Int. J. Middle East Stud. 33 (2001), 433–448.

Printed in the United States of America

Haldun Gülalp

G L O BA L I Z AT I O N A N D P O L I T I C A L I S L A M : T H E
S O C I A L BA S E S O F T U R K E Y ’ S W E L FA R E PA RT Y

Political Islam has gained heightened visibility in recent decades in Turkey. Large
numbers of female students have begun to demonstrate their commitment by wearing
the banned Islamic headdress on university campuses, and influential pro-Islamist TV
channels have proliferated. This paper focuses on the Welfare (Refah) Party as the
foremost institutional representative of political Islam in Turkey.
The Welfare Party’s brief tenure in power as the leading coalition partner from
mid-1996 to mid-1997 was the culmination of a decade of steady growth that was
aided by other Islamist organizations and institutions. These organizations and institu-
tions included newspapers and publishing houses that attracted Islamist writers, nu-
merous Islamic foundations, an Islamist labor-union confederation, and an Islamist
businessmen’s association. These institutions worked in tandem with, and in support
of, Welfare as the undisputed leader and representative of political Islam in Turkey,
even though they had their own particularistic goals and ideals, which often diverged
from Welfare’s political projects. Focusing on the Welfare Party, then, allows for an
analysis of the wider social base upon which the Islamist political movement rose in
Turkey. Since Welfare’s ouster from power and its eventual closure, the Islamist move-
ment has been in disarray. This paper will, therefore, be confined to the Welfare Party
period.
Welfare’s predecessor, the National Salvation Party, was active in the 1970s but
was closed down by the military regime in 1980. Welfare was founded in 1983 and
gained great popularity in the 1990s. Starting with a 4.4 percent vote in the municipal
elections of 1984, the Welfare Party steadily increased its showing and multiplied its
vote nearly five times in twelve years. It alarmed Turkey’s secular establishment first
in the municipal elections of 1994, with 19 percent of all votes nationwide and the
mayor’s seats in both Istanbul and Ankara, then in the general elections of 1995 when
it won a plurality with 21.4 percent of the national vote. Nevertheless, the Welfare
Party was only briefly able to lead a coalition government in partnership with the
right-wing True Path Party of Tansu Çiller. After its removal from power under pres-
sure from the armed forces, the Welfare Party was closed down by a Constitutional
Court ruling in early 1998 and has been replaced by the Virtue (Fazilet) Party. The

Haldun Gülalp is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Boğaziçi University, Bebek 80815,
Istanbul, Turkey; e-mail: gulalp@boun.edu.tr.

 2001 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/01 $9.50

434 Haldun Gülalp

Virtue Party, however, has inevitably been more circumspect and appears eager to
distance itself from the Welfare legacy, even though it inherited Welfare’s political
cadres and most of its parliamentary seats. This situation has led to an alienation
between the party and several of the institutions mentioned earlier that previously
supported Welfare, as well as many of the Welfare Party voters.
Confounding the left–right division, Islamism as represented by Welfare relied on
a multi-class political movement that articulated its themes in religious terms. This
phenomenon should be carefully distinguished from the seemingly similar liberation
theology in Latin America. While liberation theology constitutes a novel interpretation
of Christianity from a socialist perspective, Welfare’s Islamism focused on the ques-
tion of cultural superiority or inferiority. Liberation theology is concerned with chang-
ing the social order and, for this reason, it expresses class interests through Christian
terms and uses religion to mobilize people for class-related issues.1 Turkey’s political
Islam, by contrast, was concerned with a cultural project and attempted to mobilize
people by addressing their class interests in order to effect that project. In other words,
Welfare used class-related issues as a vehicle to promote a project of change in life-
style and to establish its own version of an “Islamic” society. The question, then, is:
what kinds of classes or class segments subscribed to this project?

T H E A N A LY T I C A L F R A M E W O R K

Authors who identify the center–periphery relationship as a key social cleavage in

Turkey have focused on “status”-related factors, such as lifestyles, culture, and ideol-
ogy. They have observed that in modern Turkey, Kemalism has represented the cen-
ter—hence, those who have been distant or opposed to the Kemalist state have suf-
fered political, economic, and ideological exclusion and peripheralization.2 Rightly
critical of modernization theory, which characterizes Islamism as a backward ideology
that is doomed to extinction, this perspective presents political Islam as a movement
of the “counter-elites” who are aiming for upward mobility in opposition to the secu-
larist social actors privileged by their proximity to the Kemalist state and ideology.
According to this perspective, “it is in this realm of ‘habitus’, cultural codes and
lifestyles that the power struggle between Republican elites and Islamists is taking
place.”3
It is true that Welfare successfully billed itself as the party of the “periphery”
against the “center,” the party of “civil society” against the “state.”4 But this thesis is
incomplete in two respects. First, the center–periphery perspective ignores the histori-
cal specificity of the current conjuncture. This cleavage, and consequent conflict, have
their origins in the Ottoman Empire period and have continued, under transformed
conditions, during the Republican period.5 Moreover, during the Republican period,
elements of Islamism have often been incorporated into the ideology and practice of
the Kemalist state.6 What, then, has made the Islamist challenge to Kemalism so
formidable in recent years?
Second, the “counter-elite” thesis focuses primarily, or even exclusively, on the
professional middle class and university students. Thus, Nilüfer Göle conceptualizes
the use of Islamist symbols, such as the headscarf, as a vehicle of upward mobility.7
But this concept primarily applies to the professional middle class in its struggle for
 Globalization and Political Islam 435

an assertion of identity that represents an alternative to the currently dominant one.

