| problems remained, an illiterate peasantry unconcerned with or hostile to social reforms, and a set of minor officials, ignorant of the purposes and functioning of Western institutions. Nevertheless, so much of the confusions and problems of the Young Turks had either disappeared in the course of events, or had been cleared away by the new and clearer-sighted rulers, that it was possible to tackle seriously the task of converting the new Republic into a modern state on the Western model. Why this task seemed so urgent and so obviously desirable is a problem of social history outside the scope history outside the scope of this thesis. Ataturk, to use the surname he adopted later, had established himself as a military commander of outstanding ability during World War I. In 1919, owing to an Allied slip, he was sent to Easter Anatolia as Inspector-General, to supervise disarming on behalf of the Sultan’s government. In May, 1919, the month in which he landed at Samsun, Greek troops, with British and American naval support, landed at Smyrna, on the pretext of preserving order, but in fact for reasons of international jobbery, which are neither honourable nor here relevant. (3) Ataturk at once set about organising nationalist resistance to Allied policy. A conference was held and followed by an official General Election at which the Nationalists won a big majority. This body, meeting first in Ankara, drew up a National Pact, (17th February 1920) (4) demanding full sovereignty for a state to include all territory of the Ottoman Empire not containing a majority of Christians or Arab-speaking Moslems, the end of Capitulations, and the withdrawal of all foreign troops. They then went to Istanbul to meet as a parliament, but their attitude was not sufficiently submissive, and the Allied authorities occupied Istanbul and suppressed them. In August, 1920, the announcement of the signing of the Treaty of Sevres, by which Turkey would have been reduced solely to the North-West corner of Anatolia, and the rest of her present territory divided between Greece, Italy, France, and an independent Armenia, roused a fresh wave of nationalist fervour and determination to resist stiffened. By this time Turkish irregulars were engaging Greek troops advancing eastwards from Smyrna. In spite of belated Allied attempts to mediate, the war intensified and became a fully organised campaign. After a desperate defence during 1920 and 1921, the Turks, strengthened by steadily improving organisation, and by the departure of the French and Italians, who had been occupying Cilicia and Antalya respectively, launched an offensive against the Greeks, who were, on the other hand, growing weaker in morale and in equipment as time went on, and drove them into the sea. An armistice on Turkish terms was arranged in the autumn of 1922. In October, the Ankara Government declared the Sultanate at an end, and the last Sultan Mohammed VI fled in a British warship, his son remaining as the Caliph of Islam, with no political powers. |
| Ataturk’s right hand man, Ismet, later to be called Inonu, came to confer with the European powers at Lausanne, and after much talking, from November 1922 to July 1923, won all the points of the original National Pact, except the territory of Mosul, now in N. Iraq, to which Turkey finally gave up claims in 1926. Agreement was also reached with Greece on the exchange of all Orthodox Christians, except those in Istanbul, for the Moslems of Greece, thus leaving the Kurds as the only sizeable minority inside the Republic’s frontiers. On the 29th October, 1923, Turkey was declared a Republic with Ataturk as President. I have told briefly the story of how this came about because it seems to me that, only in the light of the power and prestige which Ataturk acquired during these events, can his success in carrying through his staggering programme of Westernisation be understood. The victory of the Turks over the Greeks restored their morale, indeed the villagers today do not think of the first World War as a defeat at the hands of the Allies, but as a victory over the Greeks. |
| I.3 | The Republic of Turkey |
| From this time until the end of the second World War, Turkey was a one- party state, virtually under the control of a dictator. The organisation which began as a nationalist movement against the Allies in 1919, was re-christened the Republican People’s Part, and became Ataturk’s organ of control and propaganda. The most serious opposition at this time was from organised religion, centred on the Caliph. In 1924, the Caliphate was abolished and mild criticism of this action led to repressive measures against the Press. In the following year, the Kurds revolted, mainly, it is said on religious grounds, and though the revolt was successfully restrained, the Government fell and Inonu, Ataturk’s faithful lieutenant, became Prime Minister, a move which strengthened Ataturk’s hold and settled the reformers firmly in the saddle. Further attacks on organised Islam followed, with the closing of all monasteries and religious institutions for learning and the devotional life, and the abolition of the fez and its replacement by Western hats, carried through, at any rate locally, with a certain amount of arbitrary firmness. In 1926 the existing system of law, a dual system of Islamic personal law and state code, based on French models, was replaced, by act of the Grand National Assembly, by the Swiss Civil, the German Commercial and the Italian Penal Codes, these being chosen on the grounds that each represented the best of its kind in Europe. This series of violent social changes by legislation was completed in 1928, when the use of the sacred Arabic alphabet was made illegal, and replace by a rationalised Latin script better adapted to the needs of |
| the Turkish language. In the same year, Islam ceased to be officially the established religion of Turkey. Nominally, in five years, the country had adopted an entirely new constitution, within a news et of frontiers, crushed the power of the vested interest in the established religion, separated Islam from the state, changed completely its system of law, and introduced a new way of writing. Obviously, the implementation of these new institutions, which existed, to begin with, not in patterns of behaviour , but merely on paper, was not a matter of a overnight transformation, but of years of learning and adaptation, and the process is still going on. But these were no passing gestures of transitory enthusiasts; the work that was done has remained, and no one in Turkey raises the question of reversing any of these acts except, perhaps, for the old men in the villages who still talk of a return to the veils for women and the Arabic script. I cannot here go into details of the extent of the effectiveness of these reforms, since for any one of them the question would serve as a subject for detailed research in its own right. The early reforms were socially fundamental, more so than anything that has followed, but I do not wish to imply that westernising activities stopped with the introduction of the new alphabet; they have continued up to date and are likely