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The State, Political Party and Society in post-1983 Turkey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Metin Heper
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IN TERMS OF THE HISTORICAL CATEGORIES FORMULATED BY S. N. Eisentadt, the origins of the Ottoman-Turkish polity were imperial-bureaucratic rather than imperial-feudal or patrimonial. The regime was not patrimonial because the centre had its own distinctive normative system; the values of the centre were just a pale reflection of those of the periphery. The regime was not imperial-feudal for the centre did not have to face civil societal groups able to challenge it and impinge upon it. The members of the periphery could not develop horizontal loyalties; instead they competed among themselves for a limited number of privileges such as tax-farming rights or quotas for import or export which the centre granted. The Ottoman-Turkish peripheral elements did not develo into an aristocracy or a bourgeoisie with political influence. Consequently, the efforts towards modernization initiated during the nineteenth century took on a particular twist. Modernization meant Westernization, which in turn was perceived from the perspective of Enlightenment tradition. Informed by a ‘cast-iron theory’ of Islam ,the state's salvation was seen to lie in substituting reason for religion as the basis of public policy-making. The military and the bureaucratic elites came to see themselves primarily as the guardians of raison d'état.

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Articles
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Government and Opposition , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1990 , pp. 321 - 333
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1990

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References

1 Eisenstadt, S. N., ‘Strong and Weak States: Some Reconsiderations’, in Heper, Metin (ed.), The State and Public Bureaucracies. A Comparative Perspective, London, Greenwood, 1987 Google Scholar.

2 See Mardin, Serif, ‘Power, Civil Society and Culture in the Ottoman Empire’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 11, 1969, pp. 258–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Heper, Metin, ‘Center and Periphery in the Ottoman Empire with Special Reference to the Nineteenth Century’, International Political Science Review, 1, 1980, pp.81–105 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For this perception of Islam in the nineteenth-century Ottoman polity which took religion as no more than a set of dogmatic and irrational tenets, see Yalman, Nur, ‘Islamic Reform and the Mystic Tradition in Eastern Turkey’, Archives Européennes de Sociologies, 10, 1969, pp.41–42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Berkes, Niyazi, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, Montreal, McGill University Press. 1964 Google Scholar.

5 Kazancigil, Ali, ‘The Ottoman Turkish State and Kemalism’, in Kazancigil, Ali and Özbudun, Ergun, (eds), Atutürk. Founder of a Modern State, London, Hurst, C., 1981 Google Scholar.

6 Heper, Metin, ‘Extremely “Strong State” and Democracy: Turkey in Comparative and Historical Perspective’, in Greniman, Deborah, (ed.), Democracy and Modernity, Leiden, Brill, 1990 Google Scholar.

7 For an extensive account see Heper, Metin, The State Tradition in Turkey, Walkington, UK, The Eothen Press, 1985 Google Scholar.

8 Dodd, C. H., The Crisis of Turkish Democracy, Walkington, UK, The Eothen Press, 1983, pp. 25–6Google Scholar.

9 Heper, The State Tradition in Turkey, chap. 5.

10 ibid., chap. 4.

11 Tachau, Frank and Heper, Metin, ‘The State, Politics and Military in Turkey’, Comparative Politics, 16, 1983, pp. 17–33 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Heper, Metin, ‘The State, Military and Democracy in Turkey’, Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, 9, 1987, pp. 52–64 Google Scholar.

13 Although President Kenan Evren often talked of Atatürkism as an ideology, he did not take it as a source for public policies. Atatürkism was perceived only as a negative ideology—as an antidote to the hard ideologies of leftist and rightist variety and against Islam.

14 Metin Heper, ‘The Executive in the Third Turkish Republic, 1982–1988’, Governance. An International Journal of Policy and Administration, forthcoming.

15 Ziya Öniʂ, ‘Evolution of Privatization in Turkey: The Institutional Context of Public Enterprise Reform’, paper prepared for submission at the conference, ‘Dynamics of State and Society in the Middle East’, Cairo, Egypt, June 1989, p. 12.

16 ibid., p. 13.

17 Özay Mehmet, ‘Identity Crisis in the Islamic Periphery: The Modernization Debate in Turkey and Malaysia’, book-length typescript, chap. 10.

18 Ilkin, Selim, ‘Privatisation in Turkey’, in Heper, Metin and Evin, Ahmet (eds), Consensus and Conflict in Turkish Politics. Dilemmas of Transition to Democracy, London, C. Hurst, forthcomingGoogle Scholar.

19 Öniʂ, ‘Evolution of Privatization in Turkey’, pp. 21–22.

20 For an elaboration see Heper, Metin, ‘Introduction’, in Heper, Metin (ed.), Democracy and Local Government. Istanbul in the 1980s, Walkington, UK, The Eothen Press, 1987 Google Scholar.

21 Kalaycioğlu, Ersin, ‘Division of Responsibility’, in Heper, Metin (ed.), Local Government in Turkey. Governing Greater Istanbul, London, Routledge, 1989 Google Scholar and üstün Ergüder, ‘Patterns of Authority’, ibid.

22 Ersin Kalayciogğlu, ‘Decentralization and Democracy’, in Metin Heper and Ahmet Evin (eds), Consensus and Conflict in Turkish Politics. Dilemmas of Transition to Democracy, and Heper, Metin, ‘Politics of Central versus Local Government in Turkey’ in Ino, Takeji (ed.), Local Government and Politics in the Middle East, Tokyo, Institute of Developing Economies Middle East Series, 1990 Google Scholar.

23 This point is developed at length in Metin Heper, ‘Conclusion’, in Heper (ed.), Local Government in Turkey.

24 On this matter, here and below, I draw upon Öniʂ, Ziya, ‘The Political Economy of Turkey in the 1980s: The Anatomy of Unorthodox Liberalism’, in Heper, Metin (ed.), Interest Group Politics in Turkey, Berlin and New York, de Gruyter, forthcomingGoogle Scholar.

25 This discussion on recent interest-groups/government interface in Turkey draws upon Metin Heper, ‘Interest Group Politics in Post-1983 Turkey’ in Heper (ed.), Interest Group Politics in Turkey.

26 Heper, Metin, ‘The Motherland Party Governments and Bureaucracy in Turkey, 1983–1988’, Governance, 2, 1989, pp. 457–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 For the political dynamics of Turkey before and after 1980 see Heper, Metin and Evin, Ahmet (eds), State, Democracy and the Military. Turkey in the 1980s, Berlin and New York, de Gruyter, 1988 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.