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May 13 - May 16, 2024
It was notable that most of the liberalising measures of the early Erdogan years also helped Islamists strengthen their position in society.
True in the west too
In 2013, many Turkish liberals and secularists took to the streets in the Gezi Park protests – prompted initially by news that the Turkish leader intended to build over one of the few parks in central Istanbul to re-create an old Ottoman-era barracks that had once been the base for a rising by Islamist officers. Erdogan also planned to build a mosque in Taksim Square, the symbolic heart of Istanbul, right next to Gezi Park.
This was a Turkish ‘culture war’ – and it provoked Erdogan into a fury of paranoia and bitterness.
The HDP had become the first Kurdish party to gain representation in the Turkish parliament. But it had also attracted support from a wider public, who saw Demirtas as an articulate and principled figure, capable of standing up to Erdogan.
In the aftermath of the coup, Demirtas was arrested and accused of supporting terrorism, specifically the PKK, the armed Kurdish movement. He was detained in a remote prison and charged with various terrorism-related offences that collectively carried a sentence of up to 142 years.
In Turkey, devout Muslims and the rank and file of the AKP seemed prepared to accept Erdogan’s slide into autocracy because he was seen as a defender of the faith and the nation, against their enemies in the secular establishment. In a similar way, Trump’s most loyal base of support came from white evangelicals who saw the president as their champion against liberal America.
The claim to be a champion of the faith is fairly common among the new generation of strongman leaders. Vladimir Putin claims to see himself as the defender of 800 million Christians around the world, as
The use of ‘culture war’ distractions is one obvious tactic for a strongman leader facing domestic economic problems. Another is to employ nationalism and foreign military adventures to stir up patriotism at home.
The fragmentation of Syria, and America’s alliance there with Kurdish militias, had fanned Turkish fears of Kurdish separatism. In response, Erdogan deployed Turkish troops into Syria in 2016, who effectively occupied
He has long been at daggers-drawn with both Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
The Turkish leader is an object of deep suspicion in Riyadh as well because the Saudis regard Erdogan as a supporter of their sworn enemies in the Muslim Brotherhood.
International conflicts always carry a risk for a strongman ruler. A quick victory, followed by a military parade and a stirring speech, is ideal. But military adventures can go wrong. The invasion of the Falklands in 1982 was meant to provide a propaganda boost for General Leopoldo Galtieri in Argentina, but instead ended in military defeat and his downfall.
In June 2020, when the Washington-based Turkish analyst, Soner Cagaptay, listed ‘Erdogan’s 10 steps to power’, the list seemed distinctly familiar to many in the US: ‘Attack “nefarious elites”; Deliver prosperity; “Make Turkey Great Again”; Create fake news; Say opposition’s lying; Demonize press & courts; Frame opponents as terrorists; Curb their freedoms; Undermine and change the constitution.’24 Step 10 was an emoji of a crown.
He has helped to dash facile hopes about the reconciliation of Islam and liberalism.
the new Chinese president stood in the tradition of Deng Xiaoping, the leader who had opened up the country and liberalised its economy from 1978 onwards.
Xi became the first living leader since Mao to have his own ideas incorporated into the party’s founding document.
‘Xi Jinping Thought’ app now installed on over 100 million phones in China. All party members, students and employees of state companies were told to study Xi thought on a daily basis and their study-time and performance in quizzes was monitored.
Like the Russian leader, Xi does not believe that the collapse of the USSR was simply a result of mistakes by Soviet leaders. He sees the West as deliberately driving the process, through the promotion of subversive liberal ideas, and he is determined to prevent any similar campaign in China.
These include ideas such as ‘universal values’, ‘civil society’ and ‘the West’s idea of journalism’.18 Xi and his acolytes see these ideas as dangerous imports, alien to China. But
Their offence was apparently taking Marx’s strictures on class struggle a little too seriously and attempting to organise low-paid workers into unions.19
particularly after the death from the virus of Li Wenliang, a young doctor in Wuhan. As the origins of the disease were probed, it emerged that in the early days of the crisis, Dr Li had raised the alarm in an online chat group. This earned him a visit from the police, who forced him to promise to stop spreading rumours and to sign a confession.
For President Xi, a potential disaster had turned into a public-relations triumph.
Covid helped him
The return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997 is seen in Beijing as a key moment in the ‘great rejuvenation’ of the nation – finally drawing a line under the colonial era, associated with the ‘century of humiliation’ that had begun when Hong Kong was ceded to Britain in 1842.
In the summer of 2020 – with the outside world distracted by the pandemic and the US presidential election – Xi moved decisively to crush the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
the Xi model of political stability, economic strength and national assertiveness has attracted a variety of international admirers in Africa, Latin America and even Europe.
Xi’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiative, which has involved billions of dollars in Chinese loans and investment to support infrastructure projects across Asia, Europe and Africa. Chinese investment and influence has even expanded into Latin America, an area once regarded as the US’s backyard.