This paper, by contrast, focuses less on this much-studied area8 and more on other
social classes, and attempts to place the growth of the social base of political Islam
in the specific historical conjuncture of the 1980s and 1990s.
These two decades have been a period of global decline for nation-states. Modern
states, which early in the 20th century had begun to regulate their national economies
and protect the welfare of their citizens, now find their powers undermined by global-
ization.9 The 20th century has thus witnessed the rise and decline of the welfare state
and, with it, the rise and decline of the community formed around it. The stage was
thus set for the emergence of alternative forms of community with competing claims to
identity, as well as for the “post-modernist” critique of modernism, the nation-state, and
nationalism.10 Disenchantment with the nation-state globally has led to two seemingly
conflicting but parallel tendencies: sub-national (e.g., ethnic or tribal) separatist move-
ments and supra-national (e.g., religious or civilizational) revivalist movements.
The argument of this paper is that the rise of political Islam in opposition to Kemal-
ism can be linked to globalization and post-modernization (or the process of transition
to the condition of postmodernity).11 This argument rejects the modernization thesis
that religion will decline as a result of economic development and proposes, in a
seemingly counter-intuitive manner, that political Islam is not necessarily opposed to
globalization. As we will see later, political Islam in Turkey has actually flourished
under conditions of globalization.12
It must be noted, however, that Islamism promised different things to different
classes of people. In this regard, the Welfare Party fit the classic definition of a “popu-
list” movement as the mobilization of the urban poor by the minority segments of the
upper and middle classes into action against the status quo.13 These different social
classes and class segments, with identifiable albeit mutually contradictory interests,
nevertheless expressed their interests in a common idiom of opposition to the Kema-
list state. Their differing interests were successfully assimilated by the Islamist move-
ment in a discourse of opposition to Kemalism and the demand for an Islamic lifestyle.

G L O BA L I Z AT I O N , E X P O RT O R I E N TAT I O N , A N D P O L I T I C A L I S L A M

The 1960s and 1970s were a period of economic boom in Turkey, based on import-
substituting industrialization (ISI). Widely pursued in Third World modernization dur-
ing much of the 20th century, ISI was a model of state-led development. It consisted
of an attempt to utilize a nationalist ideology by combining the basic principles of the
welfare state with an emphasis on rapid industrialization. In practice, ISI was a process
in which technology, capital goods, and inputs were imported, and the final product
was locally manufactured to cater to the state-protected domestic market.14 During the
ISI boom in Turkey, the Islamist opposition originated in the small independent busi-
nesses that felt threatened with extinction. The creation of the first Islamist political
party in 1970 (the National Order Party, re-created as the National Salvation Party
[NSP] after closure by the Constitutional Court) was an outcome of the conflict be-
tween the ISI-based, big industrial and other business interests in urban areas and the
traditional, small to medium-size business sector in provincial towns. The constitu-
436 Haldun Gülalp

ency of the NSP mostly represented conservative followers of religious orders and
these provincial small-business people.15
Writers who predict the decline of political Islam in Turkey typically argue that,
with further economic development and cultural secularization, its social base of sup-
port will wither away. Portraying it as primarily a conservative political movement,
they talk of “Islam that functions as a protest ideology of small traders, small busi-
nessmen, and artisans, who often feel threatened by the increasing importance of the
industrial economy as Turkey becomes integrated into the world markets.”16 Although
this may have been an accurate identification of the social base of political Islam in
the NSP period, it is now anachronistic. This sector of the economy is not dwindling;
on the contrary, it is ascendant in the age of globalization. Unlike the traditional
import-substituting industrial sector that developed in the protected environment of
the statist period, this sector thrives on free trade and open markets. Within the current
context of the world economy, this sector is flourishing in the Third World.
The current context of the world economy can best be understood in terms of the
global shift from Fordism to post-Fordism.17 “Fordism” refers to a particular mode of
industrial organization with implications for the political and institutional structures
of society. As industrial organization, it signifies the manufacturing of standardized
products on a large scale, with rigid assembly-line technology. At the macroeconomic
level, Fordism has denoted the combination of mass production with mass consumers’
markets, regulated by the intervention of the welfare state. Called by some authors
the “capital–labor accord,” the welfare state has attempted to reconcile the economic
interests of the working class with those of the business class and has supported stable
economic growth.18
Globalization, however, has begun to undermine the power of individual nation-
states. The nation-states can no longer independently maintain full employment, sus-
tain economic growth, and preserve reformist welfare policies. At the same time, the
internal contradictions of Fordism have led to a dismantling of rigid assembly-line
technology and have given rise to flexible forms of capital accumulation. Prominent
among these new forms is subcontracted production, which allows employers to by-
pass trade unions and circumvent restrictions in firing workers and lowering wages.
Global trends toward these post-Fordist forms of “flexible accumulation” include a
rise in smaller-scale manufacturing and self-employment. Self-employment had a ten-
dency to decline in the advanced capitalist countries until the 1970s, but since then it
has begun to grow again.19 Although this trend is partly due to the growth of the post-
industrial service sectors, it can also be observed in traditional manufacturing sectors.
The expansion of self-employment in recent decades appears to be an outcome of the
rising trend in subcontracting. Subcontracting production to self-employed manufac-
turers, who are in effect workers in the guise of petty entrepreneurs, has become the
chief method of achieving what is euphemistically called “numerical flexibility” and
which in effect expresses the freedom to fire workers without suffering any conse-
quences.20
The trends observed in advanced capitalist countries are even more pronounced in
the Third World, where a significant share of world manufacturing activities has been
relocated through the global organization of production. A dominant pattern of global-
ization uses trade-led networks whereby labor-intensive manufacturing takes place in
 Globalization and Political Islam 437

