Stuck Inside

This chapter analyzes the powerful function in practice of the institutions whose origin and nature are explored in the previous chapter. It conceptualizes institutions that are founded to protect principles related to identity, such as secularism, as institutional obstacles to challenges from supporters of competing identity proposals. The chapter examines the attempts of the explicitly Islamist Welfare Party (RP) to spread Ottoman Islamism in Turkey’s public sphere and to shift the country’s foreign policy toward the Middle East. The chapter then demonstrates how military, judicial, and educational institutions infused with Republican Nationalism functioned to crush the RP’s efforts. It focuses on the experiences of the RP, which was pushed out of power by Turkey’s National Security Council and closed by the Constitutional Court during the February 28 process. These served as lessons from whcih the AKP, whose roots lie in the RP, would learn to circumvent such domestic obstacles and contest Republican Nationalism abroad.