Three turning points in the political development of modern Turkey

ABSTRACT

This essay investigates the choices made by the Turkish political leadership at three crucial moments in the history of Turkey between World War I and the Cold War. It asks the question if viable alternatives to the chosen route were available, and to what extent the choices made reflected international developments of the time. The episodes looked at are the establishment of a nation-state and of a republic (two separate issues) in 1920–23, the turn towards authoritarianism during the World Crisis (1930–32) and the transition to multi-party democracy in 1945–50.

KEYWORDS:

• Nation-state
• single-party state
• republic
• Turkish history
• Cold War

Introduction

The creation of the Republic of Turkey a century ago, as well as the particular way it was shaped in the following decades, is generally depicted as a conscious act of creation in the historiography. Sometimes this is immediately apparent from the titles of the books: Paul Dumont’s 1983 Mustafa Kemal invente la Turquie moderne (Mustafa Kemal Invents Modern Turkey), for instance, or Feroz Ahmad’s 1993 The Making of Modern Turkey.¹ But even when it is not immediately apparent from the book’s title, the underlying narrative is still mainly that of a determined leadership creating a ‘new Turkey’ by making radical choices. Of course this is true for the whole genre of biographies of the Republic’s creator and leader, Mustafa Kemal Pasha Atatürk, with whom the historiography of Turkey was intertwined during most of the twentieth century, but it was also true for the many works that appeared in English, French, and German from the 1920s to the 1950s and that took the emergence of a ‘new’ Turkey as their central theme (a theme that was often reflected in the book titles).

In this essay for the special issue of Turkish Studies my aim is to investigate the role of agency in the political development of modern Turkey in its formative period by placing the decisions of the Kemalist leadership in the context of international developments. Or, to formulate it slightly differently, to ask to what extent the decisions of the Kemalist leadership were in fact unavoidable, because they involved an adjustment to a movement of change in the wider world, an expression of the ‘Zeitgeist’.

Such a question is, of course, methodologically problematical as it involves positing alternatives to the course of action adopted by the Kemalists. As these alternatives obviously consist of the paths that were not taken, this involves a degree of counterfactual history. In political science and particularly in the study of international relations working with parallel scenarios or different possibilities is, of course, quite normal, but in historiography it is often seen as methodologically unsound. It surely is no coincidence that the two historians most closely associated with the upsurge in interest in counterfactual historiography in the 1990s – Geoffrey Hawthorn and Niall Ferguson – were both involved in International Relations programs. Still, if one is explicit about the determinants that are at play and the variables that are considered, I think looking again at the history of the Kemalist Republic can be an interesting way to judge how its development was determined (or not) by ‘acts of will’ of its political leaders.

The episodes I want to look at for this purpose are the establishment of the nation-state and the Republic in 1920–23; the cancelation of the experiment with multi-party democracy and its aftermath, the establishment of an authoritarian regime, in 1930–32; and the adoption of the multi-party system in 1945–1947. In each case I will summarize the political choices that were actually made, describe how they fit in the larger global developments, and try to establish whether there were viable alternatives. The aim, in the spirit this special issue that invites contemplations on Turkey’s experience over the past century, is to offer some reflections on these historical events, not necessarily to offer new evidence or fundamentally new analyses.

1922–1923: From empire to what?

When considering the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey it is important to see it as a drawn-out process and to distinguish between the different stages within that process. The first stage covered the period March 1920 to February 1921. It started with the Allied occupation of the Ottoman capital Constantinople and the closure of the Ottoman parliament. This led directly to Mustafa Kemal Pasha’s call for the deputies in the closed parliament to join a ‘Great National Assembly’ in Ankara. As only a fraction of the Constantinople deputies could reach Ankara, the national assembly had to be replenished with deputies sent from different Anatolian provinces.

