Offers an in-depth case study of the failure of popular constitution making in Turkey from 2011 to 2013.

The Turkish experience in constitution-making can be described as a series of missed opportunities to create political institutions based on broad consensus. None of the three republican constitutions (those of 1924, 1961, and 1982), nor the Ottoman Constitution of 1876 was written by a Constituent or a Legislative Assembly broadly representative of social forces or through a process of negotiations, bargaining, and compromise. Consequently, they all had weak political legitimacy. No doubt, the prospects of EU membership provided a powerful stimulus for these constitutional reforms as well as the nine harmonization packages. With these reforms, Turkey has sufficiently satisfied the Copenhagen political criteria and started accession negotiations with the EU. It would be wrong to assume, however, that these reforms were simply an outcome of Turkey's desire to join the EU. They also responded to the society's demands for a more democratic and liberal political system. Book jacket.

Presented in this volume are essays and surveys examining elements of continuity within the context of the broad changes that have marked the history of modern Turkey. The establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 represented a fresh start after the demise of the Ottoman Empire that had spanned the medieval and the modern times, but had become too outdated to cope with the complexities of the industrialized world. Although the Republic was meant to shed the burden of the past in order to meet the challenges of the contemporary era as a modern nation-state, it nevertheless inherited a great deal from the rich civilization of the Ottoman period. Over the last sixty years modern Turkey has been standing up to the challenges of the increasingly demanding and fast changing world of the twentieth century. The fact that it has been able to do so is in no small measure due to its adherence to the principles of evolution and development to keep pace with contemporary civilization. And it is the adherence to these principles that have provided a continuity along with flexibility in social, economic, political, legal, administrative and diplomatie spheres, which are discussed by the contributors to this volume.

This monograph is an attempt to answer the following questions: Can constitutional courts review the constitutionality of constitutional amendments? If yes, to what extent? It is endeavored, in a comparative perspective, to answer these questions by examining the constitutions of several countries and the case law of the Austrian, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovenian and Turkish Constitutional Courts, French Constitutional Council, Indian, Irish, and the United States Supreme Courts.

In his book on constitutional revolutions in the Ottoman Empire and Iran in the early twentieth century, Nader Sohrabi considers the global diffusion of institutions and ideas, their regional and local reworking and the long-term consequences of adaptations. He delves into historic reasons for greater resilience of democratic institutions in Turkey as compared to Iran. Arguing that revolutions are time-bound phenomena whose forms follow global models in vogue at particular historical junctures, he challenges the ahistoric and purely local understanding of them. Furthermore, he argues that macro-structural preconditions alone cannot explain the occurrence of revolutions, but global waves, contingent events and the intervention of agency work together to bring them about in competition with other possible outcomes. To establish these points, the book draws on a wide array of archival and primary sources that afford a minute look at revolutions' unfolding.

Since the Gezi uprisings in June 2013 and AKP’s temporary loss of parliamentary supremacy after the June 2015 general elections, sharp political clashes, ascending police operations, extra-judicial executions, suppression of the media and political opposition, systematic violation of the constitution and fundamental human rights, and the one-man-rule of President Erdoğan have become the identifying characteristics of Turkish politics. The failed coup attempt on 15th July 2016 further impaired the situation as the government declared emergency rule at the end of which a political regime defined as the “Presidential Government System” was established in July 2018. Turkey’s New State in the Making examines the historical specificities of the ongoing AKP-led radical state transformation in Turkey within a global, legal, financial, ideological, and coercive neoliberal context. Arguing that rather than being an exception, the new Turkish state has the potential to be a model for political transformations elsewhere, problematizing how specific policies the AKP adapted to refract social dispositions have been radically redefining the republican, democratic and secular features of the modern Turkish state.