Discursive strategies of instrumentalizing history in mainstream Turkish political discourse

Abstract

This article explores how specific narratives of the past can be functionalized/instrumentalized as discursive strategies in order to gain political power. To investigate this issue, four relevant governmental and non-governmental texts about the main opposition party in Turkey are analysed. The Republican People’s Party (CHP), which played a historic role by becoming a state party between 1923 and 1946, and which later adopted a social democratic position in the political system, has frequently been criticized by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) for its historical identity. The article illuminates how discursive strategies of argumentation, nomination and predication are used to portray the CHP as an enduring bureaucratic-militarist state party and the ways in which these strategies are functionalized by AKP politicians as well as by public intellectuals in favour of the government.