Turkey

views updated

TURKEY.

THE GREAT WAR AND THE EARLY REPUBLICAN PERIOD
TURKEY SINCE WORLD WAR II
BIBLIOGRAPHY

On 29 October 1923 the newly formed Grand National Assembly of Turkey, meeting in Ankara under the presidency of Mustafa Kemal (Kemal Atatürk after 1934, 1881–1938), proclaimed the Republic of Turkey. Ankara, the new capital in the heart of Anatolia, was a midsized city of twenty-five thousand inhabitants and located on the Anatolian railway network.

THE GREAT WAR AND THE EARLY REPUBLICAN PERIOD

In 1914 the Ottoman Empire, with its capital at Constantinople and a multi-religious and multiethnic population of roughly twenty-six million, entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers by attacking Russian port cities on the Black Sea coast. The Ottoman leadership viewed the outbreak of war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia on 28 July as an opportunity to reenter the international states system. With decades of military defeats and territorial losses behind them, Ottoman statesmen hoped to restore the empire's security by forming alliances with two of the Great Powers, the German and the Austro-Hungarian empires. Although some scholars have viewed Ottoman intervention as an attempt to create a pan-Turkist or pan-Islamist empire, the Ottoman decision is best understood as a pragmatic one. The Ottoman leaders had hoped for the rapid conclusion of the war, followed by a period of stability during which the Ottoman Empire would enjoy the benefits of military and diplomatic allies. Instead, the war resulted in the deaths of millions of Ottoman soldiers and civilians. Military wartime casualties have been estimated at 1.2 million; total mobilization approached some 2.9 million men during the four-year-long war. No reliable estimates exist for civilian casualties, however.

In the first major Ottoman land operation, the Third Army pushed against Russian lines in an offensive for the Caucasus region in December 1914. Within a few weeks, the Ottoman campaign ended in clear defeat that cost the Third Army perhaps as many as three quarters of its men. On 24 April 1915 the Ottoman government closed down all Armenian political organizations in the Ottoman capital and arrested more than two hundred leaders of the Armenian community, followed by many more arrests in the following months. On 27 May 1915 it announced the relocation of all non-Muslim citizens from the empire's eastern Anatolian provinces, by train or on foot. The Ottoman central government's intentions toward the Armenian population represent one of the most contested chapters of the twentieth century. Historians have described the Armenian deportations, which resulted in the deaths of vast numbers, as a policy of genocide intended to prevent the possibility of an Armenian nation-state on Ottoman territory, and as part of a more ambitious plan of demographic restructuring aimed at Turkish nation-building. They date this ideological disposition to the years before the war, emphasize the sporadic violence against Armenians by irregular units in late autumn 1914, and put the government's decision to implement a violent restructuring as early as mid-March 1915. The countervailing view argues that the government's policy aimed at removing a population that was hostile toward the war effort and had been collaborating with an enemy power, Russia. Government efforts to protect the deportees, some add, were thwarted by communal violence that broke out spontaneously among local populations. Armenian casualties—through disease, malnutrition, and the hardships of war as well as violence—were no greater than Muslim casualties.

During the years 1915 and 1916 Ottoman forces achieved temporary military triumphs with the successful defense at the Gallipoli peninsula by throwing back an Entente amphibious campaign, and with the victory at Kut-al-Amara, south of Baghdad, where the Ottomans not only defeated a British army but also captured thousands of its men, including its commander, General Sir Charles Townshend (1861–1924). British negotiations with Sharif Hussein (1853–1931) of Mecca and promises of an independent Arab state that included almost all of the Arabic speaking parts of southwest Asia, meanwhile, led to the sharif's support of the British war effort in the Middle East and the so-called Arab Revolt of 1916. Thanks in part to the outbreak of revolution in Russia and that country's subsequent withdrawal from the war, the Ottomans were able to hold their lines through much of 1917. By autumn, however, British forces were making considerable gains, moving north from Egypt and capturing Jerusalem on 9 December. Unable to halt the large-scale Entente offensive in the fall of 1918, the Ottomans lost possession of Damascus, Beirut, and Aleppo. With an additional British army approaching from Bulgaria, the Ottoman government initiated negotiations that resulted in an armistice signed in Mudros on the island of Lemnos, on 30 October 1918.

