Suchergebnisse

This article aims to re-assess the relationship between law and ideology, with a view to identifying the foundational policies established within the judicial-legal sphere in Turkey at the birth of the Republic in 1923. A central focus of the article is the historical project to create a new class of legal professionals, particularly attorneys, as an exemplary case for the interaction between law, ideology and modernization. Firstly, it is argued that Kemalist legal and judicial reforms were an essential part of the general social-engineering project which intended to Westernize/modernize the newly established Republic. Accordingly, reforms were dominated by two closely interrelated themes of legal ideology: the consolidation of the new order and the development of a statist understanding of justice. In turn, legal professionals were remoulded by modernizing cadres in order to secure/promote the modernist perspective within legal foundations as delineated by official ideology. Secondly, the article argues that statist policy towards attorneys was so dominated by modernizing ideology that Weberian formalism was undermined. The idiosyncratic statist concerns outweighed universalistic legal values, which intensified rather than balanced, the ongoing tension between substantive and formalist rationality that is inherent to Weberian notions of justice.

The aim of this study is to analyse cultural and social referential importance of the stereotypes of communists/communism in the anti-communist propaganda texts circulated in Turkey during the Cold War. The article displays the symbolism underlying anti-communist discourse by re-reading the propaganda material as texts that introduce the reader to ultimate anti-communist fantasies. The analyzed texts were mainly produced by one of the leading participants of anti-communist struggle, namely the Association for Fighting Communism in Turkey (AFCT) (Türkiye Komünizmle Mücadele Derneği, TKMD, 1963–1977), and its members. The article shows that the analyzed anti-communist propaganda creates mystification as a strategy and builds a narration in which temporal, spatial, and personal references are obscure. The article also shows that anti-communist propaganda operates on traditional dichotomies nature/culture, emotion/reason, and body/mind and that the images of communists/communism are constructed by appealing to a variety of animal species connoting "danger"; the unsocial connoting of the "absence of rules" and animality; and the woman of desire recalling the "immoral" in the popular imagination. It is argued that the texts are all interdiscursive thus allowing for the sexist, Islamist and nationalist arguments to be used as supportive subtopics while defending the anti-communist cause. The analysis also establishes intertextual relationship with the Nazi anti-Jewish and anti-communist discourse.