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Abstract: Philip Abrams's notion of the "state-idea" has been of immense influence in the anthropology of the state. This article suggests a contrary reading of Abrams's "Notes on the difficulty of studying the state" (1988) that focuses instead on his notion of "politically organized subjection," which allows us to examine contemporary statehood in crisis where political practice increasingly seems "unmasked." The article examines such strategies of politically organizing subjection in the contexts of current EU-Europe and Turkey. It highlights the role of hegemony-building strategies that do not so much mask political practice as openly promote polarization in society, directing ideological and material efforts at strengthening leadership over the own class alliance and using both overt and structural coercion to suppress political projects opposed to neoliberal authoritarianism.
Keywords: Europe, hegemony, neoliberal authoritarianism, Philip Abrams, stateidea, Turkey
The claimed reality of the state ... is the ideological device in terms of which the political institutionalisation of power is legitimated. It is of some importance to understand how that legitimation is achieved. But it is much more important to grasp the relationship between political and non-political power. (Abrams 1988: 82)
A few years ago, I was teaching an undergraduate class in anthropology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara. One of the assigned readings referenced Philip Abrams's (1988) argument that the belief in the state as a unified, autonomous agent acting in a common interest was obscuring our understanding of the actual disunity and interestedness of political practice. While explaining this argument and looking at somewhat confused faces, I realized that this would not make any sense to my Turkish students, today less than ever. Who in their right mind, they seemed to be thinking, would believe in an autonomous, unified, disinterested state?
This past summer, the extent to which governments in the two social contexts discussed here-Turkey and EU-Europe-seemed to have lost all interest in maintaining even a surface appearance of a democratic state was stunning. Stunning was also the success of the coercion that was used in both contexts, in different ways, in reining in the popular discontent that has been fermenting in recent years and that resulted in radically oppositional parties. The suppression of political alternatives culminated in the summer of 2015 in the...