The Routledge Handbook of Turkish Politics

Alpaslan Özerdem, Matthew Whiting, Alpaslan Özerdem, Matthew Whiting

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351387460
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Handbook of Turkish Politics pulls together contributions from many of the world's leading scholars on different aspects of Turkey.

Turkey today is going through possibly the most turbulent period in its history, with major consequences both nationally and internationally. The country looks dramatically different from the Republic founded by Atatürk in 1923. The pace of change has been rapid and fundamental, with core interlinked changes in ruling institutions, political culture, political economy, and society. Divided into six main parts, this Handbook provides a single-source overview of Turkish politics:

• Part I: History and the making of Contemporary Turkey
• Part II: Politics and Institutions
• Part III: The Economy, Environment and Development
• Part IV: The Kurdish Insurgency and Security
• Part V: State, Society and Rights
• Part VI: External Relations

This comprehensive Handbook is an essential resource for students of Politics, International Relations, International/Security Studies with an interest on contemporary Turkey.

PART I

History and the making of contemporary Turkey

1

TURKISH POLITICS

Structures and dynamics

Samim Akgönül and Baskın Oran

Introduction

Turkish politics can be seen as part of the general political tendencies observable around the world, following universal ideologies such as nationalism or capitalism. But it is also the fruit of a specific social and historical context. On the one hand, it has some solid structures due to its Ottoman and Byzantine roots, while, on the other hand, it copies Western templates in its institutions.

Nevertheless, the political habitus of this country includes original political behaviours that are difficult to name using the usual political science jargon. For example, ‘right’ and ‘left’ as political categories in the Turkish context cover very different realities compared to their European (French) roots. There are in Turkey five major political currents that the external qualification by a non-Turkish observer does not fit with the internal qualification and with the perception in the eye of the Turkish population (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 The political spectrum in Turkey

Place in the spectrum	Sees itself as	Main political parties	Active years
Extreme right	Nationalist – statist	Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (Party of the Nationalist Movement, MHP) Büyük Birlik Partisi (Party of the Great Union, BBP)	1969–1993–
Islamist right	Nationalist – conservative	Millî Görüs movement (National vision) and its parties Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (Party of Justice and Development, AKP)	1969–2001–
Liberal right	Economically liberal, nationalist, conservative	Demokrat Parti (Democrat Party, DP) Anavatan Partisi (Party of the Motherland, ANAP)	1946–1960 1983–2009
Secularist right	Centre-left, Kemalist, nationalist	Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican People’s Party, CHP) Demokratik Sol Parti (Democratic Left Party, DSP)	1923–1985–
Kurdish movement	Left – Kurdish nationalist	Partiya Karakerên Kurdistanê (Party of Workers of Kurdistan, PKK), tradition parties Halklarin Demokasi Partisi (Peoples’ Democratic Party, HDP)	1978–2012–

Source: Authors.

In the universal understanding of the political spectrum, Turkish politics, in the sense of the management and governance of the public affairs of the country, is clearly situated on the right wing. In the case of a ‘common enemy’, these right-wing movements cooperate and interact, creating de facto and sometimes de jure ‘National Fronts’. During the second half of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st century these common enemies have been communism, political Islam and the Kurdish movement. Thus, the main characteristics of Turkish politics are nationalism (Islamic and secularist), Jacobinism, and statism.

This chapter aims to analyse the trends in Turkish politics chronologically since its foundation, but in a thematic perspective.

First Republic, 1920s–1960s

Turkey, as a Republic, has passed through three steps in its foundation: (1) On 23 April 1920, during the national war (called ‘the war of independence’ in Turkish historiography), the Grand National Assembly opened in Ankara as an opponent of the Sultan’s Parliament of Istanbul; (2) On 24 July 1923 the Lausanne Peace Treaty was signed, setting up the State and recognising the legitimacy of the Ankara Government; (3) On 29 October 1923 Mustafa Kemal set up the Regime by declaring the foundation of the Republic and, by consequence, the end of the Ottoman Monarchy. Starting from this date, and during the 1920s and especially 1930s, a new political system was established.