decentralized and small-scale enterprises, which are located in the Third World and
are linked to large, brand-name retailers based in advanced capitalist countries.21 These
subcontracted firms often use primitive technology and may rely on the older methods
of “domestic, artisanal, familial (patriarchal), and paternalistic . . . labor systems.”22
The global proliferation of these sweatshops undermines trade-union organizations
and encourages the rise of “ideologies of entrepreneurialism, paternalism, and priva-
tism.”23 Political Islam in Turkey has found a particularly fertile ground in this decline
of traditional working-class politics and the rise of petty entrepreneurship.
Small- and medium-scale manufacturing industries have experienced rapid growth
in Turkey in recent decades. A recent survey of these industries in five provincial
towns (Denizli, Gaziantep, Konya, Çorum, and Edirne) reveals the following charac-
teristics. More than 80 percent of the surveyed firms were established in the post-
1980 period, with almost half established after 1990. At present, the greatest number
of new firms can be found in the area of textiles and garments. About half of these
firms report that they are subcontracted manufacturers, where subcontracting links
include both domestic and foreign firms. As an indirect indicator of their class origins,
these small entrepreneurs report that around a third are elementary-school graduates,
with another third middle- or high-school graduates.24
Government policy in the post-1980 period has encouraged this development by
taking an active role in the construction of organized industrial districts for small and
medium-size enterprises. By 1996, there were 36 such districts, housing several thou-
sand establishments. Of these 36 districts, only 6 were built during the twenty-five
years between 1962 and 1987, whereas thirty have been built since 1987. Many more
are planned for construction at this time. Although establishments within these dis-
tricts are given certain tax advantages, a common practice among these petty entrepre-
neurs is to complain about lack of support from the government. This discontent
finds expression in an anti-statist discourse, although, when questioned, the small
industrialists reveal that they would certainly welcome state support and protection.
Within the organized industrial districts there is widespread exploitation of child and
women’s labor and almost no trade-union organization at all.25
Proponents estimate that the small- and medium-scale industries in Turkey are re-
sponsible for about a quarter of the country’s export potential.26 This sector, which
has grown very rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of the export orientation of
the Turkish economy, also seems to have absorbed large numbers of recent urban
immigrants who were unable to find secure employment in the Fordist (i.e., formal
industrial) sectors. The working conditions of these small employers “can have a great
deal in common with manual wage workers,” and their activities may contain many
features of an informal economy.27
An interesting example of the links between the informal economy and the global
export markets is the way in which women’s domestic piecework and family-work-
shop production in some poor neighborhoods of immigrants in Istanbul are integrated
with the global economy through several layers of subcontracting relationships. Prod-
uct orders that come from outside the community—for example, for hand-knit sweat-
ers—are met through the organization of family labor within the community by a local
(male) entrepreneur. Labor relations between this man and the women (and sometimes
children) who do the work “are euphemized as (actual or fictive) kinship,” allowing
438 Haldun Gülalp

for the devaluation of productive labor.28 This devaluation may reach such proportions
that, because of generalized reciprocity among the members of the community, no
monetary payments may be considered necessary, regardless of whether the work is
done at home or at a local workshop.29
Not all of these petty entrepreneurs, whether the small-scale industrialists in provin-
cial towns or the intermediaries in poor neighborhoods of Istanbul, are necessarily
Islamist, but the Islamist segment of the business class comes primarily from among
this sector. This alignment can be better explained by looking at the relationship be-
tween the state and small capital.
Even the most accomplished segments of the business class in Turkey, including
the large holding companies that combine industrial and financial concerns, feel pow-
erless vis-à-vis the state. They know that they owe their existence and continued
fortune to reliance on the state.30 A bourgeois class did not exist at the beginning of
the Turkish Republic; it was created with the help of the state.31 During the ISI period,
“profit and accumulation depend[ed] to a much greater extent on policy than markets.
. . . Consequently, [entrepreneurs] devoted more attention to interacting with bureau-
crats and policymakers than trying to exploit market opportunities.”32 In the post-1980
period, ISI was ended as a strategy, and attempts were made to create the institutions
of a self-regulating market economy. But still the state did not retreat. Clientalistic
relations between the state and businessmen continued to be dominant, and, hence,
the state retained its central position for the business class.33
But despite the continuity of this general orientation, there was a significant differ-
ence between the pre- and post-1980 periods. In the 1980s, the locus of decision-
making shifted from the traditional bureaucratic elites to political elites.34 Decision-
making power was centralized by the prime ministry, while the legislative, judiciary,
and bureaucratic state institutions were weakened or undermined. This shift had sig-
nificant consequences with regard to the relationship between the state and the busi-
ness class. During the ISI period, the state intervented through routine bureaucratic
procedures, and “rents” arising from government policy were distributed to businesses
on the basis of relatively impersonal criteria. In the post-1980 period, however, even
the distribution of “rents” was done highly selectively, on the basis of personalized
criteria. There was constant and particularistic state intervention, despite the rhetoric
of “freedom of enterprise,” “market liberalism,” and so on.35
The corruption scandals that have plagued the political scene in Turkey in recent
decades are an outcome of this new situation, which partly explains the popularity of
the Welfare Party during the same period. Welfare was seen by many as the cleanest
of all major political parties, having stayed out of the ranks of the government
throughout the 1980s and 1990s, until the 1995 election. Although nothing was ever
proved in (or even taken to) a court of law, all other major political parties seemed
to be involved directly or indirectly in some form of corrupt dealings while in power.
More generally, this situation also explains Welfare’s claim that it was the only truly
pro-private-enterprise party. Welfare was in effect voicing the position and the inter-
ests of the newly emerging, but still peripheral, industrialist class. This mostly provin-
cial class of entrepreneurs was export-oriented, highly dynamic, and successful, but
it was also distant from the sources of governmental power and felt unprotected by
the state.
 Globalization and Political Islam 439

