The New Old World (76 page)

That in itself, however, would not have been enough to bring democracy to Turkey. American tolerance, even welcome, of authoritarian regimes in the Free World, so long as they were staunch military and political supports of Washington, would be a constant feature of the Cold War. Within a decade, after all, Franco too was hosting US bases. What really set Turkey apart from Spain was something deeper. The Spanish dictatorship was the product of a bitter civil war, pitting class against class, social revolution against counter-revolution, which the Nationalist crusade had needed German and Italian help to win. There were still a few guerrillas in the mountains resisting the regime in 1945. After the war democratization was an unthinkable option for Franco: it would have risked a political volcano erupting again, in which neither army, property nor church would have been secure.

Thirty years later, his regime had accomplished its historical task. Economic development had transformed Spanish society, radical mass politics had been extinguished, and democracy was no longer hazardous for capital. So completely had the dictatorship done its work that a toothless Bourbon socialism was incapable even of restoring the republic it had overthrown. In this Spanish laboratory lay a wider parabola of the future, which the Latin American dictators of the seventies—Pinochet is the exemplary case—would repeat, architects of a political order in which electors, grateful for civic liberties finally restored, could be trusted henceforward
not to tamper with the social order. Today the Spanish template has become the general formula of freedom: no longer making the world safe for democracy, but democracy safe for this world.

Turkey could become a democracy so much earlier than Spain, a more advanced society—let alone other countries as economically and socially backward as it in 1950—because there was no comparably explosive class conflict to be contained, nor radical politics to be crushed. Most peasants owned land; workers were few; intellectuals marginal; a Left hardly figured. The lines of fissure in society, at that stage still concreted over, were ethnic more than class in nature. In these conditions, there was small risk of any upsets from below. The elites could settle accounts between themselves without fear of letting loose forces they could not control. That degree of security would not last. In due course there would be both social and ethnic turbulence, as popular unrest made itself felt; when it did so, the state would react violently.

But, sociologically speaking, the basic parameters set by the first election of 1950 have remained in place to this day. Turkish democracy has been broken at intervals, but never for long, because it is anchored in a Centre-Right majority that has remained, in one form after another, unbroken. Across four historical cycles, an underlying stability has distinguished Turkish political life. From 1950 to 1960 the country was ruled by Adnan Menderes as premier, at the head of a Democratic Party whose vote, 58 per cent of the electorate at its height, was never less than 47 per cent; still giving it four-fifths of the seats in the National Assembly, and control of the presidency, at the end of its life-span.

The birth of the party marked the moment at which the Turkish elite split, with the growth of a bourgeoisie less dependent on the state than in the pre-war period, no longer willing to accept bureaucratic direction of the economy, and eager for the spoils of political power. Its leaders were all former members of the Kemalist establishment, typically with stakes in the private sector: Menderes was a wealthy cotton planter, Bayar—president after 1950—a leading banker. But its followers were, overwhelmingly, the peasant masses who formed a majority of the nation. The recipe of its rule was a paradox rare in the Third World: a liberal populism, combining commitment to the market and an appeal to
tradition in equal measure.
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In its deployment of each, rhetoric outran reality without quite losing touch with it. On coming to power, Menderes's first key move—he did not even consult Parliament—was to dispatch troops to Korea, earning high marks in Washington and the rewards of entry into NATO and a spate of dollars for Turkish services. His regime used American assistance to supply cheap credit and assure high prices to farmers, building roads to expand cultivation, importing machinery to modernize cash-crop production, and relaxing controls on industry. In the slipstream of the post-war boom in the West, growth accelerated and per capita incomes jumped in the countryside.

