The Ottoman Legacy and Turkish Politics.

• Author: HEPER, METIN

"The absence of civil society in Turkey was an inheritance from the Ottoman Empire, where political, economic and social power coalesced in the center."

Continuity rather than change characterizes Turkish political culture. Ottoman political norms emerged and developed during the many centuries of the Empire. They persist today; affecting numerous aspects of contemporary Turkish politics. This article first presents an overview of the important milestones in Turkish history; from the foundation of the Ottoman Empire to the present. Second, it points out several lines of continuity in the Ottoman and the Republican political cultures. Third, it examines the impact of the Ottoman legacy on Turkish democracy. Finally; it addresses the question of why; until recently, continuity rather than change has characterized Turkish politics.

The Ottoman Empire was founded at the end of the 14th century and reached its zenith in the 15th century. At the time, it was one of greatest empires of the world, stretching from the Caucasus to the Balkans to North Africa. From the second half of the 16th century until the end of the 19th century; the Empire slowly lost momentum, during what is now referred to as the Period of Decline. First, the territorial expansion of the Empire came to an end. Then, the Empire began to lose territory steadily. During this second period, the ruling institutions underwent changes as well. Among other things, the palace, at the apex of which stood the sultan, showed signs of losing its dominant position in the polity. Meanwhile, religious institutions and the military gained ground.

In this second period, the Ottomans remained oblivious to the intellectual, economic and technological transformations that were taking place in Europe. Great efforts were made to revive the governmental structure of earlier centuries. Not surprisingly, this strategy did not prevent the Empire from losing further ground, literally and metaphorically, to its adversaries in Europe. Because of this decline, from the end of the 18th century onward, the Ottomans tried to reform first their public bureaucracy and then their military, the Janissary Corps, by emulating their counterparts in Europe. The Westernizing reformers faced stiff opposition from the Islamist traditionalists, and they were only partially successful.

With the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the Westernizing reformers gained control over the country. Consequently, in the 1920s and 1930s, the founders of the Republic instigated a far-reaching cultural transformation to substitute enlightened reasoning for Islamic dogma. This period was followed by political transformations in the mid-1940s with the introduction of a multi-party democracy. The third important transformation in Republican Turkey came in the early 1980s, when the import-substitution economy was replaced with an export-oriented economy.(1)

SOME DIMENSIONS OF THE OTTOMAN POLITICAL CULTURE

The Ottoman state was formed by warriors who were opposed by eclectic popular culture, heterodox religious sects and threatening rival principalities.(2) Under such circumstances, keeping the realm together became the governing institutions' most critical concern, leading them to emphasize eternal vigilance against foreign enemies and the maintenance of law and order within the country Tursun Beg, Ottoman statesman and historian of the late 15th century, reiterated an Ottoman maxim: "Harmony among men living in society is achieved by statecraft."(3) It was with this concern in mind that the ruling institution in the Ottoman Empire was called Askeriye (the military).(4)

This imperative led the Ottomans to concentrate power in the hands of the sultan. Consequently, in the early Ottoman centuries, the Empire's political organization was marked by personal rule by the sultan. As a result, laws propounded by individual sultans were not considered permanent.(5) As a corollary to this, in the Ottoman Empire, the sultan's will determined a man's status in society. The sultan had the patriarch's duty of hisba; that is, he was considered personally responsible for the welfare of his subjects.(6)

A counter-trend was also present, however. As early as the second part of the 14th century,(7) the state began to separate itself from the sultan. During the Grand Vizierate of Kara Halil Pasha, who ruled from 1368 to 1373, the state treasury was separated from that of the sultan(8) This was followed by the emergence of the so-called adab tradition, which identified the state with established values, not with the reigning ruler.(9) For instance, in the Decree of Alliance (Sened-i Ittifak) of 1808, the "state," not the sultan, was mentioned as a party to the pact between the central government and local notables.(10)

