British Society for Middle Eastern Studies

Aspects of the Turkish State: Political Culture, Organized Interests and Village Communities Author(s): Clement H. Dodd Reviewed work(s): Source: Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies), Vol. 15, No. 1/2 (1988), pp. 78-86 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/195218 . Accessed: 18/03/2012 12:54
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ASPECTS OF THE TURKISH STATE: POLITICAL CULTURE, ORGANIZED INTERESTS AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES Clement Dodd This is a report on a seminar convened by the author at the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Society held in Exeter, 12-15 July 1987.1 Ed. The notion of the state has been revived in recent years. A number of political scientists-chiefly continental-have claimed that due to the Anglo-Saxon (or better, perhaps, Anglo-American) domination of political science since the war the 'state' has disappeared from use. This is usually attributed to the very low degree of 'stateness' evident in political systems like, notably, the American, and, to a lesser degree, the British. Consequently, political models which stress political conflict and its reconciliation as the stuff of politics have been popular. In other words, articulation of inputs into the political system tend to be aggregated, with the help perhaps of some bureaucratic within-puts-which is about as far as the state comes to be recognized. With this emphasis on function, political institutions rather lost the centre of the stage, with the result that there was less chance than ever for a return of the state, though even institutional approaches to the study of politics have paid little attention to the state as such, since it is difficult to give it concrete embodiment. The revival of academic interest in the state in Turkey is mainly due to Metin Heper.2 In his presentation to the seminar he took note of the fact that in some polities greater emphasis is placed 'on a notion of public interest derived from allegedly intrinsic public needs rather than on the idea of public interest indirectly created through the balancing and aggregating of sectional beliefs and interests'. The state, it seems, developed in those countries where public needs, including their definition, were recognized as primarily the concern of public authority. However, Heper did not see continental Europe as providing the only examples of states devoted explicitly to the public interest. He pointed out that 'the Ottoman-Turkish polity has achieved "stateness" par excellence', and that some studies of Turkish politics, ignoring this heritage, use models irrelevant to the Turkish scene. Originally, democracy in Turkey 'was conceived as a means of formulating "rational" policies, and not at all as a mechanism for aggregating sectional beliefs and interests'. By 'rational' Heper seems to intend a rather idealized form of democracy, which pictures the electorate choosing representatives on the basis of rational policies, though possibly allowing these representatives some leeway to make decisions in the public interest as changing circumstances may require. Heper has noted elsewhere3 that among Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk's contributions to modern Turkey was his expectation that the people 'would acquire the capacity to reach consensus not through multiple confrontations, but by attaining a higher level of rationality'.4 Even this 'relatively pragmatic' openness was not subsequently much favoured by the bureaucracy; it sought to create an 78

ideological straitjacket called Ataturkism which helped liberal tendencies disappear, and imposed on Turkey a rather closed bureaucratic state until, after the Second World War, Turkey turned to liberal and democratic politics. This important development tended, however, to lead to a party-dominated polity (to the discomfiture of the bureaucracy) rather than to a true democracy. But this party-dominated polity was unstable (as shown in 1960, 1971 and 1980). This was, in the main, because, it is suggested, of the absence of an 'Ottoman-Turkish civil society'. Analysts whom Heper follows here have stressed the point that the virtual absence of aristocratic and bourgeois classes in the Ottoman Empire meant the lack of 'members of the civil society who are able to transcend their private concerns, and to elaborate a public opinion on matters of general interest'.5 Parties drawn from such developed classes might have had the capacity to develop a 'party-state'. Instead, Turkish political parties (when not pro-state) have drawn many of their members (in so far as they have come from outside bureaucratic and professional circles) from industrial and commercial groups with traditionally little standing in societyand little self-confidence. One result of this has been disquieting in the extreme, namely, irresponsible elite conflict and party squabbling. 'Autonomous from the economically significant civil societal groups for so long, they [the political parties] carried out politics within a framework of "cultural" rather than "functional" (i.e. economic) cleavages'.6 A party-centred polity emerged after 1950 from the Ataturkist state-dominated polity, but Heper wryly notes that, while 'in Turkey under the state-dominated polity the democracy that existed stumbled along, under a party-dominated polity, however, it collapsed'.7 The military intervened to limit the damage to state and society in 1960, 1971 and 1980, but always with the 'reconsolidation' of democracy in mind, not the imposition of a closed system of thought. The military has sought, it is suggested, to restructure the political system in order to create a polity acting to some moderate degree as the instrument of society. Like Atatiirk, the military after 1980 became the state, or moved 'closer to the state' than ever in the republican period.8 And like Atatiirk, it is said to have faith in the ordinary people. The military are learning, and so too, according to Heper, is the electorate, who have shown themselves able to distinguish between political and constitutional voting-they voted for the military-imposed constitution, but for the party (the Motherland Party) least favoured by the military.
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The importance of elections and the experience of the electorate with multi-party politics are among the points made by Ustiin Ergiider. In his view the Turkish state 'performs the important and traditional functions of distributing welfare and justice', whilst 'the concentration of power at the centre and the control of the periphery through the distribution of patronage to the local influentials have been very important aspects of this state tradition-a tradition assumed to be non-supportive of democratic values and institutions, which are based on a "civil society" tradition'. Assuming that the state tradition was still operative in Atatiirk's time, there is some difference 79