Following the Mudros Armistice, the decades-old Ottoman fear of territorial partition and occupation became a reality, as the Entente powers and their allies designated the various parts of the empire under their control. As leaders of the wartime government escaped, Mehmed VI (r. 1918–1922), the new Ottoman sultan and caliph, became the head of an Ottoman state with a heavily truncated territory in parts of Anatolia. While the sultan's new government sought to consolidate its tenuous position through collaboration with the Entente, a resistance movement took shape outside the Ottoman capital, organized by officials and supporters of the former government as well as by current officers such as Kazim Karabekir Pasha and Ali Fuad Pasha (Cebesoy). This resistance movement consisted of local Societies for the Defense of National Rights and met in some thirty regional congresses. These societies were committed to the removal of all foreign troops from Anatolian and eastern Thracian territories in Ottoman possession at the time of the Mudros Armistice. They were also resolved to prevent the creation of any state on that territory, be it an Armenian or Kurdish state in eastern Anatolia or a Greek one based on Izmir (Smyrna).

After May 1919 the resistance movement increasingly found embodiment in Mustafa Kemal, a brilliant officer and military hero of the Dardanelles defense at Gallipoli in 1915. At the conclusion of the war, Mustafa Kemal offered his services to the new government of Mehmed VI first as minister of war, then as grand vezir. Turned down both times, Mustafa Kemal was instead appointed to oversee the demobilization of the Ninth Army, a position he resigned upon arrival in eastern Anatolia in May 1919. There he chaired two major congresses, one at Erzurum and one at Sivas, that streamlined the disparate resistance groups and formulated the movement's objectives and the ways to attain these. By this point, the Istanbul government had called for Mustafa Kemal's arrest (and later for his death) and outlawed the movement. The nationalists countered with a religiously based argument by claiming that the sultan-caliph and his government had fallen under the control of the Christian Entente and therefore had lost their ability to exercise sound judgment.

When elections held in December 1919 returned a Chamber of Deputies dominated by supporters of the resistance movement, British forces marched into the Ottoman capital on 16 March 1920 and arrested some 150 politicians and intellectuals, imprisoning them on the island of Malta. In response, the resistance movement elected a new representative body and renamed it the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, convening for the first time in Ankara on 23 April 1920.

Greek troops, backed by the British, had landed in western Anatolia in May 1919 and posed the most immediate threat to the objectives of the resistance movement. In August 1920, moreover, the government of Mehmed VI signed the Treaty of Sèvres, which divided nearly all of Anatolia among the states of Armenia, Georgia, Great Britain, Greece, France, and Italy; provided for an autonomous Kurdish region; and declared Constantinople and the Straits a demilitarized zone. The revision of Sèvres and the liberation of Anatolia henceforth became the rallying cry of the resistance movement. The Russian Bolshevik government's financial and material support of the resistance movement in Anatolia, and France's decision to consolidate its forces in Syria and to withdraw from its Anatolian region, allowed the movement headed by Mustafa Kemal to take control of eastern Anatolia by pushing back Armenian forces to the borders as defined by the Erzurum Congress, and to crush any Kurdish efforts to establish an autonomous region as set forth in the Treaty of Sèvres. These events, in due course referred to as the Turkish War of Independence (1919–1922), culminated in the recapture of Izmir on 9 September 1922 and the withdrawal of Greek forces from both western Anatolia and the part of Thrace claimed by the Kemalists. The new Ankara government, already recognized de facto, signed the Treaty of Lausanne on 24 July 1923 and confirmed Turkey's boundaries as defined by the resistance movement. Throughout the twentieth century, the War of Independence and the absolute necessity to preserve the state's territorial integrity and national sovereignty shaped the policies and identity of modern Turkey.