The concept of a ‘national assembly’ was not new. It had been used in April 1909 to denote the meeting of members from the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies and Senate that convened in Ayastefanos (just outside the capital) as the legitimate representative of the Ottoman people at a moment when the capital had been occupied by anti-constitutional rebels during the so-called ‘31 March Incident’. As many members of the nationalist leadership in Ankara had been involved in the fight against those rebels, this undoubtedly was still a living memory eleven years later. With the capital occupied, the Ankara assembly, which opened on 23 April 1920, regarded itself as the only legitimate representative of ‘the nation’ just like the 1909 assembly had done. Even though the Assembly and the committee of commissars (vekil) that formed its executive did not abrogate the Empire or the sultanate until November 1922, this in fact marked the start of the establishment of a nation-state.²

There is, of course, an argument to be made that the development towards a nation-state had been set in motion much earlier. After the defeat in the Balkan War the Unionist leadership that had come to power through a coup d’etat in January 1913 had put in place ethnic policies that aimed to homogenize the population of the remaining empire in the sense of giving it a Muslim-majority population everywhere. The outcome of these policies was the expulsion of the Greek Orthodox population from Western Anatolia in 1914 as well as the genocide of Armenians and Syrian Orthodox in 1915–16. It is undoubtedly true that the fact that Muslim Ottoman nationalists, as the Unionists had become by 1913, used the imperial institutions for their program constituted a denial of the fundamental logic of a multi-ethnic empire. But where the Unionist demographic engineering of the years 1914–18 had been executed in the name of an imperial government (something which explains why the Unionists took such pains to have deniability built into their procedures), the post-war movement and its National Assembly were much more open about their position.

The fundamental legitimation of the Ankara leadership was that it represented the will of the nation, through the Society for the Defence of the National Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia, which had been founded in September 1919. This society from the beginning defined those national rights as the rights of the ‘Ottoman Muslim majority’. In this sense it put a formal seal on the developments of the war years. The name of the society was a direct reference to the Wilsonian concept of self-determination for nations, and specifically to the Twelfth of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which guaranteed the ‘Turkish portions’ of the Ottoman Empire a secure sovereignty. In the Wilsonian conceptualization, adopted by the peace conference in Paris, the right to self-determination was limited to nations. Hence the resistance movement in Ottoman Anatolia and Thrace defined itself from the beginning as the voice of the nation – a nation of Ottoman Muslims – although it operated within an imperial context since the Ottoman Empire had not been abolished and the official aim of the Assembly (as reflected in its oath) was ‘the liberation of the Caliphate and Sultanate and the independence of the fatherland and the nation.’

That the underlying concept was that of the ‘nation-state’ became even more evident with the adoption of the ‘Law on the Fundamental Organisation’ by the Ankara Assembly in January 1921. In its first two articles it states that ‘sovereignty belongs unconditionally to the nation’, and that ‘the guiding principle is that of national self-determination.’

It is no exaggeration to say that in the first four years after World War I the political structure created in the areas of the Ottoman Empire that had not been occupied was essentially that of a nation-state. In this sense, it was entirely in line with the global developments of its time. The victors of World War I – France, Britain, Italy, the United States – were nation-states, as were the new states created at the peace conference – Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia).³ The same was true, at least in theory, for the four republics that made up the Soviet Union in 1922.

It is difficult to see how it could have been otherwise. The demise of the great multi-ethnic empires in World War I had left national self-determination, and its product, the nation state, as the only available alternative. The delineation of the new nation-states was very imperfect and gave rise to a lot of discontent, but that discontent (most notoriously in the case of the Hungarians) was about the limits of the nation-state, not about its nature. Even in post-war Austria, which voted overwhelmingly to abolish its own nation-state, this was not because of a desire to recreate a supranational entity, but to join the German nation-state instead.

In the Ottoman case, the alternative to the creation of a nation-state in Anatolia would have been an attempt to maintain a degree of sovereignty for the Ottoman Empire as a whole. This was a course of action rejected by the Movement for the Defence of National Rights in Anatolia. Although its foundational text, the National Pact of January 1920, demands independence for the areas with a Muslim majority within and without the armistice lines of October 1918 and calls for self-determination (through a plebiscite) for the Arabs, the movement did not make the Arab cause part of its own concrete plan of action. In other words: it made two separate claims, both on the basis of the principle of self-determination (one for Turks, one for Arabs) but it did not make any claims on the basis of a shared imperial past. There were several reasons for this. Many of the military officers involved in the national resistance had served in the Arab provinces during World War I and became disillusioned about the Ottoman patriotism of the Arabs. This had been reinforced when the British-sponsored Sharifian rebellion broke out in 1916. Direct involvement with Arab independence movements would have meant reopening the fight against the British and the French, but most importantly as its documents show, the resistance movement was primarily motivated by the need to defeat Greek and Armenian claims on Anatolian soil.⁴