implied here from the position adopted by Heper, for whom the state in Turkey under Atatiirk's control, or subsequently when under that of the military, has not been antagonistic to democracy. For Ergiider it was the state elites (whom he defines as the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia) 'who led the way in introducing free elections in 1950 to inaugurate the Turkish experiment in democracy'. But it is not altogether clear whether Heper could agree that the bureaucracy in Turkey is imaginative enough, save in exceptional circumstances, perhaps, to constitute the locus of stateness, since stateness for him requires a 'transcendental' quality-a belief 'that man primarily belongs to a moral community'.9 'Atatiirk's conception of a moral community seems to have been built around the view that the people ought to be allowed to develop freely-so that they would attain a level of rationality which would enable them to arrive at consensus by themselves without the process being arrested by the bureaucratic intelligentsia', which, after Atatiirk, is said to have leaned towards elite leadership. We are informed, however, that 'the bureaucratic intelligentsia of the early 1960s ... were after reviving a bureaucratic version of a "moral" society in place of an "interest society" which, in their opinion, had drifted to extreme instrumentalism'. So they must have had some measure of 'transcendentalism'. Whether situated in the bureaucracy or not, it does seem to be the case from Heper's enquiries that the Kemalist elites have been disillusioned by the practices of multi-party politics in Turkey. To some extent their rather antique and idealized view of liberal and democratic polities had not prepared them for the conflict-ridden realities of Turkish democracy. Also the bureaucracy was proved to be weak in its own defence. In the 1970s it was not strong enough to withstand its being staffed with the partisans of political parties: it was, in a word, politicized. In his paper Ergiider explained why: In fact, it has been centralization of all rewards, resources and power that has invited this politicization. The introduction of democracy and multi-party politics has unleashed forces in Turkey that have worked toward the development of a democratic ethos and decentralization. But it has, due to the existing extreme polarization at the center, also worked toward reinforcing that centralization. Capturing power and holding on to it for dear life becomes a very important occupation for political parties since the distribution of the spoils of power helps solidify the party and its organization. Despite the advent of political parties with liberal pretensions, like the Democrats or the Justice party, no party has really challenged or tried to dismantle this important-concentration of power and resources, which has proved so instrumental in their efforts to build a party organization and perpetuate it. Turan points out: The periodic crises of Turkish democracy during the past three and a half decades do not appear to have derived from a lack of elements supportive of a democratic system in the political culture, but from deliberate policies pursued by political parties and their 80

cadres, who felt that there was too much at stake in losing elections.11 However, change has been occurring. Voters have increasingly come to recognize that through both elections and political parties they can exert influence on the centre, and government has to be responsive to their demands. Whilst voters overwhelmingly supported the military's restoration of law and order in 1980, they showed in 1983 that they were committed to a tradition of having a choice in determining whom they would like to have in power-a point also made by Heper. Moreover, the electorate has shown its independence not only of the state, but of the political elites who struggle to enter its portals. The evidence of non-class voting which appeared in the 1979 elections shows that the Turkish electorate has become highly volatile. The conclusion seems to be that, whatever group captures power, the electorate looks for democratic leadership that can deliver in terms of (1) law and order, and (2) economic policies in a changing and more urbanized Turkey. Ergiider reminds us, also, that in these circumstances the electorate may have to forgo, however, its penchant for central control of the economy. Since 1980 economic liberalization has been reducing the role of the state in the areas of economic management. This is far from claiming, however, that the state is prepared to relinquish surveillance of economic activities as they impinge on politics. But more decentralized economic activity should lead to increased pluralism-to the conflict of interests and their reconciliation, to that view of politics as a business, which indicates for Heper a low, or even non-existent, level of stateness, at least in the economic sphere.
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The question to ask, then, is whether in the new more liberal economic environment following the military intervention of 1980 the state is showing signs of withering away. Ilkay Sunar's paper had particular relevance at this stage. He denied the claim, in the first place, that in the 1970s the governments of the Justice Party (on the right) or the Republican People's Party (on the left) were able to achieve the 'corporatist incorporation of business and labour'. He questioned the views of R. Bianchi in this regard,12 who 'puts undue emphasis on the corporatizing attempts of the AP [Justice Party], exaggerates the extent of corporatization that actually occurred in the 1970s, and hence cannot capture the irresolute and double-exposed nature of interest associability that came nowhere near the "societal corporatist" form that Bianchi attributes to it. Indeed, what prevailed in Turkey in the 1970s was a polarized and debilitated form of interest politics-a kind of inchoate and fragmented societal pluralism that surpassed state pluralism but did not develop, much less crystallize, into a new and coherent interest regime'. Nothing so weak could be the subject of corporatism, it would seem. Sunar saw the outcome as the 'superimposition of clientilist, populist and class forms of interest politics onto a state pluralist form of interest management'. This may be compared with the observations 81

