Turkey: Social Engineering Secular Project

• Authors: Paweł Sus

Abstracts

EN

Turkey is a country that lies on two continents. It is o! en regarded as a bridge between Europe and Asia, or between East and West. This in fact implies that its inhabitants participate in two separate and somewhat conflicting sets of political values. On the one hand, those are the values of western liberal democracy. As a country in which periodic elections are held and there is a competition between political parties, Turkey is a democracy at least in the procedural or formal sense. On the other hand, there are oriental values related to the authoritarian political culture that goes back to the Ottoman Empire and to political Islam, that are often regarded as incompatible with democracy. The influence of these values on the Turkish political system has made some scholars to argue that a fully- edged liberal democracy is impossible in this country. Furthermore, the existence of these different sets of values had often in the past led to a political confrontation. For decades there has been a struggle in Turkey between the secular center, represented by the Kemalist establishment, and the peripheral political religious movements.

Keywords

EN

Asia-Europe Relations; Turkish Politics; Turkey

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek
• Journal: Polish Political Science Yearbook
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 38
• Pages: 206-220

Dates

published

2009

Contributors

author

Paweł Sus

• University of Wrocław, Poland

Identifiers

DOI

10.15804/ppsy2009016

Biblioteka Nauki

2028054