The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  Once, however, the tide started to turn in Russia, and Germany looked as if it might be defeated, Ankara readjusted its stance. While continuing to supply the Third Reich with the chromite on which the Nazi war machine depended, Turkey now also entertained overtures from Britain and America. But resisting Anglo-American pressures to come down on the Allied side, Inönü made it clear that his lodestar remained anti-communism. The USSR was the main enemy, and Turkey expressly opposed any British or American strategy that risked altering Germany’s position as a bastion against it, hoping London and Washington would make a separate peace with Berlin, for future joint action against Moscow. Dismayed at the prospect of unconditional surrender, Inönü only issued a token declaration of war on Germany after the Allies made it a condition of getting a seat at the United Nations, a week before the deadline they had set for doing so expired, in late February 1945. No Turkish shot was fired in the fight against fascism.

  Peace left the regime in a precarious position. Internally, it was now thoroughly detested by the majority of the population, which had suffered from a steep fall in living standards as prices soared, taxes increased and forced labour was extorted in the service of its military build-up. Inflation had affected all classes, sparing not even bureaucrats, and the wealth tax had made even the well-off jumpy. Externally, the regime had been compromised by its affair with Nazism—which post-war Soviet diplomacy was quick to point out—and its refusal to contribute to Allied victory even after it had become certain.

  Aware of his unpopularity, in early 1945 Inönü attempted to redress it with a belated redistribution of land, only to provoke a revolt in the ranks of the ruling party, without gaining credibility in the countryside. Something more was needed. Six months later, he announced that there would be free elections. Turkey, for twenty years a dictatorship, would now become a democracy. Inönü’s move was designed to kill two birds with one stone. Abroad, it would restore his regime to legitimacy, as a respectable partner of the West, taking its place in the comity of free nations led by the United States, and entitled to the benefits of that status. At home, it could neutralize discontent by offering an outlet for opposition without jeopardizing the stability of his rule. For he had no intention of permitting a true contest.

  In 1946, a flagrantly crooked election returned the ruling Republican People’s Party with a huge majority over a Democratic Party led by the defectors who had broken with it over the agrarian bill. The fraud was so scandalous that, domestically, rather than repairing the reputation of the regime, it damaged it yet further. Internationally, however, it did the trick. Turkey was duly proclaimed a pillar of the West, the Truman Doctrine picking it out for economic and military assistance to withstand the Soviet threat, and Marshall Plan aid began to pour in. Economic recovery was rapid, Turkey posting high rates of growth over the next four years.

  These laurels, however, did not appease the Turkish masses. Inönü, after first appointing the leading pro-fascist politician in his party—responsible for the worst repression under Kemal—as premier, then attempted to steal the more liberal clothes of the Democrats, with concessions to the market and to religion. It was of no avail. When elections were held in 1950, it was impossible to rig them as before, and by now—so Inönü imagined—unnecessary: the combination of his own prestige and relief from war-time rigours would carry the day for the RPP anyway. He was stunned when voters rejected his regime by a wide margin, putting the Democrats into power with a parliamentary majority, honestly gained, as large as the dishonest one he had engineered for himself four years earlier. The dictatorship Kemal had installed was over.

  7

  In a famous essay, one of the most acute self-critical reflections to emerge out of any of the youthful revolts of the sixties, Murat Belge—a writer unrivalled in his intelligence of the political sensibility of his generation—told his contemporaries on the Turkish Left, as yet another military intervention came thudding down over more than a decade of ardent hopes, that they had misunderstood their own country, in a quite fundamental way. They had thought it a Third World society among others, ready for liberation by guerrilla uprisings in the towns or in the mountains. The paradox they had failed to grasp was that although the Turkey of the time was indeed ‘a relatively backward country economically . . . and socially’—with a per capita income like that of Algeria and Mexico, and adult literacy at a mere 60 per cent—it was ‘relatively advanced politically’, having known ‘a two-party system in which opposing leaders have changed office a number of times after a popular mandate, something which has never happened in Japan for example’.47 In short, Turkey was unusual in being a poor and ill-educated society that had yet remained a democracy as generally understood, if with violent intermissions—Belge was writing in the aftermath of the military putsch of 1980.

  A quarter of a century later, his diagnosis still holds. Since the end of the Kemalist order stricto sensu in 1950, Turkey has on the whole been a land of regular elections, of competing parties and uncertain outcomes, and alternating governments. This is a much longer record than Spain, Portugal or Greece—even, as to alternation, Italy—can boast of. What accounts for it? Historians point to earlier moments of constitutional debate or parliamentary contest, from late Ottoman times to mid-period Kemalism. But, however respectable in memory, such episodes were too fragile and fleeting to have been much of a foundation for the stability of a modern Turkish democracy now approaching its seventh decade. An alternative approach is more conjunctural, emphasizing the tactical reasons why Inönü made his feint towards democracy in 1946, and the miscalculations that ensued from it in 1950. But that leaves unanswered the question why thereafter democracy became so entrenched that even serial military interventions could not shake its acceptance as the political norm in Turkey. A more structural explanation is needed.