Despite the emergence of the adab tradition, during the Tanzimat (Reform) Period from 1839 to 1876, the modernizing upper-level bureaucrats resorted to personal rule, personally making all critical decisions.(11) At the end of the 19th century, Sultan Abdfilhamit II exercised strong personal rule even while setting up modern schools to train bureaucrats and officers. In his close entourage, he rewarded loyalty rather than merit.(12)

Although the Ottomans could not completely separate the state from the sultan, the state always constituted an important dimension of the Ottoman political culture. In the Ottoman view, the welfare of society depended upon the well-being of the state. Thus, the Ottomans adopted a circular notion of justice according to which just rule contributed to the public welfare which in turn provided the state with the resources necessary to maintain power. (13)

The Ottomans were constantly concerned with the critical question: "How can this state be maintained?" While earlier the locus of the state was the sultan, in the early part of the 19th century the civilian bureaucratic elite, which was by now almost solely guided by the notion of the state's interests, took over much of this role.(14) In the public bureaucracy; the Office of Important Affairs (Muhimme Odasi) was set up. The name of the office was a technical term referring to matters closely related to interests of the state.(15)

This preoccupation with the significance and welfare of the state led to the emergence of a center-periphery cleavage along cultural lines. Those who belonged to the Ruling Institutions--a collective term denoting the palace, the civilian bureaucracy and the military-differed from the rest of the population in their cultural orientation. In addition to their familiarity with the adab tradition, the members of this elite group had a good grasp of the complicated system of customs, behavior and language forming the "Ottoman way"(16)

This Ottoman way included the "Great Culture" of the elite, such as teachings of orthodox Islam and the use of a language permeated with Arabic and Persian words or difficult to understand neologisms. The "Little Culture" of the people was characterized by allegiance to various heterodox Islamic groups and the use of Turkish vernacular.(17) From the 19th century onward, the cultural distance between the elite and ordinary people increased as the elite became increasingly familiar with Western culture. Earlier, despite the fact that the elite and commoners subscribed to different versions of their religion, Islam had served as a vital link between them. In the 19th century, many in the elite secularized and increasingly adopted high European, frequently French, culture while the people maintained their Islamic customs and norms. In the process, the elites came to see the general population as unsophisticated.(18) Because of this, beginning in the 19th century, members of the central elite perceived themselves as far superior to the people.

During the Period of Decline, which lasted from the second part of the 16th century to the 19th century, the Janissary Corps attempted to establish its supremacy in all branches of the Ruling Institutions.(19) In the later stages of that period, the Scribal Corps tried to do the same.(20) Thus, the self-proclaimed supremacy of the elites in the 19th century was not without precedent. With the advent of Westernization, those members of the elite who came to have knowledge about the West considered themselves better able to rule the country than others. They equated their newly acquired knowledge with political legitimacy.(21) Thus, in the early part of the 19th century, the civilian bureaucratic elite--the Old Ottomans--and the modernizing Sultan Mahmud II could push the members of the Religious Institution and the traditional Janissary Corps to the sidelines. In the second part of the century, the Young Ottomans (mostly journalists and midlevel bureaucrats) neutralized the Old Ottomans, as well as the non-modernizing Sultan Abdulaziz, and initiated the First Constitutional Period, which lasted from 1876 to 1909. For the Young Ottomans, parliament was not a venue for popular representation, but a venue for elite debate, where the clash of enlightened opinions led to the formulation of the best policy.(22)

The Young Turks, a group that consisted primarily of members of the bureaucratic and military elites, carried on the political elitism of the Old and Young Ottomans. The Young Turks dominated Ottoman politics from 1912 to 1918. They adopted the views elaborated by Ahmed Riza, an Ottoman intellectual and politician. The Young Turks took Riza's positivist sociology as a source of quasi-revealed authority on social, religious, moral and political problems.(23) They thought that this new knowledge alone provided political legitimacy; finding in the social engineering aspect of Auguste Comte's sociology in particular the legitimation of their own elitist outlook.(24) Yet, they still attributed primary significance to maintaining the unity of the state and believed that the salvation of society resided in the welfare of the state. This...