What enabled the regime change? How exactly did the drive for change gather the steam it needed by 2007, when, following roughly the first five years of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) in power, the turnabout would finally be put in motion? Of all the factors that should be taken on board in rehearsing a possible answer, the interim shift in the patterns of the long enduring identity politics should perhaps be accorded the greatest weight. The republican Turkey was set up in 1923 as a centralising body politic with a fixed and increasingly assertive identity vision, seeking to create a new, ‘European’ nation out of the bulky and sharply fragmented Ottoman polity. The aim was thus to modernise not only the administration but also society, chiefly through an instrumental concept of reason that was largely indifferent to the diversity that prevailed in the periphery of the political centre. In addition to a major concern about a new civic culture cleansed as much as possible from the local patriarchy, chiefly religion, building a homogeneous nation state out of the leftover Ottoman public also required the suppression of what was ethnically ‘outlying’. The liberal–populist rule for about a decade from 1950, which was loyal on the whole to the earlier vision, would nevertheless be overthrown by the bureaucracy for having ‘betrayed’ the original republican notion of identity in its somewhat loosened approach to domestic diversity.

The identity politics safeguarded by the bureaucracy in the run-up to the regime change was still largely defined by a steadfast dedication to this original project, which this book has referred to as ‘republicanism’, following the strong emphasis that the term ‘republic’ would start receiving in opposition circles under the AKP rule, and, no less significantly perhaps, in acknowledgement of the apparent affinity of this ideology with the more fully developed discourse of republicanism in France.1 The overall catechism communicated in this creed invoked a sharp distinction of the private and public spheres in society, with the traces of the peripheral identities, religious or ethnic, greatly to be purged from the latter. Left solid among the past communal bonds would solely be a non- pious, almost ‘nominal’ Sunni Muslim identity, and a purportedly non- ethnic nationality.