Debating Turkish Modernity: Civilization, Nationalism, and the EEC 110704491X, 9781107044913

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Debating Turkish Modernity

Debating Turkish Modernity explores how Turks spoke about the prospect of joining the European Economic Community between 1959 and 1980. It argues that these debates created deep, bitter divides among Turks by bringing up long-standing questions about Turkey’s past and its ambivalent relationship with Europe. The prolific literature on Turkish–European Union relations focuses on the contemporary period (1993–present), but this book is the first English-language account of how Turks initially approached the predecessor to the European Union, exploring a time when they were able to talk about themselves and Europe on their own terms. Mehmet Dos ¨ ¸ emeci is currently an assistant professor of history at Bucknell University. He received his PhD in history from Columbia University. Dos ¨ ¸ emeci served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the International Network to Expand Regional and Collaborative Teaching (INTERACT) program at Columbia University in 2011 and as a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in 2010. He has received grants from the Fulbright IIE Program and from the Middle East Studies Summer Fellowship at Columbia University. His work has been published in Contemporary European History, South European Society and Politics, European Review of History, South East European and Middle East Studies, and the EUI Review.

Debating Turkish Modernity Civilization, Nationalism, and the EEC

¨ ¸ EMECI MEHMET DOS Bucknell University

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107044913 © Mehmet Dos ¨ ¸ emeci 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Dos ¨ ¸ emeci, Mehmet. Debating Turkish modernity : civilization, nationalism, and the EEC / Mehmet Dosemeci. pages cm Originally presented as the author’s thesis (doctoral), Columbia University. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-04491-3 (hardback) 1. European Economic Community – Turkey. 2. Nationalism – Turkey. 3. Turkey – Civilization – 20th century. 4. Turkey – Relations – Europe. 5. Turkey – Politics and government – 1960–1980. 6. Turkey – History – 1960– I. Title. hc241.25.t9d67 2013 337.1ʹ4209561–dc23 2013016823 isbn 978-1-107-04491-3 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To my parents, Ays¸e and Mustafa, who believed, in their own way, that another world was possible.

Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction The Civilizational and Nationalist Logics Matters of Time and Space: Why 1959–1980? Why the EEC? Situating the History of Turkish-EEC Relations

1

Joining Civilization (1923–1963) The Civilizational Logic The Civilizational Logic and the EEC Kafka’s Parable: Before the Law

2

˙ of the Iceberg (1963–1968) The TIP Modernist Nationalism and the Civilizational Logic ¨ Revised: TI˙P and the Reformulation of Ataturk Turkish Nationalism

3

Voices from a Threatened Nation (1968–1980) The Institutional and Epistemic Birth of the Nationalist Logic The Three Tongues of the Nation

4

The Additional Protocol: A “National” Problem (1968–1971) The Emergence of the Anti-EEC Movements Treason, Treason, Everywhere! Instituting Turkey: The SPO and the TGNA . . . And Then the Coup

page ix xi 1 2 7 16 25 28 37 52 56 58 69 77 80 91 118 120 127 132 154

vii

Contents

viii

5

Intervention, Invasion, Isolation (1971–1974) Martial CPR: Resuscitating the Additional Protocol Hard Lessons Abroad, Crisis at Home

6

From Periphery to Core (1974–1980)

157 158 169

The Great Westernization Debate Resituating Party Politics Impasse, Icing Over, Interpellation

175 177 190 196

Conclusion

210

Synthesis by Castration: Ataturkism and the 1980 ¨ Military Coup The Stipulatory Logic and the Erasure of History

210 214

Index

229

Acknowledgments

This book owes a great debt to a large number of people without whom neither it nor the author would have been what they are today. A special thank you to the numerous librarians and archivists at the Devlet Planlama Tes¸kilati, T. C. ˘ T. C. Cumhuriyet Ars¸ivi, and the Milli Kut Dis¸is¸leri Bakanlig, for all ¨ uphane ¨ their patience and assistance, and one in particular for letting me rummage through the closed stacks. I also wish to thank the Max Weber Programme at the European University Institute and the INTERACT Program at Columbia University for their generous assistance. The space, funding, and collegiality provided by these institutions were invaluable to the timely completion of the manuscript. As far as individuals go, a proper list is beyond the scope of these pages, so a partial one will have to do. First and foremost, I would like to thank Victoria de Grazia, who guided me to the intersection of culture and capital and taught me that when it comes to historical writing, theory is best kept just beneath the surface. She has seen me through many a dark hour, a second mother I am infinitely grateful to have had. Above all else, she has, for better or worse, made me the historian I am today. Then there is Stathis Gourgouris, mentor, brother, and friend. He is the one person, living or dead, who has had the greatest impact on my intellectual development and whose mode of questioning, in altered form, is forever ingrained in these pages. Special thanks are also due to Samuel Moyn, who expanded the field of intellectual history before my eyes, and in so doing eased my transition into this project; to Kiran Klaus Patel, who helped me see the early EEC for what it really was; and to Dominique Reill, Ellen Boucher, and Anne-Isabelle Richard, fellow travelers of academia and the European imaginary. To my parents, Ays¸e and Mustafa, who have been as supportive and critical as all good parents should be, whose own stories have put much of my research into perspective, and to whom this book is dedicated. I very much wish both of ix

x

Acknowledgments

you could read this now. Thanking a two-year-old may seem odd, but Willow has, through the simple yet awesome fact of her existence, given me a fresh set of eyes with which to view our past. A very solid nod is also due to Alex Toshkov, Aaron Windel, Sarah Lopez, and Yetkin Nural, whose late-night conversations have kept me honest well into my thirties. But above all, this book belongs to Jennifer Thomson. You have left the deepest of marks on both my life and the pages of this manuscript, deciphering one and keeping the other as mysterious as ever. If I had the stars from the darkest night and the diamonds from the deepest ocean, I’d forsake them all for your sweet kiss, for that’s all I’m wishin’ to be ownin’.

Abbreviations

political parties DP JP NAP NOP NSP RPP WPT

Democrat Party (Demokrat Partisi) Justice Party (Adalet Partisi) National Action Party (Milliyetc¸i Hareket Partisi) National Order Party (Milli Nizam Partisi) National Salvation Party (Milli Selamet Partisi) ˆ Republican Peoples Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi) ˙ ¸ c¸i Partisi) Workers Party of Turkey (Turkiye Is ¨

turkish state institutions ˘ MFA Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Dıs¸is¸leri Bakanlıgı) NSC National Security Council (Milli Guvenlik Kurulu) ¨ NUC National Unity Committee (Milli Birlik Komitesi) SPO State Planning Organization (Devlet Planlama Tes¸kilatı) TGNA Grand National Assembly of Turkey (Turkiye Buy ¨ ¨ uk ¨ Millet Meclisi)

european organizations EEC EP EU NATO OECD

European Economic Community European Parliament European Union North Atlantic Treaty Organization Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development

xi

Introduction

The European Economic Community (EEC) officially came into being on 1 January 1958. Founded by the Treaty of Rome, the EEC envisioned the creation of a European common market with a single external customs regime and free movement of services, goods, and labor among its member states. A year and a half later, in the summer of 1959, Turkey applied to join this nascent European organization, thus beginning a journey that has carried on for more than a half-century to the present day. From the outset, Turks perceived their integration into the EEC in more than economic terms. In fact, the most salient feature of Turkey’s long-standing membership bid has been the striking incongruity between the subject matter – the integration of the Turkish economy into the European common market – and the language used to speak about this integration. Over the course of the last fifty years, integration into the EEC has sparked the imaginations of a broad range of Turks, made zealots out of technocrats and statesmen, and led to best sellers, theater productions, and arson. It has been alternately embraced as the crowning symbol of Turkey’s accomplishments and disavowed as the recolonization of the country. Rarely has it been grasped without passion, neutrally, as something in between. This book examines how Turks spoke about their integration into the predecessor of the European Union (EU) during the twenty-one years between their initial application in 1959 and the 1980 military coup. During this period, I argue, the horizon on which Turkish elites understood themselves, their people, their state, and their culture was to a large degree framed by and through a vast multifaceted conversation about joining the EEC. How the prospect and process of membership in a relatively minor organization of western European states could come to have such a defining, if not existential, grip on Turkey’s imagination is one of the central questions this book seeks to answer. 1

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Debating Turkish Modernity

But first, some details. The Turkish application to the European Common Market on 31 July 1959 presented the EEC with a problem. Although the EEC welcomed the Turkish application as adding legitimacy to the fledging organization, it was apparent that the Turkish economy was by no measure ready to withstand the competition that immediate accession would bring. This was a dilemma the drafters of the Treaty of Rome had not foreseen. To solve this dilemma, negotiators on both sides settled on a gradual process of integration with the goal of full Turkish membership at some future date. The process was laid out four years later, in a treaty that established an Association between Turkey and EEC. The treaty, known as the Ankara Agreement, formed the fundamental framework on which Turkish integration into the EEC has been, and currently is, based. The Ankara Agreement laid out a three-phase plan at the conclusion of which Turkey was to accede fully to the EEC.1 The preparatory stage, to last five to ten years, was designed to allow Turkey’s relatively underdeveloped economy to prepare for integration. In this first phase, Turkey remained free of any obligations while the EEC agreed to annul tariffs on certain Turkish exports and to provide financial assistance to the Turkish economy. The transitional stage, to last a minimum of twelve years, would be entered into only when both sides agreed to an Additional Protocol; this stage entailed a gradual and mutual reduction of tariffs as well as the easing of restrictions on the movement of peoples and capital. It was in this last aspect that the Ankara Agreement planned beyond a simple customs union and hinted at the possibility of full membership in a future European Common Market. The third and final phase, to begin sometime between 1981 and 1986, called for the elimination of all tariffs and the gradual harmonization of economic policies between Turkey and the European Community.

the civilizational and nationalist logics The Ankara Agreement implied that, structurally, Turkish integration would be protracted and, as it stands today, incomplete. These two qualities have fertilized the rich gray zone between inclusion and exclusion in which republican Turkey has dwelt for almost two-thirds of its existence. The framework of this relationship, Turkish perceptions of the EEC, and, through these, the ways Turkey has come to understand itself have undergone dramatic shifts since Turkey’s initial application in 1959. To account for and understand the effects of these shifts, we need first to identify who in Turkey was concerned about Turkish involvement in the project for European unification, whether they perceived it in a favorable or critical light, and why.

1

For a full text of the Ankara Agreement, see Official Journal of the European Communities (OJ) No. C113/2.24.12/1973.

Introduction

3

At the birth of Turkish-EEC relations, there was near unanimous support for Turkish membership. Led by state elites in the Turkish Foreign Service and Armed Forces, members of both political parties and the media jostled with business associations and trade unions to proclaim their enthusiasm. Over the next twenty years, some of these groups would retract or dilute their positions, to be replaced by others. The reasons why various Turks supported integration were as variable as the groups themselves. Fear of the Soviet Union, the need to secure western financial aid, and the strategic rationale to not be left out of any organization solicited by Greece were motivations that, to varying degrees, informed Turkish support among different groups. To a lesser extent, economic calculation galvanized the few sectors of the Turkish economy (such as export/import, textiles, dried fruits, and later tourism) that stood to profit from a European common market. Yet, remarkably, few of these considerations factored into the way Turks vocalized their support. Instead, Turkish advocates of the EEC, with few exceptions, spoke of it in civilizational terms, as the consummation of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s vision to “raise Turkey to the level of contemporary civilization.”2 ¨ For the Turkish elite, joining the European Common Market was seamlessly incorporated into, and quickly became the benchmark and beacon for, this civilizational project. This book is in a sense framed by the question of why this occurred as well as the consequences of this marriage. The broad consensus that lent an almost festival-like quality to the signing of the Ankara Agreement in 1963 was challenged soon after by the rise of a radically new way of speaking about the EEC, one that viewed integration into the European Common Market as fundamentally at odds with Turkey’s national interests. The analysis of Turkish anti-EEC groups between 1959 and 1980 presents a series of problems. First, these groups have generally been lumped together as radical, anti-western, and oppositional.3 Yet, critics of Turkish integration neither politically nor rhetorically constituted a unified front, for the 2

3

“To reach the standards of contemporary civilization” was an oft-quoted line that came to serve as the unofficial mantra of the Turkish revolution. It was used to justify many of the radical reforms that transformed Turkish society in the initial years of the Republic, and it has come to represent Ataturk’s vision of the Turkish project. The term “contemporary civilization” ¨ was generally taken to refer to Europe and has been extended to the “West” following World War II. Yet as Nilufer Gole ¨ ¨ has pointed out, the Kemalist notion of Civilization implied more than a particular sociohistorical and thus concrete civilization. In fact, it was diametrically opposed to the German notion of Kultur. “For the Kemalist elite, civilization was intimately tied up with modernity, and as such was both universal (exportable) but more importantly, was constantly changing, moving forward, encapsulating the idea of progress. It went beyond describing an extant level of development to symbolizing an ideal that must be reached.” Nilufer ¨ ˙ ˘ ¨ Gole, Islami Kimlik Arayıs¸ı,” in Turkiye’de Modernles¸me ve Ulusal ¨ “Modernles¸me Baglamında ˘ (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1998), 75. Kimlik, eds. Res¸at Kasaba and Sibel Bozdogan ¨ Ortak Pazar Macerası 1959–1985 (Istanbul: Milliyet Yayınları, Mehmet Ali Birand, Turkiye’nin ˘ ¨ ¨ uk ¨ Avrupa Kavgası 1959–2004 (Istanbul: Dogan 1986); Mehmet Ali Birand, Turkiye’nin Buy ˙ ˙ ¨ ¨ ˘ (Ankara: Umit Kitapc¸ılık, 2005); Ilhan Tekeli and Selim Ilkin, Turkiye ve Avrupa Toplulugu

4

Debating Turkish Modernity

most part being – outside of their opposition to the EEC – bitterly opposed to one another. Anti-EEC groups also elude the category “radical” because they included institutions and political parties central to the Turkish Republic. The term “anti-western” is similarly ill-suited, as most anti-EEC elements within party politics, the bureaucracy, or civil society did not reject the west, either ideologically or strategically. A second difficulty in conceptualizing Turkish opposition to the EEC during this period lies in the internal inconsistency of the groups themselves. The history of Turkish-EEC relations between 1959 and 1980 is rife with examples of political parties switching position on the Common Market either because of external developments or simply to draw political capital within the capricious economy of Turkish politics. Finally, the sheer variety of Turkish opposition resists attempts to derive a common political-ideological basis. Political Islam’s characterization of the EEC as an invidious Christian-Zionist enterprise out to eradicate Muslim culture had little apparent overlap with, say, leftist concerns over the penetration of western imperialism. How then, if at all, should we talk about them? The more we ask who supported or opposed the Common Market and why, the more incoherent our picture becomes – as if we were forcing labels onto a motley crew of shifting interests and people, yet always leaving a remainder. Rather than focusing in on the who or why, this book asks the question how. How did various Turks speak about integration with the EEC? How did they construct their arguments? How did they understand the EEC, Turkey, and their integration? To address these questions, I introduce two historically defined categories to differentiate two distinct postures or worldviews that Turks adopted toward Turko-European relations during this period. From factual statistical observations to the hyperboles of ideological politics, Turkish statements regarding integration into the EEC fell into and were conditioned by two historical-conceptual categories I term the Civilizational and Nationalist logics. In using the term “logic” I refer to a certain mode of being that underlay a way Turks imagined themselves and their country. It describes a peculiar subjectivity, a particular way of thinking about Turkey – of giving meaning to and ordering how Turks understood and experienced themselves and the world. Each logic, I claim, is based on a distinct self/other relation that framed the terrain through which Turkish-EEC relations were signified. The logics structured the statements Turks made about the EEC during this period; more precisely, they were what made these statements possible in the first place. The Civilizational logic predominantly, but not exclusively, ordered Turkish voices sympathetic to integration. Its structuring principle was one of invitation, predicated on an initial gesture of hospitality or welcoming of the other ˘ ¨ ¸ alis¸, Turkiye – Avrupa Birligi I˙lis¸kileri (Ankara: Nobel Yayın Dagıtım, Yayıncılık, 1993); S¸aban C ¨ 2001); and Yıldırım Keskin, Avrupa Yollarında Turkiye (Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi, 2001).