Both in the abolition of the sultanate in November 1922 and then in the abolition of the caliphate in March 1924, Mustafa Kemal overcame considerable political opposition by those leaders who viewed these offices capable of balancing the new president's increasingly expanding executive powers. In the attempt to build a strong national economy, the new Kemalist government continued the policies of the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress to foster the development of a national, Turkish bourgeoisie. Despite the Ottoman unilateral abrogation of the economic and legal privileges for citizens of Western powers (the so-called capitulations) in September–October 1914, however, the Treaty of Lausanne restricted the young republic's freedom over its foreign trade and froze Turkish import duties at artificially low rates through 1929. As a result, goods from a number of countries including Great Britain, France, Greece, and Italy entered Turkey relatively inexpensively and made it difficult for Turkish manufacturers to produce competitively. In 1929, just when Ankara regained its control over its import tariffs, the worldwide depression caused agricultural prices to plummet, with harrowing results for Turkey, whose population of some fourteen million consisted of more than eleven million—or 80 percent—of citizens earning a livelihood in agriculture. Under the first five-year plan, adopted in 1934, state-developed industry expanded more than 10 percent annually, but still made up a relatively small part of the overall Turkish economy.

Next to the vast modernization projects in education and the economy of the 1920s and 1930s, the Kemalist republic also pursued an active diplomacy in order to integrate Turkey into the post–World War I international order. Among the great powers, Ankara in general was able to establish good relations with the Soviet Union, France, and Germany, whereas relations with Great Britain remained distinctly cool. But the greatest diplomatic successes were achieved in the Balkans. Here the Ankara government signed a Balkan pact in February 1934 with Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia. As early as 1928, Eleutherios Venizelos (1864–1936), the Greek prime minister, paved the way for friendly Greco-Turkish relations by intimating the formation of a two-state federation. Mustafa Kemal considered this idea and even suggested that the future federation would have two capitals, Ankara and Athens, with Constantinople/Istanbul as its cultural center. In 1936, at the Montreaux Convention, moreover, Turkey gained the right to militarize the Straits region once again. When Atatürk died on 10 November 1938, Prime Minister ?smet ?nönü (1884–1973) succeeded to the presidency, and he initially maintained the authoritarian political system as built by his predecessor.

TURKEY SINCE WORLD WAR II

Not unlike the Ottoman Empire during the early days of World War I, Turkey represented a potentially highly valuable ally for its geo-strategic position to both of the warring sides on the eve of World War II. During May–October 1939, Ankara signed agreements with Great Britain and France, partly in exchange for the disputed region of Alexandretta (Hatay), then part of the French mandate in Syria. Turkish non-intervention in World War II resulted from the experience and outcome of World War I and the relatively weak Turkish Armed Forces. Despite a military budget that had reached 40 percent of the state's entire expenditures, the Turkish Armed Forces by no means inspired confidence among the Turkish political and military elite. As a result, Ankara pursued a policy that allowed it to wait out decisive developments in the war before committing to the side of the Allies in 1944–1945. In the final months of the war, facing Soviet demands for concessions in Eastern Anatolia and the Straits region, Turkey tightened its relationship with the United States, marking the beginning of Ankara's reorientation that would not be questioned until the 1990s. Washington, moreover, embraced the new partner as a Cold War ally against the Soviet Union and formalized the relationship through the Truman Doctrine in March 1947.

Ankara's new alignment with the United States and the democratic governments of Western Europe set the stage for a new political culture domestically. The one-party rule that left little room for political opposition or basic criticism of the state, vital shortages and inflation, high taxation, and even expropriation of private property during the war years served to build up social and political pressure that could no longer be contained at the war's end. In June 1945 a small number of prominent civilians in a public letter demanded that the ?nönü government end authoritarianism and implement reforms that would form the basis for a democratic society with a capitalist economic system. The leaders of this new opposition, Celal Bayar, Refik Koraltan, Fuad Köprülü, and Adnan Menderes, formed the Democrat Party in January 1946 and won a considerable minority of assembly seats six months later, despite heavy vote rigging. As a vociferous critic of the government in the assembly, the Democrat Party forced the government to make important changes by liberalizing decades-old political and economic regulations: a reduction of the state's role in the economy, the opening up to foreign investment, greater freedom of the press, and toleration of religious practices in public life.

