Foreign affairs 2019 09-10

31

than rejecting, the . Back home, the

developed a strategy o forming

alliances to control the Turkish state.

In exercising his power, Erdogan worked

with both competent bureaucrats and

Islamists with political aspirations but

little technical know-how. “Other parties

have voters,” his teacher Erbakan fa-

mously said. “We have believers.” The

challenge for Erdogan was to retain the

believers even as he pushed for market

reforms and accession to the .

But therein lay a problem. Erdogan

had no cadres to „ll the state bureauc-

racy. Competent functionaries mostly

belonged to other political camps.

Although the Islamist bureaucrats tended

to be skilled at providing public health

and transportation services, they showed

little interest in education, policing, or

intelligence work. And so Erdogan

resurrected the Ottoman tradition o‡

indirect rule. He outsourced di‰erent

components o‡ the state—the judiciary,

the police force, and the military—to

di‰erent power players. Between 2003

and 2013, the old-school bureaucrats who

opposed the 

’s globalist agenda were

replaced in the Foreign Ministry and

the judiciary by ambitious new cadres.

Most had backgrounds in the network o‡

religious schools run by Fethullah Gulen,

an Islamic preacher who has lived in exile

in Pennsylvania since 1999, after being

accused o‡ seeking to undermine Turkey’s

secular order. Gulenists also in„ltrated

the police and the military.

But outsourcing power came with

the price o˜ losing control. Like Otto-

man sultans, omnipotent in their

palaces but ruling at the mercy o˜ local

feudal lords, Erdogan saw his decentral-

ized authority become open to usurpation.

In the military, secular, nationalist

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