‘Homegrown and national culture’: the cultural policies of Erdogan’s ‘New Turkey’

Abstract

ABSTRACT The events that have happened since 2002, when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power, contain rich research topics that need to be examined for many years by social scientists who work on Turkey. However, AKP’s cultural policies have not yet received sufficient attention in academic studies. The dissolution of the moderate atmosphere created by the EU accession negotiations and liberal policies in the early 2000s had a direct impact on AKP’s cultural policies in the 2010s. This article argues that the cultural policies implemented in the last decade, which I will define as yerli ve milli (homegrown and national) cultural policy, emerged intending to fill the cultural hegemony gap that manifested after the conservative art debates (2012), Gezi Park Protests (2013) and the termination of the Turkish-Kurdish peace process (2015). By analysing the formation and implementation levels of the yerli ve milli culture, the article shows that this unofficially implemented yerli ve milli cultural policy seeks to construct a neoliberal cultural space in which the Islamic elements are integrated into the traditional national cultural policies centred on Turkishness.