This alone would have been enough to secure the popularity of the Democratic government. But Menderes played not just to the pocket, but to the sensibility of his rural constituency. Sensing his isolation after the war, Inönü had already started to edge away from Kemal's policies towards religion. The Democrats were a good deal less inhibited: new mosques shot up, religious schools multiplied, instruction in Islam became standard in state education, calls to prayer were to be heard in Arabic again, brotherhoods were legalized and opponents denounced as infidels. The equation of Turkish with Muslim identity, for long a tacit substratum of Kemalism, acquired bolder expression. This was enough to antagonize sectors of the elite committed to official versions of secularism, but it did not signify any break with the legacy of the late Ottoman or early Republican state. Menderes, indeed, went further than Inönü had ever done in erecting Kemal into an untouchable symbol of the nation, putting him in a mausoleum in Ankara and making any injury to his memory a crime punishable with severe penalties at law.

More gravely, the integral nationalism of the inter-war period was given a new impetus, when Menderes—solicited by Britain—took up the cause of the Turkish minority in Cyprus, reclaiming rights of intervention in the island relinquished at Lausanne. In 1955, as a three-power conference on its future was meeting in London, his regime unleashed a savage pogrom against the Greek community in Istanbul. Formally exempted from the population transfers of 1923, this had dwindled rapidly under state pressure in the following years, but still numbered over 100,000 in the mid-thirties, and remained a prosperous and lively part of the city's
life. In a single night, gangs organized by the government smashed and burnt its churches, schools, shops, businesses, hospitals, beating and raping as they went. Menderes and Bayar, lurking in the suburb of Florya, boarded a train for Ankara as flames lit up the night sky.
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It was Turkey's
Kristallnacht
. Continuities with the past were not merely ideological, but even individual. In 1913 Bayar had been an operative of the CUP's Special Organization, responsible for ethnic cleansing of Greeks from the Smyrna region, before the First World War had even begun. Within a few years, only a handful of Greeks were left in Istanbul.

This time, however, there was shock in the press and public opinion, and unease even in establishment quarters at Menderes's methods. In 1957 he cruised to a third electoral victory, but with external debt, the public deficit and inflation now running high, his economic performance had lost its shine, and he turned to increasingly tough repressive measures, targeting the press and parliamentary opposition, to maintain his position. Overconfident, brutal and not very bright, he eventually set up a committee to investigate his opponents, and imposed censorship on its proceedings. He had consolidated his power by taking Turkey into the Korean War. A decade later, inspired by students in Korea who had just overthrown Syngman Rhee, whom the war had been fought to defend, students in Ankara took to the streets against his move towards a dictatorship. The universities in Ankara and Istanbul were shut down, to no avail, amid successive nights of rioting. After a month of disturbances, detachments of the army finally intervened.
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Early one morning Menderes, his cabinet and deputies were arrested, and a committee of some forty officers took over the government.

The coup of 1960 was not the work of the Turkish high command, but of conspirators of lesser rank, who had been planning to oust Menderes for some time. Some had radical social ideas, others were authoritarian nationalists. But few had any clear programme beyond dissolution of the Democratic Party, and retribution for
its leaders, who were tried on a variety of charges, among them responsibility for the pogrom of 1955, for which Menderes was executed, though Bayar spared. In the army itself, a large number of conservative officers were purged, but the high command soon reasserted itself, crushing attempts to take matters further. In a temporarily fluid situation, in which the military were not united, a new Constitution was produced by jurists from the universities, and ratified by referendum. Designed to prevent the abuses of power that had marked Menderes's rule, it created a Constitutional Court and second chamber, introduced proportional representation, strengthened the judiciary, guaranteed civil liberties, and academic and press freedoms. It also, however, created a National Security Council dominated by the military, which acquired wide-ranging powers.

With these institutions in place, the second cycle of post-war Turkish politics was set in motion. As soon as elections were held, it became clear that the voting bloc put together by the Democrats, though at first distributed across a number of successor formations, still commanded a comfortable majority of the country. By 1965, it was consolidated behind the Justice Party led by Süleyman Demirel, which alone took 53 per cent of the vote. Thirty years later, Demirel would still be at large, in the presidential palace. A hydraulic engineer with American connexions—Eisenhower Fellowship; consultant for Morrison-Knudsen—who had been picked for bureaucratic office by Menderes, Demirel was no improvement in personality or principles on his patron. But the fate of his predecessor made him more cautious, and the Constitution of 1961, though he would tamper with it, limited his ability to reproduce the same style of rule.