Introduction

5

(European civilization) into the self (Turkey). The Civilizational logic shares a close affinity with what the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas referred to as an ethical relation, whereby the European other (hypostasized through the EEC) was invited in to preside over the Turkish project. An asymmetrical relation, not unlike that of the master and pupil, the Civilizational logic ordained Turkey’s European other to stand in judgment: positioned to assess, endorse, or censure the Turkish project.4 By contrast, the various currents and movements opposing Turkey’s integration with the EEC all shared a common worldview that I call the logic of “national interest” or the Nationalist logic. The term “national interest” was first introduced into Turkey’s political lexicon by Prime Minister Adnan Menderes in the mid-1950s to refer to his democratically given mandate against a state bureaucracy that Menderes felt was undermining his reform policies. From this specific tradition onward, with the exception of the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF), the term “national interest” has been utilized much more effectively as an oppositional or critical concept rather than a unifying rallying point for those in power. In Turkish politics, the accusation of ignoring, opposing, and, in the last instance, betraying the national interest has had far greater political currency than protecting or guarding it. I mention this because I wish to focus neither on the content nor meaning of the term “national interest” (which has varied depending on the speaker and his/her time), but rather on its formal structure – that is, one based on antagonism. In this manner the logic of national interest, or what from this point on will be referred to as the Nationalist logic, can be taken as an instance of what Ernesto Laclau called antagonistic (or populist) politics.5 For Laclau, antagonistic politics referred to a particular type of terrain through which social identification occurred. The self of antagonism is based on an ontological relation wherein the being of the other is defined as what prevents me from being totally myself. It erects a discursive frontier (in this instance, between Turkey and the EEC) simultaneously positing an enemy (EEC) and a threatened self-identity (Turkey), which, though allegedly present beforehand, only takes shape retroactively through the encounter. In this way, the Nationalist logic refers to a particular way of constituting the self and makes possible a specific discourse of nationalism based on an antagonistic self/other ontology. The Civilizational and Nationalist logics are historical-conceptual categories in that they have their origin and provenance in Turkey’s past. In this sense they are immanent to Turkish history.6 This book is an intellectual and political 4 5

6

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1969). ´ Ernesto Laclau, “Populism, What’s in a Name?” University of Essex Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Online Paper Collection. http://www.essex.ac.uk/ centres/theostud/onlinepapers.asp (last accessed 17 May 2013). To the extent that their theoretical basis comes through the western philosophical tradition, the logics stand as interventions into this history that mandate justification, which the final section of this introduction attempts to provide.

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Debating Turkish Modernity

history of these logics as they came to inform Turkish stances toward the EEC. It is a historical work in two respects. First, it details the history of Turkish responses to the Common Market as the interplay of these logics by examining how various groups within Turkey spoke about the EEC and how these voices were structured. It is my claim that because these logics oriented and made possible the specific political content that was expressed through them, the history of their interplay provides a more telling analysis of the Turkish social-imaginary than the study of the particular ideologies of individuals or groups that came to weigh in on Turkish-EEC relations. Second, the book examines the historical roots of these logics within the broader histories of Turkish-European relations and the internal dynamics of the Turkish Republic. The Civilizational and Nationalist logics, while most clearly and explicitly manifest through Turkish-EEC relations, did not originate within them. To understand the emergence of these logics, it becomes necessary to step beyond the immediate history of these relations. In doing so, the book dips quite often into the history of Turkey’s interwar period. Its aim is not to trace out an objective history of the emergence of these logics (which could not help but be teleological), but rather to carry out a hermeneutic project. To do so, it looks back at this history as it was resurrected by various actors engaging in Turkish debates over the EEC between 1959 and 1980. More than any other association, the EEC occasioned in Turks a profound reengagement with their own past. How various strains of this history were appropriated by Turkish interlocutors is of central concern to this book. Its most significant consequence is to tie the history of Turkish-EEC relations to the broader themes and registers of Turkish history.7 In the most general terms, the book traces how the Civilizational logic, near-ubiquitous in the initial period of Turkish integration, soon came into question by the emergence of a radically different way of speaking about and understanding the EEC. The middle years, in the decade between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, witnessed an intense struggle between the two logics over how integration was proclaimed. The final period traces the circumstances and avenues through which the Nationalist logic moved from the periphery to the core of Turkish political culture, becoming, by the late 1970s, the predominant way through which Turkish-EEC relations were signified within Turkey. In this context, the history of Turkish-EEC relations from 1959 to 1980 can be understood as a revolutionary period for Turkey, not in the sense of political power (or even the potential for its transition) but in the more fundamental sense of how Turks imagined themselves. This period marked a time when one reigning logic had been or was in the process of being discredited and a new 7

Here I am explicitly rejecting the view that Turkish postures toward membership in the EEC were in some way a direct product of, or can be wholly explained by, an analysis of Turkish intellectual/political traditions. Rather I claim that Turkish-EEC relations became the site through which these traditions were resurrected and redeployed.

Introduction

7

one (albeit internally divided) had not achieved dominance over its rival. This struggle did not occur at the level of actual politics (either between Turkey and the EEC or as a struggle between various domestic groups); it was, rather, a struggle over the terrain on which politics took place. It is important to note, however, that the Civilizational and Nationalist logics, while conceptually delineated from one another, did not remain unchanged by their interaction. The task is to trace, in their mutually conditioned historicities, the specific forms they have taken throughout their hegemonic struggle to signify Turkish-EEC integration and, through this, Turkey itself.

matters of time and space: why 1959–1980? why the eec? This book narrates a history of Turkey’s integration into the European Economic Community from Turkey’s initial application in 1959 through the 12 September coup. Turkish-EEC relations did not, of course, end in 1980 but rather remain open-ended to this day. Why then 1980? The most obvious answer would be that the 1980 coup stands as a point of radical rupture within Turkish history, a date, much like 1789 for France or 1933 for Germany, that forms a nodal point of periodization for cultural, economic, political, and social analysis of modern Turkey. Regarding Turkish-EEC relations, however, this answer could not be more wrong. The principle aim of this book is to investigate the role of Turkish-EEC relations on the Turkish social-imaginary. To this end, it traces the evolution of Turkish responses to integration and highlights how these responses were central in forming the ways Turks conceived of themselves and the world around them. Our story ends in 1980 for the simple reason that 1980 marks the end of ideological innovation in Turkish responses to the Common Market. Though Turkish-EU relations took many dramatic twists and turns following the coup, the ways Turks approached, understood, and articulated their integration remained the same – rehashing, albeit in very different contexts, arguments that were developed between 1959 and 1980. Rather than demarcate a point of radical difference, 1980, as far as Turkish interpretations of the EU are concerned, marked the end of an evolutionary era. Domestic Context Domestically, this period coincides with the birth and death of ideological multiparty politics.8 These two decades were, in a very real sense, bounded by

8

Outside of a few controlled and short-lived experiments, Turkey’s engagement in multiparty politics dates to the immediate postwar years, consummated by the ruling Republican Peoples Party’s peaceful transfer of power to the Democrat Party following the 1950 elections. Yet, owing to the extreme similarities of the political platforms between the two parties during the 1950s, one could equally argue that only in the aftermath of the 1960 liberalization did a true multiparty political system that expressed ideological differences come into existence.

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Debating Turkish Modernity

two military coups: the first in 1960, which created the sociopolitical framework for Turkey’s first experiment as a truly open society, and the second, in 1980, which brought this experiment to an abrupt end. As a consequence of these ideological politics, Turkish society became less insular, increasingly aware, throughout the period, of the history and current state of the world around it. From 1945 until the early 1960s, few Turks beyond those in the Foreign Service were knowledgeable or concerned themselves with developments in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East. Even the west, which they interacted with and aspired to, was, by and large, perceived in monolithic terms. Yet, by the late 1950s, the Turkish elite had clearly begun to distinguish the United States from Western Europe, and by the 1970s, differentiated the latter into distinct regions, if not individual countries. Through the increasing popularity of socialist and Islamic ideas, Turkey also became aware of, and began to think of itself in relation to, the decolonization and nonaligned movements taking shape in the non-western world.9 Beginning in 1964, this heightened awareness of the outside world came to impact domestic politics, which, until that point, had consisted mainly of vying policies of development toward a shared goal. Once the barrier of questioning Turkey’s foreign policy and direction was broken, the more fundamental question of where Turkey was, or should be, headed replaced the earlier and largely instrumental debates over how best to achieve an agreed-on outcome. As this trend accelerated in the 1970s, more and more issues – including the development of the Turkish economy, debates over Turkish culture, international alignments, and even the meaning and continuation of the Ataturkist ¨ revolution – were discussed through the prism of Turkey’s integration into the EEC. In this way, the EEC served as a concrete platform anchoring the often abstract and ideological debates over the future of the Turkish nation to Turkey’s integration into the Common Market.10 The increasing importance of the EEC within the Turkish social-imaginary is confirmed by the rising number of participants or interlocutors in Turkish integration. Down to the signing ceremony of the Ankara Agreement in September 1963, few outside of the technocratic and diplomatic elites and a handful of businessmen were concerned with Turkish involvement in the project for European unification. By contrast, after the Cyprus crisis of 1974, TurkishEEC relations developed into an obsession, the cause of institutional and street battles, parliamentary interpellations, and angry youth campaigns, becoming, as Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit remarked in 1975, a “National Problem.” ¨ 9 10

¨ 1972) and Feroz Ahmad, The See Duygu Sezer, Kamu Oyu ve Dıs¸ Politika (Ankara: A.U.S.B.F, Making of Modern Turkey (New York: Routledge, 1993), 139. Tellingly, among the first actions of the leftist the WPT and the Islamic Milli Selamet Partisi after winning seats in the National Assembly was adamant criticism of the government’s pro-EEC stance.

Introduction

9

International Context: The EEC, Greece, and NATO Further west, the beginning of this period saw the postwar project of European unification in its infancy. When Turkey first applied to the Common Market in July 1959, the EEC itself was less than two years old. It was the end result of a broad agreement among European statesmen that the twin problematic of reviving the German economy while allaying (mostly French) fears of a third catastrophe could only be resolved through the integration of France and Germany under some larger European structure. The Treaty of Rome, signed in 1957, was in effect a compromise between various groups over what precisely this structure would be.11 The Treaty established the European Economic Community with the aim of creating a common market between the signatory states. The six original members (France, Germany, Italy, and the three Benelux Countries) agreed to gradually remove internal barriers to the free movement of goods, services, and people and to erect a unified supranational customs regime with respect to other, “third” countries. Within Turkey’s wider international context, the EEC was just one of Turkey’s many postwar engagements, sharing attention with Turkish-American relations, NATO, and conflicts with Greece. Yet, despite the Cold War and regional disputes, the EEC remained the central symbolic nexus of the Turkish social-imaginary, resonating with and amplified by the Ataturkist project ¨ and Turkey’s Ottoman past. This is not to imply that Turkey’s relations with Greece or the United States should be ignored, just that their influence on the Turkish social-imaginary paled in comparison to the EEC. Greece, in particular, has figured large in scholarly studies of Turkish-EEC relations. These studies assert that Turkish motives behind, or perceptions of, Turkey’s integration cannot be understood outside of the Greek context. The Treaty of Rome extended an offer of membership to any European nation with a market economy. Greece was the first to take up this offer, and its application, in the summer of 1959, was a major catalyst and factor in Turkey’s decision to apply several weeks later.12 This initial impetus has led many scholars to overstate the importance of the Greek role in Turkish-EEC relations and in Turkey’s understandings of itself through Europe more generally. Yet, as others have argued, Turkey had independently and closely followed the EEC since the Treaty of Rome, and the Greek application at most affected the timing of the Turkish decision to apply to the Common Market.13 11

12

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The essential fault line was drawn between the federalists, who favored a more supranational framework, and those who foresaw the European Community as a forum where leaders of nation-states could gather to discuss and enact mutually beneficial policies. ˙ ¸ kilerinin Bas¸langıcı: Turkiye’nin ˘ Ilis See Umut Karabulut, “Turkiye-Avrupa Birligi Avrupa ¨ ¨ ¨ ˘ Ekonomik Toplulugu’na (AET) Uyelik Bas¸vurusu,” Cumhuriyet Tarihi Aras¸tirmalari Dergisi, 8/16 (2012): 19–32. ¨ – Avrupa Birligi I˙lis¸kileri, 41. C¸alis¸, Turkiye

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Debating Turkish Modernity

Over the years, an implicit understanding was reached within the EEC that the Turkish and Greek associations should progress in parallel, and Turkish fears of unilateral Greek accession (and with it a Greek veto) propelled Turkish integration on more than one occasion. On the cultural level, the invasion of Cyprus in 1974 produced a European backlash against Turkey, reintroducing old stereotypes of the “Barbaric Turk” out to ravage the “cradle of European civilization.”14 Yet, aside from questions of timing and Europe’s Lord Byronesque reaction to Cyprus, which went all but unnoticed within Turkey, Greece figured little into Turkish-EEC relations during this period. Turkish relations with the United States, especially its membership in NATO, were a different matter. Although Turkey solicited and joined a number of postwar Western organizations, including the Council of Europe and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Atlantic Alliance was the only one that rivaled the EEC in strategic and symbolic terms. During World War II, Turkey had successfully managed to remain on the sidelines. Even before the war’s conclusion, however, it became clear that the prospects for Turkish neutrality in the upcoming global struggle were dim and quickly diminishing. Stalin’s aggressive and often boorish attempts to block western vessels from entering the Black Sea through the Dardanelles set a threatening tone in Turko-Soviet relations, pushing Turkey and the United States (who had recently replaced British interests in the region) into a mutually beneficial strategic partnership. When it became clear that the Western security framework against the Soviet Union would take the form of a mutual assistance pact headed by the United States, Turkey immediately and actively solicited the alliance, effectively buying membership in NATO by committing its armed forces in Korea.15 Undoubtedly, Turko-American relations, especially Turkish membership in the Atlantic Alliance, occupied a privileged place in Turkey’s postwar project. In the immediate postwar period, the Truman doctrine, U.S. military power against the perceived Soviet threat, and the simple fascination with a novel and thriving culture all served to propel the United States as the new symbol of the west. Compared to the Europeans, the United States also had a much greater physical presence within Turkey in the first two decades after the war. American bazaars, American military bases, American nuclear missiles, American technicians and American style highway construction funded by American 14

15

˘ “Turkey’s Image Abroad,” Journal of the Foreign Affairs Academy (May See Faruk Logoglu, 1973): 104–13; Bernard Burrows, “Turkey in Europe?” The World Today (June 1980), 266–71, ¨ ¨ and Mehmet Ali Birand, Diyet: Turkiye ve Kıbrıs Uzerine Uluslararası Pazarlıklar, 1974–1980 (Istanbul: Milliyet, 1987), 24–54. Ekavi Athanassopoulou, Turkey, Anglo-American Security Interests 1945–1952: The First Enlargement of NATO (London: Routledge, 1999); and George S. Harris, Troubled Alliance: Turkish American Problems in Historical Perspective, 1945–71 (Washington D.C.: AEI Press, 1972).