made by Heper and others on the weakness and lack of self-confidence vis-a-vis the state of business and moderate labour groups. Moreover, the business groups have been, and still are, divided amongst themselves, there being a cleavage between large and small business interests. This is mainly over preferential treatment given by the state to the one or the other. Those in small business are described as being 'the domestically oriented small and mediumsized Anatolian retailers and manufacturers'. They have grown increasingly critical of the large industrialists and businessmen, who support an internationalist, export-oriented economic policy--the policy followed since 1980. Even before then 'extreme foreign exchange shortage and a relatively strong labour movement' broke down the patronage alliance between large and small business. The result was that 'small business turned against the bourgeoisie and big labour with a vengeance; the outcome was a petit bourgeois backlash, the fragmentation of the right, and the emergence of reactionary Islamic politics and semi-fascist extreme nationalism'. Big business and industry tried before 1980 to cooperate with the large labour organizations, though this would have been at the expense of the less competitive, relatively inefficient and heavily subsidized smaller enterprises for which the import-substitution regime, not the international market, and international competition, was vital. These conflicts continue even though labour is now not a factor to be taken much into account, as a result of measures to discipline the unions taken after military intervention in 1980. It is not surprising, then, that the task of the government in controlling both business and labour groups is now even less difficult than it was, but the government has also been greatly aided in this by the formal framework of state pluralism, which was reinforced after 1980. Under this system there are public professional organizations (the Chambers), private associations and workers' unions. The Chambers have certain monopoly privileges, but do not alone represent business and industrial interests, which may organize themselves into associations whilst also being represented in the Chambers. Private associations, like unions, are subject to a certain amount of direct surveillance and control by the Ministry of the Interior, as in many other states. However, in Turkey, these state controls are rather detailed and special care is taken to prevent interest associations from engaging in political activity, and political parties may not seek their support. Unions are also strictly controlled, with political solidarity and general strikes being prohibited, and workers in seven 'strategic' sectors, as defined by law, being prevented from striking. (Sunar estimates that this is about half of the 1.5 million workers in Turkey.) 'What is envisaged in the Constitution, in fact, is a system of state and society relations in which organized social groups are segregated from each other and segmentalized; the state exercises powers of close supervision over each segment'. It is a system of 'statist' democracy designed to prevent democracy from being overwhelmed by forces which broke through less secure barriers which existed before 1980. Re-democratization may well loosen these bonds however. Sunar also took the view that the Constitution too is fundamentally statist, with power concentrated in the hands of the President, the Council of 82

