Nation-Building in Modern Turkey

The 'People's Houses', the State and the Citizen

Alexandros Lamprou

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781780768762
• eBook ISBN: 9780857737311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From 1924 to 1946 the Republic of Turkey was in effect ruled as an authoritarian single-party regime. During these years the state embarked upon an extensive reform programme of modernization and nation-building. The Kemalist reform movement has been extensively studied in its institutional dimensions as a state project of top-down reform; however, Nation-Building in Modern Turkey offers a fresh look at these formative years of the Turkish state. It studies modernist nation-building and state-society relations from a novel perspective through the study of the People's House, an institution aiming at the propagation of the modernist reforms to Turkey's urban population in the 1930s and 1940s. Using previously unpublished archival material and provincial publications, this work offers an alternative understanding of social change and state-society relations. In shifting the focus from the state as the fulcrum of change to the population's participation in the process, this book offers a 'peripheral' perspective of social change as it fashions a view from provincial towns. Focusing on everyday people, it explores their participation in and experience of the new habits and mixed-gender socialization practices the modernist state was introducing in the People's Houses, such as theatre, concerts, sports, dancing balls and village excursions. By analysing hundreds of petitions and complaint letters from the provinces, Alexandros Lamprou is able to examine the multiple ways ordinary people experienced, negotiated and resisted the reforms and to consider the ramifi cations of this process for the shaping of social and collective identities. Nation-Building in Modern Turkey will be essential reading for not only students and scholars of nation-building, socio-cultural change and state society-relations in Turkey, but also of the history, sociology, political science and anthropology of Turkey and the modern Middle East.

1

The People’s House

Building on the experience and manpower of earlier associations, the People’s House project was launched in 1932. It was composed of cultural centres the ruling Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, henceforth Party or RPP) was opening and operating in urban centres all over Turkey. As the Party’s cultural branches, the Houses were planned to propagate the regime’s ideology and policies to the population through the circulation, application and enactment of a variety of practices, discourses and activities. The Houses were neither an independent institution nor did they possess any legal identity of their own; they were part of a political party. The fact that they were exclusively financed by the state provided the justification for their abolition and the confiscation of their movable and immovable property. When the opposition came to power in 1950, it convincingly argued that for 18 years the Houses and, thus, the Party had been lavishly enriched by state funds, which had to be returned to the state; as a result, in 1951 the Houses were closed down and their property confiscated.

In what follows in this chapter I trace the prehistory of the Halkevi institution from the 1908 Young Turk Revolution until the Houses’ establishment in 1932. I then describe in detail the People’s House structure, activities and administration, and, lastly, I offer a reading of the Halkevi project within the ruling elite’s ideological make-up and the political context of single-party rule in the 1930s and 1940s.

Young Turk Social Engineering and ‘People’s Education’

The 1908 Young Turk Revolution stands as a landmark in the history of modern Turkey. United by their opposition to Abdulhamit II and their concern to save the state from disintegration, a group of political dissidents and state officials – most of whom were graduates of the Western-type schools the Ottoman state had established to staff its administration and military – formed a secret organization, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), and organized the 1908 Young Turk Revolution that ended the autocratic regime of Abdulhamit II and restored the 1876 constitution. The same year, elections were held and the Ottoman parliament convened again. The years following the 1908 Revolution saw Ottoman politics polarize between the CUP and the opposition as the political antagonism gradually became even more bitter and violent against the background of almost continuous warfare that started with the Ottoman–Italian war over Libya in 1911. In 1912, the armies of Bulgaria, Montenegro, Greece and Serbia conquered the entire Ottoman Balkan territories in the First Balkan War. Until then, the CUP had never totally controlled the Ottoman government, as it had to compete with other power constellations and opposition in the parliament, the military and the bureaucracy. In January 1913 the CUP staged a coup deposing the government and took complete control, ruling as a single-party regime until 1918. In World War I the Ottoman Empire aligned with the Central Powers and lost at great demographic, financial and social cost.