Introduction

11

credit were turning Turkey into what the then-Turkish prime minister Adnan Menderes gleefully termed a “little America.” The United States and NATO also figured prominently in Turkish antiwestern sentiment that began in the mid-1960s and continued off and on through 1980. The “Yankee Go Home!” mentality that manifested itself in protests against the U.S. Sixth Fleet, the torching of the U.S. ambassador’s car, and demands for the closure of U.S. bases or the re-legalization of opium banned as a result of U.S. pressure certainly echoed throughout Turkish society. Yet, I argue, the overall impact of Turkish membership in NATO on the Turkish social-imaginary paled in comparison to that of the EEC. There were a number of reasons for this, and a brief outline of the major differences will serve to underscore the import of the EEC during the period. First, by the time Turkey came to question and thus imagine itself through its foreign policy, Turkish integration into the Atlantic Alliance was a fait accompli. This significantly altered the positionality of Turkish supporters and detractors of NATO, forcing the latter to justify the much more radical move of renouncing the alliance. Given Turkey’s geographic vulnerability and strategic import, the Gaullist gesture of withdrawing from NATO was not a viable option. By contrast, Turkish integration into the EEC was an ongoing and incomplete process, the very framework of which was negotiated in the midst of a charged domestic debate. Second, the instrumental reality of Turkish membership in NATO served to dampen its impact on Turkish self-understandings. Turkey had historically been included into the western system for strategic reasons. In this sense NATO was the continuation of Turkey’s strategic inclusion into the west that began at the Treaty of Paris of 1856. In both instances the threat of Russian influence confirmed Turkish membership into the western system of states.16 Ironically, membership in NATO actually served to underscore the distinction between inclusion in the Western strategic orbit, to which Turkey belonged, and being accepted as a member of the European “Club” or “Community” from which Turkey had historically been excluded. By contrast, integration into the European project, the Turks believed, would mark the end of their historical exclusion. Third, Cold War delineations of east and west were based either on economic distinctions between capitalist and communist modes of production or on the politico-ideological struggle over the meaning and substance of democracy. Neither had much in common with Turkey’s historical understanding of the terms east and west, an understanding ultimately derived from the nineteenth-century European dichotomy between an advanced European civilization and its oriental and backward counterpart. Turkish integration into 16

See Meltem Muft ¸ , Turkey’s Relations with a Changing Europe (Manchester: Manch¨ uler-Bac ¨ ester University Press: 1997), 3.

12

Debating Turkish Modernity

the EEC, by contrast, resonated much more forcibly with Ataturk’s project to ¨ transform Turkey from a traditional to a modern society. Finally, the scope of Turkish membership in NATO was much narrower than Turkish association with the EEC. This difference was especially significant for Turkish opposition to both organizations. Turkish opposition to NATO was limited to arguments of territorial sovereignty, such as the presence of U.S. bases or the legality of opium production. By contrast, the EEC invoked the very real possibility, welcomed or not, of economic, political, and social union with Europe, resonating with and resurrecting debates over nationalism, modernity, and westernization that lay at the core of the modern Turkish project. The EEC and the Battle over Turkey’s Past Integration into the EEC spurred a deep interrogation of Turkey’s past relations with Europe, an interrogation that called into question the ideological foundation of the Turkish Republic. For its supporters, Turkish membership in the EEC stood as the culmination of the processional westward march of Turkish society, a march begun slowly in the eighteenth century, accelerating dramatically with the accession of Ataturk ¨ as its leader. This reading traced a linear and teleological narrative of Turkish history that steamrolled over the numerous turns, tensions, and ambivalences within the near-history of Turkish-European relations. Against this reading, detractors of Turkish integration underscored the darker history of these relations, positioning Turkey’s present attempt to join the EEC in constellation with Turkey’s Ottoman past. These historical resonances occurred in a number of areas. First, detractors often pointed out how Turkey’s integration into the EEC and the story of Ottoman capitulations shared a similar historical trajectory. Both began as bilateral agreements between Turkey and Europe initially thought to bring reciprocal advantages to both sides, but later leading to the erosion of Turkey’s advantage as European (or EEC) power increased. The Ankara Agreement, which went into force on 1 January 1964, removed European tariffs on a number of Turkish exports. At first this arrangement conferred unique advantages on Turkey. Yet as member state economies continued to grow, the EEC began to expand outward, signing multiple trade agreements with developing and ex-colonial nations over the coming years. Given that these countries exported many of the same goods as Turkey, Turkey’s initial advantages began to erode at the same time as her obligations (under the second phase of the Ankara Agreement) began to increase markedly. Second, Turks drew parallels between the ongoing negotiations for the Additional Protocol and several seminal moments in the history of Ottoman capitulations. The 1838 Anglo-Turkish Commercial Convention, which abolished state monopolies, reduced external tariffs to 3 percent, and was broadly regarded as the death knell for Ottoman industry; the law of 7 Safer 1284 (9 June 1867), which allowed foreigners (non-Muslims) to purchase land; and

Introduction

13

Kamil Pas¸a’s invitation to the British to assume indirect control of the Ottoman empire as they had in Egypt following the 1913 Unionist coup, were widely referenced as historical lessons during the negotiation period. Third, the nationalist anti-EEC movements drew parallels between the postwar Turkish elite and the mentality of the Tanzimat statesmen who had preceded them. According to the anti-EEC movements, both had bought the “western lie” that open-door liberal economic policies would benefit the Ottoman/Turkish economy through integration into the world economy, a belief that had consequently led to concessions over Turkey’s sovereign right to raise tariffs or regulate the ownership of its land and resources. By contrast, the EEC opposition drew inspiration from various Turkish movements (from ´ the Young Turks to Republican Etatism) who had introduced the protectionist ideas of the German economist Friedrich List as the only path to national economic development.17 Finally, Turkish recognition of the non-western world, particularly Japan, also prompted parallels between the EEC and the Ottoman capitulations. Much as Ziya Gokalp had argued following Japan’s first economic miracle at the turn ¨ of the twentieth century, “A nation condemned to every political interference by capitulations is meant to be a nation outside European civilization. [This is why] Japan is accepted as a European power, but we are still regarded as an Asiatic nation,” so Turkish nationalists turned their eyes once again to the Japan’s second economic miracle as an alternative to the Western path of development. In 1970, the Chamber of Mechanical Engineers remarked on the irony inherent in the Civilizational logic that structured support for Turkish integration: If the issue is one of getting the Europeans to respect you, the Turkish elite, by abandoning their essence, only draw scorn from Europe – who have no respect for those that don’t respect themselves – on the other hand, the completely eastern Japan, not having sacrificed one iota of its national culture, is tremendously respected by the Europeans who cannot stop talking about the Japanese miracle.18

Much as commentators in the Istanbul press had suggested inviting Japanese advisers to oversee Ottoman modernization, believing that they would be less inclined to assert an imperial agenda, Turkish nationalists in the 1970s explored the possibility of technology transfer and planning models from the non-western world.19 By drawing such historical constellations, Turkish opposition to the EEC cast it as the latest and most invidious vehicle of a centuries-long European imperial project to colonize Turkey. In this way, opposition to the EEC allowed 17 18 19

Feroz Ahmad, “Ottoman Perceptions of the Capitulations, 1800–1914,” Journal of Islamic Studies 11/1 (2000): 14. ¨ Makina Muhendisleri Odası, Ortak Pazar ve Turkiye (Ankara: MMO, 1970), 248. ¨ Ahmad, “Ottoman Perceptions of the Capitulations, 1800–1914,” 14.

Debating Turkish Modernity

14

various Turkish political currents to understand themselves within the broader history of European colonialism – linking their struggles to others in the colonial world.20 This is not to suggest that the anti-EEC opposition invented the memories of the visceral and physical brutality of colonial rule, experiences that informed the day-to-day existence of many colonial subjects. What it does claim, however, is that opposition to the EEC recaptured the shame of the Ottoman administration over the capitulations and the loss of sovereignty that they represented. This difference, while a major one for scholars of postcolonial studies, mattered much less to a Turkish audience receptive to identifying their War of Independence as inaugurating the worldwide anticolonial struggle coming to its global close by the late 1960s. Drawing historical constellations between the EEC and the Ottoman capitulations also, as we shall see, helped bridge the intellectual gap between resistance to colonial rule and the emerging critiques of neocolonialism and third-world dependency. The rewriting of Turkish history through the lens of contemporary TurkishEEC relations formed a constant and unique feature of Turkish debates, one not replicated in discussions concerning any other association. Perhaps more than any other factor, the constant referencing of these historical resonances imparted to the EEC an unrivaled gravity and significance. European Identity and the “Turkish Question” Turkey was of course not alone in debating the symbolic significance of its membership to the EEC. As the last few decades have shown, Turkish-EEC/EU relations have become an equally stirring issue for European identity as the “European question” has been for Turks. The prospect of Turkish accession has led to vocal popular debates across Europe on the meaning of “Europeanness” defined either as the shared cultural and historical heritage of Greco-Christian civilization (from which Turks are excluded) or an ongoing and open project of modernity (enriched by Turkish membership). Picking up on these popular debates, scholars of European history or those engaged with the broader issue

20

Meltem Akhısa, in a theoretical paper on Turkish nationalism, argues that although Turkey does not really fit into a postcolonial model because it was never overtly colonized, and also because of the complications of its own colonial past, it is still possible to argue that it is more or less a proper object of study for postcolonial criticism. Meltem Ahıska, “Occidentalism: The Historical Fantasy of the Modern,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 102/2 (2003): 351–79. This view is substantiated by Bart Moore-Gilbert’s broad definition of the postcolonial, “In my view, postcolonial criticism can still be seen as a more or less distinct set of reading practices, if it is understood as preoccupied principally with analysis of cultural forms which mediate, challenge or reflect upon the relations of domination and subordination – economic, cultural and political – between (and often within) nations, races or cultures, which characteristically have their roots in the history of modern European colonialism and imperialism and which, equally, characteristically, continue to be apparent in the present era of neo-liberalism.” Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), 13.

Introduction

15

of European identity have written extensively on the role of Turkey in European identity formation.21 Following a similar line of reasoning as this book, Paul Levin’s outstanding monograph, Turkey and the European Union, traces the historical evolution of the concept of Europe through its centuries-long encounter with the Muslim Turk, seeing the recent European debates as the latest manifestation of earlier discursive attempts to construct Christendom and Europe in opposition to Islam and Turkey.22 In fact, Levin’s contention that the question of Turkey’s position in the EU, a question that goes to core of the definition of Europe, is contingent on this longer history mirrors my claim as to the resonance of the EEC within the larger Turkish project. Others, including Bahar Rumelili, have argued that Turkish-EU debates carry an idiosyncratic symbolic weight, “constituting a primary site for the representation, validation, and performance of European identity.”23 Although this book does not explicitly engage with how Turkish-EEC/EU relations have affected European self-understandings, two points are worth noting about the ongoing European debates. First, European concerns over the meaning of Europe surrounding Turkish membership are of relatively recent mint, coinciding with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent search for a post–Cold War European identity. Not only did Turks engage in a broad and existential debate over the significance of joining the European project well before Turkey’s application for full membership in 1987, but Turkish debates on the “European question” predated their European counterparts by at least two decades. Second, and perhaps more important for the purposes of this book, is that Europeans have and continue to debate who they are vis-`a-vis Turkey’s inclusion into the EU. The last impression this book seeks to give is that of a schizophrenic Turkish society caught between embracing or rejecting a universal, unified, and static Europeaness (thereby providing further fuel to Europe’s Turkey-skeptics over Turkey’s true European credentials). The very partial list of works cited earlier highlights the basic fact that Turkey has 21

22 23

For the groundbreaking work in International Relations see Iver Neumann and Jennifer Welsh, “The Other in European Self-definition,” Review of International Studies 17/4: 327–48. For an impressive historical overview, see Paul Levin, Turkey and the European Union: Christian and Secular Images of Islam (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Other notable studies in this very extensive literature include: Angelos Giannakopoulos, “What Is to Become of Turkey in Europe?: European Identity and Turkey’s EU Accession,” Perceptions, 9/3 (2004): 58–72; Jochen Walter and Mathias Albert, “Turkey on the European Doorstep: British and German Debates about Turkey in the European Communities,” Journal of International Relations and ˚ Lundgren, “The Case of Turkey: Are Some Candidates Development, 12/3 (2009): 223–50; Asa More ‘European’ Than Others?” in Questioning EU Enlargement: Europe in Search of Identity, eds. Helene Sjursen (London, Routledge: 2006), 121–41; Hasan Kosebalaban, “The Permanent ‘other?’ Turkey and the Question of European Identity,” Mediterranean Quarterly, 18/4 (2007): 87–111. Paul Levin, Turkey and the European Union, 164–65. Bahar Rumelili, “Turkey: Identity, Foreign Policy, and Socialization in a Post-Enlargement Europe,” Journal of European Intergration, 33/2 (2011) 238–19.

