Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

These did not prove to be a simple matter. Turkey had been built on waves of refugees, from the Caucasus, the Balkans and the Crimea, and they had brought with them the ‘nation-building’ techniques that they had had to learn in a very cruel way from the ‘Christian’ states that had taken over. You got rid of minorities; 7 million people had had to flee to Anatolia, and they made up half of the urban population of republican Turkey, with villages of their own dotted up and down the land. There was hardly a family that did not remember tales of disaster, and even the government quarter of old Istanbul had been swamped by these refugees in 1912. From the Balkans, the Turks had learned how a new nation was to be established. This was a business involving considerable artificiality — for Romania, even the name of the state was false, since the original ‘Romania’ had been the Latin kingdom of the Crusaders in Thrace; Bulgaria was cobbled together by American missionaries; in Greece the need to classicize run-of-the-mill but, for the peasants, unknown concepts was sometimes funny. In Turkey there was also a new national language, because the peasants needed to be made literate, and could not manage that under the existing Arabic script; words had to be invented (Ernst Reuter, who had been a prisoner of war in Kazakhstan, knew something about Turkic languages; he was put on the language reform commission within months of his arrival from Buchenwald concentration camp, and advised learnedly on the Uzbek word for this and that, designed to displace the Ottoman original). In economic matters, state boards were established to run this or that industry; people were arrested for selling the national currency without authorization; police and army were powerful; in Turkey the capital had even been moved away from sophisticated, historic and cosmopolitan Istanbul, to Ankara, in the bleak centre of the Anatolian plateau. There, you did not hear a mosque, and people of country dress were turned away if they appeared. The Western admirers of Atatürk did not really see this side of things, and he himself had a considerable sense of moderation, knowing when to stop. In his day, the Christian minorities were recognized as necessary, or even vital: they were Turkey’s passport to the West. When Hitler started his campaign against the Jews, Turkey’s doors were opened to (some of) them. Four and a half centuries before, the Jews of Iberia had been expelled by the crusading king. The Sultan had let them into his empire, and their descendants, many of them converts to Islam, contributed much to thirties Turkey, which was run with a sense of mission. Atatürk, who had saved his people from conquest and massacre, had enormous charisma, and now stands as a symbol of an old-fashioned Progress, of which Turkey’s neighbours are not exemplars. He died in 1938, and his successors suffered from excessive caution.

Enlightenments eat their parents. The medical improvements, considerable in their own way — in Ankara, malaria had been a mass killer until the Republic, with its Çubuk reservoir and its devoted doctors — also resulted in a demographic explosion. This was worst in the partly Kurdish east, where polygamy, starting for a boy in his mid-teens, with a girl even younger who was soon ditched, was standard, though not legal. Then again, as France had discovered post-Napoleon, education creates an unappeasable intelligentsia; a Russian reactionary, Konstantin Leontiev, sagely said that, in Russia, ‘the tavern does less damage than the school’. The best products of the educational system, as with developing countries from the Third Republic or united Italy onwards, went into technical services and were very good indeed, but there were others, hanging discontentedly around the media or the educational institutions, and thinking that they knew it all. This was to be an enormous problem in the Turkish seventies, more or less as happened in Chile; and such men and women tended to look on the peasantry, trooping into the towns, as isomorphic magnitudes like a sack of potatoes. Migrant peasants occupied huge areas on the outskirts of the main cities, especially Istanbul. By law, they could not be evicted if they managed to put up a house during one night’s work. These ‘night constructions’ ( gecekondu ) formed rings round historic Istanbul and Ankara, a terrible affront to modernizing Turkey. Ankara had been planned by central European architects and their Turkish associates in the 1930s, and they had aimed higher than this.