Ministers, the State Supervisory Board, and the National Security Council. In particular he saw the President-with his wide powers of appointment and strategic prerogatives in legislation and execution-as a countervailing power to Parliament. This is an interesting point, though the role of the President since the return to democracy has been rather muted, and of course the President will eventually be elected by Parliament. Nevertheless, the Constitution and the way it was drawn up do suggest that the state tradition in Turkey is not dead by any means. After pointing out that the Kemalist state bore the marks of the Ottoman state, Sunar continued: The authoritarian variant in force until 1950 rested on a state-dominant monoparty regime. The democratic variant, on the other hand, has incorporated the minimum procedural rules of the 'citizenship principle', but in terms of the core mechanisms of decision-making, it has kept its statist characteristics of power centralization, normative secularism and nationalism, bureaucratic autonomy from interest claims and popular demands, administrative penetration and depoliticization of society, territorial plebiscitarianism, and functional state-bound pluralism.
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A point not much developed by Sunar found ample representation in Brian Beeley's paper. In dealing with the relations between village and state he makes the point that the key concept is integration. Villages are being integrated into modern styles of living by the 'operational' state-the one that is visible to them through the activities of the numerous state officials with whom they are now in quite frequent contact. This is not necessarily an easy relationship; in some ways it is easier for the villager to relate with the broader national state, especially if he has had the opportunity to acquire an enhanced sense of national identity through having worked abroad, or even elsewhere in Turkey. And, even at the practical level, not all the integration of the villager into urbanism is the result of the direct efforts of the agents of the state; the economic and social changes which have swept over the country since 1950 have had their own momentum in this regard. In fact, once the villager is induced to move out of the village circle, the drive to integration into urban society is so powerful that there is little hankering after the lost world of intimate village society. As for the part played by the 'operational' state in the process of integration, the villagers clearly expect more now than they used to do. 'The existence of an urban-gap is not itself a novelty: it was indeed much more visible a century ago when townspeople and villagers even looked different. The important feature of the gap today is that it is experienced by people who have been educated-and politicized-into thinking that they are equal within the new Turkish state and that differences between Turks should be disappearing. Aspirations and attitudes to the State and to what it ought to make possible are irreversiblychanged from even a few decades ago'. 83

But are the attitudesof those who seek to changethe villageschangingtoo? Beeley was not optimisticin this regard.He showed how indeed the state has undera variety givenmore and more attentionto villageand areadevelopment of schemes since 1950. There have been many projectsand plans, whereasa hundredyears ago there was no national plan, nor any set of state priorities based on notions of nation-wide integration and equality. The Ottoman establishmentran an empire in which people were identified by religious confessionratherthan by areaor village.'Villageswereplacesvisitedby urban people as administrators,recruiters,tax-collectors-not as developers, and certainly not as equals'. By the 1960s, at least, there were changes in some the respectswhen the new StatePlanningOrganization 'spearheaded new state .'. The fashionable was CommunityDevelopment,but this approach. concept was 'a pragmaticapproachdirectedto achievingnationaltargetsratherthan a real invitation to villagersto progressas they wished. It achieved scattered successes, but was unloved by those who saw it as an extreme-even romantic-form of paternalismat the centre'. Other approacheshave been tried, concentrating on areas, or on general social change, but Beeley concludedthat 'overall,the sense that ruralpeople are at the receivingend of what "they" offer from the centre-without much prospect of effective beyondthe ballot box-seems to remain,despitenearlyfour counter-argument decades in which there have been elected governments.Arguably,the deeper roots of this view of the centre lie in the Ottoman past'. This suggests the prevalence still of paternalist/supplicant relationshipsbetween official and a harkingback to the notion of the state as devletbaba-the state as villager, father.The presentPrimeMinister,TurgutOzal, will have none of it: 'We keep The hearingabout this father-state. state is not a father.Don't ever forgetthat the fatherwieldsa stick from time to time. The state is thereto serveyou; it is The sentimentis modern, and in line with the new revival of democracy. But, as well as wieldinga stick at times, the father is also in some sense the servant of the family, its protector and provider. Hence, perhaps, the predilectionof the Turkishelectoratefor making demandsfor concretelocal benefitsfrom the state. Clearlyin the countryside,at least, old images of the state, and traditionalstate practices,still survive, but might be expected to decline under the influenceof economic policies which lay stress on entreand self-reliance, individual preneurship, acquisitiveness.
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your servant, nothing more.

To conclude,it it evidentthat the state is still importantin Turkey,and that it still has some traditionalqualities.The paternalisticaspect is still there, as describedby Beeley,but would seem to be breakingdown undervarioussorts of change, even though deputies who obtain favourable administrative decisions for their constituents may sometimes appear as paternalistic purveyorsof state bounty ratherthan the elected servantsof society. And, as Sunar stresses, the Turkishstate has mapped out large areas of control for itself, especially in the fields of business, commerce and labour-to which 84