16

Debating Turkish Modernity

figured just as much into Europe’s self-definition as the reverse. While the book approaches the dialectical construction of Turkey and Europe from the Turkish angle, it does so with the assumption that Turkey and Europe have, in this sense, made each other.

situating the history of turkish-eec relations This book operates on, engages with, and is a product of three platforms of historical inquiry that can be reservedly termed the material, symbolic, and theoretical. On the most immediate level, the book offers a material history of Turkish-EEC relations from 1959 to 1980. By material, I refer to the analysis of Turkish integration into the EEC as a concrete and specific historical relation. In the fifty-two years since the Turkish application, Turkey’s membership in the EU has occasioned a prolific body of scholarly work. While every branch of the humanities and social sciences has weighed in on the subject, two disciplines in particular, international relations and political science, dominate the current literature.24 This has created a double bias. First, it has led to an extensive focus on the instrumental questions of how Turkey is to become a member or why it is still at the gates. Second, it has favored analysis of contemporary developments, consigning the rich history of Turkish-EU relations before the end of the Cold War to a prelude of current events. Although these commentators invariably highlight the exceptional longevity of Turkish-EU relations, this history is by and large referenced to lend a certain gravity to contemporary debates, to point out that Turkey’s membership bid has been an intractable, vital, and persistent issue for both sides. In fact, outside of underscoring its length, very little is made of this history: the usual accounts brush over the 1963 Ankara Agreement with a few introductory strokes, skip completely the ensuing three decades as a time of paralysis, and take up discussion of their chosen topic somewhere in the mid-1990s. The dearth of scholarly work on this period stems almost exclusively from the fact that, following the Ankara Agreement in 1963, Turkish-EEC relations entered a period of relative stagnation, marked by a mutual souring, that only escalated following the invasion of Cyprus and the continental economic downturn in 1974. While the Common Market became one of the most discussed and polarizing issues in Turkey between 1963 and 1980, very little was actually accomplished in advancing Turkish integration itself. Despite – or more accurately, because of – this functional paralysis, Turkish-EEC relations during these years held great sway over the Turkish social-imaginary. The impasse in relations created a clearing where the merits of Turkish integration were discussed in a broad scope, enabling new conceptualizations of 24

While the most exhaustive bibliography of Turkish-EEC/EU relations stretches three volumes and more than 4,000 pages, the number of full-length historical works on the subject totals five.

Introduction

17

the Turkish project. One aim of this book, then, is to revive these discussions in order to juxtapose them with more recent and familiar accounts of TurkishEU relations. In doing so, it aims to draw out the continuities and differences in Turkish approaches to the EEC: How did Turks frame their integration? What were the central questions being discussed, then and now? From where, both geographically and epistemologically, do these questions originate? Only by comparing the last two decades of Turkish approaches to its first two can we see what endured and what is contingent. Doing so is an act of defamiliarization, allowing us to question the assumptions on which our present interpretations of Turkey, the EU, and their relation are based. The epilogue to the book, which examines the changing dynamics in these relations from 1980 to the present day, is a preliminary, if incomplete, exercise in drawing out some of these implications. The initial period of Turkish relations (1959–80) itself has two histories. The first is the history of the negotiations themselves; the at times political, more often technocratic, history of offers, deliberations, and counteroffers between the various branches of the EEC and the Turkish government. The few fulllength historical accounts of Turkish integration largely fall into this category, favoring sources directly involved in, or closely circling, the official and largely closed-door diplomatic process.25 Their task has been to trace the trajectory of Turkey’s relations with the EEC, describing its twists and turns through the interests, concerns, and mentalities of those involved in negotiating it. It is a history of goods like raisins, and the endless wrangling over the quotas for their importation, but it is also the story of two inexperienced actors (the EEC and Turkey) laying out the rules as they went along.26 The second history is the story of the effects and reception of these negotiations. It asks how the negotiation process was structured, interpreted, and talked about in Turkey. What were the effects of this public reception on how Turkey understood itself? Who in Turkey was talking about the EEC and how did they speak about it? This approach, the one taken by this book, is less concerned with developments within Turkish-EEC relations than with their effect on Turkey’s self-understanding. While taking official or diplomatic sources as a starting point, this second history encompasses the wider debate around 25

26

¨ – Avrupa Birligi Ilis¸kileri, which touches on The one exception is S¸aban C¸alis¸’ work, Turkiye the intersection of Turkish-EEC relations and questions of Turkish identity. His work has been invaluable to this study, particularly as a starting point for many of my own investigations. While S¸aban C ¸ alıs¸ and I occupy this same intersection, the aims of our works are diametrically opposed. His follows a constructivist approach, asking how the cultural and symbolic signification of joining the EEC impacted the course of these relations, whereas this book does the exact opposite, inquiring into how debates on joining the Common Market informed the cultural and symbolic imaginations of Turks. ˘ ˘ Birand, Turkiyeʾnin ¨ ¨ Avrupa Ekonomik Toplulugu˘ Ortaklıgı; Ortak See Sarac¸oglu. Turkiye ¨ ¨ uk ¨ Avrupa kavgası 1959–2004; Tekeli Pazar Macerası 1959–1985; Birand, Turkiye’nin buuy ˙ ¨ ˘ and C¸alis¸, Turkiye ¨ and Ilkin, Turkiye ve Avrupa Toplulugu; – Avrupa Birligi I˙lis¸kileri.

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Debating Turkish Modernity

the negotiations, selecting materials based on the strength of their reverberation throughout Turkish society. It is a history of the evolving and dynamic mentalities with which Turks have understood their relationship with the EEC. Because of this approach, the book also operates on a symbolic level, engaging with a set of historical categories that stretches beyond the immediate context of Turkish integration. An analysis of Turkish-EEC relations as the interplay of the Civilizational and Nationalist logics resonates with and is informed by issues of westernization, nationalism, and bifurcated identity – themes central to the study of modern Turkey. This platform of historical analysis positions Turkish-EEC relations between 1959 and 1980 within the broader area of Turkish studies, a cross-disciplinary field constructed around the problematic of the modern Turkish project. Since the mid-nineteenth century, through the east-west debates at the founding of the Republic, and continuing to the Islamic resurgence at the turn of the twenty-first century, the categories of westernization, nationalism (whether Ottoman or Turkish), and the resultant problematic of Turkish identity have framed Turkey’s successive forays to modernize its society. These meta-categories have been duly taken up by foreign and Turkish scholars of modern Turkey, and today serve as the premier framework through which the study of Turkey is approached. Against this trend stands the historiography of the two decades between 1960 and 1980. This is particularly the case for the intellectual history of political ideas during this period, often written in piecemeal and fragmentary fashion. The overwhelming reason for this fragmentation lies in the ideological polarization of Turkish society into explicitly antithetical projects, each referenced by their own domestic or global historical traditions. The historiography of these two decades has, for the most part, respected these divisions, opting for vertical histories of their provenance. Scholars have focused on a particular political ideology that (re)surfaced during these years and have traced its origins to domestic predecessors or placed it within a wider global movement. Hence, for example, commentators have looked for the intellectual roots of state planning in the Kadro movement of the early 1930s, or traced the birth of a socially conservative yet economically liberal Turkish populism to Adnan Menderes and the Democratic Party of the 1950s. Numerous other histories have outlined the origins and development of political Islam, the Turkish left, and ultranationalist right in much the same manner.27 While these efforts have 27

For an excellent analysis of the ideological underpinnings of the Kadro movement, see Mustafa Turkes¸, “The Ideology of the Kadro [Cadre] Movement: A Patriotic Leftist Movement in Turkey,” in Turkey Before and After Ataturk, ed. Sylvia Kedourie (London: Routledge, 1999), 92–120. For an early yet challenging history of the origins of political Islam in the 1970s, see Binnaz Toprak, Islam and Political Development in Turkey (Leiden: Brill Academic Pub, 1981). For an introduction to the intellectual origins of the Turkish nationalist right, see Burak Arikan, “The Programme of the Nationalist Action Party of Turkey: An Iron Hand in a Velvet Glove?” in Turkey Before and After Ataturk, 120–35. For a theoretical and illuminating analysis of

Introduction

19

produced some excellent intellectual insights and have contributed immensely to an understanding of political ideology and its development within Turkey, they have tended to treat their subjects in isolation. Consequently, these studies fail to account for the remarkable discursive overlap between disparate political ideologies of the period – an overlap that was so prevalent as to occlude the possibilities of coincidence or political expediency. A history of Turkish-EEC relations as the interplay of the Civilizational and Nationalist logics offers a holistic perspective of Turkish political and intellectual trends between 1959 and 1980. The Civilizational and Nationalist logics cut across the various distinct groups that either supported or opposed the EEC as well as the categories used to differentiate their support or opposition in either cultural, economic, or religious terms. The logics represent a crosssection of Turkish society, underscoring connections outside of the left/right, religious/secular, or statist/populist binaries that pervade understandings of this period. As such, these logics stand as an intervention into Turkish history. Their history positions the debates over Turkish integration between 1959 and 1980 as the continuation of a problematic that has informed the Turkish project since the mid-nineteenth century. It demonstrates how the struggle between the logics was an instance and arguably the most nuanced and complex manifestation of a nearly two-centuries-long discussion around the historical categories of westernization and Turkish nationalism, terms that have always been defined through one another. For cultural scholars of the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, the worldviews of the Civilizational and Nationalist logics will be all too familiar. The twin impulses of invitation and antagonism at heart of these logics formed a constant theme in Ottoman and Turkish approaches to Europe. Many of these scholars have pointed out how Ottoman and Turkish reformers harbored deeply ambivalent stances toward the west, simultaneously viewing Europe as Turkey’s salvation and its greatest threat.28 As Orhan Koc¸ak and others have argued, the persistent feeling of danger inherent in engaging with western civilization as a grudgingly admired enemy, a model to be cautiously emulated, had been an integral part of the Ottoman and early Republican imaginaries. Ziya

28

˘ “Demokratik various leftist Turkish populist movements in the 1970s, see Necmi Erdogan, ¨ Soldan Devrimci Yol’a: 1970’lerde Sol Populizm Uzerine Notlar,” Toplum ve Bilim, 78 (1998): ¨ 22–37. Cemil Aydın convincingly traces the evolution of this antagonistic impulse in the late Ottoman Empire. Aydın claims that the Ottoman Empire’s liminal position vis-a-vis Europe (included into the European system of states yet excluded on religious or racial grounds) led intellectuals in the late Ottoman period to explicitly formulate a nationalist anti-imperial discourse against the European notions of race, civilization, nationalism, and progress. This discourse, Aydın claims, was put in service of saving the Ottoman state, most notably during the PanIslamist campaign against the British during World War I. See Cemil Aydın, “Emperyal˙ ˘ izm Kars¸ıtı Bir Impatatorluk: Osmanlı Tecrubesi Is¸ıgnda 19 Yuzyıl Dunya Duzenı,” Divan, ¨ ¨ ¨ ¨ 12/22 (2007): 39–85 and Cemil Aydın, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

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Debating Turkish Modernity

Gokalp, often cited as the first theoretician of Turkish nationalism, believed ¨ the only path to defending Turkish culture was to engage with, while surviving the influence of, European civilization. In his oft-quoted dictum, “Either we master Western Civilization, or become subjugated by Western States,” the sense of the imminent danger hanging over the Ottoman Empire is evident.29 The ambivalence of Ottoman/Turkish attitudes toward Europe was even more poetically articulated by Enver Pas¸a, the future leader of the wartime empire, who wrote in a 1911 letter to a European lady friend, “Your civilization, it is poison, but a poison which awakens, and one cannot, one does not want to sleep anymore. One feels that if one were to close one’s eyes, it would be for dying.”30 The trope of danger that accompanied the necessary engagement with the west persisted well into the Republican period, perhaps best exemplified by Kemal Ataturk ¨ himself, who in a 1925 speech exclaimed, “Civilization is a fire, a fire that burns and devours all who are indifferent to it.”31 Such statements all attest to a profound tension in Turkish attitudes toward Europe, an uneasy synthesis of invitation and antagonism, of the antimony between the benefits of a necessary Europeanization and its dangers. The contradictory impulses that coexisted within the Turkish elite during the late Ottoman and early Republican periods were disassociated from one another after World War II. In this disassociation lay the historical origins of the Civilizational and Nationalist logics. The Civilizational logic that informed Turkey’s initial response to the Common Market explicitly disavowed the antimonies between antagonism and invitation that had informed Turkish nationalism’s view of the west. Or, more precisely, it deproblematized the antimony by dismissing its antagonistic elements. To signify membership in the EEC as the culmination of a singular and centuries-old ambition to join the west required a very selective reading of Turkish history – one accomplished by the forced reconciliation of Turkish nationalist thought with the project of Europeanization. In this context, the new nationalist currents that sprouted across the sociopolitical spectrum in the 1960s can be viewed as a response to this disavowal, as the reemergence of the antagonistic elements formulated at the turn of the century but subsequently erased and abandoned. Much like the famous lines of the Turkish National Anthem, which spoke of civilization as a “monster” out to slay the Turkish nation, the new nationalisms of the 1960s approached the EEC in an antagonistic light, staging a rearguard action to thwart an impending demise.

29 30

31

˘ Yayınları, Istanbul, 1980), 42. Ziya Gokalp, Makaleler IX (Istanbul: Kult ¨ ur ¨ Bakanlıgı ¨ Orhan Koc¸ak, “Westernisation against the West: Cultural Politics in the Early Turkish Republic” in Turkey’s Engagement with Modernity: Conflict and Change in the 20th Century, eds. C ¨ Kerslake, K. Oktem, and P. Robbins (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 310. ˙ ¨ un ¨ S¸apka Devriminde Kastamonu ve Inebolu Seyahatleri (Ankara: Turk Selim Imece, Ataturk’ ¨ Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1959), 18.