When one reads the documents produced by the Turkish national resistance movement between 1919 and 1922, the problematic aspects of the definition of the nation underpinning the state are immediately apparent. They are of two kinds. One the one hand, Kurds and Turks are recognized as distinct categories, but from the earliest days at the Congress of Erzurum in July 1919, they were conceptualized as forming a single nation, united in culture and ideal. The distinctiveness of the Kurds is not seen as a basis for national identity. On the other hand, the existence of Greeks and Armenians is also recognized, but these communities are imagined as national minorities ‘living in our midst’ and definitely not as part of the nation. The inclusion of the Kurds in the dominant nation would, of course, from 1925 onwards evolve into a policy of assimilation, while the exclusion of the Christian communities led to the compulsory population exchange of 1923–24, as well as to repressive policies towards the remaining minorities in the 1930s and 1940s. While one could argue that assimilation and repression were fairly standard features of the new nation-states that came into being after 1918, the compulsory movement of populations is more reminiscent of the forced movement of people in the Central Europe of 1942–1948.

In the context of the global, or at least European, situation of 1918–1920, the Turkish national resistance movement made the obvious choice. Just like the Poles and Czechs, but also like the Egyptians and Armenians (among others) it rested its claims on the only widely recognized principle of legitimacy after the demise of dynastic empires, that of national self-determination. If the first stage of the emergence of modern Turkey, the creation of a nation-state is thus completely in line with international developments, the same cannot be said for the second and third stages, the abolition of the monarchy and the proclamation of the Republic.

It is important to distinguish between the abolition of the monarchy (and therefore of the empire) on 2 November 1922 and the proclamation of the Republic almost a year later. The abolition of the monarchy had broad support in the national assembly. The debate was not about the necessity of the abolition as such but about the nature of the state that was to replace it. The large majority of deputies insisted on making clear that this was a Turkish state (by 1922 Turkish had largely replaced Ottoman Muslim as descriptor), whose government was the ‘government of the national assembly of Turkey’, that all national sovereignty rested only with the assembly, and that this was immutable. The aim clearly was to make sure that after the demise of monarchy the road could not be opened to a dictatorship.

In an international context, the decision was radical and courageous. One has to remember that at the time all of the neighboring nation-states in the Balkans and Southern Europe – Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Albania, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) – were monarchies. The same is true for all of the independent neighbors in the Middle East: Iran, Iraq, Transjordan, Hejaz, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. The Turkish resistance movement did not opt for a national constitutional monarchy as successor to the empire (even though there were ardent admirers of the British system among the leadership) or for a traditional parliamentarian republic. Instead it enshrined a political system that gave almost unrestricted powers to the elected legislature, with an executive consisting of commissars elected directly from among its members. It was a revolutionary democratic regime quite unique in the world at the time.

Mustafa Kemal Pasha accepted the decisions of the assembly of November 1922 but he was determined to change the system with its strong legislature and weak executive for post-war Turkey. Through a number of measures in the course of 1923, including the transformation of the Society of the Defence of National Rights into a centralized People’s Party (Halk Fırkasi) and holding elections before peace had been concluded at Lausanne in which only candidates from that party and handpicked by himself could stand, he prepared the ground for the proclamation of the Republic, which was duly passed by the new national assembly on 29 October 1923.⁵ The decision also involved the election of Mustafa Kemal himself as president and introduction of a cabinet system under a prime minister appointed by the president. Unlike the decision of 2 November, this one was contested, particularly by Mustafa Kemal’s former co-leaders of the national resistance. The decision was taken while they were absent from Ankara and their spokesman, Hüseyin Rauf Bey, voiced criticism in the Istanbul press, saying that while they fully supported popular sovereignty and democracy, proclaiming a republic in itself did not guarantee those. This led to fierce debates within the party and ultimately, a year later, it would lead to a formal split and the creation of the opposition Progressive Republican Party (Terakkiperver Cumhuriyet Fırkası).⁶