The transition from a one-party to a multiparty system required the direct intervention of President ?nönü, however, whose public recognition of the new party granted the opposition its necessary legitimacy. To the great surprise of many, the new party swept the general elections of 1950 (and again in 1954), ending the twenty-seven-year rule of Atatürk's Republican People's Party. The Democrat Party, led by Bayar and Menderes, fostered an anti-elitist and anti-statist image, and it attempted to keep in check the traditional centers of power—the state bureaucracy and the military—by empowering the private commercial sector, university administrators and students, and religious groups.

During the early 1950s, these policies appeared to be the winning formula, and the Democrat Party seemed to be delivering its promises of converting Turkey into a prosperous and democratic state. Fueled by the injection of American aid, agricultural production underwent mechanization, which increased the acreage of cultivated land and led to an overall boom in the economy. Once the economic success of the early years halted and then reversed its trend, with ever-greater rates of inflation and national deficits, the new government found itself facing the old military-bureaucratic elite of the Republican People's Party. That elite was now gradually regaining the support of an economically discontented populace, especially those on fixed incomes. The economic crisis of the late 1950s resulted primarily from the lack of capital, both in terms of foreign investments and in terms of domestic investors willing to take over businesses formerly run by the state. An economic aid package granted to Ankara by the International Monetary Fund in 1958 might have bolstered the economy and saved the Menderes government. But when the Democrat Party began issuing harsh regulations to silence any opposition, the army carried out a coup d'etat on 27 May 1960 by occupying government buildings in the capital and in Istanbul and arresting all prominent members of the government, including President Bayar and Prime Minister Menderes. Menderes, along with other Democrat Party leaders, received the death penalty and was executed, an act that many contemporary observers deemed hasty and unnecessary.

Since the Truman Doctrine and Turkey's entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1952, the Turkish military had been both rapidly modernized and exposed to the standards and practices of the West and its armies. The 1960 coup, led by young army officers and backed by the retired general Cemal Gürsel, had been carried out in the name of defending the constitution. The leaders of the coup intended to restore political power back to the traditional ruling elite, the alliance of state bureaucracy and army officers. To protect the constitution from subversion in the future, the new guard charged a commission of law professors with redrafting the constitution in a manner that would, for the first time, create a constitutional system equipped with legal checks and balances. The new constitution, presented in early 1961 with general elections scheduled for October, appeared to pave the way for a genuinely pluralistic political system. The elections of 1961, however, returned to parliament the successor parties to the old Democrat Party, frustrating the attempts of the military-bureaucratic elite to reclaim the political control over government. In 1965 the main successor party, the Justice Party—with Süleyman Demirel (b. 1924), a political novice and engineer by profession, as its leader—consolidated its grip over parliament by carrying the majority vote in that year's elections.

As in the past, the goal of governments during the 1960s and the following decades was to guide Turkey's transition from a largely agricultural, developing country into a modern, industrialized one. New protective tariffs allowed for the emergence of private companies manufacturing consumer goods while the continuing mechanization in agriculture resulted in migrations from the countryside to urban centers such as Ankara and Istanbul. In the cities, many of the migrants settled in makeshift housing, and employment was often hard to come by. One alternative, however, became emigration to Germany, which began filling its post–World War II labor shortage with workers from Turkey and other Mediterranean basin countries. For the Turkish economy, too, this migration brought clear advantages, as it helped to cool down the employment market and initiated a flow of remittances in much-valued hard currency. For many Turks, these "guest workers" became in due time a large window to the West, introducing Western experiences as well as consumer goods upon their return. Related to the increasing levels of unemployment in the cities and the countryside, the 1960s also witnessed the flourishing of new ideological trends. Intellectuals, academics, and students hotly debated the reasons for Turkey's economic underdevelopment, a discussion that has remained contested into the twenty-first century. Those on the Left blamed Western imperialism for making the Turkish economy dependent on those driving the world economy, and they perceived a solution in Marxist revolution. Others located the reasons for slow industrial progress in the ancient but persistent structures of the Ottoman state. On the extreme right, the party of the army officer Alpaslan Türke? established an ultranationalist movement that used militant tactics to intimidate its opponents. By 1969 and 1970, this confrontation turned violent, with clashes in the streets, bombings, and hostage taking.