The main characteristic of this ‘new’ system found its roots in the Ottoman Empire: the sacralisation of the State. Indeed, since the establishment of the very strong State apparatus, much more centralised than the Ottoman system, the State, as the incarnation of the nation, has been placed above everything, especially above liberal values such as democracy, human rights or the rule of law. The sacralisation of the State¹ justified an authoritarian regime, rarely contested, and in particular, four military interventions in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997.

The foundation of the Turkish political system between the 1930s and 1960s followed two main interconnected guidelines: the installation of structural fears, and constant identity engineering.

The Turkish political system after 1923 was an authoritarian presidential unicameral administration, in a single-party regime controlling the government, the State apparatus, the military, and the local and regional administrations. During this period, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) founded in 1923 was the master, at the same time, of the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary, but also of the media and civil society.

This period can be divided into two with regard to two different personalities: Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) (1923–1938), a national hero who became over decades the main political reference of the Turkish Politics alongside Islam; and İsmet Pasha (İnönü) (1938–1960), who followed, in the very precarious atmosphere of the interwar years, a pragmatic, balanced, multilateral, and very cautious foreign policy, at least until the 1950s.

Atatürk’s period is characterised by very radical Westernising ‘reforms’ in order to construct a homogeneous nation, with two attempts at a multi-party system, in 1924 because of internal scissions in the CHP, and in 1930 by the will of the President Atatürk to build a ‘His Majesty’s most loyal opposition’. Both attempts failed and the opposition parties were shut down.

İnönü’s period was more fragmented. Between 1938 and 1946 the authoritarian system worsened. Between 1946 and 1950, however, Turkey adopted a multi-party system under pressure from the UN. And between 1950 and 1960, Democrat Party (DP), more liberal in economic matters but more permissive concerning Islam, governed the country until the military coup d’état of 27 May 1960.

During this period, which can be qualified as the ‘first Republic’ (that the internal political jargon rejects²), the political system was based on two main ‘structural fears’ that are constant until today.

Division

Turkey has been founded on a fear: a fear of disappearance due to the Peace Treaty of Sèvres fragmenting the defeated Ottoman Empire. This Treaty signed in 1920 between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire, not only completed the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and the Middle East, but also divided Asia Minor for the benefit of the victors. The Peace Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, guaranteeing Turkish sovereignty over Anatolia and a small section of Thrace, has certainly avoided the measures imposed by Sèvres, but the fear has remained as a perfect ‘chosen trauma’ to this day. Every time that some section of the Turkish population has claimed rights, or every time that Western allies of Turkey have asked for liberal reforms, the ‘Sèvres Syndrome’ has been reactivated (Schmid 2014) to the point of becoming a ‘Sèvres Paranoia’ in the hands of nationalists and conservatives.

As the core ideology of any nation-state³ consists of building the ‘national’ homogeneity, the Turkish specimen, using that ‘sacrosanct fear’, tried, as in many other nations built after the establishment of a State, to accomplish this aim in three different steps.

First, it tried to extinguish the non-Muslim minorities which were impossible to assimilate due to their different religion. Impossible because, in the Middle East and the Balkans where the historical conditioning of the Millet System is almighty, the main determinant of national identity is not language or ethnicity, but religion and even denomination.

Therefore, during the first decades of the Republic, an extermination policy, which had already begun at the very beginning of the 20th century with Armenians, and very repressive policies were directed at the religious and ethnic minorities that remained in the newly established Turkey as the silts of the Ottoman tide. Especially between the 1930s and 1960s, the main target of these repressive policies was the Rums (Constantinopolitan Greek orthodox), but also smaller non-Muslim groups such as Armenians, Syriacs, and Jews. The milestones in this process were 1915 (the extermination of Anatolian Armenians), 1923 (the compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey), 1941–1942 (abusive measures towards Jews, Armenians, and Greeks), 1955 (the 6–7 September pogroms), and 1964 (the expulsion of Rums and Levantines bearing Greek citizenship).