  During the Second World War, Inönü had steered his country in much the way Franco had done Spain, tempering passive affinity and assistance to the Nazi regime with a prudent attentisme, allowing for better relations with the West once it looked as if Germany would be defeated. But after the war the situation of the two dictatorships, though equally anti-communist, differed. Spain was at the other end of Europe from the USSR, while Turkey was geo-politically a front-line state in the Cold War, with a long history of hostilities with Russia to boot. So there was both a more pressing interest in Washington, and a more pressing need in Ankara, for a close understanding between the two than there was in the case of Madrid, and hence for a better ideological and institutional alignment of Turkey with the West.

  That in itself, however, would not have been enough to bring democracy to Turkey. American tolerance, even welcome, of authoritarian regimes in the Free World, so long as they were staunch military and political supports of Washington, would be a constant feature of the Cold War. Within a decade, after all, Franco too was hosting US bases. What really set Turkey apart from Spain was something deeper. The Spanish dictatorship was the product of a bitter civil war, pitting class against class, social revolution against counter-revolution, which the Nationalist crusade had needed German and Italian help to win. There were still a few guerrillas in the mountains resisting the regime in 1945. After the war democratization was an unthinkable option for Franco: it would have risked a political volcano erupting again, in which neither army, property nor church would have been secure.

  Thirty years later, his regime had accomplished its historical task. Economic development had transformed Spanish society, radical mass politics had been extinguished, and democracy was no longer hazardous for capital. So completely had the dictatorship done its work that a toothless Bourbon socialism was incapable even of restoring the republic it had overthrown. In this Spanish laboratory lay a wider parabola of the future, which the Latin American dictators of the seventies—Pinochet is the exemplary case—would repeat, architects of a political order in which electors, grateful for civic liberties finally restored, could be trusted henceforward not to tam
per with the social order. Today the Spanish template has become the general formula of freedom: no longer making the world safe for democracy, but democracy safe for this world.

  Turkey could become a democracy so much earlier than Spain, a more advanced society—let alone other countries as economically and socially backward as it in 1950—because there was no comparably explosive class conflict to be contained, nor radical politics to be crushed. Most peasants owned land; workers were few; intellectuals marginal; a Left hardly figured. The lines of fissure in society, at that stage still concreted over, were ethnic more than class in nature. In these conditions, there was small risk of any upsets from below. The elites could settle accounts between themselves without fear of letting loose forces they could not control. That degree of security would not last. In due course there would be both social and ethnic turbulence, as popular unrest made itself felt; when it did so, the state would react violently.

  But, sociologically speaking, the basic parameters set by the first election of 1950 have remained in place to this day. Turkish democracy has been broken at intervals, but never for long, because it is anchored in a Centre-Right majority that has remained, in one form after another, unbroken. Across four historical cycles, an underlying stability has distinguished Turkish political life. From 1950 to 1960 the country was ruled by Adnan Menderes as premier, at the head of a Democratic Party whose vote, 58 per cent of the electorate at its height, was never less than 47 per cent; still giving it four-fifths of the seats in the National Assembly, and control of the presidency, at the end of its life-span.

  The birth of the party marked the moment at which the Turkish elite split, with the growth of a bourgeoisie less dependent on the state than in the pre-war period, no longer willing to accept bureaucratic direction of the economy, and eager for the spoils of political power. Its leaders were all former members of the Kemalist establishment, typically with stakes in the private sector: Menderes was a wealthy cotton planter, Bayar—president after 1950—a leading banker. But its followers were, overwhelmingly, the peasant masses who formed a majority of the nation. The recipe of its rule was a paradox rare in the Third World: a liberal populism, combining commitment to the market and an appeal to tradition in equal measure.48 In its deployment of each, rhetoric outran reality without quite losing touch with it. On coming to power, Menderes’s first key move—he did not even consult Parliament—was to dispatch troops to Korea, earning high marks in Washington and the rewards of entry into NATO and a spate of dollars for Turkish services. His regime used American assistance to supply cheap credit and assure high prices to farmers, building roads to expand cultivation, importing machinery to modernize cash-crop production, and relaxing controls on industry. In the slipstream of the post-war boom in the West, growth accelerated and per capita incomes jumped in the countryside.

  This alone would have been enough to secure the popularity of the Democratic government. But Menderes played not just to the pocket, but to the sensibility of his rural constituency. Sensing his isolation after the war, Inönü had already started to edge away from Kemal’s policies towards religion. The Democrats were a good deal less inhibited: new mosques shot up, religious schools multiplied, instruction in Islam became standard in state education, calls to prayer were to be heard in Arabic again, brotherhoods were legalized and opponents denounced as infidels. The equation of Turkish with Muslim identity, for long a tacit substratum of Kemalism, acquired bolder expression. This was enough to antagonize sectors of the elite committed to official versions of secularism, but it did not signify any break with the legacy of the late Ottoman or early Republican state. Menderes, indeed, went further than Inönü had ever done in erecting Kemal into an untouchable symbol of the nation, putting him in a mausoleum in Ankara and making any injury to his memory a crime punishable with severe penalties at law.

