The New Old World (75 page)

A ruler who took to drink in despair at the ultimate sterility of his rule: that, at any rate, is one conjecture, to be heard among critical spirits in Turkey today. Another, not necessarily contradictory of it, would recall Hegel's description of the autocrats of Rome:

In the person of the Emperor isolated subjectivity has gained a perfectly unlimited realization. Spirit has renounced its proper nature, inasmuch as Limitation of being and of volition has been constituted an unlimited absolute existence . . . Individual subjectivity, thus entirely emancipated from control, has no inward life, no prospective nor retrospective emotions, no repentance, nor hope, nor fear—not
even thought; for all these involve fixed conditions and aims, while here every condition is purely contingent. The springs of action are no more than desire, lust, passion, fancy—in short, caprice absolutely unfettered. It finds so little limitation in the will of others, that the relation of will to will may be called that of absolute sovereignty to absolute slavery.
⁴⁰

The picture is highly coloured, and no modern ruler has ever quite fitted it, if only because ideology has typically become inseparable from tyranny, where on the whole legitimacy sufficed in classical times. But in its portrait of a kind of accidie of power, it hints at what might, on another reading, have been the inner dusk of Kemal's dictatorship.

His successor, whom he had wanted to discard at the end, was another figure altogether. Inönü, another CUP officer, had served under Kemal in 1916, collaborated with Karakol in the War Ministry in 1919–20, and held a senior command in the independence struggle. He was dour, pious and conservative, in appearance and outlook not unlike a less plump Turkish version of Franco. With war in Europe on the horizon by 1938, his regime sought an understanding with Germany, but was rebuffed by Berlin, at that point angling for the favour of Arab states apprehensive of Turkish revanchism. To insure itself against Italian expansion, and the potential implications for Turkey of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, Ankara then signed a defence treaty with Britain and France in the Mediterranean, shortly after the outbreak of war. When Italy attacked France in 1940, however, Inönü's government reneged on its obligations, and within a year had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. Three days later, when Hitler invaded Russia, the Turkish leadership was ‘carried away with joy'.
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Enver's brother Nuri, still alive, was dispatched posthaste to Berlin to discuss the prospect of arousing Turkic peoples in the USSR to rally to the Nazis, and a pair of Turkish generals, Emir Hüsnü Erkilet and Ali Fuad Erden, were soon touring the front-lines of the Wehrmacht in Russia. After briefings from Von Rundstedt in the field, they were flown to Rastenberg to meet
the Führer in person. ‘Hitler', General Erkilet reported, brimming with enthusiasm,

received us with an indescribable modesty and simplicity at his headquarters where he commands military operations and dispatches. It is a huge room. The long table in the middle and the walls were covered with maps that showed respective positions at the battle zones. Despite that, they did not hide or cover these maps, a clear sign of trust and respect towards us. I expressed my gratitude for the invitation. Then he half-turned towards the map. At the same time, he was looking into our eyes as if he was searching for something. His dark eyes and forelock were sweeter, livelier and more attractive than in photographs. His southern accent, his formal, perfect German, his distinctive, powerful voice, his sturdy look, are full of character.

Telling the Turks that they were the first foreigners, other than allies, to be ushered into the Wolfsschanze, and promising them the complete destruction of Russia, ‘the Führer also emphasized that “this war is a continuation of the old one, and those who suffered losses at the end of the last war, would receive compensation for them in this one” '.
⁴²
Thanking him profusely for ‘these very important and valuable words', Erkilet and Fuad hastened back to convey them to the National Chief, as Inönü liked to style himself.