Introduction

21

The Nationalist logic, insofar as it structured Turkish reservations to the EEC, was both ideationally and historically a product of the Civilizational logic’s unidimensional reading of Turkish history; it occupied, through hermeneutic revival, ways of relating to Europe that had been silenced by the Civilizational worldview. This, in theoretical terms, is a directional reversal of the Hegelian dialectic, where a previously unified synthesis is broken down into its antithetical parts. Turkish debates over joining the Common Market were, I claim, central to this process. Turkish-EEC relations between 1959 and 1980 became the site through which the ambivalent and contradictory foundations of Turkey’s relationship to the west were first dissected, polarized into competing visions, and finally, as we shall see, reassembled. Lastly, this book offers a reading of Turkish-EEC relations as a case-instance in the methods of historical inquiry. This third, theoretical level, which extends beyond the Turkish-EEC context and its symbolic implications, engages with and is informed by the theorization of collective identity formation within history. Here, I am especially concerned with the use and abuse of the concepts of the “self” and “other” in historical analysis.32 Until quite recently, popular debates over Turkey’s identity and the west tended to start from the premise that Turkish identity is a problem or in crisis. Whatever their differences, and they were many, these interpretations all situated contemporary Turkish identity as the child of contradictory impulses between east and west, between modernity and its discontents, between state paternalism and democracy, between Islam and secularism. The list goes on and on. Turkey’s economic and political resurgence over the last decade has done much to dismiss these views. Despite the unease felt among certain segments of the Turkish elite, there is an undeniable and collective swell of Turkish confidence; a security in the sense of self that is natural to those who actively engage with, rather than passively resign themselves to, the world around them. The old dichotomies that informed both domestic and foreign analyses of Turkey have disappeared not so much because they were resolved, but because Turkey’s recent rise as a formidable regional power has made them obsolete. The fact that most twenty-first-century Turks do not approach Turkish identity as a problem has had a little-noticed, but nonetheless emancipatory, effect on Turkish scholarship. Modern Turkish studies, especially its cultural 32

There are a number of theoretical works written by Turks that address the theorization of the self/other within other fields such as international relations and international political economy. I mention Fuat Keyman and Bahar Rumelili specifically because they both directly address this problematic in relation to the EU and have published extensively on Turkish-EU relations. Bahar Rumelili, “Constructing Identity and Relating to Difference: Understanding the EU’s mode of Differentiation,” Review of International Studies, 30 (2004): 27–47; and Fuat Keyman, “Articulating Difference: The Problem of the Other in International Political Economy,” Review of International Political Economy 2/1 (1995): 70–95.

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Debating Turkish Modernity

arm, was a product of this crisis in Turkish identity, its research parameters conditioned by the need to explicate the symbolic tension and unease felt by many Turks from 1980 to the turn of the century. The crisis over, the field of Turkish studies is no longer straightjacketed to confronting Turkish identity as a problem. Silently liberated, recent scholars have begun to engage with more complex and nuanced conceptualizations of the self/other problematic. This book hopes to contribute to this vibrant and much needed impulse taking place within Turkey today. To do so within the confines of this historical project, we must ask what theorizations of the self and other are best suited to an understanding of Turkish perceptions of Turkey’s integration with Europe. The intellectual history of self/other theorizations can be roughly separated into two trajectories.33 The first, and most prominent, is the “dialectical” tradition in modern European thought, beginning with Hegel and extending through Marx to Habermas. This tradition posits the self and the other as raw materials for a future dialectical Aufhebung (sublation or elevation) to or in a new self. Whether in the name of reason or progress, the self and the other are always already encountered and bounded within a process of integration. Even for Habermas, who explicitly attempted to overcome this tendency, an insistence on consensus as the driving goal of communication belies an underlying impulse toward assimilation.34 The second, obverse trajectory has insisted on the immutable otherness of the other. Though this trajectory has been taken up in a number of disparate contexts, from the work of western Marxist Theodor Adorno to that of the French post-structuralist Jacques Derrida, all situate the other, either ontologically or epistemologically, as fundamentally alterior to the self. For this strain, the other exists as the incommensurable, whose slippery historical contingency stands as a thorny injunction against the totalizing and identitarian proclivities of the modern self. Neither of these trajectories applies to the present historical examination. The very material reality of Turkey’s protracted and incomplete integration situates it in a grey zone between inclusion and exclusion vis-`a-vis its European other. This position demands a self/other theorization that embraces liminality; one that informs and underscores a world of interstices. To do so we must shift our focus away from the terms “self”/“other” and toward the theorization of the boundary between the two; a theorization of the slash, or what Fredrik Barth referred to as “diacritica.”35 An emphasis on dialogue, as set forth by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, as the basis of the self/other nexus 33

34 35

I am not suggesting that the intellectual history of theorizations of the self and other can be subsumed or reduced to this dichotomy. This binary categorization stands simply as a useful framework to introduce the subject. See Iver Nuemann, Uses of the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) for an interesting discussion of Habermas regarding this point. Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969).

Introduction

23

offers such a path. Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism distances itself from both the dialectical tradition with its insistence on transcendence as well as from the fetishism of a theoretically inviolable yet politically always-already violated alterity. The invitational and antagonistic gestures at the core of the Civilizational and Nationalist logics offer dialogical yet nonetheless obverse constructions of the “slash.” In each case, the self is always-already split by the presence of the other. In the former, the self is created through an initial gesture of hospitality, a welcoming of the other to preside over the self. For the latter, by contrast, the self comes into being through invasion by the other, defined as that which is prohibited from actualization because of the very presence of the other. Yet, to not make the mistake of many dialecticians, we must be careful not to see in antithetical opposition the presence of totality. It is important to note the historical specificity of Turkey’s self/other constructions. Far from being universal, they are only made possible by, and must be seen as responses to, the historically conditioned unequal geographies of Turkey and Europe. Underlying and uniting both the antagonistic and invitational gestures is a shared construction of the Turkish self as a “lack” vis-`a-vis its European other. An obsessively comparativist stance – where the Turkish self is regarded as missing something that someone else (Europe) has – informed both the supporters and detractors of Turkish integration with the EEC. It was evident in arguments to adopt practices and norms present in the west but lacking in Turkey as well as antithetical claims that this westernization was preventing Turkey from developing its own national forms (be they cultural, political, literary, or statistical); an argument which only makes sense relationally, ironically in reference to forms individual European nations ‘have’. The index of lack forms the common historical specificity of both the Civilizational and Nationalist logics, and underscores a fundamental asymmetry with its European counterpart (imagine a France or Germany wishing to emulate a Turkish model, or even more absurdly, viewing relations with Turkey as inhibiting their own realization of Turkish forms). The sense of lack imparts to the Turkish project two specific qualities. First, it construes the Turkish project as one of mimetic desire in the Girardian sense, where the object of desire is not approached directly, but is rather mediated by the model which possesses it: whether this be contemporary civilization, a set of ever-changing attributes and configurations possessed by European society (the Civilizational logic), or the already developed national economic, social, and cultural forms of European states (which, though seldom acknowledged, often served as models for the Nationalist logic).36 Second, it fosters a tendency to keep the European other as a point of comparison, at a distance – to not 36

This view of non-western societies appropriating, for themselves, the same formal categories used to describe European society (nation, culture, state, liberty, etc.) in their struggle against European colonialism has been criticized by postcolonial theorists. See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University

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scrutinize it too closely – lest this complicate the opposition between Europe’s haves and Turkey’s have nots.37 This mediated nature of desire, where the Turkish project was referenced not to a static set of attributes but rather indexed, either positively or negatively, with the changing face or threat posed by the European other, is precisely what enables its plasticity. For both the Civilizational and Nationalist logics, the particular characteristics of the self and other remained dynamic and open to contingency. They were, as we shall see during the course of this book, redefined as much by slippages in the self’s definition of the other as by the historical exertion of the other onto the self. Where the second symbolic level concerned itself with the what of Turkey, of the different problematics and frames through which Turkey was imagined, this outermost level of analysis delves into the how of Turkey – the conditions for the possibility of conceiving (and reconceiving) Turkey in the first place. That these conditions were intimately bound to Turkey’s dialogue with Europe will, I hope, become evident through the course of this book. But enough talk of “what is it,” as T.S. Eliot once put it, “let us go and make our visit.”

37

Andrew Davison brilPress, 2000). Applying Chakrabarty’s ideas to a reading of Ziya Gokalp, ¨ liantly unearths a quasi-hermeneutic element in his thought, showing how Gokalp distinguished ¨ between the positivistic understanding of European “forms” such as culture and nation, and the differences that arise in their “meaning” as they are translated by the intimate and localized contexts which adopt them. See Andrew Davison, “Ziya Gokalp and Provincializing Europe,” ¨ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 26/3 (2006): 377–90. An explanation, perhaps, for why the Civilizational logic turned a blind eye to the descent of European civilization into war, authoritarianism, and genocide when reconciling the Europe of Ataturk ¨ with its record after his death.

1 Joining Civilization (1923–1963)

. . . admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological . . . At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that “I” and “you” are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.1 – Sigmund Freud

Turkey’s application for membership to the fledgling European Economic Community on 30 July 1959 marked the beginning of the half-century-plus history of relations between Turkey and the organization that gradually came to signify official Europe. The reasons for the timing and manner of Turkey’s application have been the subject of an intense, ongoing discussion among Turkish politicians, diplomats, and historians. Undisputed by these groups, however, has been the question of why Turkey would concern itself with European economic integration in the first place. In the years after World War II, Turkey took firm steps to align itself with the liberal-democratic, free-market states of the west. Turkey’s first contested multiparty election in 1950 resulted in the landslide defeat of the incumbent ˙ ˙ on Republican People’s Party (RPP), led by Ataturk’s successor Ismet In ¨ ¨ u, ¨ 2 and the bloodless transfer of power to the antistatist, populist, and economically liberal Democrat Party (DP), led by Adnan Menderes. Keeping to its campaign promises to open up the Turkish economy, the DP largely scrapped the statedirected economic development policies of the RPP. Restrictions on foreign 1 2

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002), 31. ˙ ˙ on Ismet In ¨ u¨ was a celebrated general in Turkey’s Independence War and the right-hand man of Ataturk, replacing him as “National Leader” after Ataturk’s death in 1938. After World War II, ¨ ¨ ˙ on In ¨ u¨ oversaw Turkey’s transition to a functioning democracy, handing over power and joining the opposition after the RPP’s defeat in the 1950 elections.

25

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investment and trade were lifted, loans (often short term) were taken out, and the lira was devalued to attract foreign, especially American, capital. Economic liberalization was accompanied by the DP’s push to secure Turkey’s place in the west. The DP sent Turkish troops to Korea and, in return, oversaw Turkish entry into Europe’s most important international organization, the Atlantic Alliance. As part of this westward alignment, the DP had closely followed the project of European unification from its beginnings in the European Coal and Steel Community and welcomed the creation of a European Economic Community (EEC) by the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. So it was no surprise that six weeks after Greece’s announcement of its application, the DP, with alacrity, followed suit. Within a few months, negotiations commenced over the details of Turkey’s integration into the EEC, resulting in a treaty, known as the Ankara Agreement, signed formally some four years later, in September 1963. The negotiation process that began with Turkey’s application to the EEC in July 1959 and concluded with the signing of the Ankara Agreement in September 1963 lasted four years. In the interim, Turkey witnessed three changes of government and a thorough refashioning of its sociopolitical order. The Democrat Party government was overthrown on 27 May 1960 by a military coup carried out by junior officers in the Turkish Armed Forces. The military government known as the National Unity Committee (NUC) drafted a ˙ ˙ on new constitution and restored civilian rule to a coalition led by Ismet In ¨ u¨ following the general elections of 15 October 1961. Interrupted by the coup, negotiations with the EEC resumed shortly thereafter, with the final text of the association agreement between Turkey and the EEC hammered out in five meetings between March 1962 and July 1963.3 During this period, the EEC and Turkey’s relations with it were the preoccupation of the Turkish elite. Few outside the two mainstream parties, bureaucrats in the trade and foreign ministries, and a handful of academic, business, and military men knew much about the project for European economic integration. There were two reasons for this. First, Turkey was a censored society for the first half of this period. From the last years of the DP government and throughout the subsequent period of military rule, there were severe restrictions on freedoms of speech and assembly. Political and syndical activities of all kinds were banned outside of government and dissent, through various measures, silenced within it. Second, 1959 to 1963 was a period of great domestic, social, and political upheaval. Amid the unrest and repression under Menderes, the military coup, the trials of the former Democratic Party leadership,4 and the radical institutional changes put in place by the NUC, few people 3 4

Journal Officiel des Communaut´es Europ´eennes, No.VIII, August 1963, 3. For an excellent analysis of Turkish public opinion and the press during this period, see Duygu ¨ 1972). Sezer, Kamu Oyu ve Dıs¸ Politika (Ankara: A.U.S.B.F,

Joining Civilization (1923–1963)

27

concerned themselves with a nascent integration project Turkey hoped to join some twenty-two years later. For those who kept an eye on the outside world, the Cyprus crisis, Franco-American tensions within NATO, and Cold War developments in Cuba and Berlin took precedence over the EEC. Yet the handful of men within the Turkish elite who concerned themselves with the EEC felt very passionately about it. Much more passionately, in fact, than one might expect to feel toward membership in an economic organization whose principle task was to construct a common market among its memberstates with the aim of facilitating trade. What exactly these Turks felt about the EEC during their initial encounter, how they made sense of and defined Turkish integration into it, are the questions guiding this chapter. Its task is to examine the process of European unification as it was perceived by Turks, to detail the particular narrative the EEC was simultaneously subsumed by and reinforced. To this end, it asks how the negotiation process was structured, interpreted, and talked about in Turkey. At the time of the Turkish application in the summer of 1959, the EEC was in its infancy, barely eighteen months old. Looking back on these beginnings in ˙ the early 1990s, Ilhan Tekeli, a prominent social scientist and Common Market expert, underscored this aspect of freshness, “Since any new economic community must renegotiate its relations with its neighbors, Turkish-EEC relations, from the very start, were formed by a reciprocal search for definition.”5 So what did members of the Turkish elite make of this new organization? For DP Foreign Minister Fatin Rus ¨ ¸ tu¨ Zorlu, the significance of the EEC was unequivocal. At a cabinet meeting in the presidential palace on 30 July 1959, he stressed how “our application to the EEC was a logical outcome of Turkey’s desire to be counted as European,” adding that “the formation of the EEC must be seen as another historical opportunity for Ankara to demonstrate Turkey’s Europeanness.”6 Four years later, at a banquet attended by the EEC commissioner and the foreign ministers of the EEC member-states, Zorlu’s successor, Feridun Cemal Erkin, spoke in a similar vein, “The Association Agreement between Turkey and the EEC is the consummation of the Turkish Republic’s goal to join Europe and the standard of civilization that it represents.”7 All too often, such statements have been uncritically viewed as articulations of Turkish westernization or summarily dismissed as ideological dressing for a pragmatic politics. Scholars have usually looked beyond these statements and focused either on Turkey’s geostrategic concerns such as Turko-Greek 5 6 7

˙ ¨ ˙ ¨ ˘ (Ankara: Umit Tekeli and Selim Ilkin, Turkiye ve Avrupa Toplulugu Yayıncılık, 1993), 7. Ilhan ˘ ¨ S¸aban C¸alıs¸, Turkiye – Avrupa Birligi I˙lis¸kileri (Ankara: Nobel Yayın Dagıtım, 2001), 41. Turkiye Ticaret Odası, Discours Tenus a l’Occasion de la Signature de l’Accord Creant Une ¨ Association Entre la Communaute Economique Europeenne et la Turquie. 1963 (Ankara: TTO, 1963), 8.

