What Turkey needs is a coup

nationalpost.com

BY: Emmett Robinson, National Post

What started out as a minor spark of protest over the proposed construction of a shopping mall in Istanbul has burst into flames of nationwide unrest in Turkey, and the fuel available to feed the fire has been building up, depending on how one measures it, for 10 years, or maybe closer to 100. What Turkey needs now is what it has always needed, and has always had, in the past — a powerful check on the forces of reactionary Islam. Modern Turkey arose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire following the First World War. In its wake came a dynamic, visionary leader: Mustafa Kemal, later given the honorific title Atatürk, or “Father of the Turks.” By emphasizing the national identity of the Turkic people who populated the heartland of the former Islamic empire, Atatürk was able to unify the region, originally divided into post-war Allied occupation zones, to form the Turkish nation state. National identity wasn’t the only principal upon which Atatürk built the new country. To him, the war had made the stifling, sclerotic nature of Ottoman society glaringly obvious. What Turkey needed, Atatürk concluded, was a completely remade, Westernized society. This meant developing an open society. Most importantly, it meant discarding the Islamic state and instituting liberal democratic reforms. The path to success for Turkey, Atatürk concluded, forked toward the liberal West rather than the Islamic East. Thus, under Atatürk, Turkey scrapped the Arabic alphabet in favour of the Latin. It abolished what remained of sharia law, adopted a legal code modeled after Switzerland’s and famously banned the fez in favour of Western-style headgear. Opposition parties were eventually allowed to form (though the earliest attempts were quashed). The franchise, and the right to be elected to parliament, was extended to women in the mid-1930s.After his death in 1938, Atatürk’s successors took up the cause of continued liberalization. Perhaps the greatest achievement of these Kemalists (as Atatürk’s ideological followers were known) occurred in 1950. That year, the Kemalist party was thoroughly trounced at the polls and peacefully ceded power to the opposition Democrats. Turkey became the first true democracy in the modern Muslim world. Yet reform in Turkey has never come easily. Since the country’s founding, the Kemalists and their successors have faced staunch opposition from the forces of reactionary Islam. On several occasions after free elections were first instituted, the Turkish military, closely aligned with the reforming Kemalists since the days of Atatürk himself, has had to intervene directly in government affairs in order to keep democracy from destroying democracy — to stave off, “one man, one vote, one time.” Following the election of 1950, for example, the Democrats ruled Turkey for 10 years. Over that decade, the party and its leader, Adnan Menderes, became increasingly anti-liberal and pro-Islam. Menderes arrested the opposition party leader, instituted extensive censorship of the press and, in an at first seemingly minor decision that ultimately highlighted the Democrats’ shift away from both Turkish national identity and secularism, reverted broadcasts of the call to prayer announced from the nation’s mosques back to Arabic from Turkish. Fearing a reversion to reactionary Islamic government, the military intervened in 1960.Elections were held quickly thereafter in 1961. In a testament to the free nature of those elections, the new reactionary-friendly Justice Party (which replaced the banned Democrats) lost to the Kemalists by only 2% of the vote. Similar coups designed to quell the anti-liberal machinations of Islamist-leaning administrations also occurred in 1971 and 1980. The 1980 coup notably resulted in a new constitution, approved by referendum, which forbade “even partially basing the fundamental, social, economic, political and legal order of the state on religious tenets.” The new constitution also revamped the country’s National Security Council, the seats of which were to be divided equally between members of the prime minister’s civilian government and military leaders. The reworked NSC was designed to give the military a permanent, formal avenue by which it could express its concerns to the elected government. The hope was that the NSC would allow the military to check the excesses of Islamic reactionaries in the government while avoiding direct intervention. The system worked well for 20 years. There were no more coups, yet the military was able to keep those prime ministers with Islamic-reactionary tendencies honest. In Turkey, military intervention, or at least the threat thereof, has historically been a vital bulwark against encroaching reactionary Islam But the equilibrium was disturbed in the early 2000s. In 2003, current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan assumed office. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) is the direct descendant of the Islamic reactionary Democratic and Justice Parties. The military was initially able to keep Erdogan’s reactionary tendencies in check, but this success was relatively short lived. Around the time of Erdogan’s succession, negotiations concerning Turkish membership in the EU ramped up. As a condition of those talks, the undoubtedly well-meaning bigwigs in Brussels demanded more extensive subordination of the Turkish military to civilian authorities. The AKP-controlled parliament happily complied, weakening the role of the NSC and changing its membership to majority-civilian. In 2009, parliament also passed a law giving civilian courts jurisdiction to punish military personnel charged with threatening national security (read: intervening to temper the excesses of reactionary officials). Other similar changes, often put forth for the ostensible purpose of advancing Turkey’s prospects of EU membership, have also reduced the military’s influence. All these steps would be commendable, even crucial, in most liberal democracies. But in Turkey, the liberal-democratic consensus is not a broad as it is in Canada, the U.S. or Western Europe. While military coups are (usually rightly) seen as anathema to liberal democracy, in Turkey, military intervention, or at least the threat thereof, has historically been a vital bulwark against encroaching reactionary Islam. The military’s decline in influence over the past decade has given these reactionary forces a freer hand. Thus, the recently enacted restrictions on alcohol, the crackdown on public kissing in Ankara and other limitations on personal freedom. While the curbs on liberty have thus far been fairly modest, the fear is that the slow, unmistakable, march away from societal openness will continue. Turkey needs what every liberal society needs: A democratic government bounded by institutions strong enough to check that government’s encroachments on liberty. In the past, the Turkish military was such an institution, albeit an imperfect one. The presently weakened state of the military has emboldened Erdogan and company. He must be brought to heel. Let’s hope what we are witnessing now in Turkey is, in part, a revival of the Kemalist spirit. If military coups in Turkey are indeed obsolete, let’s hope that the present protests prove to be an ideological coup of sorts — a coup instituted by a minority passionately committed to personal liberty.