Table Of ContentModern Turkey: Continuity and Change
Schriften des Deutschen Orient-Instituts
Modern Turkey:
Continuity and Change
Herausgegeben von
Ahmet Evin
mit Beiträgen von
Ergun Özbudun, Ahmet Evin, Henri Barkey,
Metin Heper, lIter Turan, Oral Sander, Yilmaz Altug
Leske Verlag + Budrich GmbH, Opladen 1984
Contributors
Yllmaz Altut, professor of constitutional law, served as Dean of Istanbul
University Faculty of Law.
Henri Barkey, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science,
University of Pennsylvania, teaches at Lehigh University.
Ahmet Evin is Director of Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
Metin Heper is professor of pOlitical science at Bogazi~i University, Istanbul.
Ergun Özbudun is professor of political science at Ankara U niversity Faculty of
Law.
Oral Sander is professor of international relations at Faculty of Political
Science, Ankara.
liter Turan is professor of political science at the University of Istanbul.
Modern Turkey: continuity and change I hrsg.
von Ahmet Evin. Mit Beitr. von Ergun Özbudun
... - Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1984.
(Schriften des Deutschen Orient-Instituts)
ISBN 978-3-8100-0488-8 ISBN 978-3-663-01177-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-663-01177-4
NE: Evin, Ahmet (Hrsg.); Özbudun, Ergun (Mitverf.)
Cl 1984 by Leske Verlag + Budrich GmbH, Opladen
Preface
Presented in this volume are essays and surveys examining elements of
continuity within the context of the broad changes that have marked the history
of modern Turkey. The establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923
represented a fresh start after the demise of the Ottoman Empire that had
spanned the medieval and the modern times, but had become too outdated to
cope with the complexities of the industrialized world. Although the Republic
was meant to shed the burden of the past in order to meet the challenges of the
contemporary era as a modern nation-state, it nevertheless inherited a great deal
from the rich civilization of the Ottoman period.
Over the last sixty years modern Turkey has been standing up to the
challenges of the increasingly demanding and fast changing world of the
twentieth century. The fact that it has been able to do so is in no small measure
due to its adherence to the principles of evolution and development to keep pace
with contemporary civilization. And it is the adherence to these principles that
have provided a continuity along with flexibility in social, economic, political,
legal, administrative and diplomatie spheres, which are discussed by the
contributors to this volume.
The contri butions were originally discussed at a seminar held at the U niversity
of Pennsylvania in April 1982. The editor and the contributors wish to thank
Professors Dankwart Rustow of the City University of New York, Richard
Chambers of the University of Chicago, and Frederick Frey and Alvin
Rubinstein of the University of Pennsylvania for agreeing to moderate the
sessions and for their valuable suggestions and comments.
Thanks are also due to three people whose assistance was crucial in the
preparation of this volume for publication. Sharon Lefevre did the copy editing,
Gerald Perna assisted the editor at every stage of prepartion, and Selim Earls did
the typesetting.
A.Ö.E.
Contents
Preface 5
Part One
Sodal and Political Antecedents 9
Communitarian Structures and Social Change
Ahmet Ev;n 11
Antecedents of Kemalist Secularism
Some Thoughts on the Yo ung Turk Period
Ergun Ozbudun 25
Part Two
Economy, Bureaucracy, Politics 45
Crises of the Turkish Political Economy: 1960-1980
Benr; Borkey 47
Bureaucrats, Politicians and Officers in Turkey:
Dilemmas of a New Political Paradigm
Metin Beper 64
The Evolution of Political Culture in Turkey
i/ter Turon 84
Part Three
Surveys: Foreign Policy, Law 113
Turkish Foreign Policy:
Forces of Continuity and Change
Oral Sander 115
The Developroent of Constitutional Thought
Y,lmaz Altug 131
Bibliography 150
Index 162
Part One
Social and Political Antecedents
Communitarian Structures and Social Change
Ahmet Evin
Until recently the majority of the studies on modern Turkey have focused
primarily on the Repu blican period, even to the extent of ignoring the influence
of the Ottoman past. Outside of Turkey, only a handful of historians of the older
generation who witnessed the birth of the Republic were interested in
contemporary history, but those who were would often divorce their treatment
of the evolution of modern Turkey from all but its most immediate antecedents.
