Contemporary Turkish Politics: Challenges to Democratic Consolidation.

• Author: Laurens, Peter G.
• Position: Review

Ergun Ozbudun (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2000) 144 pp.

The near-decade since communism's demise has seen the passing of an initial euphoria over the sudden flowering of political participation by people in countries where such participation had been previously curtailed. The near universal legitimation of democracy, made possible by the fall of communism, is in no danger of being threatened by other styles of political organization. Nevertheless, a certain wary acknowledgment has set in among academics and laymen alike that the challenges to the consolidation of democracy are perhaps more tenacious than had been imagined. In many erstwhile one-party dictatorships, assemblies of the rubber-stamp kind have been succeeded by legislative bodies, popularly elected but often reduced to a kind of impotence by the self-aggrandizement of many legislators.

The growth of civil society, considered the essential precondition of democratic government, has been stunted by; among other factors, the rise of a mercenary mentality among the emerging elites of nascent democracies, which flourishes in the absence of public trust in political institutions. It is perhaps not surprising that, in the eyes of prescient observers, the heady optimism of Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History" has been replaced by the apocalyptic musings of Robert Kaplan's "The Coming Anarchy"

In Contemporary Turkish Politics: Challenges to Democratic Consolidation, Ergun Ozbudun presents a succinct and clearly argued portrait of the Turkish nation's volatile experience with the democratic process. His narrative interweaves historical insights with comparative insights drawn from other, chiefly Latin American, experiences with democratic development. This linkage of Turkish and Latin American approaches to political participation is perhaps best summed up by a footnote at the end of the book, in which Ozbudun states: "It is interesting that the term accountability has no direct equivalent in Turkish, Spanish, or Portuguese."

Ozbudun devotes one chapter to a roughly chronological view of breakdowns in the political process, each of which culminated in interventions by the military in the machinery of government. The three interventions--1960, 1971 and 1980--were all precipitated by the behavior of key political actors; none were directly caused by flaws in the political infrastructure or society at large, such as class conflicts. The first foray of the military into...