Turkish president Tayyip Erdo?an’s moderate conservatism and pro-EU and pro-market direction as an antidote to Islamic fundamentalism and a role model for Islamic world. To the disappointment and shock of its admirers, in the later years of his tenure, the “new Turkey” took a sharp turn toward authoritarianism. Indeed, a single-party regime until 1946, Turkey has been a nominal democracy with mostly functioning democratic institutions with a history of populists-turn-authoritarians and recurring coup d’états. Some define it as “competitive authoritarianism,” others call it “electoral tyranny.” Though of significant value, recent approaches mostly fail to account for two aspects of the hotbed of Turkish authoritarianism. Thus, I have two interrelated claims. First, this was, in a sense, neither a “sharp turn,” a “drift,” nor an “exit” from or an aberration of the Turkish democracy when, at least, situated into the broader Turkish history. On the contrary, it reveals an innate feature of the Republic, the history of which oscillates between coup d’états and the civil rule of populist parties closely monitored by the military. An incessant state of exception underlies modern Turkish political life in one authoritarian continuum between the Kemalists and the Islamists; hence, it is a story of two authoritarianisms. Second claim is concerned with the role of the masses. Except for the times of episodic, bottom-up mobilizations, the “masses” have almost always been rendered an auxiliary power either in the Kemalist era or under Islamist rule. Depending on the ideological lenses of the ruling elite of the time (either Kemalists or Islamists), they were treated either as a pool of electoral clients during times of ‘normalcy,’ or a ready-made force to mobilize against fellow citizens during times of legitimacy crisis. Therefore, I claim that against this authoritarian background, the history of mass action in Turkey can be read as characterized by a pendulum between mass violence and rarely, episodic mass mobilization. These two phenomena are integrated by an inherent authoritarianism of the Turkish state structure.