In power, Demirel like Menderes benefitted from fast growth, distributed favours in the countryside, made resonant appeals to village piety, and whipped up a virulent anti-communism. But there were two differences. The populism of the Justice Party was no longer liberal. The sixties were a period of development economics throughout most of the world, and the authors of the 1960 coup, vaguely influenced by Nasserism, were no exception to the rule, seeking a strong
dirigiste
state. Demirel inherited a turn towards standard import-substituting industrialization, and for electoral purposes made the most of it. The second change was more fundamental. However burning the resentment of his cadres at the army for dethroning the Democrats, and however close to the secularist bone his religious histrionics might come,
at any sign of unrest in the barracks Demirel quickly deferred to the military.

This in itself, however, was not enough to secure a dominance of the political scene otherwise comparable to that of Menderes. The Republican People's Party, trounced three times in the fifties, posed little challenge. When Inönü finally shuffled off the stage in the early seventies, the party was taken over by Bülent Ecevit, who briefly attempted to make it a Centre-Left alternative, before collapsing into the arms of the military as figurehead of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, and ending up as an empty fossil of plaintive chauvinism. The mechanics of coalition-building in a Parliament which no longer delivered the first-past-the-post landslides of old made him premier three times, but the Kemalist bloc he inherited never came near to winning an electoral majority of the electorate,
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sinking to a mere 20 per cent of the vote by the time he finally exited the scene.

The danger to Demirel lay elsewhere. The new Constitution had allowed a Workers' Party to run candidates for the first time. It never got more than 5 per cent of the vote, posing no threat to the stability of the system. But if the Turkish working class was still too small and intimidated for any mass electoral politics, the Turkish universities were rapidly becoming hotbeds of radicalism. Situated, uniquely, at the intersection between First, Second and Third Worlds—Europe to the west, the USSR to the north, the Mashreq to the south and east—Turkish students were galvanized by ideas and influences from all three: campus rebellions, communist traditions, guerrilla imaginations, each with what appeared to be their own relevance to the injustices and cruelties of the society around them, in which the majority of the population was still rural and nearly half were illiterate. Out of this heady mixture came the kaleidoscope of revolutionary groups whose obituary Belge was to write a decade later. In the late sixties, as Demirel persecuted left opinion of any sort, it was not long before some took to arms, in scattered acts of violence.

In themselves these too were little more than pinpricks, without significant impact on the political control of the Justice Party. But they lent energy and opportunity to movements of a much more threatening character on its other flank. In 1969, the ultranationalist
Nationalist Action Party (MHP) was created by Alparslan Türkes, a colonel who as a young officer during the Second World War had been an ardent pro-Nazi, and was one of the key movers of the coup in 1960. Adopting fascist methods, it swiftly built up paramilitary squads—the Grey Wolves—far stronger than anything the Left could muster, and boasted a constituency twice its size. Nor was this all. As Demirel tacked towards the military, while the elasticity of the political system expanded, a less accommodating Islamism emerged to outflank him. In 1970 the National Order Party was launched by Necmettin Erbakan, like Demirel an engineer, but at a higher level—he had held a university chair—and with more genuine claims to piety, as a member of a Sufi order of Naqshbandi. Running on a more radically Muslim ticket than the Justice Party could afford to do, and attacking its subservience to American capital, his organization—re-dubbed the National Salvation Party—took 12 per cent in its first test at the polls.

The turbulence caused by these unruly outsiders was too much for the Kemalist establishment, and in 1971 the army intervened again. This time—as invariably henceforward—it was the high command that struck, with an ultimatum ousting Demirel for failure to maintain order, and imposing a technocratic government of the Right. Under martial law, trade-unionists, intellectuals and deputies of the Left were rounded up and tortured, and the liberal provisions of the constitution cancelled.
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Two years later, the political scene was judged sufficiently purged of subversion for elections to be held again, and for the rest of the seventies Demirel and Ecevit see-sawed in coalition governments in which either Türkes or Erbakan, or both, held casting votes, and populated the ministries under their control.