Featured illustration by Mirko Rastić. Photo by punghi / Shutterstock.com

Years from now, when we look back at the 2010s, what will be the images that come to mind? Will we recall the wealth and prosperity brought to us by free markets and private investment? The freedom and democracy we enjoyed under our neoliberal governments? Or the ways in which we bravely protected our cultural and natural heritage, safeguarding it for future generations?

Most likely not. When we think of the 2010s, we will remember the protesters in the streets, the wars ravaging the Middle East, causing entire populations to leave home and hearth behind, and the millions of people across the globe risking their lives just to make a living somewhere else. We will remember the xenophobic attacks, the racist politicians, the gag orders and the crackdowns. But perhaps most of all, we will look back in disbelief, unable to understand how we could idly stand by and witness the slow but steady destruction of our planet — blindly burning, digging and slashing our way beyond the point of no return.

To be sure, the state’s response to the global financial crisis has been swift and determined: banks were bailed out, protesters beaten back and border fences put up. The economic recession, the popular uprisings and the increasing political instability of recent years encouraged neoliberal governments around the globe to discard their democratic pretenses and let their authoritarian nature to come to the fore. These developments have been particularly acute in Turkey, whose anti-democratic turn in recent years provides one of the most striking examples of authoritarian neoliberalism. As a strategic NATO ally, a former Islamic darling of the West and a long-time contender for EU membership, Turkey’s current state of emergency is in fact not the exception, but the rule pushed to its natural extreme.

Turkey’s Boiling Point

The curtain first began to fall on Turkey’s neoliberal success story in the summer of 2013, when the Gezi protests combined with intensifying economic pressures to produce a powerful catalyst for the country’s authoritarian turn. Since then, the violent escalation of the Kurdish question, rising tensions with the Gülen movement and the attempted coup d’état of July 2016 appear to have driven these developments to their logical conclusion: the move towards an authoritarian state presiding over the steady erosion of hard-fought social rights and political freedoms.

Back in 2013, the millions of people who expressed their discontent with the government during the Gezi protests caught Erdoğan’s AKP-led government by surprise. Until then, the AKP had been all but basking in praise and support, enjoying a privileged position as the West’s Muslim prodigy in the region, working hard and successfully to tick all the boxes and join the neoliberal club of capitalist democracies. What it had failed to recognize was that more and more people felt like their neighborhood, city and society was no longer theirs; they had become strangers, outsiders in their own lives, victims of the structural violence that had bulldozed their homes, taken away their jobs, destroyed their theaters, cut their trees and killed their hopes.

Faced with a significant share of the population that refused to buy into the neoliberal myth of progress and prosperity the government responded in the only way it knew how: it sharpened the bayonets and launched a war on its own people.

More and more people felt like their neighborhood, city and society was no longer theirs; they had become strangers, outsiders in their own lives, victims of the structural violence that had bulldozed their homes, taken away their jobs, destroyed their theaters, cut their trees and killed their hopes.

After a very violent police crackdown on the street protests — in which hundreds were arrested, thousands were injured and over a dozen protesters were killed, including the 15-year-old Berkin Elvan — the state then continued its repression in less overt but no less authoritarian ways. Activists, artists and academics who had expressed support for the protests were accused of supporting terrorism, and in many cases charged as such. Teenagers were sent to jail for posting a tweet, and teachers lost their jobs for trying to analyze and discuss the social relevance of the largest popular uprising in the country’s history in their classes.

Many foreign observers have described the violent response of the Turkish state as the AKP’s “authoritarian turn.” While it is true that the government acted in a more authoritarian manner than before the Gezi uprising, it would be misleading to present this development as a break with the past. The post-Gezi crackdown and subsequent political repression did not constitute a breaking point with the past, but a boiling point — the culmination of many years of structural violence and oppression, which have long been so characteristic of neoliberal regimes across the globe.