Although ruling the Empire through continuous warfare, the CUP was able to introduce a number of sweeping changes in the administrative, educational and legal structures of the Ottoman state predating and prefiguring the reforms of the Republican period after 1923. The Ottoman state was made a constitutional monarchy and the sultan’s prerogatives were severely reduced. The army was reorganized and provincial administration was put in order with the 1913 Provincial Administration Law. The position of the ulema (religious functionaries) was undermined. The highest religious official (şeyhülislam) was removed from cabinet; previously controlled by the ulema, religious schools, courts and foundations were reorganized and placed under state control, while the new inheritance (1913) and family (1917) laws, although technically within religious law, granted women more rights of inheritance and choices of marriage and divorce. Women were encouraged to study and participate in social life, and in 1913 basic education was made compulsory for girls. New schools for girls opened and women were accepted into university.¹

Following the capitulation of Bulgaria, the Empire signed the armistice of Moudros in October 1918. The top Unionist leaders fled the country, but the military and civil administration was still in Unionist hands. In the aftermath of the armistice, a resistance movement organized and led by Unionist forces emerged in Anatolia. It gained impetus with the invasion of Izmir by the Greek army and the signing of the peace Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 which virtually erased the Ottoman Empire from the map of Anatolia. Ultimately, the nationalists fought and won a war to annul it and under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal the victorious nationalist forces signed the Treaty of Lausanne establishing the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Left with an independent but ruined country and a devastated population, the ruling elites around Mustafa Kemal have been since hailed for the extensive reforms they initiated during the 1920s and 1930s that gave shape to the modern Turkish state and society.

During its first years the Republic of Turkey went through a brief phase of multi-party politics. In 1924 an opposition party was formed in the National Assembly and the press was relatively free to criticize the ruling RPP. In 1925 the outbreak of a Kurdish rebellion in the east of the country offered the ruling party the pretext to silence and purge the opposition. To counter the rebellion, the government was granted extraordinary powers that were immediately used against the insurgents in the east but also against the opposition; the oppositional party and many newspapers were closed and a number of journalists prosecuted. The purges continued with the trials of prominent opposition leaders after a failed assassination attempt against Mustafa Kemal in 1926. As a consequence, after 1925, Turkey was in effect ruled as a single-party regime with a parliamentary facade. The government’s extraordinary powers were kept in force even after the crushing of the Kurdish rebellion as a means to repress any resistance to the reforms or any potential opposition to the regime. In 1930, Mustafa Kemal decided to experiment with multi-party politics, entrusting the formation of an opposition party to a close associate and friend. Although envisaged as a loyal opposition, the Free Republican Party rapidly attracted much popular support and revealed the population’s extensive dissatisfaction. After three months and the contemporaneous outburst of popular discontent, the Free Republican Party was dissolved by its own leader. A month after its dissolution, a small group of militant Islamists entered Menemen, a small town in the west of Turkey, and proclaimed the restoration of sharia, the Islamic law, in the local mosque. Then in front of the congregation and other assembled townspeople, they killed three policemen who tried to arrest them. The incident ended swiftly with the arrival of more policemen as in the ensuing fight some of the militants were killed and the remaining arrested. Alarmed by information that some among the crowd had applauded the militants’ acts, the government’s reaction was harsh: martial law was declared and tens of people were executed or imprisoned, while the fallen officers were declared heroes of the Kemalist reforms ‘martyred’ by reactionaries and enemies of the republic.

The Free Party experiment and the Menemen incident exposed the extent of the population’s dissatisfaction. In response, the regime turned towards more authoritarian policies and for the next 16 years, until the end of World War II, Turkey was ruled as an authoritarian single-party regime exhibiting extremely limited tolerance even to the most subtle criticism. In the postwar period, Turkey aligned with the West, and as an ally of Western parliamentary democracies went through a gradual liberalization of its political regime. Political parties were permitted and multi-party politics established in 1946. The process was so successful that in the 1950 elections the Democrat Party could gravely defeat the Republican People’s Party and end its uninterrupted rule of the previous 27 years.

Upon the political context briefly sketched above, the ruling elite of the republic embarked upon a comprehensive reform programme that followed and built upon the Unionist reforms of the period 1913–18. In the first years of the republic, the legal and educational framework of the new state was set up. The sultanate and caliphate were abolished and the country was declared a republic. The Islamic law was abolished and European legal codes filled the void. The Law for the Unification of Education in 1924 abolished all religious schools and established a unitary state educational system. The role and position of the religious functionaries were thus curtailed and they were closely controlled (as civil servants) by the state Directorship of Religious Affairs. Following the consolidation of the regime after the purges of 1925 and in effect under conditions resembling martial law, the political leadership went even further. In 1925 it abolished the Islamic brotherhoods (tarikat) and closed their places of worship. Next, the fez and other local headgear were prohibited and replaced by the Western hat, and the international clock and calendar were introduced in 1926. In 1929 a Latinized alphabet and Western numerals replaced the Arabic ones used in Ottoman Turkish. Western measures were introduced in the 1930s, and women were given the right to vote (1930) and be elected (1934).

