This ambitious work in comparative politics promises a lot and delivers a lot. The question is whether what it in fact delivers makes good on the promise made at the start, which is this: “The tripartite typology of ethnicity regimes developed in this book is . . . an exhaustive and coherent typology that is theoretically applicable to every country in the world. Most importantly, it is superior to classical typologies based on ethnic, civic, territorial, and other similar designations of nation-states because these previous categorizations were neither precise nor exhaustive” (p. 43).
At the heart of Şener Aktürk’s typology of ethnicity regime change—in practice, of state policy on immigrant-based diversity and historic minorities—are three independent variables. One is the presence of counterelites representing constituencies with ethnically specific grievances. A second is the existence of new discourse on ethnicity and nationality articulated by counterelites. The third is counterelites’ establishment of a hegemonic majority allowing them to overhaul prevailing state policy on ethnicity. These three factors “are separately necessary and jointly sufficient for change” (p. 5). What is left out of the explanatory framework is arguably the greatest catalyst of ethnic regime change today—the unprecedented demographic transformations of contemporary states mainly as a result of migration processes.
Aktürk faces a measurement problem. What set of indicators can tell us that a group of politicians standing in opposition to an incumbent coalition has become a counterelite? When is a discourse new? And what is the measure of a hegemonic majority? Setting aside metrics, to assert that an outsider group disposing of a new program and assuming a near monopoly on power will effect change in an ethnicity regime appears tautological.
Three ideal-type ethnicity regimes based on extent of membership and expression of ethnic differences are identified: 1) monoethnic (involving segregation); 2) antiethnic (involving assimilation); and 3) multiethnic (involving consociation). Aktürk recognizes that many states have hybrid regimes shifting between these ideal types.
An impressive feature of Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey is the richly documented, parsimonious account of each of the three countries. The author skillfully parses German, Turkish, and Russian primary sources. The footnotes themselves constitute a wealth of information. If his Fingerspitzengefühl for the countries may be uneven, he is hardly alone, and it does not affect his scholarship anyway.
The measurement problem becomes stark when the ethnicity regime-change model is operationalized. The author deserves credit for anticipating such criticism by presenting his narrative in clear tabular form (see Table 8, p. 40). In Germany, “the assimilationist hegemony established by the SPD [Social Democratic Party] in 1999/2000” (p. 108) and supported by the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and some Green Party members made possible the enactment of the 1999 Citizenship Law on Naturalization. Paradoxically, what Aktürk terms assimilationist hegemony actually opened the gates to German citizenship for millions of longtime nonethnic German residents. Instead of viewing this historic shift from the century-old jus sanguinis principle as liberalizing Germany’s citizenship policy, the author depicts it as a move from a monoethnic regime (a kind of Volksstaat) toward an antiethnic one (where assimilationist policy supposedly makes ethnicity irrelevant).
Let me return to the measurement problem. What metrics make the SPD-FDP a counterelite in 1999? What precise indices are used to determine that the mantra “Germany is a country of immigrants” constitutes new discourse? And how reliable is the measure of hegemony? Thus, the SPD (with 298 seats in the 1998 Bundestag elections) and other parties of change (with 126 seats) still faced a Christian Democratic opposition having a not insignificant 245 seats.
In the case of Turkey, the quantitative data presented do suggest that the Justice and Development Party (AKP) could justifiably be framed as a counterelite with a hegemonic majority. In the 2002 elections, it recorded a 34% swing in its favor and won a robust majority of seats (363 of 550). Aktürk provides a judicious analysis of the AKP’s accommodating policies toward Kurdish and Alevi minorities. He underscores how AKP hegemony is tied to significant Kurdish representation in parliament. But is it correct to conclude that the crowning achievement of its Islamic multiculturalism discourse was providing television broadcasting rights in Kurdish and other minority languages beginning in 2004? As an indicator of ethnicity regime change, it is qualitatively different from citizenship reform in Germany.