China’s increasingly aggressive line over Taiwan partly reflects a shift in the balance of global power. Over the past generation, Beijing has poured money into its armed forces. The Chinese navy now has more ships than the US navy.
Jawaharlal Nehru, who had mistakenly embraced Western ideas, believing them to be universal. Instead Modi was basing India’s governance on its own unique culture. ‘In our view,’ Sinha proclaimed, ‘heritage precedes the state. People feel their heritage is under siege. We have a faith-based view of the world, versus the rational-scientific view.’
Modi brought the strongman style to India. With populations of about 1.4 billion people each, China and India together account for roughly 40 per cent of the world’s population and these two countries are the emerging superpowers of the ‘Asian century’.fn1 Within the space of two years, they had both succumbed to the strongman style of leadership.
Unusually for a serving leader in a democratic country, Modi has allowed monuments to be named after him, while still in office.
His promise is not just to make India great again but, more specifically, to make Hindus great again. Some 80 per cent of Indians are Hindus.
In a vast country where the competition for jobs, educational opportunities and resources is fierce, any suggestion that minorities are being given unfair privileges is politically potent.
Founded in 1925, the RSS was dedicated to the idea that India is in essence a Hindu nation. Its founder, K. B. Hedgewar, was an admirer of European fascists such as Italy’s Benito Mussolini, and emulated their fascination with uniforms and paramilitary training.
He was born into a low-ranking caste and, as a teenager, helped his father run the family tea shop near the train station in Vadnagar. His origins as a humble tea seller are now crucial to Modi’s image and certainly make a powerful contrast with the high-born Gandhis,
To this day, Modi remains unmarried and (it is claimed) celibate.8 Modi’s lack of personal family ties is a key political asset in a country in which politicians are routinely, and often accurately, accused of corruptly favouring members of their own family.
Its meteoric rise had been fuelled by the party’s championship of the destruction of a mosque in the city of Ayodhya, which it claimed had been built on a site holy to Hindus.
As one Delhi journalist put it to me: ‘Modi doesn’t say the worst stuff himself. He just poses for selfies with those who do.’
Unfortunately, strongman leaders have a tendency to become steadily more autocratic and arbitrary the longer they stay in office.16 Putin and Erdogan both became more radical during their second and third terms in office. And a similar pattern set in during Modi’s second term.
Any wave of anti-Pakistan feeling in India is liable to spill over into increased antagonism towards India’s Muslim minority, who are often portrayed by ardent Hindu nationalists as a ‘fifth column’.
The Modi government then moved to extend citizenship registration across the whole of India. Millions of people faced the potential loss of their citizenship unless they could produce papers, proving their right to live in India. In a country with poor levels of literacy, weak record-keeping and a creaking legal system, the threat was terrifying.
which was passed in December 2019, giving any Hindu fleeing persecution abroad the right to Indian citizenship – a right that was to be denied to Muslims in the same situation. (The BJP argument was that there was only one state in the world where Hindus could take refuge, whereas Muslims could seek asylum in a number of Muslim-majority states.)
Explains why they love israel
Given that India accounts for roughly 20 per cent of the world’s population, changes in that country alone go a long way in shifting the global balance from democracy and towards authoritarianism.
in their common emphasis on ethno-nationalism, both Modi and Trump were flirting with fascist themes. As Stanley saw it, ‘The core of fascist ideology is realised in changing citizenship laws to privilege a single ethnic group … Trump’s triumphant visit to India demonstrates just how global ethno-nationalism has become.’
Modi botched India’s response – not once, but twice. His impetuous decision to impose a harsh lockdown, with just four hours’ notice, in March 2020 had the counterproductive effect of causing manual labourers, who had lost their jobs, to stream out of India’s major cities back to rural areas. That led to the disease being spread even more rapidly around the country.
Modi’s personal popularity was seemingly unaffected by this debacle. In mid-June 2020, with the pandemic raging, the Indian leader’s approval ratings stood at a sky-high 74 per cent.
Western critics of India are frequently accused of lingering colonialism. But the West is no longer a plausible threat to Indian security. By contrast, the deadly clash between Indian and Chinese troops in the summer of 2020 shocked the Delhi establishment and Indian public opinion.
danger of embracing a seriously oversimplified world view – in which democratic India acted as an ideological bulwark against authoritarian China. In reality, it could equally well be argued that India’s own slide into illiberalism was actually strengthening the global trend towards authoritarianism.
he set out the case for ‘illiberalism’. The Hungarian leader caricatured liberalism as an elitist ideology, favoured by ‘globalists’, intent on erasing national borders and cultures.
The murderous terror attack on Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical weekly in January 2015, gave Orbán a first opportunity to establish himself as one of the loudest voices in Europe, sounding the alarm about immigration from the Muslim world.
The decision by the German chancellor Angela Merkel to open her country’s borders to more than a million refugees was motivated, in large part, by horror at what was happening inside Orbán’s Hungary.
