Fight ‘acceptable’ with ‘acceptable:’ football, cultural battle in Turkey and the story of two ‘doxas’ over an old military song

Abstract

Fight "acceptable" with "acceptable:" Football, cultural battle in Turkey and the story of two "doxas" over an old military song Football has become a politico-cultural battlefield in Turkey since the early 2010s, as the Islamistpopulist Prime Minister (and then President) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan launched a new project called the "New Turkey" (Carney 2019, 140) aiming to create a cultural domination of "pious, vengeful generations," (Pekerman 2017,310) after having eliminated his Kemalist rivals within the State. This campaign openly targeted secular lifestyles that dominate sociocultural activities in metropolitan cities like Istanbul or Izmir, which envisaged policies like the restrictions in alcohol sale and the abortion ban (Özdemir 2015, 250), as well as the suppression of free speech, press freedom and Internet freedom (Kemahlıoğlu 2015, 447). These autocratic tendencies triggered an outrage among urban, secular, middle classes, who have traditionally been the cultural capital owners within the country. The growing discontentment among these groups reached its climax in 2013, as millions took over streets because of the police violence and media gag orders that were caused by the protests against an urbanisation project at Gezi Park, downtown Istanbul. Football fans proved to be instrumental in the popularisation of the Gezi Protests, as thousands of otherwise antipolitical Istanbulites participated in the events, donning jerseys of their favourite football clubs. The biggest football clubs of the city, Beşiktaş, Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe, are each based in the secular middle-class neighbourhoods of Istanbul, and have been intertwined with the Turkish modernity, even before the Republic of Turkey was founded. These clubs, founded by the "Young Turks" in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, have always represented founding elements of modern Turkey (Irak and Polo 2018, 660), even though their popularity has since expanded to all over the country and the diaspora communities abroad, having reached people from all walks of life. Furthermore, the fandom practices of these clubs' fans have been dictated by the lifestyle in the cosmopolitan and secular neighbourhoods of Istanbul that engendered the clubs. These practices, including football chants repurposed as anti-police violence slogans, functioned as the humorous, popular facet of the anti-governmental movement (Turan and Özçetin 2019, 209), also legitimising protests in the eyes of thousands who had never joined a political protest before, as participation to active politics by ordinary citizens has been socially unwelcome since the political violence period in the 1970s.The Erdoğan regime attempted to employ several measures to the vocal dissidence of football fans after the Gezi Protests. The measures included the creation of pro-governmental fan groups (which were short-lived), support to pro-governmental clubs financed by the ruling party-run municipalities, and putting fan leaders who participated in the protests on trial, accused of "staging a coup d'...