INTERVIEW: Simon Waldman and Emre Çalışkan on upheaval in the 'New Turkey'

Turkey's contemporary history is notoriously complicated. Under each layer of the onion seems to lie yet another unforeseen set of intricacies. It is hardly surprising that many locals resort to spectacular conspiracy theories as mental shortcuts. 

It is very difficult to give outsiders a rundown of the country, but "The New Turkey and its Discontents," a new book co-authored by Kings College London's Simon Waldman and Oxford University's Emre Çalışkan, gives a good primer on how Turkey has gotten to where it is today over the past few decades. 

Waldman and Çalışkan spoke to the Hürriyet Daily News about their book (reviewed in HDN here) and the state of Turkey in the aftermath of last summer's failed coup attempt.

You talk in the book about how Turkey has in recent years gone from being an optimistic shining star praised by everyone to a struggling country with terrible security, political and economic woes. How did that process happen? 

Simon Waldman: When we set out to write this book one of the first things we were thinking about was the role of the military. The military's involvement in politics is of course against democratic principles, but as the military got weaker in its ability to be involved in political affairs why did this not lead to greater democracy? 

Was Turkey ever a shining star or "model" for other Muslim countries to emulate? No. I don't think even the AKP believed it was. Even the AKP itself used to say, especially after the Arab Spring, that it may be an example but it was not a model. It was concerned about what kind of spotlight that might shine on Turkey. But after 9/11 the Western world - the U.S. and Europe - needed a model of Muslim democracy. In many...