A N I S L A M I C C A P I TA L I S T C U LT U R E

The division between the core and peripheral segments of the business class can also
be seen by comparing the pro-Kemalist and pro-Islamist voluntary business associa-
tions—TÜSİAD and MÜSİAD, respectively. TÜSİAD (the Turkish Industrialist and
Businessmen’s Association) was founded in the early 1970s by a small group of big-
business people who had continual close relationships with political authorities and
were thus both able and encouraged to expand their enterprises. At present, most of
the several hundred member companies of TÜSİAD are large enterprises based in
Istanbul.36 MÜSİAD (the Association of Independent Industrialists and Businessmen),
on the other hand, was founded in 1990 to unite the small- and medium-scale enter-
prises that proliferated rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of the export orienta-
tion of the Turkish economy, and were open to exploitation by large capital through
subcontracting links and left unprotected by the state. These employers were unable
to find any representation in the Chambers of Commerce and Industry or in the Cham-
bers of Craftsmen and Artisans. MÜSİAD was founded to organize them within the
framework of a voluntary association. As the official pro-Islamist line of MÜSİAD
indicates, this new class of entrepreneurs has been an important supporter of the
Welfare Party.
MÜSİAD, most of whose members have fewer than twenty-five employees, main-
tains that “its constituency has traditionally received unfair treatment from the state
authority.”37 MÜSİAD’s grievance is confirmed both by the testimony of the small
employers themselves, who complain that they all are “step-children of the state”
because “state policy always favors the large firm,” and by official statistics showing
that “credit given by state institutions and banks to small firms as a percentage of
total credits has run at around three to four per cent in the last decade.”38 This is the
case even though, based on figures from 1990, small firms constitute the vast majority
(more than 90 percent) of manufacturing establishments in Turkey, and they employ
more than a third of those working in the manufacturing sector.39
MÜSİAD, as a voluntary association, attempts to provide to its members services
that they would be unable to get from the state. These services include organizing
conferences, publishing periodicals, and disseminating technology- and market-related
information. MÜSİAD organizes international fairs where members can meet foreign
business representatives and establish import–export links; arranges trips to fairs in
foreign countries; prepares research-based reports on matters of interest and submits
them to political authorities and to the public; prepares reports on countries that
MÜSİAD members might consider doing business with and provides economic, legal,
and practical information; organizes training and instruction for members in such areas
as foreign languages, modern management techniques, foreign-trade procedures; and,
finally, fosters feelings of solidarity and establishes networks among members.40 These
networks may involve the creation of market niches or sources of investment. Thus,
MÜSİAD uses the Islamic identity at both the domestic and the international levels
as a basis for cooperation among businesses.41 In short, it attempts to turn “peripheral”
status from a disadvantage into a network of solidarity.
According to the president of MÜSİAD, Erol Yarar, the association had 3,000 mem-
bers as of the first quarter of 1998, representing roughly 10,000 companies, which
440 Haldun Gülalp

together employed approximately 500,000 people.42 Most MÜSİAD member compa-

nies were established after 1980, in the post-ISI phase of Turkish development, and
have constituted a dynamic force in the export orientation of the Turkish economy.43
After more than a decade of export orientation in Turkey, many enterprises that started
out at a small or medium scale have been able to grow. At this point, MÜSİAD also
has numerous large-scale and growing companies among its members, but they all
are very recently established and can be easily distinguished from the traditional big
businesses in Turkey, which still rely on the state and support Kemalism. Thus,
MÜSİAD represents the new and peripheral segment of the business class that sup-
ports political Islam in Turkey.
Apropos to this class base, the Welfare Party’s projected “just economic order”
draws a utopian picture of an egalitarian petit-bourgeois society composed of individ-
ual entrepreneurs.44 In a recently published pamphlet (printed in Turkish and English),
Yarar complements that picture with his own vision of a synthesis between Islamic
values and post-Fordism. “Assessing from the point of view of industrial (that is,
employer–employee) relations, it seems that the information society demands many
characteristics of the pre-industrial, agricultural societies: family values, small and
medium-sized enterprises, and non-profit voluntary associations.”45 In the same pam-
phlet, MÜSİAD’s president presents the Islamic version of Max Weber’s “Protestant
Ethic.” “For a Muslim individual, the goal in this life is to get the consent of the
Creator, Allah. . . . In this respect, economic development is not an end in itself, but
simply a means to this end.”46
A constant theme in the discourse of all Islamist circles, including Welfare (now,
Virtue), MÜSİAD, and others, has been the conflict between the interests of “rent-
seeking” businesses that are close to the political establishment on the one hand, and
the decent and hard-working entrepreneurs who have humble backgrounds on the
other. Welfare blamed the “rentier” circles throughout its ordeal of being unable to
secure power despite an electoral victory in 1995. Likewise, MÜSİAD stated, in its
report on the Turkish economy in 1997, that the “rentier” circles were responsible for
the disruption of the democratic process, culminating in the removal of the Welfare-
led government, by creating the noise about the crisis of the secular regime.47 The
same themes can be found in the articulate diatribe of the prominent Islamist econo-
mist Mustafa Özel against what he characterizes as the rentier circles who hide behind
the shield of Kemalism and continue to exploit the people through state protection.
According to Özel, these circles, amounting to no more than a few thousand people,
comprise the monopolists, the usurers, and the import-substitutionist pseudo-industri-
alists, all of whom are compradors exploiting the domestic market through the power
of the state. He maintains that, by contrast, the truly competitive, export-oriented
entrepreneurs, who serve the national interest, oppose the Kemalist ideology and sup-
port the “Islamic liberalism” of the Welfare Party.48
This discourse was the key to Welfare’s popularity among the working class, as
well. As we will see in the next section, in the context of the collapsed welfare state,
a worsening distribution of income, a continually high rate of inflation, and constant
rumors of government corruption, the discourse that identified the exploiters as those
who rely on the state and its Kemalist ideology won significant support from the
working class. The populist appeal of political Islam successfully united around a
 Globalization and Political Islam 441

politics of identity both those who lost and those who gained from globalization and
from the “neo-liberal” restructuring of the economy in the post-1980 period.49
The findings of a survey conducted in 1993 indicated that small entrepreneurs,
including those who were self-employed in the informal sector, combined Islamist
tendencies in social and cultural matters with “liberal” attitudes in matters of govern-
ment economic policy.50 The populist rhetoric of political Islam appealed to these
small businessmen who were recent immigrants to the cities and seeking upward
mobility from their humble backgrounds. The same survey also revealed that in Istan-
bul, popular opposition to the “status quo” (including that by the industrial working
class) was channeled toward support for the Islamist party much more so than for the
social democrats.51 Welfare, then, brought under one roof both the peripheral segments
of the business class and people from the working class and attempted to unite them
around a common Islamic identity. As we will see next, for the working class, the rise
of political Islam represented the decline of social democracy and its replacement by
a politics of identity.