Turkey’s shift toward a multiethnic regime is precarious and has the “potential for backsliding in the assimilationist direction” (p. 194). A subject that the book does not take up is the country’s largely unaccommodating policies toward its own immigrants, whether would-be settlers or those in transit. Aktürk explains why he focuses on immigrants in Germany but not in Turkey or Russia: “[I]n the Soviet, Russian, and Turkish cases, autochthonous groups such as the Tatars and the Kurds were more numerous and much more challenging for the state than the immigrants” (p. 18). This logic allows him to ignore such an important issue, explicitly recognized in Turkey in 2013 by the adoption of the Law on Foreigners and International Protection, which codifies immigrant rights. It lends support to Aktürk’s thesis that Turkey is moving in a multiculturalist direction, and hence it is regrettable that the subject was not considered.
Variable measurement for the Russian case poses a special challenge. Boris Yeltsin was indeed at the head of a counterelite, but hegemony is not the word to describe his administration, especially given who succeeded him. Bombarding the parliament building in 1993 was not a hegemonic act, nor were extreme centrifugal processes sweeping across the country indicators of hegemony. At this point, Aktürk unconvincingly invokes “Yeltsin’s relative power vis-à-vis his opponents” (p. 256) as evidence of hegemony. In addition, generally unconvincing evidence for new discourse is grounded in the writings of a Soviet-era official, Valery Tishkov, who was portrayed by Harvard historian Roman Szporluk as an empire savior, a conceptualization that Aktürk rejects.
For Aktürk ethnic regime change in Russia consisted of the removal in 1997 of ethnicity from a bearer’s internal passport. Given the scale of system change in Russia in the 1990s, the debate on ruski versus rossiiski identity, and the reconfiguration of titular peoples and their powers in the 1993 constitution, this reform is loose change. The author discounts the idea of the Soviet Union as multinational state or affirmative action empire. His insistence instead on the existence of a Soviet nation (Sovietskii narod) rather than a Soviet people disregards decades of analysis by specialists who demonstrated the contrary. Among them were ethnographers for whom the idea is nonsensical. Homo Sovieticus existed but a Soviet nation never did. On the other hand, an intriguing feature of the Russia case study is the author’s account of the reputed effort by Yuri Andropov after taking power in 1982 to do away with ethnic republics (pp. 219–23).
Whether the social sciences can be value free is a long-standing question. Aktürk believes that it is feasible: “I refrained from making value judgments and moral, philosophical, and normative judgments regarding the purported superiority of one ethnicity regime over another, not because I do not have an opinion of my own regarding the relative merits and pitfalls of each ethnicity regime, but because such an evaluation is not the goal of this work” (p. 268). But on the next page, he writes how “unfortunate” it is that bans have been placed on the building of minarets in Switzerland, on ritual animal sacrifice in the Netherlands (“historically a paragon of religious tolerance”), and on the wearing of headscarves in France and Germany. Such “recent developments do not bode well for the accommodation of religious differences in Europe” (pp. 269–70). Is this a purely descriptive statement? Is the rejection of what can be represented as a reasonable accommodation regime not values based?
Another possible example of values-based analysis in this book concerns a different level of appreciation of smaller countries compared to ones with imperial histories. The author claims that “East European countries are . . . extremely susceptible to international influences and direct external imposition” because they are “much smaller in size and population, with little experience of self-governance independent of direct and indirect occupation and external rule” (pp. 263–64). This may be both a contestable and a biased assertion. Small countries of this region may have adopted liberal international norms so as to facilitate admission into European structures—and because it was the right thing to do.
The author dismisses Christian Joppke’s influential theory of change in ethnicity policy, which highlights norm diffusion: It charts an emerging transnational approach to immigration and citizenship grounded in antidiscrimination and civic integration. Aktürk counters: “I find explanations based on the primacy of international norms and global waves unconvincing because my three cases do not exemplify a movement in the same direction” (p. 21). A different reading of recent German, Turkish, and Russian ethnicity policy might actually point to the emergence of a liberal consensus. Even European Union skeptics in Turkey often credit EU norm diffusion for promoting its remarkable economic growth over the past decade.
Aktürk’s general achievement is to have provoked political science specialists on nationalism and ethnicity with iconoclastic interpretations of recent developments in three major countries. In Turkey and Russia more than in Germany after its landmark citizenship law, state policies on the status and rights of minorities continue to be negotiated in many important ways. His voice seeking to make sense of these ongoing processes is one we need to listen to critically.