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rivalry and the Cold War, or the economic discourse used by the few diplomats throughout the negotiation process.8 Yet, between 1959 and 1963, very few Turks contextualized Turkey’s intentions to integrate into the EEC economically or geostrategically. Rather, the aforementioned statements by the foreign ministers of Turkey’s two rival parties, four years apart, attest to a language of a very different sort, one that spoke of integration in civilizational terms. Moreover, they typify how concerned Turks made sense of relations with the EEC from 1959 to 1963. In what follows I attempt to trace the historical-conceptual outlines of a logic that made such statements possible. A particular logic, which I have termed the Civilizational logic, formed the dominant framework through which Turkey’s application to, and association agreement with, the EEC was signified within Turkey. This chapter begins by establishing the Civilizational logic in both its historical and theoretical contexts. The first part details the birth of this logic with the founding of the Turkish Republic, tracing how the Ottoman aim of “joining the civilized nations of the world” came to denote the modern Turkish project. It next outlines the philosophical structure and implications of this logic, and concludes by positioning it within the worldview of the Turkish elite between 1959 and 1963. The second part of the chapter examines how this logic framed Turkish understandings of the Common Market, and through it of Turkey itself, in the four years between 1959 and 1963. Part anecdotal, part institutional, part theoretical, and part descriptive, this chapter is a cultural history of the Civilizational logic and how it came to structure Turkish attitudes toward the EEC.

the civilizational logic Like most ideologies of the Republican period, “joining the civilized nations of the world” passes through the prism of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In fact, ¨ to this day, a handful of radical leftists notwithstanding, Ataturk’s life and ¨ vision have formed the discursive limit of Turkish politics.9 In the sixty-eight 8 9

˘ C¸alıs¸, Turkiye ¨ ¨ ve Avrupa Toplulugu; – Avrupa Birligi Ilis¸kileri, M.A. Tekeli and Ilkin, Turkiye ¨ Birand; Tuurkiye’nin Ortak Pazar Macerası 1959-1985 (Istanbul: Milliyet Yayınları 1986). To be sure, although Ataturk ¨ was by far the most important single person in fashioning the outlines of the Turkish state and westernization project during the country’s initial decades, he was by no means solely responsible for them. Not only were important aspects of the Turkish project advanced and implemented by other men, but Ataturk ¨ was himself influenced by the continuous debates and competing views of, at times, a quite large inner circle. Nevertheless, the parceling out of credit from Ataturk to his fellow travelers is a relatively recent trend ¨ in Turkish historiography, and one that certainly did not exist in the early 1960, when the cult of personality reigned supreme. This does not imply that the Turkish elites of the 1960s were not aware of the contributions of others, or the existence of competing views, during the foundational years of the Turkish Republic. What it does imply, however, is that in the political discourse of the 1960s these other people and their views did not matter as they do to

Joining Civilization (1923–1963)

29

years since his death, both his followers and detractors have read and reread Ataturk ¨ into contemporary politics. Given the duration and breadth of his rule, coupled with what one Ataturk ¨ scholar has called a “political pragmatism” in the face of motley challenges,10 Ataturk ¨ bequeathed numerous, sometimes contradictory threads by which to sew his legacy. These competing legacies, and the competing political projects to which they have been subsequently appended, present a problem for scholars of modern Turkey. After his death in 1938, Ataturk eclipsed Turkey’s conceptual horizon, ¨ becoming the foundational myth of the Turkish Republic. For modern scholars, Ataturk’s life, project, and context are always-already political; they can ¨ neither be detached from the present political situation, nor can they exist outside of, or objectively from, the history of interpretations layered between Ataturk ¨ and the present. Anything other than a hermeneutic approach, inquiring into how Turks have historically articulated Ataturk’s legacy, runs the risk ¨ of essentializing as objective, a particular and thus partial interpretation. To inquire into the historical-conceptual roots of Turkish attitudes toward Turkish-EEC relations between 1959 and 1963, we must construct one of these hermeneutic circles. Our task is to trace, from a contemporary perspective, how Turks of the 1950s and early 1960s framed Ataturk’s project and legacy. ¨ Accordingly, the following three sections offer a historical-conceptual interpretation of this framing, which I have termed the Civilizational logic. ¨ and the Standards of Civilization Ataturk The Civilizational logic has its roots not in the Ottoman Empire but rather within the history of Europe’s changing relationship with the non-European world.11 In the mid-nineteenth century, Europeans began to refine and redefine the conceptualization of their self and the other. Increased contact by European states with their colonial holdings and the Ottoman Empire problematized an earlier civilized/barbarian dichotomy, and with it Europe’s self-definition. In response, European statesmen and intellectuals began to distinguish between integration within a European “system” (of which Turks were a part) and the

10 11

historians today. In the 1960s, if Turkey and the Turkish project were going to be redefined, this redefinition had to go through the central axis of Ataturk ¨ and his legacy. ¨ (New York: William Morrow & Co, 1964), 442. Lord Kinross, Ataturk Many scholars have examined the effects of a European-delineated international society on the non-Western world. For those that pay considerable attention to the impact on the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, see Ayla Gol ¨ (working paper), The Requirements of European International Society: Modernity and Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire (Canberra: Dept. of International Relations, Australian National University, 2003); Geritt Gong, The Standards of “Civilization” in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

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notion of a European “club” or “community” (from which Turks were excluded).12 This separation of a logic of culture from raison d’´etat marked a shift in Turko-European relations; no longer represented by Europeans as their barbaric and Asiatic polar other, the Turks came to occupy a liminal position, the gap between ex- and in-clusion, the “sick man of (not in) Europe.” Cemil Aydın has forcefully argued that this liminality was the product of two contradictory discourses with which Europeans approached non-western empires like Turkey and Japan: one a universalist and inclusive discourse of humanist civilization, the other an imperial discourse founded on cultural and racial exclusion.13 The ambiguous and paradoxical position of the late Ottoman Empire vis-`aproject, caught between integravis Europe became a backdrop for Ataturk’s ¨ tion within a system of European states and exclusion as its uncivilized other. In this sense, Ataturk’s imperative to “elevate Turkey to the level of civilized ¨ nations” can be read as a response, an attempt to resolve this paradox, to end the liminal status of the Turk. In the first years of the Republic, from 1923 to 1945, this Civilizational imperative served as rhetorical justification for the revolutionary changes impressed upon Turkish society. For Ataturk, this not only meant a radical ¨ architectural restructuring of a multiethnic theocratic empire into a homogeneous secular nation-state, but also entailed seemingly cosmetic gestures to transform the daily lives of the Anatolian people. In a speech given in Akhisar over the outlawing of the traditional Ottoman fez, Ataturk ¨ chastised his fellow countrymen for their reluctance to embrace the west: Let us not fool ourselves. The civilized world is very advanced. To catch up to it, to be included in Civilization’s circle, is our obligation. We must get rid of all our sophistries. To debate whether we should wear a hat or not is meaningless. We shall not only wear hats but appropriate all the works and ways of Western Civilization.14

While some of these acts of cultural assimilation, such as the outlawing of the fez and veil (in state institutions) or the adoption of the Latin alphabet, were enshrined in Turkish law, many others were adopted as normative imperatives by a Turkish elite that saw itself as the pedagogue of the Anatolian people. “To shave, sport a tie, eat with a fork, shake hands, attend theater, and write from left to right were just some of the behaviors that defined a progressive and civilized person.”15 12 13 14 15

Gong, The Standards of Civilization, 11. Aydın, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia, 15 ¨ un ¨ Diliyle Ataturk’ ¨ un ¨ Soylevleri ¨ Kemal Ataturk, Bugun (Ankara: Turk ¨ ¨ Dil Kurumu Yayınları, 1968), 224. ˙ ˘ ¨ Islami Kimlik Arayıs¸ı,” in Turkiye’de Modernles¸me Nulifer Gole, ¨ “Modernles¸me Baglamında ˘ (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1998), ve Ulusal Kimlik, eds., R. Kasaba, S. Bozdogan 75.

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31

Nowhere was this impulse more apparent than in the newly founded capital of Ankara, which, a nationalist critic in the 1970s observed, “was home to an opera house and classical music concert hall well before any space was provided for Turkish folk music.”16 As a cultural historian of the period noted, “Every conceivable facet of life, from the heights of state institutions to the excremental world of toilets was delineated into a European ‘a la franga’ (or French) way, deemed appropriate and possessing value, and its ‘a la turka’ (Turkish) counterpart, considered negative and condescended to.”17 A fundamental ambiguity and unsettledness of the self underlay these radical and slightly mad acts of Europeanization. This ambiguity differentiates the self-narrative of Turkey from the typical foundational self/other narratives of other nation-states. Unlike most instances of a developmental logic, in which the self has been defined and referenced by the utopia of itself yet to come, the Turkish self was constituted as being-toward something outside of it, that something being contemporary (European) civilization. This constitutional gesture is unique in revolutionary history; it not only erases its past history, but also radically negates the very act of Turkey’s own creation – its war of independence against the west – through an initial act of generosity, a welcoming of the western other into itself as Turkey’s future projection. Perhaps the most remarkable example of this gesture occurred in 1934, as Ataturk ¨ presided over the first modern war memorial to honor the enemy dead. At the unveiling ceremony at C ¸ anakkale (Gallipoli), Ataturk ¨ addressed the British Empire he had defeated on those shores eighteen years prior: You heroes that have spilled your blood on this nation’s soil! Sleep in peace and quiet for you rest on your brother’s homeland, lying side by side with the Turkish soldier (Mehmetcik). You mothers of far off lands that have sent your sons to war! Dry your tears for your children are in our bosom. They lie in peace and will always do so – for the moment they gave their lives on our soil, from then on they were our sons.18

These remarks can be attributed to Ataturk’s aim at full rapprochement with ¨ Europe following Turkey’s war of independence or to a particularly poetic instance of the dying art of military chivalry.19 Yet it is also possible to read these remarks as the clearest instance of the radical hospitality at the core of Ataturk’s project, bringing the European other into Turkey’s “bosom.” ¨ The numerous references to familial relations and a common earth underscore Ataturk’s vision of a single family of nations united by a shared civilization. The ¨ invitational gesture at the heart of this address becomes even more apparent when contrasted with the imperial mentality of the Great War, well encapsulated in Rupert Brooke’s famous sonnet, “The Soldier,” which mused, “If I 16 17 18 19

Kamil Turan, “Ortak Pazar Maceramız,” Devlet, 29 December 1969, 9. ˘ 78. Gole, ¨ “Modernles¸me Baglamında,” ¨ Soylevleri, ¨ Ataturk, Ataturk 327. ¨ Stephen Stillwell, Anglo-Turkish Relations in the Interwar Era (New York: Edwin Mellen, 2003).

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should die, think only this of me/That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.”20 If Brooke’s poem is the hypostatization of the appropriating colonial mentality par excellence, Ataturk ¨ at Gallipoli represents its radical opposite. The Theoretical Structure of the Civilizational Logic Ataturk’s initial act of hospitality, his welcoming of the contemporary western ¨ other into Turkey as the vision, standard, and arbiter of Turkey’s future self, lies at the core of the Civilizational logic. Its theoretical structure is based on an invitational gesture that brings the other into the self. This radical construction of the self, predicated on an initial act of hospitality toward the other, is evident in many of Ataturk’s less remembered statements. “A people are not only the ¨ rightful owners of the territory they have settled on, but they also reside there as the representatives of humanity.”21 Likewise, “To comply with the orders and demands of civilization is enough to make you Turkish – but more so, to make you human.”22 In each instance, being Turkish involves a fundamental unsettledness, containing both a part that is itself and a part that is more than itself. The ambition to develop according to an external standard is by no means unique to the Turkish Republic. Many states, if not most, have consciously emulated the techniques, structures, and practices of their more successful counterparts.23 Yet, three aspects peculiar to the Civilizational logic differentiate the Turkish case from other developmental logics. First, the Civilizational logic is not solely, or even primarily, based on economic or military development, but operates on a cultural and spiritual register.24 These latter realms, as many postcolonial theorists following Partha Chatterjee have pointed out, have usually been spaces jealously guarded from western intrusion.25 Second, Turkey did not seek to emulate the other for its own advancement (a position that maintains separation of the self/other) but, much more radically, defined its own project as becoming the other, as gaining acceptance by this other as 20 21 22 23

24 25

Rupert Brooke, “The Soldier,” in The Oxford Book of War Poetry, ed. Jon Stallworthy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 163. ¨ ¨ un ¨ Soylevleri, Ataturk, Ataturk 275. ¨ Ibid., 12. Benedict Anderson has argued that perhaps the most important reason for the remarkable spread and endurance of the nation-state is that its form is modular, i.e., easily transported from one context to another. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). In fact, this distinction is an important one separating the westernizing reforms of the late Ottoman period since the Tanzimat from the reforms of the Turkish revolution. See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Ania Loomba, Colonialism-Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998); Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850 (London: Routledge, 2000).

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a member. Turkey was to develop into itself by becoming European, a project made possible only if this project already contained, through an initial invitational act, the European other in itself. Third, the Civilizational logic charged the European other to arbitrate over Turkey, to stand in a position of judgment as to the success or failure of its project. This was to have monumental implications for Turkey’s self-understanding in its relations with the European Community. In theoretical terms, the Civilizational logic is akin to the ethical relation of the type described by the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. It consists of a voluntary invitation, and hence an ethical responsibility to the other, insofar as it grants this other the power to adjudicate over itself.26 To be clear, the term “ethical” in no way refers to the subject matter or content of this responsibility (such as respect for human rights or civil freedoms), but rather denotes the structure of the self/other relation. Although Turkey’s relations with Europe have involved such ethical content, this structure is better revealed through trivial but perhaps more telling examples such as the introductory comments to a book on the Turkish Armed Forces, which offered its readers the following advice, “While it is certainly healthy to take pride in our Turkishness, we should also take to heart the criticisms of these [European] writers so that we can identify and correct our faults.”27 That the book was commissioned by the Turkish Chief of General Staff and entitled The European Image of the Turk and the Turkish Army is just as indicative of the ethical self/other relation underlying the Civilizational logic.28 Just imagining a similar book tracing 26

To claim that one structuring logic of Turkish-EEC relations, and through it a social-imaginary of Turkey, is best interpreted as an ethical relation, it is necessary to develop Levinas’ thought into a historical methodology. This presents a series of problems. In a working paper entitled Being at Home in the World, Hugh Dyer brings to light some of these issues, many of which bear relevance to this project. According to Dyer: Once “face-to-face” relationships are brought centre-stage, the problem remaining for the social sciences in general is how to characterize aggregates of such relationships. These are the characterizations for which theory normally provides guidance, and which epistemology requires in moves from the particular to the general. The difficulty is that accounts of concrete human relationships may be presented as merely anecdotal, and not amenable to generalization. This is evident in the objection that “face-to-face” relationships do not take account of third parties, or collectivities, and so would leave open the central political questions of governance, representation, collective action, etc. Furthermore, cultural factors only enter in to “face-toface” relationships through the self-identification of individuals, and the traditional and creative aspects of culture remain distant.