G L O BA L I Z AT I O N A N D T H E D E C L I N E O F T H E W E L FA R E S TAT E

We have identified the 1980s as the critical turning point in Turkey’s new economic
strategy and in the rise of political Islam as a populist movement. The link between
the new socio-economic trends and the themes that political Islam has raised as an
opposition movement can be observed in some social and economic indicators.
Urbanization reached unprecedented proportions in the post-1980 period. The urban
share of Turkey’s population in 1960 was only 32 percent. Within thirty years, how-
ever—that is, in 1990—59 percent of the population was living in cities. The share
of the urban population surpassed the share of the rural population for the first time
in the 1980s. The rural population actually declined in absolute numbers in the same
time frame. The rate of urban growth from 1980 to 1990 was a staggering 70 percent.52
As suggested earlier, rapid urbanization led to the expansion of the informal sector
and of the small manufacturing sector engaged in subcontracted work, but it did not
bring about an improvement in the economic welfare of the working classes, which
suffered a steady decline in real wages throughout the 1980s.53 The share of urban
wages and salaries in national income (gross domestic product, or GDP) declined
from 32.7 percent in the late 1970s (1974–77) to 20.8 percent in the late 1980s (1988–
91).54 In contrast, the increasing significance of “rentier” earnings in national income
during the same period could be seen in the growing proportion of “interest” income
to the GDP, which shot up from 1.9 percent in 1980 to 14.1 percent in 1988.55 Finally,
the distribution of household income worsened during this period. In 1994, the top
quintile of households received 54.9 percent of total income (up from 49.9 percent in
1987) while the bottom quintile received only 4.9 percent (down from 5.2 percent in
1987). The distribution was even more skewed toward the top. In the same year, the
top 5 percent of the population received 30.3 percent of total income, and the top 1
percent received as much as 16.6 percent.56
These figures explain why a populist discourse of “justice” and “welfare” (the name
of the Islamist party) and a critique of the “rentiers” would appeal to the poor and the
dispossessed. The social democrats who could resort to the same kind of discourse
442 Haldun Gülalp

could not prevail over the Islamists during this period because of the historical associ-
ation of the social-democratic tradition in Turkey with Kemalist ideology as the advo-
cate of a modernization and Westernization project from above. The Welfare Party’s
rise signified the decline of social democracy as the bearer of the Kemalist legacy in
Turkey.57
This can best be seen by comparing the Welfare Party’s electoral performance rela-
tive to the social democrats in the 1980s and 1990s with that of the NSP in the
1970s.58 In the 1970s, the level of development of the provinces had an inverse rela-
tionship with the relative strength of the NSP and a positive relationship with the
relative strength of the social-democratic Republican People’s Party (RPP). With re-
gard to the size of cities, too, the RPP was the clear winner in the largest ones, while
the NSP did poorly in them.59 By contrast, in the 1990s, Welfare had been particularly
successful in big cities.
Welfare’s rise in the 1990s was at the expense of the social-democratic parties.
Welfare’s voter base grew fastest in poor neighborhoods that lie at the periphery of
large metropolitan centers—neighborhoods that were the solid source of support for
social democrats in the 1970s.60 The Welfare Party spoke the language of socio-eco-
nomic justice and equality in poor urban neighborhoods. Filling the void created by
the collapse of statism and the ensuing crisis of modernist ideologies that were based
on it, such as nationalism and socialism, Welfare represented a post-nationalist and
post-socialist sense of “justice.” The Islamic sense of justice was not only manifested
in the realm of ideology. More concretely, in the 1980s the functions of the defunct
welfare state were taken on by local religious organizations and foundations working
to help the poor in urban neighborhoods, thereby contributing to the popularity of the
Islamist political movement. This was particularly instrumental in Welfare’s success
in local elections.61
There was a class pattern of support for the Welfare Party. A recent survey revealed
that a majority of Welfare supporters did not have much knowledge of Welfare’s
program for creating a “just order,” but believed that it had something to do with
creating an “egalitarian” and “nearly socialist” society. A majority of Welfare’s sup-
porters were clearly motivated not by religious, but by political, demands.62

ISLAM IST CHALLENGE TO KEM ALISM AND THE

PROFESSIONAL M I DDLE CLASS

Finally, we will address the Islamist professional middle class concerned with status
issues. The recently growing group of intellectuals who support political Islam has
manifested itself in the proliferation of Islamist publications in the 1980s and 1990s.
The emergence of a segment of university students and upwardly mobile young pro-
fessionals as active supporters of political Islam is a new phenomenon because, in
Turkey, “intellectual” and “Westernized” have traditionally been identical. Turkish
modernization was led by an “enlightened” bureaucratic elite, for whom moderniza-
tion was synonymous with Westernization.
With the global crisis of modernism and the rising challenges against the universal
myths of Western civilization, however, the promises of the Kemalist project began
to lose credibility. The deconstruction of the universal pretensions of European civili-
 Globalization and Political Islam 443

zation, and the growing recognition of its character as a provincial culture with its
own hegemonic project, allowed for alternative visions of civilization to gain currency.
Just as in the West the crisis of ideologies based on modernism led to the rise of
several post-modernist politics of identity,63 so, too, in Turkey the crisis of moderniza-
tion led to Islamism. Islamist themes, such as anti-Westernism, championing the pe-
riphery against the center, and emphasizing the particularism of Islamic culture, began
to find resonance among the post-modernist sensibilities of a new generation of stu-
dents and other intellectuals whose counterparts in the West favored environmentalism
and multi-culturalism as political projects.64 The post-modern condition, in other
words, allowed for questioning of the unquestionable truths of Turkey’s Westerniza-
tion project, hence contributing to the popularity of a movement that was hitherto
unable to gain a widespread following.
Like other post-modern identity politics, Islamism has both cross-class and cross-
national claims. The (imagined) immutable quality of Islamic identity, perhaps para-
doxically, originates from accepting the Eurocentric assertion of an essential differ-
ence between European and non-European cultures. In the post-modern age, those
identities, such as class, that derive from modern social structures have been replaced
by the defense of authenticity, and those cultural sources which are perceived as tradi-
tional are appropriated in the name of diversity.
Many observers have noted the connection between the post-Fordist context and
the increasing salience of “culture wars” at the expense of class struggles.65 These
culture wars characterize what generally have been called the “new social movements”
and seem to be unrelated to socio-economic issues. For example, unlike the Fordist
compromise between labor and capital over the distribution of rewards that accrue
from increased productivity, new social movements tend to reject the productivist deal
and advocate post-materialist values, such as the protection of the environment.66
Despite this appearance, however, it is still possible to identify the class foundation
of the “culture wars.” Middle-class professionals, unlike labor and capital, are not
anchored in the capitalist relations of production; hence, they are primarily concerned
with “status.” Cultural capital in general is a source of “social closure” that generates
and maintains status stratification.67 The class interests of intellectuals and other mid-
dle-class professionals do not directly engender political projects involving the trans-
formation of production relations, although intellectuals may individually attach them-
selves to the advocacy of the interests of other classes. Culture wars originating from
the “status struggles” of (and within) the professional middle class have become more
salient than class struggle because of the weakening organization and resistance of
the working class due to the post-Fordist globalization process. Their salience, indeed,
has become a marker of the post-modern age.68
In Turkey, status stratification within the professional middle class has primarily
taken place along the lines of whether one has accepted the Kemalist ideology and
internalized the Western lifestyle. Indeed, given the Kemalist identification of “West-
ernized” with “enlightened,” the now widely used term “Islamist intellectual” has until
recently been considered an oxymoron (and now an unlikely, even exotic, phenome-
non—hence the qualifier). Thus, the status struggle, which has become easier for the
Islamists because of the post-modern weakening of Kemalism, is especially true for
the middle-class professionals and Islamist intellectuals who have parochial and mod-
444 Haldun Gülalp

