Sylvia Kedourie (editor) - Turkey Before and After Ataturk: Internal and External Affairs (Middle Eastern Studies (Hardcover))

TURKEY BEFORE AND AFTER ATATRK

Internal and External Affairs

Edited by

Sylvia Kedourie

FRANK CASS
LONDON PORTLAND, OR

First published in 1999 in Great Britain by
FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS
2 Park Square, Milton Park,
Abingdon, Oxon, 0X14 4RN

and in the United States of America by
FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS
270 Madison Ave, New
York NY 10016

Transferred to Digital Printing 2005

Copyright 1999 Frank Cass Publishers

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Turkey before and after Atatrk : internal and external affairs

1. Turkey History 2. Turkey Foreign relations Europe

I. Kedourie, Sylvia

956.1

ISBN 0-7146-4947-3 (cloth)

ISBN 0-7146-8006-0 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Turkey before and after Atatrk : internal and external affairs /

edited by Sylvia Kedourie.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7146-4947-3 (cloth). ISBN 0-7146-8006-0 (pbk.)

1. TurkeyPolitics and goverment20th century. 2. Turkey

Foreign relations. I. Kedourie, Sylvia.

DR576.T863 1998 98-31627

956.102-dc21 CIP

This group of studies first appeared as a special issue of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.34, No.4, October 1998 (ISSN 0026-3206), published by Frank Cass.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

At first sight it may seem strange that a collection of academic studies on Turkey before and after Atatrk should refer only in passing to the founder of the Turkish republic. One explanation may be that the changes wrought by Mustafa Kemal Atatrk, which were officially described, and were seen by contemporaries, as a revolution, have, like revolutions elsewhere, changed aspect in retrospect and now appear as an episode in the history of the Turkish people and state, an episode amply prepared by precursors and assimilated by successors to the slow-moving evolution of their society. But the researches, which have borne fruit in this volume, suggest another reason why scholars of Turkey's recent past and present need not have Atatrk constantly in their sights.

Mustafa Kemal Paa as he then was, led a national movement of resistance to the designs of ethnic adversaries, who were threatening the largely Turkish-speaking Muslim population of Anatolia and eastern Thrace with the loss of their land. He frustrated these designs by reassembling the Ottoman army, which the Allies had defeated in the First World War. After he had led this army to victory, he employed its commanders and civil officials, who, like them, had formerly served the Ottoman state, to govern the republic of which he became the founding father and first president. Although the Republican People's Party, which he fashioned as his political instrument, had a monopoly of power, and was influenced by totalitarian parties first in Bolshevik Russia, and then in Italy, Germany and elsewhere in Europe, Atatrk's republic was not a fully-fledged totalitarian state. The French Revolution remained a more potent source of inspiration than the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent radical ideologies. Atatrk created the framework of an orderly independent state, within whose secure frontiers, proponents and opponents of contemporary Western secular ideologies liberalism, Marxism, solidarism, fascism argued their cases with a vigour which survived periodic, and usually measured, repression, and which left its mark on government policies. The ferment of ideas permitted and utilized by the Kemalist regime, to the extent it saw fit, is illustrated by the studies in this collection by Asim Karamerliolu on the cult of the peasant which was promoted by People's Houses and which inspired the establishment of the Village Institutes in the 1930s and 40s, and by Mustafa Trke on the Kadro movement, launched by ex-Marxists and Marxisants also in the early 1930s, to urge the planned development of the country by a cadre of committed radical reformers, negotiating a third way between socialism and capitalism. The debate encompassed an elite educated in Western knowledge and aware of Western thought and experience, while excluding orientals for whom traditional Islamic knowledge provided a frame of reference. But as Islamic officialdom the hierarchy of mfts [muftis], largely inherited from the Ottoman state hastened to submit to the secular republic, popular resistance to the cultural revolution, imposed by Atatrk and his regime, could find leaders only among the small fry of provincial hocas [khodjas] and eyhs [sheykhs]. The data presented in this volume by Gavin Brockett show both the extent and the sporadic, disorganized and doomed nature of what the Kemalist regime called reactionary incidents.

However, the forces which the regime sought to control have survived to this day, as three papers in this collection make clear. Ethnic Turkish nationalism has spilled out of the civic mould shaped for it by Atatrk in his enlightened moments and has found an expression in the Nationalist Action Party, which has latterly tried to combine it with Islamic sentiment in the framework of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, an ideology which received some official encouragement after the 1980 military coup. Burak Arikan charts the progress of the party as it tried to steer by the incompatible beacons of ethnic exclusiveness, Islamic religious inclusiveness, and more universal democratic values. Metin Heper, an expert on the Turkish tradition of a strong state, joins forces with Fuat Keyman in explaining how and why this traditional strong state is showing weakness in its dealings with political parties more notable for promoting the interests of their clients than for advocating distinct policies. Meltem Mftler-Bac sheds light on the relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy with regard to the possibility of Turkey's accession as a full member of the European Union. Atattrk was well aware of the link, as witness his insistence that a country's foreign policy should be consistent with its domestic political organisation. Mftler-Bac sees both cultural and political obstacles on Turkey's path to Europe: the history of antagonism between Christendom and Islam, and the shortcomings of Turkish democracy, as measured by the standards of the European Union. Turkey's disagreements with Greece, particularly over Cyprus, constitute an additional difficulty. All these problems have antecedents.