27 28

Hugh Dyer, “Being at Home in the World” (POLIS Working Paper: 2004), 117. ¨ ¨ ¨ Ordusu (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basım Evi, Işık, Yabancı Gözuyle Turkler ve Turk Huseyin ¨ 1995). An interesting contrast is between this late-twentieth-century book and one of the first books printed in the Ottoman language by the first Turkish printing press, established by Ibrahim Muteferrika in 1729. This book explained the successes of Christian military arms against the Ottomans and drew attention to attempts to restructure Ottoman institutions along European

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34

the German image of the French or Red Army, much less one prefaced by their general staffs urging readers to learn from German criticisms, gives one a sense of peculiarity of the Civilizational logic. This relation also appears in other, more paradoxical instances, as in the 1961 military ordinance forbidding gregarious speech in public places, “lest this create a bad impression on Western tourists.”29 Until very recently, the opinions of Europeans, whether evaluating Turkish literature or commenting on Turkey’s football clubs, were reiterated by the national media, standing as “objective” judgments of Turkish competence.30 The Civilizational Logic and the Turkish Elite The Civilizational logic was more than a domestic or foreign policy slogan used to legitimize a certain set of internal reforms or external alliances. It describes a peculiar subjectivity, a particular way of imagining Turkey, a way many Turks gave meaning to and made sense of themselves and the world around them. By the late 1950s this logic informed how most educated Turkish people interpreted Ataturk’s project, and thus how they understood themselves as ¨ Turks. A Turkish sociological study carried out in 1961 revealed that “being civilized” had replaced “being courageous” as the prime virtue of the Turkish people.31 That such sociological studies, appropriating the methods of inquiry and verification of Western epistemology, were being conducted at all is telling in itself. In 1963, Nuri Eren, a career diplomat and former Turkish ambassador to the United Nations, claimed that, “the nation as a whole shares a common vision of the future. To reach the standards of western civilization has become the password of every group, of every age.”32 Of course, this was somewhat of an exaggeration in a predominantly agricultural society with a literacy rate slightly higher than 50 percent, but it did apply to most of Turkey’s governing and intellectual elite. Until the 1950s, most of Turkey’s ruling elite accepted the need for significant, even revolutionary reforms and embraced Ataturk’s programs ¨

29 30

31 32

lines. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 28. The contrast is worth noting for two reasons: first, it underscores the explicitly relational nature of modernity at its entrance into the Ottoman Empire, one that continues through Republican Turkey; second, while both books examine the Turkish military from a European perspective, the Ottoman text is interested in appropriating European tactics for instrumental reform while the Turkish Armed Forces book focuses on European perceptions of the Turkish military, valuing these opinions for their own normative sake. Cumhuriyet, 25 July 1961. I say until recently because over the past decade there is a noticeable nationalist backlash in the Turkish media to European commentary, the roots of which the following chapters will examine in detail. Nuri Eren, Turkey Today and Tomorrow: An Experiment in Westernization (London: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963), 30. Ibid., 256.

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enthusiastically. During the initial years of the Republic, this elite was recruited from the Ottoman bureaucracy and military. Most government officials and commanders of the early Republican era had been involved with or were sympathetic to various pre–World War I Ottoman progressive political groups. Ataturk himself had been a member of the Society of Union and Progress ¨ while serving as an Ottoman army commander in Macedonia. Further uniting this group was their educational training. The Turkish state elite of the 1950s was comprised of predominantly male Turks who had received a western education either at home, at Istanbul or Ankara University (whose professors included many German-Jewish intellectuals escaping persecution), or the Robert Kolej (founded by U.S. missionaries in the 1850s), or abroad, as beneficiaries of the Turkish government scholarships that sent thousands to study in Europe and the United States.33 Service to the country and a western higher education, rather than wealth per se, became the primary qualifications for acceptance into the bureaucratic and military corps.34 Following World War II, a nongovernmental professional elite also emerged and included architects, engineers, lawyers, managers, physicians, and university professors, who, though not necessarily unified in their domestic political views, supported the bureaucratic-military core in matters of foreign policy and orientation. While all of these groups interpreted Ataturk’s project as “raising Turkey to ¨ the level of contemporary civilization,” nowhere was the Civilizational logic more entrenched than in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). As in the late Ottoman period, diplomatic service in the Turkish Republic was a venerated occupation, staffed by the western-educated elite of the country. Of the 474 Foreign Service officers in 1967, 384 (81%) had finished top high schools either in Istanbul (264), Ankara (84), or Europe (46). A stagerring 294 (62%) were graduates from a single department: the Faculty of Political Science in Ankara.35 They formed a close-knit fraternity of like-minded men who, according to one caustic nationalist observer, “had more in common with Europeans than their own countrymen.”36 The diplomatic corps, for obvious reasons, came into face-to-face contact with Europeans to a much greater extent than other sectors of the Turkish elite, not to mention the population at large. More than anyone else, its members 33 34 35

36

“The Roses and the Thorns” in Turkey and the Community (Sussex: Sussex Dankwart Rustow, ¨ European Research Centre, 1981), 10. Frederick W. Frey, The Turkish Political Elite (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965). Metin Tamkoc, Warrior Diplomats (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1976). Between 1959 and 1963, the Turkish diplomats who were either directly involved with or publicized Turkish-EEC negotiations made up an even more homogenous group. All were born between 1910 and 1920, avoided combat in both World War I and Turkey’s war of independence, and were relatively young (in their forties) in the early 1960s. Most had attended Galatasaray High School, either traveled or studied in Europe before entering service, and were fluent in at least ¨ two European languages (mostly French, German, and English). See Turkiye’de Kim Kimdir (Istanbul: Tanıtım Yayınları, 1959, 1963). Devlet, 29 December 1969.

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were in a position to register and thus attune themselves to European judgments about their country. In their personal reflections and public statements, Turkey’s foreign service officers became the leading spokesmen for the Civilizational logic, especially in regard to Turkey’s relations with the EEC. In their concern for European judgment, which colored their conception of Turkey and its people, national pride, aim, and duty, the logic was articulated in its purest form. ˘ Gokmen, The memoirs of Oguz a career diplomat and a Turkish member of ¨ the Joint Parliamentary Commission (JPC), attest to this preoccupation with European assessment. The JPC, created by the Association Agreement and comprised of members from the European Parliament and the Turkish Grand National Assembly, was an effort to increase cooperation and understanding between Turkey and the EEC. It thus functioned as a site for the face-to-face ethical relation at the heart of the Civilizational logic. Describing the Commission’s proceedings, Gokmen noted that, “During the meetings of the Joint ¨ Parliamentary Commission here in Turkey, many European politicians had an opportunity to closely observe our country and our people. I can sincerely say they liked and identified with Turkey and Turks, counted them as one of their own.”37 Behind these remarks, acknowledging that Turkey was being judged and, after “close observation,” was found to be identical with its European other, one can unmistakably detect the workings of the Civilizational logic. In a particularly telling anecdote from 1964, Gokmen recounts how he ¨ awoke one morning informed that the then-president of the European Parliament, Mr. Duvijeusart, whom he had been assigned to escort during his stay in Turkey, had gone out for a walk by himself: I was alarmed, to be sure. Not for his safety so much as what he might see. When he returned, however, I could tell by the smile on his face that he was left with a positive impression. Happily he turned to me and my colleagues and said, “You are Europeans, European . . . of this fact no one should have any doubt.”38 (author’s original emphasis)

account attests to an almost visceral fear felt by the Turkish elite that Gokmen’s ¨ Turkey’s European credentials would be betrayed by the beliefs and behavior of its underdeveloped citizenry. His elation stems from Mr. Duvijeusart’s affirmation of Turkey’s Europeanness at the very site of its disavowed and veiled reality. Nihat Dinc¸, another career diplomat who, in 1962, served as permanent delegate to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, claimed: However non-binding the decisions of the Council were on member states, for Turkey, with its ongoing ambitions of becoming European, the true importance of the Council 37 38

˘ Gokmen, Oguz Bir Zamanlar Hariciye (Istanbul: Kaptan Ofset, 1999), 421. ¨ Ibid., 421.

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lay in providing a platform of European thought and principles which were taken up as models and examples in the Turkish Grand National Assembly.39

The Council of Europe, although a largely ineffectual body, functioned as the normative institution of Europe, a place where European values and beliefs were internationally discussed and dispensed. Dinc¸’s quote gives explicit voice to the power of the ethical relationship by describing how European parliamentary practices and normative standards should form the horizon of Turkish political deliberations at home. Tellingly, the voluntary aspect of these possible influences – a testament to the invitational mentality of the Turkish elite of the early 1960s – stands in marked contrast to the forced stipulations for constitutional and parliamentary change being demanded of Turkey by the European Union today.

the civilizational logic and the eec From Application to Coup Between 1959 and 1963, the diplomatic corps, flanked by other like-minded civil servants, together comprising what can be called the bureaucratic-military elite, was the principle Turkish actor engaged with the EEC. It both negotiated Turkey’s association agreement and introduced the Common Market to its countrymen. In the summer of 1959, seven weeks after the Greek application, Foreign Minister Fatin Rus ¨ ¸ tu¨ Zorlu raised the issue of Turkey’s application for membership in the Common Market at a Council of Ministers’ meeting where it was briefly discussed and approved.40 The decision to apply to the EEC was made by a handful of men in the upper echelons of the governing party; it was never brought before the Turkish Grand National Assembly or discussed with any members of Turkish civil society, including the country’s various business organizations. According to Tozun Bahc¸eli: The decision to seek Associate membership [sic] was not based on comprehensive studies of the implications for the Turkish economy and development strategy of the envisaged customs union. For Turkish policy-makers, the Association initially had greater 39 40

˙ ¨ ul ¨ u¨ Diplomat (Istanbul: Ithaki Yayınları, 1988), 54. Nihat Dinc¸, Gon Fatin Rus ¨ ¸ tu¨ Zorlu was born on 20 April 1910 in Istanbul to a family originating from the village of Zor, Artvin in northeastern Turkey. After finishing high school at Galatasaray Lisesi, Zorlu was educated in political science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, France, and in law at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Returning to Turkey, Zorlu began his career as a diplomat in 1932 in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Following Turkey’s joining of NATO on 18 February 1952, he was appointed Ambassador to NATO at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Paris. His final portfolio was as Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1957 ¨ until the 27 May 1960 military coup. Turkiye’de Kim Kimdir, 1959.

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importance as a step towards the realization of Turkey’s long-range aspiration to become an integral part of Europe.41

There was neither an official announcement on the day of the application nor any mention of it in the semi-official DP newspaper Zafer. By 5 August, both Le Monde and the Times had published news of the event, and F.R. Zorlu, perhaps holding out for the EEC response, finally authorized Zafer to print a small article announcing that, “Turkey, a few days ago, had applied for membership to the European Economic Community.”42 While Zorlu and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs forged ahead into negotiations with the EEC, relations with the Common Market did not escape the attention of those outside of government. In the months immediately following Turkey’s application there was a spate of articles in the wider Turkish press weighing in on Turkish-EEC relations. ˙ Cihat Iren, a Swiss-educated lawyer, economist, and founder of two important business organizations, claimed that liberalization of both trade and the Turkish economy were crucial to stimulating growth, and argued that membership in the EEC would undoubtedly aid these aims.43 In a September 1959 ˙ spoke in near-revolutionary terms about Turkey and the Common article, Iren Market, “Not just industry, but all of our economic, social, and cultural institutions must be reorganized. Not on the basis of our particular conditions, but rather on the conditions of a community to which we belong and to which our destiny is tied.”44 In February of the following year, Feridun Ergin, a columnist for Cumhuriyet, argued, “This [integration to the EEC] is a long term project spanning twenty to thirty years. What Turkey will gain by this process is a slow coalescing or coming together of Turkish economic policies and politics with the mentality of the contemporary civilized world.”45 A few months later, in September 1960, Ergin characterized Turkey’s integration with the EEC as part of much grander project, “For those that wish to see Turkey reach the level of Western Civilization and the standards of its prosperity, the Common 41 42 43

44 45

Tozun Bahc¸eli, “Turkey and the EEC: The Strains of Association,” in Revue d’Int´egration Europ´eenne/ Journal of European Integration, 2 January 1980, 222. Zafer, 6 August 1959. ˙ Cihat Iren was later to become trade minister under the military appointed government – and by a July 1961 order of the NUC, took over as head of the Turkish delegation in Turkey’s negotiations with the EEC. ˙ “Mus Cihat Iren, ¨ ¸ terek Pazar Kars¸ısında Sanayimiz,” Zafer, 26 September 1959. A jack of all trades, Feridun Ergin matriculated from Sciences Po in Paris and Istanbul Law, was a member of the Turkish Parliament, served on the European Council, and as the governor of the IMF. He was chief editorial writer for two papers and helped draft the 1961 Constitution as part of the NUC appointed Constitutional Congress. Feridun Ergin, Cumhuriyet, 6 February 1960.

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Market must be seen as an opportunity rarely produced by either fortune or history.”46 An article by the politician and economics professor Aydın Yalc¸ın47 that ¨ u¨ is worth quoting at length, as it illustrates appeared on 10 August 1960 in Onc many of the putative assumptions in this period: The prevailing wind that has begun in Western Europe aims, first and foremost, at a political and social union. It is a movement to form a European Union. Turkey is a new state that has taken Europeanization, its culture, lifestyle, social and political organization, as its own reason for existence. Particularly since the time of Ataturk, the view ¨ that Turkey’s salvation and development can only be achieved through Europeanization has been firmly adopted by our people. We are a young state that has pricked its ears with great interest at every trend, tendency, and current to become manifest in Western Europe. Since we have rejected being an Asian people, or a Middle Eastern state, and understood ourselves as in Europe, the EEC, in this regard, carries a different meaning. The considerations outlined above, which approach the Common Market from a social, political, but above all spiritual dimension, should come first in any decision. Only then should we consider the economic points.

