The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (142 page)

 
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The ideology promoted by Mustapha Kemal (known as
Atatürk
) (1881–1938) and his associates after the creation of the Republic of Turkey, Kemalism is based on a collection of ideals nurtured in pragmatism and necessity. The Ottoman reforms of the nineteenth century—known as the Tanzimat (reorganization) which began in 1839— produced the Young Ottomans, followed by the Young Turks, and came to constitute the main features of Kemalism. They produced a class of civil servants, professional and military technocrats, imbued with knowledge, organizational skills, and technological adeptness of their counterparts in Europe, together with aspirations and motivational drives engendered by modernizing influences.
Tanzimat
modernization led to the adoption of secular legal codes and the reorganization of the civil administration along European lines, but preserved the fundamental traditional institutions of the
Sharia'a
(Islamic law), together with its courts and the Islamic schools. Later reformers—Kemal included—regarded the maintenance of the latter as an important reason for the weakness of the
Tanzimat
reforms.
Six principles which comprise Kemalism were formulated by the founders of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. (1) Republicanism, sweeping Europe in the wake of failed empires, incorporated the ideas of popular sovereignty, freedom, and equality before the law. (2) Secularism was the foundation stone of the reforms and a necessary component of modernization and social change. It meant that there would be no state religion as well as secular control of law and education. In 1924, the Caliphate was abolished, followed by the abolition of the
Shari'a
courts (1925), together with the adoption of the Swiss civil and Italian penal codes (1926). Included in this package was the suppression of convents, monasteries, and religious schools, the Latinizing of the alphabet, the enforced change to a Western style of dress, emancipation of women, and Turkification of the
Qur'an
. (3) Nationalism promoted the idea that the Turkish language identifies the nation, that it was devoid of racial, religious, or ethnic sense, and encompasses all those found within the confines of Turkey. In other words, national unity was based on the principle of a linguistic community. (4) Populism was a vague notion which stressed popular sovereignty, the mutual responsibility of state and individual, and the absence of social class. This was to be a way of harnessing the people to the objectives of reform and change. (5) Revolutionism entailed the orderly transformation of society to bring it into the family of advanced nations. This meant transforming the outlook of people, the adoption of Western ways, confronting ignorance and superstition, and importing new techniques together with the promotion of economic development and science. (6)
étatism
implied that the state should play an active role in economic development, and in social, cultural, and education activities when the general interests of the state are involved.
BAR 

 
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(1908–63)
US political scientist. Renowned first for
Southern Politics
(1949), the finest work in the electoral geographical tradition of André
Siegfried
to appear in the United States, and subsequently for the first challenge to the
party identification
perspective on the American voter in favour of
issue voting
and retrospective voting. He was also noted for his writing on
interest groups
.

 
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(1883–1946)
British economist, who made a leading contribution to economic theory, particularly through
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
(1936), to economic policy, and to international economic negotiations. The use of the word ‘Keynesian’ to describe a particular mix of economic and social policy is a reflection of the success of his attempt to provide an intellectual justification for a form of government intervention that would save capitalism and liberal democracy, a task which appeared to be a compelling and urgent one in the 1930s. In a chapter entitled ‘Concluding Notes on the Social Philosophy towards which the General Theory might Lead’, Keynes admits that his theory is moderately conservative in its implications. The state would intervene in some areas, including the use of the tax system to influence the propensity to consume, but wide fields of activity would be unaffected. A comprehensive socialization of investment would be necessary to achieve full employment, but this could be achieved by what would later be called public-private partnerships. There was no obvious case for a comprehensive system of state socialism, and most of the necessary measures could be introduced gradually, and without a general break in the traditions of society.
Keynes was a product of an essentially Victorian milieu which had set aside religious belief, but maintained a strong interest in moral rules of conduct, underpinned by rational justification rather than faith in the existence of a deity. His father was a university administrator at Cambridge, the university with which Keynes was associated throughout his life. From Eton he went to King's College where he graduated in mathematics and then spent a fourth year reading economics, then dominated by Alfred Marshall and his
Principles of Economics
. While at Cambridge, Keynes wrote a long prize essay on
Burke
which gives a good indication of Keynes's developing political beliefs. Keynes emphasized Burke's advocacy of expediency against abstract rights, and, like Burke, he was uncertain about the value of basing action on absolute principles. Keynes emphasized immediate benefits compared with less certain gains in the future. Keynes supported Burke's view that war should be approached with prudence, and in the First World War he applied to register as a conscientious objector, although his appeal was rejected on the grounds that he was already exempt on the basis of his work with the Treasury. In 1919 he published a critique of the Versailles settlement entitled
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
, which achieved very wide sales throughout the world and had a considerable influence on political opinion. Keynes argued that the Versailles settlement would impoverish Europe. Some commentators criticized him for undermining the peace settlement, particularly in the United States.
In the early 1920s, Keynes became involved with the Liberal Party. In 1926 he became a member of a Liberal Industrial Inquiry, drafting substantial parts of the report on
Britain's Industrial Future
, better known as the
Yellow Book
. One of the proposals was that the investment funds of all public concerns should be put into a separate capital budget under the direction of a national investment board. Keynes also advocated what later came to be known as the public corporation as a means of running public concerns. The disappointing performance of the Liberals in 1929, and their reactions to the depression, lessened his enthusiasm for the party. He gave some financial support to individual Labour candidates in the 1930s, and made some favourable comments about Labour policies. When he became a peer in 1942 he sat as an independent, although he continued to express some sympathy for the Liberals and gave them a small donation in 1945. As one of Keynes's biographers, Robert Skidelsky , has pointed out, Keynes was a political economist rather than a political animal, someone who was interested in influencing public policy, but who believed that the intellectual argument had to be won before the political argument. Although Keynes wrote extensively for the popular press in the middle period of his life, he was of a generation that believed that rational decision-making could be left to a well-informed élite based in London and the ancient universities. Keynes had the economist's habit of referring to political difficulties as second-order problems for which economists had no professional responsibility to provide solutions. He recognized that full employment could lead to upward pressures on wages, a problem which eventually led economists working in the Keynesian tradition to advocate incomes policies. He argued that the task of keeping wages reasonably stable was a ‘political rather than an economic problem’, and that the combination of collective bargaining and full employment was an ‘essentially political problem’ where analytical methods were of little assistance. His involvement in important economic negotiations with the Americans after the end of the Second World War showed that he had good negotiating skills, and an awareness of political realities and the need for mutual accommodation. At the time of his death, Keynes was working on a memorandum for the chancellor on the problem of inflation to which he offered no solution. Keynes's advocacy of macroecomic economic management did not provide an enduring solution to the problem of maintaining full employment, even less that of curbing inflation, but no discussion of the politics of economic management in the latter half of the twentieth century can proceed very far without reference to Keynes and his influential, if often ambiguous, ideas.
WG