To summarize: the proclamation of the Republic on 29 October 1923 does not signify the establishment of a nation-state in Turkey. That was a process that had started four years earlier when national self-determination had been made the key notion around which the resistance movement could gather. This was entirely in line with trends in Central Europe and the Middle East in the post-war era, the ‘Wilsonian moment.’ It had culminated in the opening of the National Assembly in April 1920. However, the decision to abolish the monarchy and to perpetuate the revolutionary political regime without separation of powers in November 1922 was something else: it was quite radical and did not fit any dominant international trend. The proclamation of the Republic a year later was essentially an internal coup to strengthen the executive at the expense of the legislature. It brought Turkey into line with the mainstream republican current in Europe, but the Republic did not replace the empire; it replaced government by the National Assembly within the existing context of the nation-state.

An authoritarian response to the world crisis

Six years after the establishment of the Republic the world economic crisis broke out. It hit Turkey particularly hard because of nature of its economy. After ten years of warfare and dramatic demographic change, Turkey was an impoverished country in 1923. In the years that followed, its agricultural sector (and Turkey was still overwhelmingly an agricultural economy) had recovered significantly thanks to the return of peacetime conditions. Average growth between 1923 and 1929 was over 16 percent. The other sectors, trade, industry, and services lagged far behind, due in no small part to the disappearance of the Greek and Armenian communities that had played a dominant role in those sectors. The global crisis dealt a hammer blow to agricultural prices, which fell between 50 and 60 percent from 1928 to 1932. Turkey’s exports were more than halved between 1927 and 1933. In addition, the terms of trade turned against agricultural produce, both domestically and internationally. As a result, the purchasing power of the Turkish population declined sharply. Hardship was felt everywhere, but most in the developed coastal regions that were integrated into world trade through the export of commodities.⁷

The Kemalist government consisted of former military officers and bureaucrats and lacked the expertise as well as the means to intervene effectively. There was almost no economic know-how. Tax income from the relatively small and impoverished population was low, and Turkey had had to shoulder a significant debt burden as successor to the Ottoman Empire. The state had no means to stock agricultural produce and so could not support prices effectively either.

Of course, Turkey’s situation was not unique. No country in the world had an immediate and adequate response to the crisis. The additional problem of the Turkish government was that under the single-party regime of the preceding four years it had ruled the country with extraordinary powers under the Law on the Maintenance of Order of March 1925. No political activity outside the ruling party was allowed and the press was heavily censored. Under these conditions the flow of information from society to the leadership had become clogged. Even the National Assembly had become an obedient instrument of the government with very limited room for debate. As a result, the latter lacked awareness of the mood in the country as well as responsiveness.

President Mustafa Kemal Pasha was aware of the problem. In early 1929 he allowed the Law on the Maintenance of Order to lapse and in 1930 he tried to infuse the system with more dynamism by creating an opposition party (the Free Republican Party, [Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası]) under his old friend Ali Fethi. This party was intended as a controlled experiment, but it almost immediately got out of hand. It received an enthusiastic reaction from many parts of the country. When Fethi toured the coastal regions as part of the campaign for municipal elections, he was greeted by enthusiastic crowds and during his visit to Izmir on 4–7 September he was celebrated as a liberator. The crowds reacted angrily to attempts by the local governor to stop him from speaking. Riots broke out and the police killed a child, who was placed by the father at Fethi’s feet as a sacrifice. In a reaction, Mustafa Kemal, who had earlier promised to take up an ‘above-party’ position as President of the epublic Rnow publicly reaffirmed his bond with the ruling party. As a result, Fethi closed down his party on 17 November.

The short history of the Free Republican Party has fascinated Turkish and foreign historians for many years, and, for such a brief episode, the scholarly literature is quite abundant.⁸ However, the point to make here is that the hatred for the Kemalist regime shown by the demonstrators in Izmir was the first time the Kemalist leadership was really made aware of the degree of discontent and disaffection in the country during the economic crisis. The day after the closure of the party, Mustafa Kemal and his entourage, including ministers and party bosses, embarked on a factfinding tour of Anatolia, followed by a similar tour of Thrace. This confirmed the bad state of the country and led to the decision for a more interventionist economic policy, the so-called ‘devletçilik’ or statism. The new economic policy was officially adopted at the 1931 party congress (but the term had already been coined by Prime Minister İsmet Pasha in a speech in Sivas in September 1930).

