The Struggles of a "Strong" State.

• Author: BARKEY, HENRI J.

"The process of transition to the European Union--even if success is a long way off--is likely to force Turkey to undertake significant changes that will make the state smaller, more efficient, less repressive and intrusive and, yet, genuinely stronger."

Turkey has long been regarded by social scientists working on the developing world as one of the best examples of a strong, modernizing state. The single-mindedness with which Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the state, and his successors pursued the modernization project has been the envy of many leaders in Turkey's immediate region and beyond. This drive has also helped Turkey anchor itself solidly in the West's imagination as a secular, democratic and allied Muslim state. But the recent re-emergence of Kurdish nationalism and Islamic reactionism, and the methods employed by the state to confront them, raises questions about the nature of this "strong" state. The construction of the Turkish state as a top-to-bottom enterprise ultimately resulted in an edifice that is less capable of handling major challenges. Unlike a strong state that relies on its legitimacy to cajole and co-opt its citizenry and opposition, the state in Turkey usually sought to overpower them. Kurdish and Islamic challenges to the construction of the Turkish state in the 1990s are, in many ways, a replay of earlier such confrontations and have reopened the debate on what kind of state Turkey ought to have.

In this article the rise of Kurdish nationalism and, to a lesser extent, Islamic reactionism, are used to demonstrate the weak underpinnings of the Turkish state. They have not been the only challenges faced by the Kemalist elite, but they represent the most fundamental ones. The founders of the state and the bureaucratic-military elite that succeeded them envisaged a controlled, linear course for Turkish development. Ataturk defined the course of this development as a race to catch up with and become part of "contemporary civilization." The state had to be strong and omnipresent to succeed in this endeavor. Societal engineering, however, turned out to be more difficult than originally conceived. In fact, well before the troubles of the 1990s, the military intervened on three different occasions to bring events and errant political processes under control starting in 1960. Reliance on its military to save the day when faced with crises has made this institution a fixture of everyday political life. The Turkish General Staff, as the representative of the highest echelons of the military, has become an arbiter and, in many cases, the originator of policy decisions, which, in turn, has further undermined the natural development of state-society relations. The Turkish leadership, therefore, has opted for a state that orders its subjects around rather than penetrating society to mobilize resources in the form of taxes, information, expertise and manpower, effectively managing the bureaucracy, making alliances, subordinating vested interests, upholding its decisions and gaining the population's acceptance for proposed changes. The irony for the Turkish state lies in the fact that it is about to confront its most dramatic challenge in the form of the EU accession. The process of transition to the European Union--even if success is a long way off--is likely to force Turkey to undertake significant changes that will make the state smaller, more efficient, less repressive and intrusive and, yet, genuinely stronger.

REPRESS, BUT DO NOT PENETRATE: THE SINGLE PARTY ERA

The image of a strong and autonomous state reshaping society in its own image has long been associated with Ataturk's Turkey. Indeed, this strong state is also considered responsible for a genuine success: Modern Turkey's transformation from the hapless Ottoman Empire, the "Sick Man of Europe" as it was known to many, to the robust country knocking on the doors of Europe has been remarkable. Many authors have described how this feat was achieved by a relentless pursuit on the part of Ataturk's visionary leadership, and that of his successors. The pursuit of modernization, or Westernization, through the adoption of a series of rapid reforms was nothing less than a "Revolution from Above."(1) The new Republican elite's passion for modernization, seen as an escape from backwardness, translated itself into a total dislike and distrust of all things associated with the ancien regime and the old way of life. Topping the long list of suspect establishments were religion and the religious institutions that linked the former regime with its citizenry Of course, the culture associated with religion and religiosity--such as a dress code and a way of life--was also deemed antithetical to contemporary civilization.

After the establishment of the new Republic in 1923, the Caliphate was abolished, the tarikats (religious orders) banned, history was re-written to suit the needs of the new state, the Arabic alphabet discarded for a "Western" one and a new dress code was adopted. Together with the jettisoning of the multi-ethnic character of the Ottoman Empire, these changes would also help redefine the Turk, the citizen of this new nation.

