“What Should Turkey Be”: Constitutional Orientation Between Normativismand and Decisiveness

Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt are two important legal thinkers who have provided a theoretical framework for the problems we face in the modern era in the context of the state, politics, and law. The constitutional theory debates between Kelsen and Schmitt in the Weimar Republic of the 1930s remain relevant for understanding the structure and limits of the modern constitutional state. Kelsen's approach, which centers on the normative legal order, and Schmitt's perspective, which emphasizes political decision-making, authority, and sovereignty, present two opposing paradigms regarding the source, legitimacy, and functioning of the constitutional order. The tension between the idea of legitimacy arising from legality and legality arising from legitimacy has moved beyond being merely a historical academic debate; it continues to be a fundamental point of reference in contemporary constitutional law. The regime debates that have intensified in Turkey in recent years have increasingly brought to the fore issues such as the scope of the rule of law principle, the limits of political power, the role of judicial review, the criteria for democratic legitimacy, and the protection of constitutional identity. These debates, though not explicitly stated, are largely shaped within the theoretical distinction between Kelsen's normativist perspective and Schmitt's political-authoritarian conception of decision-making. This study aims to reveal the differences between the two thinkers' conceptions of the constitutional state by comparing Kelsen's understanding of the legal order, hierarchy of norms, and democracy with Schmitt's understanding of sovereignty, the political, and the authority underlying the constitutional order. The article compares the legal conceptualization of politics (Kelsen) with the political conceptualization of law (Schmitt) and evaluates the theoretical contributions this comparison can make to conceptualizing the ongoing constitutional debates in Turkey.