Modern Turkish history was viewed as a process that began after the
replacement of indigenous institutions with those adopted by westernizers. 1
Meanwhile in Turkey, the intelligentsia, whose ranks then included the members
of the academic profession, were taking stock of the Turkish revitalization,
rewriting history to stress the Turkish (rather than Ottoman) past and
attempting to reinforce the nation-building program by inculcating a sense of
national unity based on a common cultural past of the Turkish-speaking
people.2
The emphasis on contemporary Turkey was particularly noticeable in the
limited corpus of anthropological and sociologicalliterature published between
the 1920s and 1950s. Whereas European observers were taken up by the changes
in the economic, social and cultural life of Atatürk's Turkey, scholars in the
newly emerging fields of social sciences in Turkey were busy mapping out the
distinction between Turkish culture and Islamic religion. It was certainly the
great transformation of Turkey from empire to nation-state that captsred the
imagination of all contemporary observers and which turned the attention away
from the heritage of the defunct empire.
While before the 1950s most studies were concerned with Atatürk's reforms,
explaining, documenting, reinforcing and indeed celebrating the construction of
a modern state, it was only after World War 11 that substantial scholarly
12 Evin
attention began to be paid to Turkish social history. Especially since the 1960s
there have been increasingly successful attempts at defining social and economic
patterns in Turkey in their historical context. This welcome development is to a
large extent the result of interdisciplinary collaboration which has been achieved
with the rem oval of the artificial barriers separating "orientalism" from
"science. "
Over the last two decades much research has been undertaken to explain the
social structure and political economy of the Ottoman period within one kind of
structural framework or another. Many such studies, therefore, have taken the
approach of hypothesis testing. One model employed has been the Asiatic Mode
of Production, which goes a long way toward explaining the underdevelopment
of rural Anatolia (Keyder, 1976). The Asiatic Mode of Production, with its
attendant system of patronage, is one which impedes horizontal integration and
therefore provides an explanation for the persistence of small collectivities in
Anatolia. Another explanation for the persistence of communitarian structures
certainly rests with the political system determining the distribution of power.
Mardin (1969) has shown the absence of mechanisms and institutions for the
development of "civii society" during the Ottoman period. As we shall see, a
fundamental principle of the Ottoman state was to disallow the formation of
segments "that could operate independently of the central government and
[wh ich had] property rights" (Mardin, 1969: 264). Direct control of communities
rather than giving them autonomy has been shown to reinforce small-group
solidarity and impede integration. A third theoretical approach has been to
emphasize the wide gap between the center and the periphery, wh ich has helped
perpetuate the distance between the elite and folk cultures throughout the
Ottoman period (Mardin, 1973), and has obstructed communication among
various groups, leading to a disparity in the outlook, attitude and va lues among
the ruling elite, local notables and ordinary subjects (Heper, 1980).
In all these approaches the leitmotiv of community-society continuum is
discernable. Regardless of the disparity of ideological contexts associated with
each of the foregoing theoretical frameworks, all of them have contributed
towards achieving a composite picture of Ottoman society, consisting of several
homogeneous groups, differentiated from one another in terms of spatial,
confessional and vocational distinctions, all co-existing under the umbrella of
the state, whose ruling institutions were governed by three types of elites
(military, bureaucratic, legal-educational) drawn from two different estates
(men of the sword and men of the pen).
There is general agreement on this schematic picture of Ottoman society in
which each individual and each group had a prescribed position and a function
according to that position which was controlled by the state. In the transition
from empire to republic, however, the heritage of the Ottoman social