Statism was primarily an economic development model devised as an answer to an economic crisis, but it had political consequences. The reason that the early 1930s is a turning point in Turkey’s political development is that the introduction of statism coincided with a drive to increase the one-party state’s control over all aspects of society. A brief summing-up makes this clear. In 1931 (and again in 1935) discipline within the party was tightened through changes in the statutes that gave the center more control. Ultimately, in 1936 state and party were officially merged. Moreover, in 1931 a new and draconian press law was passed. Civil society organizations that shared the nationalist and secularist aims of the party, but which often pre-dated the Republic and up to then had maintained a certain independence, were all closed down or brought under party control. In 1931 the Turkish Hearths (Türk Ocakları), a network of 267 nationalist culture clubs founded as far back as 1913, were closed. Next year they were replaced with the People’s Houses (Halk Evleri), whose functions were quite similar but which formed part of the party organization. In 1933 the Darülfünun (University) in Istanbul was closed down and, after a purge of its teaching staff, reopened as the University of Istanbul. In 1935 the Turkish Women’s Union, which had been founded in the late Ottoman era, was closed down, as were the masonic lodges. The Turkish Society of Journalists was also dissolved.

Collectively, these measures meant that a new phase had begun in the development of Turkey. This was something of which the Kemalists themselves were well aware, seeing their use of the term ‘second phase of the revolution.’ The measures of the early 1930s shaped the Kemalist one-party state as well as the way it is remembered in the collective memory of Turkey. This is true for proponents of Kemalism, who display a certain ‘nostalgia for the past’ and particularly for the modernism and strict secularism of the era, as well as for its opponents, who see it as the dark age of ‘Jacobin’ terror.

Putting aside such judgments, I here ask a different set of questions: was the turn towards state intervention in the economy and the attendant political authoritarianism inevitable?; and what does a comparison with international trends of the era teach us in that respect?

If Fethi’s Free Republican Party had been allowed to continue in November 1930 a few things can be predicted with near-certainty. The strong support for the party in the most developed and populous areas of the country with international trading links (Istanbul, the Aegean coast, the Samsun area) would have made the party a serious contender for power, even if the two-tier election system in force in Turkey at the time would have favored the incumbents. The main plank in the party’s program was a rejection of the economic policies of the governing party, notably the heavy investment in railway building (which brought with it heavy taxation) and its suspicion of foreign direct investment. Fethi advocated development with the aid of foreign capital. It is, however, very doubtful whether that would have yielded results as during the Great Depression international investors had become risk averse and therefore investment capital was simply not available. In 1930 it was not so much the attraction of Fethi’s solutions as resentment against İsmet’s rule that motivated the supporters of the new party. The popular manifestations of discontent on the Aegean coast, particularly in Izmir, made that very clear.

This discontent was fed by very real economic hardship, and state interventionism, announced by İsmet in September 1930 as ‘moderate statism’, did not do much to alleviate it. This result had to do with the nature of İsmet’s statism. A shift to a more interventionist approach can of course be observed in many of the countries that were hard hit by the world crisis, particularly when the crisis turned into a depression in 1930–1933. When states intervened, it was often to combat skyrocketing unemployment (mostly through public works programs). Only in Fascist Italy was there a systematic effort to support the banking sector and industry. In Nazi Germany, the public works programs inherited from the Weimar Republic were soon combined with rearmament, which also brought down unemployment. The transition to a statist economic model certainly brought Turkey closer to the economic models adopted by the authoritarian states in Europe, but there were important differences as well. The statism adopted at the party congress of 1931 and the concrete policies that followed from it in the 1930s were not aimed at lowering unemployment or saving the banking and industrial sectors as the latter still made up only a very small part of the largely agricultural economy. Turkish statism was aimed at developing a basic industrial and transport infrastructure, as well as the means for the state to intervene in the agricultural sector (through the building of silos) for the future. While it certainly brought long-term benefits, it did not provide immediate relief. In this sense the Turkish model was actually closer to that of Stalinist industrialization in the Soviet Union than to that of Italy or Germany. This is partly due to the fact that Soviet specialists helped in drawing up the first five-year plan and that the Soviet Union made available industrial plant through its ‘Turkstroj’ agency, but it also had to do with the Kemalist regime’s own priorities.