Kemal and the Republican elite introduced these changes pragmatically. When it suited them--as in their confrontation with the Greeks and the Allies during the War for Independence from 1919 to 1922--they built alliances with would-be dissidents, including Kurds. When conditions changed, and the new regime in Ankara deemed it was strong enough, it jettisoned the promises made to Kurdish leaders about the multi-ethnic character of the new state.(2) This pragmatism extended to the vision of where the natural boundaries of the new state were to be drawn. Commenting on Woodrow Wilson's 14 points, Kemal is reported to have said, "poor Wilson, he did not understand that lines that cannot be defended by the bayonet, by force, by honor and dignity, cannot be defended by any other principle."(3) Hence, Kemal settled on the existing borders of Turkey, forsaking the Mosul province which, minus present-day Alexandretta, the British had decided would be incorporated into the new state of Iraq, but could have been a natural expansion of the new Turkey

The Kemalist modernization effort, similar to the preceding Ottoman attempts, was elite, state driven and quite alien as far as the rural population of the new state was concerned. Religion, a more central element of the Ottoman legitimization process, had been discarded by the new elite. Serif Mardin points out that Islam "established bridges between social groups because it functioned as a common language shared by the upper and lower classes."(4) This contributed to a break in communication between the bureaucratic center and the rest of the population. Coming on the heels of war and war-related economic dislocations, the population went along with the changes with some resignation. The reforms, including those attempted by the modernizing elites of the Ottoman Empire, "touched a relatively small part of Ottoman and Turkish society in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Outside the privileged domain of the political elite stood large numbers of people whose visions and voices were rarely acknowledged during the initial years of the Republic."(5)

The modern Turkish state emerged, therefore, in a kind of no man's land of state-society interaction. The new state had not inherited a strong civil society; on the contrary, the Ottoman Empire had discouraged autonomous civilian activity. Moreover, the wars, which were followed by population exchanges, rid the country of the bulk of the minority population that had been active in trade and commerce. The economic liberalism of the new regime did not last long as the deteriorating world economic conditions at the end of the 1920s pushed the Kemalist regime to adopt rigid state-directed industrialization policies. This indirectly undermined the development of independent new societal forces. With no opposition from economic interests, there remained few sources of dissent to the new regime, especially in urban areas where it mattered. But the changes imposed by Ankara had not been without cost and, as Mardin argues, the provincial population of Anatolia was "unhinged" by "the transformation from a setting in which Islam had occupied a central place to a secular `laic' society."(6) The regime, whether it was cognizant or not of this shock to rural society; suspected and expected resistance from "reactionary" elements, which it was ready to crush.

Hence, the new regime brooked little opposition or dissent. Even when it tolerated a modicum of dissension in the Parliament (as in 1924), with the creation of an opposition party and the appointment of a liberal prime minister, the experiment, in the eyes of the elite, turned sour. Such concessions were interpreted as a weakening of the regime. In fact, when some of Kemal's former comrades-in-arms established an opposition party in 1924, the immediate response from Kemal's confidant and would-be successor, Ismet Inonu, was to attempt to impose martial law; he was, however, rebuffed by his own party and forced to resign.(7) Facing the potential dissolution of his party through defections to the opposition, Ataturk decided to appoint a liberal-minded prime minister. Not long after the new government's rise to power, the 1925 Sheikh Said Rebellion--the first of the serious Kurdish rebellions--began, confirming the worst fears of Republican leadership. The rebellion provided the hard-liners with an excuse to reassert control; Inonu returned to power, and a series of draconian laws were promulgated to deal with opposition from all types of groups, not just from the Kurds under Sheikh Said's leadership.(8) The regime redefined the Sheikh Said Rebellion as a reactionary--and not a Kurdish--act...