to persist. In order to explain what had happened, and to spread knowledge of the new ideas, the R.P.P. launched, in 1932, a programme for establishing Party clubhouses, called People’s Houses, in all townships in Turkey, which were intended to act as general adult education centres and for indoctrination in the new ideas. “The R.P.P.”, Ataturk had announced at its inception, “will be a school destined to bring about the political education of our people.” In many cases, minor Party branches were established in the villages, and up to 1950, nearly all village headmen and schoolmasters, and a good few others, declared themselves supporters of the R.P.P., but often without much knowledge of it, beyond the fact that it was the Government. It was not until the nineteen-thirties that a serious attempt to establish industry was made. A five year plan was announced in 1934, to include sugar, cement, paper, textile factories, coal and metal mining, and a steel mill; a further plan on similar lines was announced in 1938. The was brought a stop to these activities, but since the war, with foreign, largely American, aid, further ambitious plans for increasing industrial output, improving transport, and raising the productivity of agriculture have been put into operation. Private capital has so far played a comparatively small part in development, and in 1947 about three-quarters of Turkish industry was run by the State. No reliable figures are available which would give a precise picture of the present relative importance of industry and agriculture. Agriculture is by far the most important source of income and by far the most common occupation - |
| thought, in the area in which I was working, in many villages the population depended on migrating for non-agricultural employment as an alternative or supplementary means of livelihood, and such evidence as I have suggests that this is by no means a rare phenomenon in Turkey. Official statistics for the year 1935 gave farming, forestry and fishery as the occupations of 80% of the working population, a figure which is not likely to be very far wrong, and I doubt whether the industrial programme will have had much effect so far in altering this overall percentage. As far as residence goes, there has been little change in the proportion of town to village dwellers since 1927. The most remarkable progress towards a Western way of life in Turkey seems to be in the field of civil liberties and political rights. From the beginning, the Party firmly declared its belief in democratic liberty as the term is understood in the West - professions which seemed to go ill with a one-party system and the absolute, and on occasion, arbitrary rule of Ataturk. But the constitution was, and is, in form democratic; a single assembly is elected by universal suffrage, and in turn elects the President, who chooses the Prime Minister, and approves the appointment of other ministers. The President can be over-ruled by the majority of the Assembly. “All citizens are endowed at birth with liberty”, and all the usual rights - freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to travel, and so on, - are listed. After Ataturk’s death in 1937, Inonu took his place as President. Already in 1931 an attempt had been made to found an opposition party, but Ataturk was not pleased with the results, and it had been abandoned. Inonu made a further attempt in 1939 which also failed, but in 1945 permission was given for the foundation of other political parties, and the Democratic party was founded, mainly by defection from the R.P.P. It contested the election of 1946, but as it had little organisation, and the conduct of the election was questionable, it gained only some sixty seats out of about four hundred and eighty. But real freedom of the press to criticise was now allowed, and the Democratic Party set to work to build up an organisation, and to campaign for reform of the electoral law. This reform was carried out, and the election which I witnessed in 1950 was fair and satisfactory to all parties. The R.P.P. was heavily defeated and the Democratic Party came into power with an overwhelming, yet genuine, majority. Since their triumph in the election, they have disappointed many of their supporters by showing even less difference in practice than they did in electoral programme, from their political opponents. Celal Bayar, the new President, is one of the original associates of Ataturk, and in any case it is constitutionally impossible for the Democratic Party to depart from the six basic tenets of the R.P.P. In 1937 these tenets were written into the Constitution. They are Republicanism, Nationalism, |
| Democracy, Etatisme, Secularism and Revolution, all of which are sufficiently vague to be held consistent with a wide range of policies, and hardly likely to inhibit or embarrass any party in the foreseeable future. The present government claims to be in favour of doing much more to encourage private enterprise in building up industry, but as long as some large scale undertakings remain in state hands it can still claim to be following in the path of Etatisme. Whatever it may have been at times during the past twenty-five years, the present Republic of Turkey is in no sense a police state. It has a democratic constitution which does, in fact, operate. There is freedom to express criticism of government policy, freedom of the press, freedom of movement and there has been one democratic and fair election. On the other hand, even moderately left wing opinions are suspect, the propagating of views about social classes or about internationalism is actually unconstitutional, and the highly centralised administrative system concentrates power in the hands of the official class of Ankara. II. RELATION OF TOWN AND VILLAGE - GENERAL ADMINISTRATION |
| 1. | Divorce of Town and Village |
| Under the Ottoman Empire, the Government did not concern itself with the villages beyond the collection of taxes, the conscription of soldiers, and the preservation of a minimum of law and order. Apart from these official activities, there was no occasion for townsmen to take any interest in the country. It appears long to have been the custom in many areas for villagers to go to town to earn money if they were in need, but such casual and temporary visiting to a society which offered a man no social links, beyond a purely economic one with a temporary employer, can have forged no more permanent relationship between town and village than similar, even regular, migration for employment does today. At the lowest end of the social scale, kinship and personal acquaintance ties between a town and its suburban villages must have existed, and at the top end of the social scale, in villages within reach of towns, marriage alliances with town families were probably not uncommon. In the closest and most pleasant villages, rich town families even owned land and country houses. But the main point - that those responsible for governing took as little interest as possible in the villages - remains true without serious qualification. In theory, the policy of the new Republic was opposed to this established |