est backgrounds but ambitions of upward mobility and empowerment. As Michael

Meeker observes, “the Muslim intellectuals are not unwilling urban residents yearning
to return to the security of the rural town or village where there was no need to think
through who one was and what one was to do. They are very much creatures of the
contemporary Turkish city, like their secular counterparts.”69
It was suggested earlier that the multi-class populism of the Islamist party could be
seen in its ambiguous, often contradictory statements aiming to appeal to both the
working class and the capitalist class. A similar situation can be observed between
the “post-modernist” middle class and the accumulation-minded capitalist-class wings
of political Islam. For example, MÜSİAD’s president, Yarar, states, “We must em-
brace the motto ‘High Morality, High Technology’ in our scientific and commercial
efforts.”70 But high technology is rejected by the post-modern philosophy of the lead-
ing Islamist authors. This divergence of views created a division within the Islamist
camp with regard to Necmettin Erbakan’s policies when he came to power. One of
Erbakan’s first acts as prime minister was to organize a trip to East Asia in order to
set up economic and political ties with Islamic nations in the region and to present
them as a model at home of how economic and technological development could be
combined with “cultural authenticity.” The response to this move from the prominent
Islamist theorist Ali Bulaç, torn between the desire to oppose Erbakan’s policy and
the commitment to support his government, was one of bitter resignation. “I, for one,
believe that such concepts as modernity and development have destructive effects.
But I also accept that the Muslim world, and Turkey in particular, have to swallow
this bitter pill. Therefore, what needs to be done should be done right away.”71 This
example also serves to illustrate another characteristic of populist movements in gen-
eral—that is, their reliance on lower classes when in opposition and their willingness
to serve the interests of upper classes when in power.

CONCLUSION

The social base of political Islam in Turkey, then, can be conceived of as a vertical
bloc comprising segments of different socio-economic classes. Although they have
different concerns and motives for supporting political Islam, these different segments
of society are united in their common opposition to Kemalism and their expression of
political will through the assertion of an Islamic identity. The Welfare Party success-
fully managed to keep these diverse forces under one roof and emerged as a powerful
opposition movement to the status quo.
Welfare’s vertical bloc of support included the following class segments:
1. The peripheral segment of the capitalist class, consisting of small- and medium-scale, and
mostly provincial, businesses. The interests of this segment have been opposed to the inter-
ests of the mostly Istanbul-based big capital, which has grown in cooperation with the state.
In recent years, however, taking advantage of the export orientation of the economy, Islamic
capital has also grown, leading to the foundation of some holding companies that have
reached the size and economic power of many units of “core” capital.
2. The professional middle class, whose peripheral segment has consisted of those university
graduates who have a conservative and mostly provincial background and who have begun
to challenge the “core” professional elite who are the fundamental mainstay of Kemalism
 Globalization and Political Islam 445

in Turkey. In recent years, taking advantage of the trends toward asserting authenticity, this
segment has established itself as a legitimate category of “intellectuals.”
3. The working class, whose peripheral segment has consisted of the recent immigrants to the
cities who have mostly been unable to find secure employment and have engaged in mar-
ginal activities. Unlike the established and organized working class, which is close to the
“core” through formal links with the state, this segment of the dispossessed has been prone
to be swayed by non-mainstream political movements. The efforts of the Islamist political
party to mobilize a mass-based movement through populist propaganda has been directed
mostly toward this social segment. But political Islam has also won support among the more
established working class.72

In recent years each of these groups has been growing numerically and as a social
or economic force. This opposition began to challenge the state, whose welfare and
developmentalist ideology and practices entered a declining phase due to a weakening
associated with processes of globalization and post-modernization. The weakening of
the protectionist practices of the state left its oppressive character more apparent than
before and created an opportunity for waging an assault on its founding ideology of
Kemalism. This set of conditions resulted partly from the relative strengthening of
some peripheral groups and partly from the weakening and consequent politicization
of others. Globalization has strengthened peripheral capital and peripheral profession-
als while it has adversely affected the working class. With its radical rhetoric in the
face of the failures of Turkey’s Westernization project, the Islamist movement hence
was able in the 1990s to broaden its base of support by appealing to a wider range
and greater variety of disaffected social segments.