Their mission was not taken lightly in Moscow. Within a week, Stalin issued a statement personally denouncing Erkilet's exchange with Hitler, and soon afterwards embarked on a high-risk operation to try and cut off the prospect of joint compensations for 1918. Determined to stop the Turkish army linking arms with the Wehrmacht in the Caucasus, he sent the top NKVD operative Leonid Eitingon—responsible for the killing of Trotsky two years earlier—to Ankara to assassinate the German ambassador, Von Papen, in the hope of provoking Hitler into a punitive attack on Turkey.
⁴³
The attempt was bungled, and its
origin quickly discovered. But Moscow had every reason for its misgivings. In August 1942, the Turkish premier Saraço
ğ
lu told Von Papen that as a Turk he ‘passionately desired the obliteration of Russia'. Indeed, it was his view that ‘the problem of Russia can only be solved by Germany on condition that at least half the Russians living in Russia are annihilated'.
⁴⁴
As late as the summer of 1943, another Turkish military mission was touring not only the Eastern front but the West wall of Nazi defences in France, before flying once more to an audience in the Wolfsschanze. The war had revived Unionist ambitions: at one time or another, Turkey manoeuvred to regain western Thrace, the Dodecanese, Syria, the region of Mosul, and protectoral rights over Albania.

Nor was alignment with the New Order confined to policy abroad. In June 1941, all non-Muslim males of draft age—Jewish, Greek or residual Armenian—were packed off to labour camps in the interior. In November 1942, as the battle for Stalingrad raged, a ‘wealth tax' was inflicted on Jews and Christians, who had to pay up to ten times the rate for Muslims, amid a barrage of anti-Semitic and anti-infidel attacks in the press—Turkish officials themselves becoming liable to investigation for Jewish origins. Those who could not or would not meet the demands of local boards were deported to punishment camps in the mountains. The effect was to destroy the larger part of non-Muslim businesses in Istanbul.

The operation, unabashedly targeting ethno-religious minorities, was in the lineal tradition, passed down from Unionism to Kemalism, of Turkish integral nationalism. A decade earlier Inönü had declared: ‘Only the Turkish nation is entitled to claim ethnic and national rights in this country. No other element has any such rights'. His minister of justice dotted the i's and crossed the t's: ‘The Turk must be the only lord, the only master of this country. Those who are not of pure Turkish origin can have only one right in this country, the right to be servants and slaves'.
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New in the campaign of 1942–3 was only the extent of its anti-Semitism, and the fact that the Inönü regime—hard pressed economically by the costs of a greatly increased military budget—levied any
part of its exactions on Muslims at all. Jewish converts to Islam were not included among the faithful for these purposes. Such was the climate in which Hitler returned the compliment by sending Talat's remains back to Turkey, in a ceremonial train bedecked with swastikas, to be buried with full honours in Istanbul, by the Martyrs' Monument on Liberty Hill, where patriots can proceed to this day.
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Once, however, the tide started to turn in Russia, and Germany looked as if it might be defeated, Ankara readjusted its stance. While continuing to supply the Third Reich with the chromite on which the Nazi war machine depended, Turkey now also entertained overtures from Britain and America. But resisting Anglo-American pressures to come down on the Allied side, Inönü made it clear that his lodestar remained anti-communism. The USSR was the main enemy, and Turkey expressly opposed any British or American strategy that risked altering Germany's position as a bastion against it, hoping London and Washington would make a separate peace with Berlin, for future joint action against Moscow. Dismayed at the prospect of unconditional surrender, Inönü only issued a token declaration of war on Germany after the Allies made it a condition of getting a seat at the United Nations, a week before the deadline they had set for doing so expired, in late February 1945. No Turkish shot was fired in the fight against fascism.

Peace left the regime in a precarious position. Internally, it was now thoroughly detested by the majority of the population, which
had suffered from a steep fall in living standards as prices soared, taxes increased and forced labour was extorted in the service of its military build-up. Inflation had affected all classes, sparing not even bureaucrats, and the wealth tax had made even the well-off jumpy. Externally, the regime had been compromised by its affair with Nazism—which post-war Soviet diplomacy was quick to point out—and its refusal to contribute to Allied victory even after it had become certain.

Aware of his unpopularity, in early 1945 Inönü attempted to redress it with a belated redistribution of land, only to provoke a revolt in the ranks of the ruling party, without gaining credibility in the countryside. Something more was needed. Six months later, he announced that there would be free elections. Turkey, for twenty years a dictatorship, would now become a democracy. Inönü's move was designed to kill two birds with one stone. Abroad, it would restore his regime to legitimacy, as a respectable partner of the West, taking its place in the comity of free nations led by the United States, and entitled to the benefits of that status. At home, it could neutralize discontent by offering an outlet for opposition without jeopardizing the stability of his rule. For he had no intention of permitting a true contest.