The 1961 constitution also provided for the creation of a "National Security Council," a new government department of top military leaders with supervisory powers over national affairs. Since its establishment in March 1962, this body has been considered by many to be the real arbiter of Turkish politics. In March 1971 the army dismissed the government to put an end to the violence and public disorder, an intervention initially welcomed in wide circles. Subsequently, however, it became clear that the coup aimed in large part at centralizing the powers of the state by shutting down leftist organizations and ending the near autonomy enjoyed by the television and radio networks as well as the print media. Once the army had taken over the reigns of government, it discovered how fractured the political landscape had become. The period of weak coalitions that followed, dominated by the parties of Demirel and Bülent Ecevit (b. 1925) and the smaller, religiously oriented party of Necmettin Erbakan (b. 1926), only prepared the ground for yet another military coup d'etat on 12 September 1980. The creation of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) by Abdullah Öcalan (b. 1948) in 1978 and its activities further added to the state's increasing instability. In all, the violence of the 1970s cost the lives of more than two thousand individuals, mainly activists associated with extremist organizations but also including prominent politicians.

The worldwide recession brought about by the international oil crisis of 1973–1974 produced acute shortages in foreign currency as the cost of energy tripled and the already low demand for Turkish goods dropped further. By the end of the decade, the Ecevit government negotiated aid packages with the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the World Bank. These aid packages were extended in return for deep restructuring measures that would transform Turkish society and the economy over the next two decades. These measures called on Ankara to cut subsidies and government spending and to lift restrictions on foreign trade. Those groups who would be affected adversely by such reforms put up considerable opposition, and some historians have argued that the 1980 coup aimed precisely at overcoming this resistance and pushing through the reform package. Others have explained the coup by pointing to the increasing politicization of Islam over the previous decade, buoyed by the Islamic Revolution in 1979. In the aftermath of the 1980 coup, the military by no means eliminated religion from public life. Rather, the officers strove to control Islam by making it part of the state and to create a "Turkish-Muslim synthesis" that would serve as the foundation for a modern Turkish identity.

Under the leadership of Turgut Özal (1927–1993), Turkey underwent a drastic liberalization of its economic relations in the 1980s and early 1990s and shifted from being an importer of manufactured goods and technologies to an exporter of manufactured textile, leather, glass, and steel products. To a great extent, this shift was made possible by large Western loans, as Turkey's geostrategic position had become critical once again following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq War, and the First Persian Gulf War. In the 1980s Ankara's international position differed sharply from the 1970s, when the United States, in particular, withdrew its support in response to Turkey's invasion of Cyprus in 1974.

In the aftermath of the 1980 coup, more than 120,000 individuals were arrested for their political activities or views. Reports of torture and hunger strikes in Turkish prisons and the military's fullfledged campaign against the PKK in southeastern Turkey brought Ankara repeated international criticism. When Turkey applied for full membership in the European Communities (EC, later European Union, EU) in April 1987, it became clear that human rights, in addition to economic issues, would be a large factor in that process. And since the 1980s Ankara has recorded some improvement in granting both expanded personal freedoms and minority rights, such as Kurdish language education.

The clear election victory of the Justice and Development Party in November 2002 marked the end of ineffective coalition governments of the previous decade. While the election of a conservative party to the helm of government caused many observers to fear the Islamization of state and society at the expense of secular democracy, the Justice and Development Party, led by Recep Tayyip Erdo?an (b. 1954), has so far shown itself committed to the democratizing and pro-Western policies of its immediate predecessors, and entry into the European Union has remained a principal policy goal. The Erdo?an government's most momentous policy question arose in early 2003, when it had to decide on whether to support the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The parliament's vote against the participation in the invasion, which was highly unpopular among the populace, damaged U.S.-Turkish relations, but it placed Ankara in the camp of most of its European neighbors.