The veil of civilization: personalist power and Muslim Turkishness in Erdoğan’s Turkey

This article explains the AKP’s reversal from pro-Western conservative democracy to anti-Western Islamist civilizationalism not as identity resurfacing or ideational conversion, but as a power strategy rooted in political economy. The AKP’s dependent, credit-driven growth model was structurally vulnerable; sustaining it required a new, more personalized and discretionary neoliberalism, for which civilizationalism supplied the ideological cover, recasting coercive redistribution as national restoration. Domestically, it denied citizens’ rights-bearing status; internationally, it produced a transactional, inconsistent foreign policy, culminating not in elevated standing but in confirming the lesser state status Turkish modernizers have sought to escape since the late Ottoman period.