In 1946, a flagrantly crooked election returned the ruling Republican People's Party with a huge majority over a Democratic Party led by the defectors who had broken with it over the agrarian bill. The fraud was so scandalous that, domestically, rather than repairing the reputation of the regime, it damaged it yet further. Internationally, however, it did the trick. Turkey was duly proclaimed a pillar of the West, the Truman Doctrine picking it out for economic and military assistance to withstand the Soviet threat, and Marshall Plan aid began to pour in. Economic recovery was rapid, Turkey posting high rates of growth over the next four years.

These laurels, however, did not appease the Turkish masses. Inönü, after first appointing the leading pro-fascist politician in his party—responsible for the worst repression under Kemal—as premier, then attempted to steal the more liberal clothes of the Democrats, with concessions to the market and to religion. It was of no avail. When elections were held in 1950, it was impossible to rig them as before, and by now—so Inönü imagined—unnecessary: the combination of his own prestige and relief from war-time rigours would carry the day for the RPP anyway. He was stunned when voters rejected his regime by a wide margin, putting the Democrats into power with a parliamentary majority, honestly
gained, as large as the dishonest one he had engineered for himself four years earlier. The dictatorship Kemal had installed was over.

In a famous essay, one of the most acute self-critical reflections to emerge out of any of the youthful revolts of the sixties, Murat Belge—a writer unrivalled in his intelligence of the political sensibility of his generation—told his contemporaries on the Turkish Left, as yet another military intervention came thudding down over more than a decade of ardent hopes, that they had misunderstood their own country, in a quite fundamental way. They had thought it a Third World society among others, ready for liberation by guerrilla uprisings in the towns or in the mountains. The paradox they had failed to grasp was that although the Turkey of the time was indeed ‘a relatively backward country economically . . . and socially'—with a per capita income like that of Algeria and Mexico, and adult literacy at a mere 60 per cent—it was ‘relatively
advanced
politically', having known ‘a two-party system in which opposing leaders have changed office a number of times after a popular mandate, something which has never happened in Japan for example'.
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In short, Turkey was unusual in being a poor and ill-educated society that had yet remained a democracy as generally understood, if with violent intermissions—Belge was writing in the aftermath of the military putsch of 1980.

A quarter of a century later, his diagnosis still holds. Since the end of the Kemalist order
stricto sensu
in 1950, Turkey has on the whole been a land of regular elections, of competing parties and uncertain outcomes, and alternating governments. This is a much longer record than Spain, Portugal or Greece—even, as to alternation, Italy—can boast of. What accounts for it? Historians point to earlier moments of constitutional debate or parliamentary contest, from late Ottoman times to mid-period Kemalism. But, however respectable in memory, such episodes were too fragile and fleeting to have been much of a foundation for the stability of a modern Turkish democracy now approaching its seventh decade. An alternative approach is more conjunctural, emphasizing the tactical reasons why Inönü made his feint towards democracy in
1946, and the miscalculations that ensued from it in 1950. But that leaves unanswered the question why thereafter democracy became so entrenched that even serial military interventions could not shake its acceptance as the political norm in Turkey. A more structural explanation is needed.

During the Second World War, Inönü had steered his country in much the way Franco had done Spain, tempering passive affinity and assistance to the Nazi regime with a prudent
attentisme
, allowing for better relations with the West once it looked as if Germany would be defeated. But after the war the situation of the two dictatorships, though equally anti-communist, differed. Spain was at the other end of Europe from the USSR, while Turkey was geo-politically a front-line state in the Cold War, with a long history of hostilities with Russia to boot. So there was both a more pressing interest in Washington, and a more pressing need in Ankara, for a close understanding between the two than there was in the case of Madrid, and hence for a better ideological and institutional alignment of Turkey with the West.