  More gravely, the integral nationalism of the inter-war period was given a new impetus, when Menderes—solicited by Britain—took up the cause of the Turkish minority in Cyprus, reclaiming rights of intervention in the island relinquished at Lausanne. In 1955, as a three-power conference on its future was meeting in London, his regime unleashed a savage pogrom against the Greek community in Istanbul. Formally exempted from the population transfers of 1923, this had dwindled rapidly under state pressure in the following years, but still numbered over 100,000 in the mid-thirties, and remained a prosperous and lively part of the city’s life. In a single night, gangs organized by the government smashed and burnt its churches, schools, shops, businesses, hospitals, beating and raping as they went. Menderes and Bayar, lurking in the suburb of Florya, boarded a train for Ankara as flames lit up the night sky.49 It was Turkey’s Kristallnacht. Continuities with the past were not merely ideological, but even individual. In 1913 Bayar had been an operative of the CUP’s Special Organization, responsible for ethnic cleansing of Greeks from the Smyrna region, before the First World War had even begun. Within a few years, only a handful of Greeks were left in Istanbul.

  This time, however, there was shock in the press and public opinion, and unease even in establishment quarters at Menderes’s methods. In 1957 he cruised to a third electoral victory, but with external debt, the public deficit and inflation now running high, his economic performance had lost its shine, and he turned to increasingly tough repressive measures, targeting the press and parliamentary opposition, to maintain his position. Overconfident, brutal and not very bright, he eventually set up a committee to investigate his opponents, and imposed censorship on its proceedings. He had consolidated his power by taking Turkey into the Korean War. A decade later, inspired by students in Korea who had just overthrown Syngman Rhee, whom the war had been fought to defend, students in Ankara took to the streets against his move towards a dictatorship. The universities in Ankara and Istanbul were shut down, to no avail, amid successive nights of rioting. After a month of disturbances, detachments of the army finally intervened.50 Early one morning Menderes, his cabinet and deputies were arrested, and a committee of some forty officers took over the government.

  The coup of 1960 was not the work of the Turkish high command, but of conspirators of lesser rank, who had been planning to oust Menderes for some time. Some had radical social ideas, others were authoritarian nationalists. But few had any clear programme beyond dissolution of the Democratic Party, and retribution for its leaders, who were tried on a variety of charges, among them responsibility for the pogrom of 1955, for which Menderes was executed, though Bayar spared. In the army itself, a large number of conservative officers were purged, but the high command soon reasserted itself, crushing attempts to take matters further. In a temporarily fluid situation, in which the military were not united, a new Constitution was produced by jurists from the universities, and ratified by referendum. Designed to prevent the abuses of power that had marked Menderes’s rule, it created a Constitutional Court and second chamber, introduced proportional representation, strengthened the judiciary, guaranteed civil liberties, and academic and press freedoms. It also, however, created a National Security Council dominated by the military, which acquired wide-ranging powers.

  With these institutions in place, the second cycle of post-war Turkish politics was set in motion. As soon as elections were held, it became clear that the voting bloc put together by the Democrats, though at first distributed across a number of successor formations, still commanded a comfortable majority of the country. By 1965, it was consolidated behind the Justice Party led by Süleyman Demirel, which alone took 53 per cent of the vote. Thirty years later, Demirel would still be at large, in the presidential palace. A hydraulic engineer with American connexions—Eisenhower Fellowship; consultant for Morrison-Knudsen—who had been picked for bureaucratic office by Menderes, Demirel was no improvement in personality or principles on his patron. But the fate of his predecessor made him more cautious, and the Constitution of 1961, though he would tamper with it, limited his ability to reproduce the same style of rule.

  In
power, Demirel like Menderes benefitted from fast growth, distributed favours in the countryside, made resonant appeals to village piety, and whipped up a virulent anti-communism. But there were two differences. The populism of the Justice Party was no longer liberal. The sixties were a period of development economics throughout most of the world, and the authors of the 1960 coup, vaguely influenced by Nasserism, were no exception to the rule, seeking a strong dirigiste state. Demirel inherited a turn towards standard import-substituting industrialization, and for electoral purposes made the most of it. The second change was more fundamental. However burning the resentment of his cadres at the army for dethroning the Democrats, and however close to the secularist bone his religious histrionics might come, at any sign of unrest in the barracks Demirel quickly deferred to the military.

  This in itself, however, was not enough to secure a dominance of the political scene otherwise comparable to that of Menderes. The Republican People’s Party, trounced three times in the fifties, posed little challenge. When Inönü finally shuffled off the stage in the early seventies, the party was taken over by Bülent Ecevit, who briefly attempted to make it a Centre-Left alternative, before collapsing into the arms of the military as figurehead of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, and ending up as an empty fossil of plaintive chauvinism. The mechanics of coalition-building in a Parliament which no longer delivered the first-past-the-post landslides of old made him premier three times, but the Kemalist bloc he inherited never came near to winning an electoral majority of the electorate,51 sinking to a mere 20 per cent of the vote by the time he finally exited the scene.