It could be argued that İsmet’s choice (with Kemal’s blessing and Soviet support) for economic statism, that is, for heavy state investment in long-term economic development at the expense of high taxes and low living standards, made an increasingly authoritarian and repressive regime inevitable. After all, it went directly against the short- and medium-term interests of an impoverished population. If Fethi’s more liberal Free Republican Party had come to power in 1930–1931, it is very unlikely it would have been able to find effective solutions to the economic crisis in the country. The failure of liberal regimes in Europe to do so indicates that a naïve reliance on private investment would not have been the answer. On the other hand, a policy more closely attuned to the concerns of the vast majority of the population could have removed the necessity of the kind of authoritarian, centralized and repressive regime that characterized the ‘second phase’ of the Kemalist revolution. It is pure speculation, but it is not unreasonable to think that a country with a more liberal republican government would have joined the Allies in World War II rather than stay neutral.

The transition to multi-party democracy

Fifteen years later a radically different choice was made. Where in 1930 Mustafa Kemal Pasha had aborted the experiment with a multi-party system as soon as it became clear that popular discontent made the opposition a serious contender for power, his successor İsmet İnönü persisted with the transition to a more democratic system. The transition to multi-party democracy from 1945 onwards is undoubtedly one of the major milestones of modern Turkish history. However tortuous the path of the development of political pluralism has been since then, with eight military interventions (attempted and actual) and abuse of power by dominant parties, competition between rival political parties has become the engine driving political development in Turkey.

In the transition of 1945–1947, President İsmet İnönü is without doubt the protagonist. He announced his desire to make Turkey more democratic as early as 19 May 1945. On 7 June four parliamentary deputies submitted a memorandum, the famous ‘dörtlü takrir,’ to the party, in which they demanded full implementation of the Turkish constitution and democratic reforms. They aimed for reform within the ruling party rather than for the establishment of an opposition party, but İnönü did not want dissent within the party. Even back in 1930 he had strongly opposed this idea and preferred to have his enemies outside rather than inside the party. This time it was no different. Three of the four authors of the memorandum were ousted from the party on 27 September and on 1 November of that year İnönü declared that Turkey needed an official opposition party. Subsequently he held confidential discussions with Celâl Bayar, who had been his main rival for power in the late 1930a and who was widely seen as the obvious leader of any formal opposition. In early December Bayar resigned from the ruling Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP)and a month later, on 7 January 1946, the Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti, DP) was officially registered.

For about a year and a half after that the future of democracy in Turkey was uncertain. The elections originally scheduled for 1947 were brought forward to July 1946, making it hard for the opposition to organize. They were clearly full of irregularities with the state bureaucracy intervening massively on the side of the ruling party, but even so it was clear that the DP was greeted with widespread enthusiasm. It won 62 seats in the National Assembly in an election that was clearly rigged against it. As in 1930, tension between the two parties rose sharply and the hawks within the CHP, led by the new Prime Minister Recep Peker, who had been appointed on 7 August 1946, did everything they could to delegitimize the opposition, branding them as traitors, communists and even psychopaths. But unlike Mustafa Kemal Pasha in 1930, İsmet stuck to his guns. He conferred with Peker and with opposition leader Bayar in a manner that is reminiscent of Mustafa Kemal’s talks with İsmet and Fethi in 1930. Then, on 12 July 1947 he issued a statement in which he said that political opposition was legitimate and natural and in which he called upon the organs of the state to act impartially. This marked the end of the hardliners. Peker had to resign and gradually more and more concessions were made to the opposition. Three years later the DP would win national elections in a landslide and took over power, ousting İnönü.

Here we come to question at hand: was İnönü’s decision to embrace multi-party democracy inevitable?