NOTES

Author’s note: This paper is based on a report originally prepared for the project on “Muslim Voices
in the European Union,” funded by the European Union and coordinated by Dr. Pandeli Glavanis at the
University of Manchester. I am grateful to the editor of this journal and the anonymous readers of this
article for helpful comments on earlier drafts.
1
See Phillip Berryman, Liberation Theology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987). For the English transla-
tion of one of the original programmatic statements of liberation theology, see Gustavo Gutierrez, “Libera-
tion, Theology, and Proclamation,” in The Pope and Revolution, ed. Quentin Quade (Washington, D.C.:
Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1982).
2
Şerif Mardin, “Center–Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics?” Daedalus 102 (1973): 169–90.
3
Nilüfer Göle, “Secularism and Islamism in Turkey: The Making of Elites and Counter-Elites” Middle
East Journal 51 (1997): 52. See also idem, “Authoritarian Secularism and Islamist Politics: The Case of
Turkey,” in Civil Society in the Middle East, ed. Augustus Richard Norton (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 2:
20–25.
4
See Yael Navaro-Yashin, “Uses and Abuses of ‘State and Civil Society’ in Contemporary Turkey,” New
Perspectives on Turkey 18 (1998): 1–22.
5
Mardin, “Center–Periphery Relations.”
6
See Binnaz Toprak, “Religion as State Ideology in a Secular Setting: The Turkish–Islamic Synthesis,”
in Aspects of Religion in Modern Turkey, ed. J. M. Wagstaff, University of Durham, Center for Middle
Eastern and Islamic Studies, Occasional Paper Series, no. 40 (1990); Ümit Cizre Sakallıoğlu, “Parameters
and Strategies of Islam–State Interaction in Republican Turkey,” International Journal of Middle East
Studies 28 (1996): 231–51.
7
Nilüfer Göle, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1996).
8
See, for example, Michael Meeker, “The New Muslim Intellectuals in the Republic of Turkey,” in Islam
446 Haldun Gülalp

