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The term “New Turkey” refers to the ongoing formation of a new socio-political system by the incumbent AKP (Justice and Development Party) administration. A neglected issue within the existing literature is the study of New Turkey in the broad context of social theory beyond Turkish studies. Deterministic narratives of globalization have long presented Turkey as a “beacon of hope” in the Muslim world, a westernizing society that would supposedly combine liberal democracy, Islamic values, secularism and free-market capitalism. In contrast to these expectations, today the New Turkey constitutes an illiberal polity, a neoliberal economy based on clientelism and an increasingly Islamized social environment. How and why the Turkish modernization experience has gradually culminated in an authoritarian non-Western variant of modernity?  This article utilizes a historical sociology approach based on the Uneven and Combined Development Theory (U&CD) to locate the origins of the unexpected rise of New Turkey in our age. It is argued that complex interactions between elements of Western modernity (e.g. secularization and democratization), various social engineering programs launched since the late Ottoman era and Turkey’s own path dependent trajectory have gradually produced a socio-economic and political model that radically diverges from the Western experience.

Many foreign policy analysts portray leaders as “chief negotiators” responsible for delicately sustaining a balancing act between the interests of their domestic constituents and the wishes of extra-national actors (e.g. other governments, international organisations, multinational companies). This depiction may accurately explain the behaviour of decision-makers in liberal democratic societies, but foreign policy making function differently in illiberal populist polities. This article argues that contemporary Turkey constitutes an illiberal populist regime where foreign policy making is subjugated to domestic policy concerns, and an assertive anti-Western foreign policy rhetoric is often systematically employed to generate public support to the incumbent AKP (Justice and Development Party) administration. Using the AKP’s 2017 Constitutional Referendum campaign as a case study, I suggest that anti-Westernism is an effective discourse to garner domestic support under illiberal populism.

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