The decision is often linked to the ‘victory of democracies over authoritarianism’ in World War II, but that does not explain it, at least not in full. In Turkey’s part of the world the result of World War II was not so much the end of authoritarian rule but the replacement of one authoritarian system with another. Another argument is that democratization was needed for Turkey to make itself acceptable to the United States-dominated Western bloc when it was faced with aggressive demands from the Soviet Union. It is undoubtedly true that the Soviet threat had to be taken seriously. Molotov’s demands for joint Soviet-Turkish control of the Straits and changes to the Montreux Convention were threatening enough but not completely unexpected. The demand for revision of the Turkish-Soviet border in northeastern Anatolia was a bolt from a clear blue sky. As Turkey was not able to stand up to the Soviet Union militarily on its own, it urgently needed American protection, which it would receive under the Truman doctrine of 1947. It is very doubtful, however, whether a transition to a multi-party system was a precondition for that. As the contours of the Cold War slowly started to emerge after the Potsdam Conference, the West proved itself quite ready to work with authoritarian regimes such as that of Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain, Syngman Rhee in Korea, and Mohammad Reza in Iran. It probably could have worked just as well with an authoritarian Turkey. After all, it would do so on several occasions later in the twentieth century. Whether in such conditions NATO membership would have been available to a non-democratic Turkey in 1952 is an open question, but in 1945–47 the issue was not yet collective defense; it was American protection and that probably would have been available.

İnönü’s motivation was primarily internal. He was aware to some extent of discontent in the country, where living standards, which had started to recover somewhat in the late 1930s, had been falling year after year during the war. Policies like the ‘National Defense Law’ of 1939, which allowed for price and production controls but also for forced labor, were deeply unpopular. At the same time, the debate on his draft law on land distribution in May 1945 had shown that also within the ruling party there was still an active faction with more liberal and capitalist ideas around his former rival Bayar six years after the latter had been sidelined by İnönü in early 1939.

The key decisions in the democratization process were thus İnönü’s own. Although he certainly reacted to internal and external pressures in taking them, there was nothing inevitable about them. Even as late as July 1947 that decision could easily have gone another way. The ruling party was still entrenched in the state bureaucracy on all levels. After the sacking of Field Marshal Fevzi Çakmak in 1945, İnönü had full control over the army. There were many in the ruling party who opposed his move to democracy, out of principle or self-interest. It would not have been difficult for İnönü to mobilize state and party to suppress the opposition.

Even when the DP won its huge majority in the elections of May 1950, İnönü could have refused to step down, and there were rumors that some in the army would have backed him.⁹ Had he done so, the long term effects on Turkish society would certainly have been no less traumatic than that of the military coup of May 1960 that eventually did bring down the DP. That İnönü opted not to do so, even though he was bitter about the ‘ingratitude’ shown by the Turkish electorate, is to his eternal credit.

Summing up

This has been an enquiry into three historical episodes that have been key to the political development of modern Turkey in the thirty years between World War I and the Cold War. It was an attempt to see whether the choices made in these three instances were in line with international developments, and to gauge to what extent alternatives were available at the time.

We have concluded that in the period 1920–23, the transition from empire to nation-state in itself was entirely in line with international developments and probably unavoidable. The shape that nation-state took on the other hand was not: a ‘national’ constitutional monarchy, with a Turkish nation-state governed by a member of the Ottoman dynasty was an option that had some support. The decision in November to abolish the monarchy and maintain the system of self-government developed during the national struggle was quite radical, certainly in an international context in which monarchies dominated both Southeastern Europe and the Middle East, and in which government by an assembly that elected ‘commissars’ from among its own members was associated more with Bolshevik revolutionaries than with European nation-states. Notably, there was a lot of support for maintenance of the system that had developed during the independence war, in which the National Assembly essentially combined legislative and executive functions and ruled through a committee of commissars. The transition from National Assembly government to a republic was not inevitable. It was inspired by Mustafa Kemal Pasha’s desire for a stronger executive dominated by himself and the result of a deliberate decision, but it also brought Turkey into line with the European mainstream.

