An upcoming court decision could sound the death knell for Turkey’s primary opposition party.

Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, in his article, “A world with two predatory superpowers,” states that the EU is caught in a pincer between an “extractive” and a “dependency” superpower: the US and China. Two European economists, Moreno Bartoldi and Marco Buti, placed the United States in the first category with reference to a 2012 book, Why Nations Fail, by two Nobel laureates, Turkish-born Daron Acemoglu and his fellow economist James Robinson.  

Acemoglu and Robinson define an extractive institution as one designed to extract wealth from one subset of society to benefit another. It is not by coincidence that US president Donald Trump recently enjoyed a cordial meeting with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, at the White House in late September. There is a Turkish proverb that is apt: the pot has found its lid.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty is a groundbreaking work, whose central thesis is that economic growth and prosperity stem from inclusive political and economic institutions, while extractive institutions typically lead to stagnation and poverty.

Inclusive institutions both require and maintain pluralism, the rule of law, and economic opportunities available to a broad cross-section of society. Economic growth under an extractive system, for example, under slavery, serfdom, or colonialism, is possible but not sustainable. Such systems are marked by political instability, civil wars, and infighting, which can ultimately lead to their downfall. 

Why Nations Fail, based on fifteen years of research, is empirical rather than prescriptive and wide-ranging in its frame of reference. It deals, for example, with the Roman and Aztec empires, the Mayan civilization, and countries as diverse as Britain, the United States, Russia, Korea, Japan, China, South America, and sub-Saharan Africa. 

There is the contingent role of history, which is marked by critical junctures like the Black Death, the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688, the Industrial Revolution, and the French Revolution, which led to the development of politically and economically inclusive societies.

Their work rejects historical determinism. A successful political revolution or transformation does not necessarily lead to a change for the better. The Bolshevik Revolution is a good example. Also, moves towards inclusive institutions can be reversed. Glasnost and perestroika led to Putin’s Russia.   

Turkey is a case in point. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and its defeat in the First World War led to the creation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 under the leadership of Turkish general Mustafa Kemal, later lauded as “Atatürk” (“Father of the Turks”). The abolition of the caliphate and introduction of the secular republic led to a period of Western-oriented reform.

The election of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) in 2002 under the leadership of the former mayor of Istanbul, Erdogan, set out to restore the role of religion in public life. In the 1980s, a Turkish imam, Fethullah Gülen, and his followers established a network of schools in Turkey with the same aim. By the end of the 1990s, this network had expanded to include schools and business interests around the world. Initially an ally of the AKP, Gülen had a falling out with Erdogan, leading to the latter blaming the movement for the attempted coup of 2016. A purge of the judiciary, military, and civil service followed. 

Erdogan’s aim is to follow in the footsteps of his mentor, Necmettin Erbakan, the father of political Islam in Turkey, and establish this ideology’s hegemony over Turkey. The final obstacle is the secular opposition, the CHP (Republican People’s Party), founded by Atatürk, which he is in the process of undermining.