In essence, the reforms consisted of the extensive discarding of a series of educational, administrative, legal and symbolic structures, from religious law, courts, schools and brotherhoods to political associations and pieces of clothing. In their place, ‘modern’ and ‘national’ ones were translated, adopted and invented from Western or local sources. The civil, penal and commercial legal codes that were to replace older and/or religious law were translated and adopted from Europe as was the case with the hat and Western numerals, calendar and measures that replaced the local ones. The language reform though was a more complex project involving, on the one hand, the adoption of a Latinized alphabet in place of the Ottoman-Arabic version, and, on the other hand, the extensive replacement of Arabic and Persian words with supposedly ‘pure Turkish’ ones retrieved among the people of Turkey or kin Turkic populations in central Asia, but also invented by linguistic engineers.² An official national history was also invented, downplaying the Ottoman and Islamic aspects of Turkish history while emphasizing the pre-Ottoman and pre-Islamic past of the Turks. To assist in the process of inventing the republic’s national language and history, the Turkish History and Language societies were established in 1931 and 1932 respectively.³ And to propagate the new national script, language and history, and to facilitate the regime’s nation-building project, a series of educational and propaganda structures were established. The Village Institutes (1940–50), for instance, trained village youths and had them return to their villages as teachers and carriers of everything the new republic sought to instil in the villagers – the majority of the population which otherwise the state could not properly reach due to its infrastructural weakness. Planned to modernize and Turkify the villager, the state established 21 institutes that trained more than 15,000 village youths until their abolition in 1950.⁴ The People’s House was probably the most distinctive institution the interwar Turkish leadership established to propagate its ideology and policies, but it was not the first such attempt; in fact, Unionists and Turkish nationalist intellectuals had established a series of similar institutions since the 1908 Revolution.

There was a profound continuity in the ideological make-up, policies and cadre between Unionists and Kemalists.⁵ These state elites were deeply influenced by the positivism and social Darwinism of the nineteenth century. They saw Western science as the means to reform society and save the state. In the course of imperial disintegration, they became Turkish nationalists unwavering in their resolution to instil national consciousness and create the Turkish nation out of the Muslim populations of Anatolia. As elitists they shared a deep distrust of the masses. They never believed in popular representation – in contrast to their declarations that their power was based on popular sovereignty – as they considered the masses to be backward and irrational. They were bent rather on enlightening and leading that population through the mobilization of educated elites like themselves into instructing the masses.⁶ The need to educate and awaken the people into nationhood was probably one of the most consistent and ubiquitous motifs of the emerging Turkish nationalism since the late nineteenth century.⁷ But it was the Young Turks, Unionists and then Kemalists who made it one of their key objectives.

With the 1908 Revolution, a conscious Unionist policy was to reach, discover and, ultimately, educate the people. The need to reach and educate the people was an idea pronounced in the thought and preaching of Ziya Gökalp. Considered the father of Turkish nationalism, he was one of the most influential thinkers and Unionist leaders of his era (he died in 1924). One of the recurrent themes of his writings was the need to awaken the people, and his famous distinction between civilization and culture is of great relevance. In his theoretical scheme, the Turkish nation would be the product of a synthesis of civilization, which he considered singular and essentially international/Western, and culture, which was national and intimate. For Gökalp, the elites were the carriers of civilization: ‘the intellectuals and the thinkers of a nation constitute its elite […] separated from the masses by their higher education and learning.’ Culture, on the other hand, was to be found among the masses, the people. The elite’s duty then was to reach the people in a move that was envisaged as a double act of instilling modern, that is, Western, civilization in the people, while also retrieving and reclaiming the ‘true’ national culture that was alive among them.⁸

Within their objective to mould the Muslims of Anatolia into becoming a modern and civilized nation, both regimes gave great emphasis to reform of the educational system, as it was seen as the primary means to modernize and nationalize society, but also to legitimize their power through the creation and widening of their constituency. But apart from improving state education and expanding schooling, both Unionists and Kemalists underscored the need to instruct and train the people. The CUP, for instance, embarked on a huge effort to propagate its ideology and policies through establishing or patronizing a number of clubs and societies,⁹ among them cultural associations aiming at the ‘people’s training’ (terbiye-yi avam)¹⁰ or their ‘civilizational training’ (terbiye-yi medeniyeye); National Libraries;¹¹ female associations working for the promotion of women’s rights in education, professional and cultural life, and the raising of their cultural level; paramilitary youth associations aiming to prepare the youth for war through sports, physical and military training (terbiye-yi bedeniye); societies to promote the national economy or carry out charitable work; and peasant associations to raise the educational, hygienic, cultural and...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The People’s House
• 2. People’s Houses in Provincial Urban Centres
• 3. People’s Houses and Local Politics
• 4. People’s Houses vs Coffee Houses
• 5. Women on the Halkevi Stage
• 6. People’s Houses in the Countryside
• 7.Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography