Islamism, Democracy, and Liberalism in Turkey: The Case of the AKP by William Hale and Ergun Özbudun. New York, Routledge, 2009. 214 pp. $130.00. Democratization and the Politics of Constitution Making in Turkey by Ergun Özbudun and Ömer Faruk Gençkaya. New York, Central European University Press, 2009. 150 pp. $40.00. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a landslide victory in Turkeyʼs November 2002 parliamentary elections. Since then, Turkish politics has become a laboratory for analyzing the transformation of former Islamists and their interactions with democracy and secularism. Ergun Özbudun is an academic observer of these interactions, as well as an active participant, because he chaired the scholarly committee to draft a new constitution pro- posal, which was requested by the AKP and had so far remained unenacted. With two eminent experts on Turkish politics, he coauthored two important books that examine the recent political history of Turkey through a rich con- ceptual framework. The book by William Hale and Özbudun is a significant analysis of the origin, policies, and impacts of the AKP. It rightly portrays the AKP as a party of paradoxes, which constantly tries to keep a balance between gener- ally contradictory processes. The AKP has roots in Islamism, while it has had to prove loyalty to the Turkish military and judiciaryʼs understanding of secularism, which is so assertive and authoritarian that it has no “parallel in any Western democracy” (p. 75). The AKP is one of the two parties, with the Kurdish nationalist party, which have had high vote-share in the Kurdish- populated region, whereas it has been eager not to alienate its Turkish nationalist constituency. The AKP has been anxious to avoid antagonizing the military; but at the same time, it has sought to establish civilian authority. The AKP has been a key supporter of a free market economy, privatization of state enterprises, and foreign investments; yet, it has also promoted wel- fare services, both as an electoral strategy and as a result of its embracing the idea of the “social state.” The AKP has prioritized strong relations with the United States and Turkeyʼs membership in the European Union, whereas it has pursued an extremely active friendship policy toward Arab countries and Iran. Özbudun and Haleʼs arguments about secularism and the military are the most remarkable of several important points they develop. They ex- amine the AKPʼs self-defined ideology of “conservative democracy” in terms of its similarities to and differences from British conservatism and European Christian Democracy. They contend that the AKPʼs ideology is not “an Islamist worldview which aims at Islamicising the society” (p. 22). Referring to my publications and terminology, they define the AKP as a defender of “passive secularism,” which pits it against the military and the judicial bureaucracy, which have promoted “assertive secularism” as the BOOK REVIEWS | 349