Secondly, the Turkish Nation-State tried, not to exterminate, but to assimilate the Kurds, who were considered assimilable due to their being Muslims like the Turks. It should also be noted, however, that the Turkish State, exasperated by a strong Kurdish resistance against assimilation, especially after the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê) took up arms, lost hope of assimilating these people considered thus far as ‘Prospective Turks’ (Yeğen 2006, 74–78). After the Nawruz festivities of March 2005 the Turkish General Staff in an official declaration used a term amounting to a ‘spiritual deportation’: ‘The so-called Citizens’ (Vatan 2005).

Concomitantly, a second wave of assimilation was started immediately after the advent of the Republic and has been very successful: assimilation of non-Turkish Muslim groups, mainly originating from the Balkans (such as Albanians, Bosniacs, or Pomaks) and also the Caucasus (such as Circassians, Laz, or Georgians). Successful because these immigrants had not only escaped massacres in their host-states, but were also very fit for assimilation due to their being allochthonous Muslims.

A third and important step should be added to these two: the on-going process of folklorisation of the regional, ethnic and cultural differences, applied to regional identities and also (but only after 1990s) to the small remaining non-Muslim minorities.

Since the beginning of the Republic, the major systemic ‘problem’ of Turkish politics has been the way to deal with Kurds. The Kurds also were targeted at the beginning of the nation-building process but the triangle of extermination/assimilation/folklorisation didn’t (couldn’t) work for them. In contradiction to the allochthonous non-Turkish Muslims referred to above, the Kurds enjoyed a specific clan-based social organisation, they were (are) too many – forming 15–20% of the population of Turkey – and they were autochthonous. Autochthonous people are incomparably very jealous about their identity. Therefore the Kurds have been only partially assimilated and have not been fit to be folklorised and become a ‘cute’ local culture.

Thus, the first violent reaction (actually, action) of the freshly established Turkish State was against the Kurds in 1925, namely only two years after the proclamation of the Republic. The so-called Sheik Said revolt of 1925 was the pretext to legitimise a coordinated violent attack against Kurdish tribes, considered as dangerous in three ways: (1) Kurdish identity was not welcome anymore in the Turkish nationalistic discourse of 1920s; (2) the Islamic character of the ‘revolt’ was considered incompatible with the secularist agenda; and (3) the tribal organisation of Kurds was considered as a rival that competed with the sovereignty of the newly centralised Turkish Nation-State. Starting with the Nestorian uprising in 1924, until 1937 no less than 20 regional uprisings to the central authority, led by Kurdish sheikhs or landlords, were violently quelled by the Turkish Army (Olson 1989, 111–117), although many of them were simple incidents of perturbation and protestation. In addition, in the official discourse, these uprisings are always linked to some external meddling to weaken Turkey’s internal stability or its claims over the non-Turkish Middle Eastern territories such as Mosul. The concept of Dış Mihraklar (foreign evil forces) is a constant of the Turkish political discourse to explain every single problem (Aydın 2003, 345–355).

During the first decades of the Republic many central ‘reports’ were written to underline the necessity of assimilating the Kurds to Turkishness and annihilating their traditional social organisation.⁴ The last and the best-known manifestation of this repressive policy, which became structural violence, took place in Dersim in 1937–1938. There was no revolt or anything like it in Dersim; this operation was simply the liquidation of the last region of differentness, resulting in 13,160 Kurds of Dersim killed and 11,808 people exiled. Starting with this pitiless repression, the Kurdish question was frozen, at least until the 1960s.

Islam

The second structural fear, motivating the establishment of a specific Turkish political system, is ‘Islam’, considered as dangerous in two ways. On the one hand, the founders of the Republic were almost all secularis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Author’s biography
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: History and the making of contemporary Turkey
• PART II: Politics and institutions
• PART III: The economy, environment, and development
• PART IV: The Kurdish insurgency and security
• PART V: State, society, and rights
• PART VI: External relations
• Index