anti-democracy in the twenty-first century: iran, russia, turkey

Hamit Bozarslan

(CNRS, 266 pages, 2021)

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, many people announced the end of ideologies and the unabashed victory of liberal democracy. But in some countries, democratic principles have been eroding rather than getting stronger, such as in Russia, Iran, and Turkey—states that have become prominent players on the international scene.

In this incisive book, the historian and sociologist Hamit Bozarslan dives into the heart of the radicalization logic of authoritarian regimes. Behind a democratic facade, Iran, Russia, and Turkey, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, have presented structural similarities: cult of an infallible leader invested with a “historical mission”; “purity” of the nation too long corrupted by the West; mobilization of religion; organization of a parallel state based on personal ties, corruption, and resource grabbing; a security apparatus on par with a cleverly cultivated paranoia vis-à-vis internal and external enemies; and institutionalization of an alternative reality over which the facts no longer have any hold.

While the author contains his comparative analysis within a limited timeframe—the years 2000 through 2010—he notes that these three anti-democracies share many characteristics with those of past regimes, which Umberto Eco has defined as Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism. Cautiously, Bozarslan highlights the lines of continuity and difference with the previous century by going back and forth between the years 1920 and 1940 and the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Bozarslan’s comparative analysis is based on remarkable documentation, the result of monitoring the news of these three countries for years as well as an in-depth knowledge of official documents by a leading scholar in his field. Anti-Democracy in the Twenty-First Century offers the reader not only the tools with which to comprehend what is at stake in the current international crises but also serves as a powerful warning as we confront the teetering and failings of our own democracies.

Hamit Bozarslan is Director of Studies at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He is a regular contributor to French media, such as Le Monde, and has published extensively on the Kurdish issue, Turkey, and the Middle East. He is one of the editors of The Cambridge History of the Kurds (Cambridge University Press, 2021) as well as Writing the Modern History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges (World Scientific, 2012). His recent publications include Le temps des monstres (La Découverte, 2022), Histoire de la Turquie: De l’Empire ottoman à nos jours (Tallandier, 2021), and Crise, violence, dé-civilisation (CNRS Editions, 2019), and Une histoire de la violence au Moyen-Orient (La Découverte, 2016).