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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This is an essay, which owes a lot to Clement Dodd of the University of Hull. It was he who first encouraged me to write a book on Turkey. Although his original suggestion for the topic was somewhat different from the end result he has nevertheless consistently provided me with the necessary moral and academic support.
Over the years my work on Turkish bureaucracy has led me to the conclusion that the political role of that bureaucracy could not be explained in terms of the paradigms formulated to explain the bureaucrat-politician relationship in developing countries. For Turkey a more historical approach was needed which compared Turkey with the Anglo-Saxon and Continental European countries. During the last few years as I have been groping for such an approach in my lectures at Bogaziçi University, my students have graciously put up with me, and, by their comments and criticisms, have often showed me the light. In any case, I think that I saw the light.
My work on the present essay greatly benefited from my sojourn during the academic year 1981-1982 at the University of Connecticut as a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor. I am grateful to Howard Reed, David E. RePasse, Rudolf Takes, Ramon Knaurhause and Florence Selleck, who together made my stay there very pleasant and profitable. I should also acknowledge the invaluable support provided by the American Research Institute in Turkey.
Clement Dodd read the whole, and Frank Tachau and Andrew Mango part, of the manuscript. I have greatly benefited from their remarks. The errors, of different proportions that remain are due to my stubbornness.
In this essay at places I have drawn heavily from some of the material I have recently published. In this regard I am indebted to the publishers of International Journal of Turkish Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Orient, International Political Science Review, Comparative Politics, Journal of the American Institute for the Study of Middle Eastern Civilization, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey, and Modern Turkey: Continuity and Change, for permission to use this material.
Fulya Ertek skillfully typed the manuscript with the assistance of Ülker Özür. I am grateful for their patience.
My greatest debt of gratitude is as always to my family. They have masterfully ignored the whole event.
Bebek, Istanbul, 1985.
Chapter I
Introduction
One student of the Turkish political system has noted that during the last thirty years, Turkey has successfully replaced an authoritarian-bureaucratic single-party regime by a multi-party system influenced by peripheral forces, and, furthermore, that Turkey has begun to show signs of developing a new party system based on functional cleavages.1 Another student of Turkish politics has suggested that the political system in Turkey has moved from a structural emphasis on tutelary control to a more open and competitive system; he has also advanced the view that if effective, yet democratic, political development could succeed anywhere it would be in Turkey.2
Political democracy, however, has been in trouble in Turkey during recent decades. Since 1960 Turkey has faced three military interventions. Political fragmentation and ideological polarization reached a particular pitch during the 1970s. After 1973 increased street violence and civil strife were accompanied by incessant bickering among the coalition partners in government. During this period political conflicts frequently ended in immobilism. Such a state of affairs has been in sharp contrast to the smooth political development implied by the somewhat optimistic evaluations referred to above.
On the other hand, attempts at explaining political instability in terms of ‘growing pains’ theory, domination of personalistic factions and communalistic conflicts over government policy, and/or in terms of political culture alone — factors considered to be causes of political instability in developing countries — do not appear to be relevant in the case of Turkey.3
The initial institutionalization pattern of the Ottoman Empire was that of a well-organized ruling centre that could easily extract resources from the periphery, and wage successful wars.
Following the degeneration of these early institutions, the administrative and political institutions of the Ottoman polity were streamlined; this began with the Reform Period of 1839-1876 and continued thereafter. During the single-party years of the Republican regime (1923-1945), Ismet Inönü (prime minister for most of the 1923-1935 period, and president from 1938 to 1950) was particularly instrumental in bureaucratizing and systematizing the government. In fact, Inönü frequently clashed with the charismatic president Atatürk,4 when the latter wished to interfere in day-to-day governmental affairs by circumventing the usual bureaucratic channels.5 The longevity of the political party tradition in Turkey, which dates back to the Young Turk era of 1908-1918, also contributed to a relatively high level of party system institutionalization. Finally, it should not be forgotten that Turkey has had seven completely free and unhampered general elections, which in some cases were followed by a transfer of power.
Given the level of institutionalization of Turkish politics and the longevity of the Turkish experience with a multi-party system, to explain recent political developments by calling them ‘growing pains’ would be too simplistic. Besides, such a blanket explanation would not explain why the 1961-1965 period of coalition governments did not descend to the ‘politics of the absurd’ that we have witnessed during the more recent (1975-1977) Nationalist Front governments.6
The last point would also render less than persuasive the argument that the Turkish case may be explained as yet another example of the domination of personalistic factions and communalistic conflicts over governmental policy. According to this view, the political elites themselves are the major sources of instability. Intra-elite conflict in these countries has a massing effect that has traditionally been associated with segmentary …
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