The decision to abort the experiment with a liberal opposition party as soon as it proved to be genuinely popular in 1930 paved the way for fifteen years of authoritarian and repressive rule by the CHP. With this choice Turkey moved closer to the authoritarian regimes of Central and Southern Europe. Allowing inter-party competition in 1930–31 would probably not have led to a less severe economic crisis but it would have led to a more responsive government and less of a chasm between the rulers and the ruled. Internationally it would have brought Turkey closer to the liberal democracies like France and Great Britain. The decision to combat the economic crisis through a statist industrialization policy made a return to a more competitive democratic system impossible, because it aimed at the long-term development of the country at the expense of the standard of living of the mass of the population. The decision to cut short the experiment with a pluralist system and establish an authoritarian one-party state was therefore a deliberate decision, but inextricably linked to a second one on the chosen economic developmental model.

Fifteen years later the decision was made to allow competitive party politics. In this decision İsmet İnönü intervened decisively four times: by announcing the need for more democracy, by allowing it, by blocking the single-party hawks in 1947, and by accepting his defeat in the 1950 elections. None of this was inevitable. In 1945, 1947 and possibly even in 1950, he had the means at his disposal to halt the transition to democracy and it is unlikely that that would have cost Turkey American support in the Cold War. The decisions made Turkey a credible member of ‘the Free World’ (to use the Cold War terminology) and it enabled Turkey to seek a closer relationship with the burgeoning movement for European integration, something that would have been unthinkable for a single-party dictatorship, as is shown by the examples of Spain and Portugal, which could only start their accession process after the fall of the dictatorships in the mid-1970s.

So, was modern Turkey indeed ‘created’ in the period between World War I and the Cold War? Did its development reflect the deliberate choices of its political leadership or did it primarily reflect global trends with minor variation? I think that the three examples we have explored seem to confirm the first alternative. In each case, the choice made was a reaction to a wider international development: the dissolution of the continental empires after World War I, the World Crisis of 1929–32, the end of fascist dictatorships and the beginnings of the Cold War in 1945–47. The precise choice that was made was not inevitable. It was very much the result of decision making in Turkey itself: abolition of the monarchy and (separately) the proclamation of a republic in 1922–23; the suppression of political opposition and imposition of an authoritarian regime (linked to economic statism) in 1930–33; and the suppression of opposition within the governing party, linked to the encouragement of the formation of a formal opposition and multi-party politics in 1945–1947. Collectively, these were indeed choices that made the Turkey we know today.

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Erik-Jan Zürcher

Erik-Jan Zürcher was awarded his Ph.D. at Leiden University in 1984. He has taught at Nijmegen and Amsterdam Universities and has twice been attached to the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam (1990–99 as senior research fellow and 2008–2012 as general director). From 1997 to 2018 he was full professor of Turkish Studies at Leiden University, and from2018 to 2020 he served as director of the Leiden Institute of Area Studies. He has been a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2008 and affiliate professor at Stockholm University from 2013 to 2016. He has written or edited twenty books, mostly on Turkey in the twentieth century. His primary focus is on the transition from empire to nation state. His Turkey: A Modern History has been translated into ten languages, and been reprinted in Turkey over 25 times.

Notes

1 Dumont, Mustafa Kemal, and Ahmad, The Making.

2 Tarik Zafer Tunaya analyzed the assembly in a seminal article: “The Establishment,” in which he interprets the council of commissars as a cabinet. However, this is, in my view, incorrect.

3 At the time, both Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were created under the premise of national self-determination, even though, as it turned out several decades later, the multiple nations living in these states eventually desired their own nation-states.

4 Cf. Zürcher, “The Vocabulary.”

5 Michael Finefrock studied this change in: From Sultanate to Republic.

6 Zürcher, Political Opposition.

7 Pamuk, Türkiye’nin 200 Yıllık, 185–8.

8 The pioneer study was Weiker, Political Tutelage. A more recent study is Yetkin, Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası. Fethi Okyar’s own memoirs of this (for him traumatic) episode can be found in Okyar and Seyitdanlıoğlu, Fethi Okyar’ın Anıları. Cem Emrence (99. Günlük) represents the state of the art on the subject.

9 Karpat, Turkey’s Politics, 242.