Creating the Desired Citizen is a comparative study of the social engineering projects of Kemalism and Erdoğanism. According to Ihsan Yilmaz, despite their ideological differences, the Kemalist and Erdoğanist eras are strikingly similar, given these two regimes’ ambitions to radically transform their societies to establish hegemonic rule. Yilmaz argues that both regimes have used similar strategies and tools in their efforts to reshape society. They established authoritarian rule, utilized schools and the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) to inculcate their ideologies, manipulated historical memory, and relied on a personality cult for legitimation. More importantly, they portrayed minority groups as security problems and played on fear, anxiety, and siege mentality to mobilize support. The use of anti-Western conspiracy theories, extraordinary measures to repress the activities of undesired citizens and minorities, and glorification of the state and the nation have been common to both the Kemalists and the Erdoğanists. Yilmaz makes an emotion-centered analysis to explain these similarities. He argues that Erdoğan's regime “is built on the Kemalist paradigm and extensively uses its discursive and emotional reservoir, but it reconstructs it from an Islamist and civilisationalist perspective” (258). The Kemalist elite who experienced the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire developed a strong sense of fear, skepticism, and resentment in their relations with the West. Years of military defeat, humiliation, and territorial loss at the hands of the Western powers were behind the negative emotions that informed the Kemalists’ approach to minorities and their strong desire to build homogeneity. The Erdoğanists inherited and capitalized on these emotions, but to build a different kind of society.
The book introduces three citizenship categories in the Turkish context: Homo LASTus, Homo Diyanetus and Homo Erdoğanistus. These categories refer to the desired and tolerated citizens. Homo LASTus refers to the desired citizen of the Kemalists: those who are laicist, Ataturkist, nationalist, Sunni Muslim, and Turk. The desired citizen category of the Erdoğanists is Homo Erdoğanistus, who is Islamist, Muslim nationalist, anti-Kemalist, anti-Western, militarist, and jihadist. Homo Diyanetus is a liminal citizenship category, referring to practicing Sunni Muslims who are not members of any organized religious group and who receive their religious education mainly from the Diyanet. For both regimes Homo Diyanetus is the tolerated citizen category. Those who are in this category are not ideal citizens, but they also are not threatening to the regime. They are under Diyanet's influence and not politicized. Yilmaz divides this category into two: Homo Diyanetus 1.0 and Homo Diyanetus 2.0. This is because Diyanet's role and mission changed under Erdoğan. Homo Diyanetus 1.0 refers to the practicing Muslims that the Kemalists could not secularize. Those who are Homo Diyanetus 2.0 are not adequately Islamist or pro-Erdoğan for the Erdoğanists.
By conceptualizing these categories with the word “Homo,” Yilmaz argues that his objective is to call attention to the fact that both regimes did not consider their undesired citizens as humans who deserved human rights (27). Yet, the author does not systematically bring support to this argument by showing how both regimes used dehumanization as a legitimation strategy to exclude undesired citizens. In his examples, Yilmaz shows that both regimes considered the undesired citizens threats to their regimes, using the fear of external intervention and portraying them as the “fifth column” of foreign powers to justify exclusion. This is different than seeing them as unhuman or subhuman. Labeling a political concept with a biological term does not add much explanatory value to the author's conceptualization of the nature of exclusion, giving the impression that these labels merely serve an ornamental purpose.
The book is divided into five parts. In the first part, Yilmaz examines Kemalism. He is careful in portraying Kemalism as a flexible ideology that changed over time (p. 46), but its basic tenets, such as secularism, Turkish nationalism, and Westernism, continued to inform state ideology until the early 2000s. In separate chapters, Yilmaz surveys the Kemalist regime's relationship with its undesired citizens, such as practicing Muslims, Islamists, leftists, liberals, non-Muslims, Alevis, and Kurds and explains how the regime used the Diyanet to control practicing Muslims’ perspective of Islam.
The rest of the book is devoted to the rise and consolidation of Erdoğanism. In the second part, Yilmaz writes about the development of Turkish Islamism, the different stages of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), and the ideological components of Erdoğanism after the Gezi Park protests. He explains how the protests along with the 15 July coup attempt increased the Erdoğanists’ fears, insecurities, and siege mentality vis-à-vis the West, pushing the regime toward an authoritarian, populist, and Islamist path. In the third part, the author discusses the desired citizen typology for Erdoğanism and the methods that the government uses to remake society. One chapter in this section analyzes the propagation of Erdoğan's personality cult and the ideology of the regime through commemorations, national holidays, social media, movies, and TV dramas. Another chapter is about changes in the educational system and the national curriculum under the AKP government. In Part 4, the author discusses the undesired citizens of the Erdoğanist regime, who are largely the same as the Kemalists’ undesired citizens, except for practicing Muslims who are Erdoganists' desired citizens. The last part of the book examines the role of the Diyanet under AKP rule and how the government strengthened and utilized this institution to propagate an Islamist, populist, Ottomanist ideology. Chapter 13 examines the content of the Diyanet's Friday sermons from 2001 to 2020. This analysis reveals that, although the sermons have conveyed the message of anti-Western conspiracies, Muslim nationalism, glorification of martyrdom, siege mentality, and victimhood since the beginning of the republic, the AKP's addition to these sermons was a new Islamist and restorative-Ottomanist narrative that is more belligerent toward the West.
Creating the Desired Citizen is a valuable book for anyone curious about the AKP government. It provides detailed information concerning its social engineering policies. It also highlights the similarities between the Kemalists and the Erdoğanists, which is not much discussed in academia or the media. However, the book leaves the reader with more questions than answers. The analytical framework based on emotions is too broad to explain the insistent effort at social engineering. It is not clear to what extent the negative emotions of fear, anxiety, and insecurity have been the cause of social engineering policies and how much they have been merely tools to justify these policies and mobilize support for them. If it is the latter, it is not clear why people buy into this emotional narrative. The emotions analysis also does not shed light on why the Kemalists made Westernization of the society a key component of their social engineering project, whereas the Erdoğanists have been averse to it even as they share with Kemalists similar negative emotions toward the West. The author also does not take alternative arguments into account. The similarities between the Kemalist and Erdoğanist regimes could have something to do with the institutional structure of Turkey. One can argue that establishing effective control over state institutions gave these regimes the opportunity to pursue ambitious social engineering policies. Rather than an underlying emotional dynamic as cause, the reason both Kemalists and Erdoğanists have tried to transform their society may be simply because they can push for it to consolidate authoritarian control.