in Modern Turkey, ed. Richard Tapper (London: I. B. Tauris, 1991), 189–219; Binnaz Toprak, “Islamist
Intellectuals: Revolt against Industry and Technology,” in Turkey and the West: Changing Political and
Cultural Identities, ed. Metin Heper, Ayşe Öncü, and H. Kramer (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993), 237–57.
9
James Mittelman, ed., Globalization: Critical Perspectives (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1996).
10
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Ox-
ford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of
Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 328–56.
11
For further discussion of this concept, see Stephen Crook, Jan Pakulski, and Malcolm Waters, Postmod-
ernization (London: Sage Publications, 1992). See also Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity.
12
Understanding the link between globalization and the rise of political Islam may also help account for
the more general phenomenon noted in recent literature as the seemingly contradictory union of “McDon-
aldization and tribalism”: see Benjamin Barber, “Jihad vs. McWorld,” Atlantic Monthly (March 1992),
53–63.
13
Torcuata Di Tella, “Populism into the Twenty-first Century,” Government and Opposition 32 (1997):
187–200.
14
The classic work on ISI is Albert O. Hirschman, “The Political Economy of Import-Substituting Indus-
trialization in Latin America,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 82 (1968): 1–32.
15
Ahmet Yücekök, Türkiye’de Din ve Siyaset (Istanbul: Gerçek Yayınları, 1983); Türker Alkan, “The
National Salvation Party in Turkey,” in Islam and Politics in the Modern Middle East, ed. Metin Heper
and Raphael Israeli (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984); Binnaz Toprak, “Politicization of Islam in a
Secular State: The National Salvation Party in Turkey,” in From Nationalism to Revolutionary Islam, ed.
Said Amir Arjomand (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); Ali Yaşar Sarıbay, Türkiye’de
Din ve Parti Politikası: MSP Örnek Olayı (Istanbul: Alan Yayıncılık, 1985).
16
Faruk Birtek and Binnaz Toprak, “The Conflictual Agendas of Neo-Liberal Reconstruction and the
Rise of Islamic Politics in Turkey: The Hazards of Rewriting Modernity,” Praxis International 13 (1993):
199. See also Binnaz Toprak, “Islam and the Secular State in Turkey” in Turkey: Political, Social and
Economic Challenges in the 1990s, ed. Çiğdem Balım, et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995); Ahmet Yücekök,
Dinin Siyasallaşması: Din-Devlet İlişkilerinde Türkiye Deneyimi (Istanbul: Afa Yayınları, 1997).
17
See Ash Amin, ed., Post-Fordism (London: Blackwell, 1994).
18
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, “The Labor-Capital Accord,” in The Transformation of Industrial
Organization, ed. Frank Hearn (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1988).
19
George Steinmetz and Erik Olin Wright, “The Fall and Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie: Changing Patterns
of Self-Employment in the Postwar United States,” American Journal of Sociology 94 (1989): 975–1007.
20
Crook et al., Postmodernization, 177–90; Anna Pollert, “Dismantling Flexibility” Capital and Class,
34 (1988): 42–75.
21
See Gary Gereffi, “Capitalism, Development and Global Commodity Chains,” in Capitalism and Devel-
opment, ed. Leslie Sklair (London: Routledge, 1994), and idem, “Global Production Systems and Third
World Development,” in Global Change: Regional Response, ed. Barbara Stallings (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).
22
Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 152.
23
Ibid., 192.
24
Sevil Kişoğlu, A. H. Köse, A. Öncü, and G. Çakar, “Anadolu Sanayisi Araştırma Raporunun Sunul-
ması,” in 1997 Sanayi Kongresi, ed. Makine Mühendisleri Odası (Ankara, 1997), 1–90.
25
Oğuz Oyan and Aziz Konukman, “Esnek İşgücü Piyasaları, Anadolu Kaplanları ve Sendikalaşma,” in
1997 Sanayi Kongresi, 233–38.
26
Mustafa Şahin, “Türkiye’de Küçük ve Orta Boy İşletmelerin (KOBİ’lerin) Önemi,” MÜSİAD Bülteni,
no. 20 (Nisan–Mayıs [April–May] 1997), 35.
27
Theo Nichols and Nadir Sugur, “Small Employers in Turkey: The OSTIM Estate at Ankara,” Middle
Eastern Studies 32 (1996): 250.
28
Jenny White, Money Makes Us Relatives: Women’s Labor in Urban Turkey (Austin: Texas University
Press, 1994), 105.
29
Ibid., 105–31.
30
Ayşe Buğra, State and Business in Turkey: A Comparative Study (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1994), 4–5.
31
See Çağlar Keyder, State and Class in Turkey (London: NLB, 1987).
 Globalization and Political Islam 447
32
Ziya Öniş, State and Market (Istanbul: Boğaziçi University Press, 1998), 244.
33
Buğra, State and Business, 264; Öniş, State and Market, 253.
34
Öniş, State and Market, 255.
35
Korkut Boratav, 1980’li Yıllarda Türkiye’de Sosyal Sınıflar ve Bölüşüm (Istanbul: Gerçek Yayınları,
1991), 92–97.
36
Buğra, State and Business, chap. 5; Ayşe Buğra, “Class, Culture, and State: An Analysis of Interest
Representation by two Turkish Business Associations,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 30
(1998): 521–39.
37
Buğra, “Class, Culture, and State,” 525.
38
Nadir Sugur, “Small Firm Flexibility in Turkey: The Case of OSTIM Industrial District at Ankara,”
New Perspectives on Turkey, 16 (1997): 99–100.
39
Nichols and Sugur, “Small Employers in Turkey,” 231.
40
MÜSİAD Publicity Pamphlet, n.d.
41
Buğra, “Class, Culture, and State.”
42
Interview on the television program 32.Gün, 14 April 1998.
43
Buğra, “Class, Culture, and State.”
44
Necmettin Erbakan, Adil Ekonomik Düzen (Ankara, 1991). For a critical assessment, see Haldun Gülalp,
“Political Islam in Turkey: The Rise and Fall of the Refah Party,” The Muslim World 89 (1999): 27–28.
45
Erol Yarar, A New Perspective of the World at the Threshold of the 21st Century (Istanbul: MUSİAD,
n.d. [1996]), 8.
46
Ibid., 45.
47
MÜSİAD Bülteni, no. 22 (Agustos–Eylül [August–September], 1997), 7–11.
48
Mustafa Özel, Refahlı Türkiye (Istanbul: İz Yayınları, 1997).
49
Ziya Öniş, “The Political Economy of Islamic Resurgence in Turkey: The Rise of the Welfare Party
in Perspective,” Third World Quarterly 18 (1997): 743–66.
50
Korkut Boratav, Istanbul ve Anadolu’dan Sınıf Profilleri (İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1995), 104.
51
Ibid., 94.
52
State Institute of Statistics, Statistical Yearbook of Turkey (Ankara, 1996).
53
Boratav, 1980’li Yıllarda, 37.
54
Hasan Kirmanoğlu, “Refah Partisi’nin Yükselişinin Ekonomi Politiği,” İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Araş-
tırma Merkezi, mimeo (1997), 18.
55
Boratav, 1980’li Yıllarda, 55.
56
State Institute of Statistics, Income Distribution (Household Income Distribution Survey Results) (An-
kara, 1994).
57
In this context we may also recall the commonly heard argument that the growth of political Islam was
due to the support provided by the generals during the military regime of the 1980s in their attempt to
suppress the left. See, for example, Toprak, “Religion as State Ideology,” and Sakallıoğlu, “Parameters and
Strategies.” Although it may be true that the generals supported the Islamists against the leftists, this
argument ignores the crucial facts that traditional left-wing politics declined in a process not even fully
understood (let alone engineered) by the generals and that, in the same time frame, not only Islamism but
also other sorts of religion-based political movements began to sprout around the world.
58
For a more detailed analysis, see Gülalp, “Political Islam in Turkey,” 29–32.
59
Sarıbay, Türkiye’de Din ve Parti, 155–70.
60
Aydın Köymen, Necat Erder, and Ahmet Kardam, “TÜSES Araştırması, Seçim Sonuçları ve Sosyal
Demokrasinin Krizi Üzerine,” Sosyal Demokrat Değişim, no. 1 (1996); Erol Tuncer, “24 Aralık 1995 Genel
Seçimlerine İlişkin Sayısal ve Genel Bir Değerlendirme,” ibid.; Gülgün Tosun and Tanju Tosun, “27 Mart
1994 Yerel Seçimlerinden 24 Aralık 1995 Genel Seçimlerine: Siyasal Coğrafyaya İlişkin Gözlemler,” Amme
İdaresi Dergisi 29 (1996).
61
Ruşen Çakır, Ayet ve Slogan: Türkiye’de İslami Oluşumlar (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 1990); Mustafa
Haki Okutucu, İstikamet Şeriat: Refah Partisi (Istanbul: Yeryüzü Yayınları, 1996), 76–84.
62
ARAŞ, Refah Araştırması (Ankara, 1994), 24–27, 34.
63
Pauline Marie Rosenau, Postmodernism and the Social Sciences (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1992).
64
See Haldun Gülalp, “Postmodernism and Islamism,” Contention 4 (1995): 59–73; and idem, “Globaliz-
ing Postmodernism: Islamist and Western Social Theory,” Economy and Society 26 (1997): 419–33.
448 Haldun Gülalp
65
See, for example, Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage Publications,
1994); Robert J. Antonio and Alessandro Bonanno, “Post-Fordism in the United States: The Poverty of
Market-Centered Democracy,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 16 (1996): 3–32.
66
George Steinmetz, “Regulation Theory, Post-Marxism, and the New Social Movements,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 36 (1994): 192–94.
67
On the concept of “social closure,” see Jeff Manza, “Classes, Status Groups, and Social Closure: A
Critique of Neo-Weberian Social Theory,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 12 (1992): 275–302.
68
See, for example, Scott Lash, Sociology of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990), 4.
69
Meeker, “New Muslim Intellectuals,” 217.
70
Yarar, New Perspective, 47. See also Erol Yarar, “Tekno-ekonomik Paradigma ile Satranç” Çerçeve 15
(1995): 7.
71
Yeni Şafak, 22 August 1996.
72
There is also a fourth group of people who have supported Welfare but who cannot be identified in
terms of class position: Kurds who were disaffected by the Turkish government’s handling of the Kurdish
issue but were unwilling to support the PKK. The origins of the Kurdish movement and Kurdish support
for Welfare lie beyond the scope of this paper. For a treatment of Welfare’s Kurdish policy, see Hamit
Bozarslan, “Political Crisis and the Kurdish Issue in Turkey,” in The Kurdish Nationalist Movement in the
1990s: Its Impact on Turkey and the Middle East, ed. Robert Olson (Lexington: University Press of Ken-
tucky, 1996); Haldun Gülalp, “Islamism and Kurdish Nationalism: Rival Adversaries of Kemalism in Tur-
key,” in Islam and the Question of Minorities, ed. Tamara Sonn (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1996).