Modelling democracy: Western hegemony, Turkey and the Middle East

Abstract

This chapter analyses how the uprisings in the Middle East are re-shaping the global discourses on democracy, the dominant structures of meaning within which we discuss and make sense of democracy. It shows how the practice of referencing Turkey as a model reproduces the hierarchical structure of the discourses on democracy within which the West occupies a hegemonic position. The chapter highlights a number of contradictions in the presentation of Turkey as a model for the democratic uprisings in the Middle East and discusses how these contradictions stem from and are simultaneously obscured by the global discourses on democracy. It draws on liminality theory to discuss how the developments of the Arab Spring have laid bare a liminal space within which the conflation of the discourses on democracy and the West may be subverted. The chapter also draws a number of implications from the preceding analyses of democracy in Turkey and the Middle East.