education might be added-and particularly as they impinge on politics. This control might be interpreted as bureaucratic dominance (selfless or otherwise) or party dominance, or at best the sort of control in the Ataturkist spirit, as outlined by Heper, which has the ideal of development towards a liberal and democratic society at heart. Whatever the origin of the impetus to control, it seems to be strong enough to resist, for the time being, challenges from the new more pluralist society. But in the meantime the Turkish electorate is clearly learning, and is developing a more mature understanding of the democratic political process, as Ergiider observed. If this should continue, the pronounced party elite conflict which has characterized Turkish politics might well suffer some diminution. However, the question was then raised of the assumptions on which the discussion was based. It was suggested by the author of this report that in the papers presented, and subsequently in the discussion, the dichotomy between the state, on the one hand, and civil society, on the other, was perhaps overstressed. There was a tendency, it was argued, to regard modern liberal democracy as somehow emerging out of civil society and constituting a polity, or political system, not a state, as if it was Locke who thought that the state would wither away. A fuller definition of the state than that being implied seemed to be needed. Consequently, it was suggested, with some acknowledgement to the work of Max Weber, that by the state we refer to the political, judicial and administrative institutions of a society which are equipped with coercive power, legitimate or not (and operating within a given territory), and which provide for the maintenance of law and order in society and a good measure of predictability in the relations between government and society. In brief, a state is a settled political order backed, if necessary, by force.14 The notion of 'public interest' does not enter into this basic definition. Usually, however, states are built around sets of values more developed than the above definition requires-and by reference to which public interest may be defined. So, by taking into account the values embodied in the state, it is possible to conceive of various kinds of state, not just of one. In fact there exist in the world, inter alia, authoritarian states, paternalistic states, secular states, socialist states, Islamic states, and not least, liberal-democratic states. The problem is not, therefore, how far, in order to achieve democracy, must the state be pushed into the background. The problem is how far to convert the existing state-for there is nearly always some form of state-into one with liberal and democratic characteristics. Simply to set up a pluralist society is not enough. It can easily be forgotten that democracy is not a pluralistic free-for-all, but a particular form of government necessarily operating within the range of values embodied in the state, behind which in extremis lies coercive power. In other words, conflicts of interest in a pluralist society are not just settled by reconciliation, but within a framework of recognized norms, which are often founded in public offices and institutions, and expressed through the rule of law, but which are also internalized by individual politicians, public servants and citizens. These norms do not constitute an explicit public interest, but among the desiderata of any dynamic state is some recognition also of the public interest 85

in matters of public policy which may well differ from individual or group interests, or from the sum of interests even. This is a most difficult aspect of the state to reconcile with liberal-democracy, and perhaps carries the greatest dangers. The public interest is sometimes represented by senates, where they or their equivalents exist, but more often, and less legitimately, by public bureaucracies, or by the military, and it often also finds advocates among the intelligentsia. It is less dangerous for liberal democracy when it is expressed through public debate rather than through closed corporations. Its promotion is one of the means of seeking to prevent liberal and democratic states from being overrun by political party and group interests. It is something of this vision of democracy that Atatiirk seems to have had in mind. That it has not been fully realized does not mean that Turkey is not in important respects a liberal-democratic state. Notes
1. Papers were presented by Professor Ostiin Ergilder, 'Political Parties, Political Culture and the State in Turkey' and Dr Ilkay Sunar, 'Redemocratization and Organized Interests in Turkey', and Professor Metin Heper made a verbal presentation on the subject of the state in Turkey. All three participants were from the Bosphoros University, Istanbul. Dr Brian Beeley (The Open University) presented a paper, 'The Village and the State'. Quotations in the text without footnote references are from the papers presented or from summaries provided by the authors. 2. See in particular his The State Traditionin Turkey, Beverley, The Eothen Press, 1985. 3. Notably in The State Traditionin Turkey. 4. Ibid., p. 64. 5. Ibid., p. 104. Reference is made here to the concept of the 'bourgeoisie-as-public', which is attributed to G. Poggi in The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction, London, Hutchinson, 1978. 6. The State Traditionin Turkey, p. 150. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 152. 9. Ibid., p. 7. 10. Reference is here made to the work of Ersin Kalaycioglu, 'Elite Political Culture and Regime Stability: The case of Turkey' (paper read at the Conference 'The Centennial of Mosca's Theory of the Ruling Class', Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, 7-9 September, 1981. 11. Ilter Turan, 'The Evolution of Political Culture in Turkey' in Ahmet Evin (ed.), Modern Turkey: Continuityand Change, Opladen, Verlag Budrich GmbH, 1984. 12. R. Bianchi, Interest Groups and Political Development in Turkey, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984. 13. Quoted by Professor Ergiider in his paper. Mr Turgut Ozal was addressing a mass rally in Corum, 19.7.1987. 14. For a fuller discussion of this approach to the state see my 'State and Bureaucracy-the Anglo-American Case', in M. Heper (ed.), State and Bureaucracy, 1988.

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