Migrant rurals even besieged the old part of Ankara, where Atatürk had established the modernizing State. You could leave the official entertainment palace of the foreign ministry, where, once, Atatürk had danced the waltz with Western ambassadresses, and perhaps discussed the principles of Bauhaus architecture with Bruno Taut, luminary of Weimar, Moscow and Tokyo. (Taut, out of gratitude, said that he would design Atatürk’s catafalque gratis. He then designed something resembling a huge gilded eggbox. The Turks did not know how to respond. Taut let them off the hook by himself dying, and being buried in it, at Edirne.) Then you would smell kebabs, and have to avoid large, religious-clad women driving their brood along the pavement towards a multifarious bazaar. Istanbul’s population grew from 2 million to 10 million (and by some accounts, even 15 million). There had been 12 million Turks in 1922. By 1950 there were 20 million, by 1975 35 million and by 1980 45 million. The infrastructure could hardly respond to this. Schools were too few, the electricity network was overburdened, and even the sewage system suffered. It was a variant of what western Europe had undergone in the later nineteenth century, but on a much greater scale, and in a much shorter time. In the 1970s order was breaking down.

All enlightened, reforming states encountered a political problem: how far could liberty be sacrificed for the sake of progress? This problem was well-known in Russia or Spain, two countries with which Turkey had a great deal in common. Pushkin had said that ‘the State is the only European in Russia’, and in such countries the army had a role in public affairs that it did not have in more advanced places. It took in ambitious boys from the provinces, sometimes even the peasantry, gave them discipline and education, and so caused them to rise in society (e.g. the chief of staff in 1960 came from a tobacco-farming family, and a later military saviour, Kenan Evren, was the son of a bank clerk in the Balkans). Military schools taught medicine and engineering, and the Turkish officer corps had had a role in the modernization of the country ever since the early nineteenth century. Under Atatürk — himself, in Salonica, a one-time cadet, refugee from a religious school — this went on: the army was at the centre of the State. On the other hand, there was much pressure for political change, in the direction of greater freedom. In the later 1940s there was a split in the ruling single party, the Republicans, partly because of foreign pressure, and partly because the two wings grew further apart. The Republicans, under İsmet Inönü, represented bullying Westernizing virtue, and Inönü had a statue of himself, bigger than the National Monument itself, designed for Taksim Square, where once had been an Ottoman barracks. But there were rivals, interested in prising open the State and, in some grubby cases, using primitive nationalism to expropriate the property of the minorities, especially the quarter-million Greeks in Istanbul. They were also prepared to open up to the peasantry, especially as regards the legalization of religious practices that the Republicans had regarded as ridiculous. The Republicans were by this stage unpopular, as they were associated with a police state.

In 1950, under American pressure, Inönü allowed free elections, and the free-market, liberalizing element, established as the Democratic Party, won an enormous victory. The old Republicans survived in any number only because local prefects had done deals with Kurdish chieftains in the east, whose tribes voted en bloc as instructed. The Democrats were in power for ten years, and started well: American aid flowed in, some of the state restrictions were lifted, a large concrete mosque was put up in the middle of Ankara (with a supermarket underneath) and the Democrats’ leader, Adnan Menderes, won respect abroad because of his NATO connections (he said, ‘Whatever America does is right by us’). Then came the worst mistake of modern Turkish history. The Greeks of Istanbul occupied much of the best real estate and ran the best shops; they were half of the stock exchange. Some were even deputies of the Democratic Party. On 5-6 September 1955 there was a riot in the European part of Istanbul, and the great avenue running through it, once called Grand’ rue de Péra, was filled with broken glass and goods flung out of shop windows, while the police stood by. This was ostensibly done because the Greeks on Cyprus were behaving intolerably against the Turkish minority, but the main factor was simply greed, and stupid greed at that, on the part of Democrat associates. The Greeks (and many Armenians) left Istanbul, except for a tiny remnant, even then — in the Fener district — overshadowed by true-believing Moslems at their truest-believing noisiest, and having to be protected by the army and the police. The Greek district was then taken over by rural migrants, and took two generations to recover. So did the country. Menderes was later executed because of this, though, oddly enough, the Greek Patriarch appeared as a witness on his behalf. The Democrats made whoopee with the budget, lost control of finance, split, had to attempt a fiddling of elections, then tried to govern in authoritarian style. They encouraged religion, whereas Atatürk had determinedly kept it out of public life. Secular Turkey hated all of this, and there was a military coup, on 27 May 1960. A general, Cemal Gürsel, now became head of state, and tried, in close co-operation with Inönü, to produce an updated version of Atatürkism. Professors of law produced a revised constitution, in the extraordinary belief that the decreeing of things on paper would mean their realization in practice. The Americans offered almost immediate recognition and $400m credit; more professors — Dutch — arrived with a Plan.