Yalc¸ın made it clear that when it came to Turkish integration into the EEC, economic points were secondary to spiritual coalescence. Where economic considerations did appear, they were marshaled to support Turkey’s outstanding spiritual quest. After a brief and wholly nontechnical and qualitative description of the economic benefits to be gained from integration, Yalc¸ın concluded, “In short, as Turkey is able to economically as well as socially, culturally, and politically integrate with a speedily progressing and prosperous Europe, it will be that much closer to realizing its centuries-long dreams.”48 The domestic crisis that culminated in the military takeover on 27 May 1960 would, at least temporarily, interrupt these teleological prognostications. Three meetings and a few short months into the negotiation talks with the EEC, Turkey experienced the first of three military coups in a twenty-year span. By the time civilian rule was restored eighteen months later, Turkey had undergone a radical restructuring that rivaled, at least politically, the most progressive societies of the west. The National Unity Committee and the Common Market The military coup came at a critical moment domestically and internationally. It intruded upon Turkish-EEC relations in the short run by limiting who in 46 47

48

Feridun Ergin, Cumhuriyet, 24 September 1960. Aydın Yalc¸ın was an economics professor at Columbia University, having earned degrees from Istanbul University and the London School of Economics. He was also part of the inner circle of the RPP. ¨ u¨ Gazetesi, 10 August 1960. Aydın Yalc¸ın, “Ortak Pazara Girmeliyiz,” Onc

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Turkey spoke about the Common Market, and in the long run through its institutional changes that greatly expanded the number and breadth of Turkish interlocutors. Externally, the Cold War was reheating, with the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. In Africa and Asia, decolonization movements were at their height, and within Europe, the initial rivalry between the EEC and the EFTA over the future of European integration had, after Britain’s application to the former, been resolved in favor of the EEC. These developments had an immense impact on the military government’s relations with the EEC. The Democrat Party, led by Adnan Menderes, came to power in 1950 after a landslide victory in Turkey’s first democratic election. Projecting itself as a liberal and populist party, the DP, by the mid-1950s, had resorted to increasingly authoritarian and repressive tactics to silence widespread discontent. With no institutional system of checks and balances, the DP was able to pass a restrictive Press Law, prohibit public assembly, and end the autonomy of the state bureaucracy and universities. By 1956, Menderes had effectively proscribed freedom of speech outside of the Turkish Grand National Assembly. With the constitutional amendments of December 1957, he silenced all opposition within it. Dissatisfaction with the slow pace of reforms, deteriorating living conditions, and the increasing authoritarianism of the DP government prompted the junior officers of the Turkish Armed Forces to carry out a coup on 27 May 1960. This coup had three lasting effects on Turkey’s relations with the European Economic Community. First, the military administration, self-nominated the National Unity Committee (NUC), arrested the former leaders of the DP. The trials that began on 15 October 1960 convicted and sentenced to death fifteen members of the DP government. While twelve of the sentences were commuted, three, including those of former prime minister Menderes and former foreign minister Fatin Zorlu, were carried out on 16 and 17 September 1961. These hangings were covered extensively by the European press and became a source for outrage among the member-states, tarnishing Turkey’s image within the EEC. Second, the NUC asked Turkey’s academic and intellectual community to draft a new constitution. The decision to involve intellectuals completely altered the character of the 27 May movement, transforming it from a military coup into an institutional revolution.49 The 1961 constitution created a bicameral legislature whose lower house was elected by proportional representation rather than majority vote. As a result, smaller radical parties of both the left and right enjoyed a disproportionately greater voice in politics than their electoral strength would suggest. This was to have a profound effect on Turkish-EEC relations in the 1970s. The constitution also explicitly defined an extensive bill of rights that enshrined freedoms of thought, speech, and assembly (including 49

Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey (London: Routledge 1993), 127.

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the right of workers to form unions and strike). These new freedoms made possible the emergence of a political civil society, adding a third force alongside the politicians and bureaucratic-military elite that would weigh in on Turkey’s relations with the Common Market in the years to come. Third, the junior officers of the NUC felt that Turkey should be a “social state” whose citizens possessed social and economic rights. To ensure this, they charged the state with the planning of the nation’s economic, social, and cultural development. A product of this impulse, the State Planning Organization (SPO), quickly established itself as a rival authority to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in matters regarding the EEC. Although the election of 15 October 1961 signaled the transition to civilian rule, the results were inconclusive: neither the RPP nor the neo-Democrats (led by the Justice Party) showed a clear victory. Under military pressure, the Justice Party reluctantly agreed to form a coalition with the RPP, to be headed ˙ ˙ on by Prime Minister Ismet In ¨ u. ¨ Negotiations with the Common Market states by this coalition government concluded with the signing of the Ankara Agreement on 12 September 1963, establishing Turkey as an associate member of the EEC. Further west, the project of European integration was in its infancy and in crisis. With the creation of the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) in November 1959, the free-market states of Europe were split into two rival economic areas: the EEC “6” and the EFTA “7” (led by the United Kingdom and including Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland). In this climate, the Greek and Turkish applications were warmly welcomed as adding legitimacy to the fledging EEC. During August 1961, in the midst of the EECTurkish negotiations, the United Kingdom, followed by Denmark, Ireland, and Norway, applied for membership to the EEC. Charles de Gaulle’s veto of the British application in January 1963 put an end to these accession talks and effectively cemented the EEC’s victory over the EFTA. Globally, the Cuban missile crisis also figured significantly in Turkey’s relations with the EEC. Kennedy’s apparent willingness to sacrifice Turkey’s security by removing U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkish soil led some sectors of the Turkish bureaucratic-military elite to question Turkey’s overreliance on the United States. These men called for a more multidimensional approach to Turkish foreign policy and increasingly turned their thoughts to Europe. Added to this were the radical changes occurring to Turkey’s east and south. The African and Asian decolonization movements had crescendoed by 1962, and though having little immediate impact on Turkey, helped galvanize an anti-imperialist sentiment among radical groups that would affect TurkishEEC relations in the future. Amid the whirlwind of foreign and domestic issues facing the new military regime, Turkey’s relations with the EEC did not escape the attention of the National Unity Committee. On the day of the coup, one of the first radio broadcasts stated that, “Turkey would honor all of her external obligations,

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˙ contracts, and agreements.”50 Abdi Ipekc ¸ i recalled that the future of TurkishEEC relations was among the first topics discussed by the NUC.51 “Believing that they would return to the barracks in a short time, the military leadership decided to postpone talks with the EEC until a democratically elected government was formed.”52 This is significant because it attests to the belief among officers of the NUC, well before European criticism of the coup, that the military government was, according to European requirements, an illegitimate interlocutor for Turkey. Yet within a few weeks, the NUC had decided that it would remain in power to carry out necessary reforms. Reversing its previous stance, the military regime sought to continue the association talks. Based on private interviews with officers in the NUC, M. A. Birand, a prominent Turkish journalist with a long history of interest in Turkish integration, has argued that the junta may have seen the EEC negotiations as a platform to justify itself and explain the necessity of the coup to a European audience sensitive to democracy.53 The military government’s program, issued on 12 June, seems to confirm Birand’s claim. The program proclaimed that, “developing stronger relations with the western European states, whom, since the revolutions of Ataturk, we ¨ resemble more and more with each passing day, will be the guiding principle of our foreign policy.”54 A substantial paragraph in the program directly addressed Turkey’s relations with the EEC, stating that the previous efforts at integration were being continued with “a view to conclude the negotiations as quickly as possible.” The economic, financial, and trade reforms being carried out by the government will enable rapid industrialization as well as ease integration into the Common Market. The precise details of industrial protection and Turkey’s obligations to the EEC will be worked out in conjunction with the Common Market states.55

While the military government was clearly thinking about the EEC, its language betrayed ambivalence. On the one hand, the program reiterated the discourse of the Civilizational logic. On the other, it spoke of “industrial protections” 50 51

52 53

54 55

˘ 144. ¨ ve Avrupa Toplulugu, Tekeli and Ilkim, Turkiye ˙ Abdi Ipekc ¸ i was a Turkish journalist who became editor-in-chief of Milliyet in 1959. An ˙ intellectual and an activist for human rights, Ipekc ¸ i was murdered by right-wing paramilitaries in 1979. ˙ ¸ Bankası Kult ˙ ¨ u¨ (Istanbul: Turkiye Is Abdi Ipekc ¸ i, Ihtilalin I˙c¸yuz ¨ ¨ ur ¨ Yayınları, 1966). ¨ ¨ See C¸alıs¸, Turkiye – Avrupa Birligi I˙lis¸kileri, 67; Birand, Turkiye’nin Ortak Pazar Macerası, 104; and Le Monde, 4 June 1960. For internal debates among factions of the NUC as to the length and extent of military rule and reform, see Walter Weiker, The Turkish Revolution, ¨ 1960–1961 (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1963), 116–53; and Ergun ¨ Ozbudun, The Role of the Military in Recent Turkish Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 30–39. ˘ Hukumetler ¨ ve Programlar II: 1960–1980 (Ankara: CI, 1988), 5. Nuran Daglı, Ibid., 9.

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implying an external tariff regime, an idea that at least economically ran contrary to the invitational language of this logic. Strikingly, the members of the NUC seemed unaware of the incommensurability. Having been accustomed to speak of the EEC in civilizational terms, these officers could not perceive the incongruity of joining a Common Market, which required the liberalization of Turkey’s trade regime, and a state-directed industrialization that demanded stiff tariffs. It would take a few more years before significant members of the bureaucratic-military elite noticed discord in these two endeavors, sparking a struggle that would be carried out on a much grander scale in the decades ahead. In the summer of 1960, however, Turkey’s application to the EEC drew near-universal support from the government and bureaucracy. In fact, the NUC government felt that the association negotiations, led on the Turkish side by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, were progressing too slowly.56 Announcing a “New claim–New politics” posture toward the Common Market, the NUC dissolved the existing Turkish delegation, replacing it with an intermin57 ˙ ˙ istry committee to be led by Cihan Iren. Iren had been one of the first and perhaps most prolific spokesmen for the Common Market outside the DP government, writing numerous articles on the subject before the coup. Accord˙ ing to Iren, “Turkey could not afford to be left out of this [EEC], its final stage of Westernization. . . . Rather than thinking in terms of a few exportable goods, we [Turkey] should approach the negotiations from a much broader perspective.”58 Not surprisingly, in the first meeting following the coup, an “informational session” during which the Turkish delegation attempted to allay ˙ European apprehension of the military administration, Iren dropped most of Turkey’s previous demands in hopes of a speedy conclusion.59 Yet by then, the “6” had become concerned with Turkey’s application for an altogether different matter, one not so easily solved through economic concessions. With the “retreat from democracy” following the 27 May coup, Europe, which to most Turks had hitherto remained an abstract and represented other, began to assert judgments, normative standards, reproaches, and demands. In the summer of 1960, “contemporary civilization” found a concrete and dialogical “face” in the EEC. Europe Speaks Back Turkey’s domestic political situation impacted the EEC-Turkish dialogue from its outset. Even before the 27 May coup, the European Commission had raised concerns about the repressive political climate under the Democrat Party. A 56 57 58 59

¨ – Avrupa Birligi I˙lis¸kileri, 69. C¸alıs¸, Turkiye ˙ Iren was the ex-secretary general of the TOB (Turkish Chamber of Commerce) and soon-to-be trade minister under the military government. Zafer, 10 September 1959. ˙ ¨ ˘ 131. Tekeli and Ilkin, Turkiye ve Avrupa Toplulugu,

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report by the Belgian Social Work Commissioner, Gust de Muynck, dated 14 April 1960, linked Turkey’s economic backwardness to its political backwardness vis-`a-vis the EEC member states, and urged the Commission delegation to bring up the issues of free press, union rights, and the independence of civil organizations in its negotiations with Turkey.60 Though unheeded by both the Commission president and the Council of Ministers, this report is nonetheless striking in that the Commission, as early as 1960, was concerning itself with the political situation in third (non-EEC) countries. Overall, however, the EEC’s initial response to the coup was muted, espousing a wait-and-see attitude. According to Kamuran Gur ¨ un, ¨ the Turkish ambassador to London in 1960 and later head of the Turkish delegation in the negoti˙ on ation talks under the In ¨ u¨ government, “The EEC was not initially concerned with whether the Turkish regime was democratic or not.”61 Whatever truth lay in this claim, by October 1960, the EEC’s position regarding the military coup had shifted. After a lengthy discussion in the Council, the EEC finally voted to hold an “informational session” with Turkey, agreeing to attend a meeting to hear out Turkish proposals without any commitment to act on them. This decision was taken by many in Turkey to imply that the EEC did not view the military government of the NUC as a legitimate negotiating partner.62 The European Parliament (EP) also began to pronounce on the Turkish situation. Dominated by the European-wide socialist group, the EP had, from the outset, taken a strong interest in the conditions for membership to the community and the terms on which it would grant economic concessions to associated states. In 1962, partly as a response to the Turkish coup, partly as statement of opposition to the authoritarian regimes of the Iberian Peninsula, and partly as a warning to the colonels in Greece, the EP produced what has come to be known as the Birkelbach Report.63 The report, named after its author, the German Social Democrat Willi Birkelbach, made explicit the existence of a “democratic-human rights requirement” as a prerequisite for Community membership. In the report, the EP established that: The states whose governments do not have democratic legitimacy and whose people do not participate in the decisions of their government, either directly or through freely elected representatives, cannot be admitted into the circle of peoples that form the European Community.64 60 61 62 63 64

¨ Ortak EEC Social Work Commission Document S/6530 as quoted in M. A. Birand, Turkiye’nin Pazar Macerası, 66. ¨ Kamuran Gur (Istanbul: Milliyet Yayınlaı, 1994), 128. ¨ un, ¨ Akıntıya Kurek ¨ ˘ I˙lis¸kileri, 91; and Birand, Turkiye’nin ¨ See C¸alıs¸, Turkiye – Avrupa Birligi Ortak Pazar Macerası, 154. Guillermo O’Donnell, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 21. sur les Aspects “Rapport de la Commission Politique de l’Assamblee ´ ´ Parlamentaire Europeenne Politiques et Institutionnels pour ascencion de la Communaute Economique Europeenne.” European Parliament Document 122/61, January 1962.

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Although not formalized in Community law until the Treaty of European Union of 1992, the Birkelbach Report signaled the European Parliament’s intention to weigh in on the EEC’s external relations and the discourse it would employ in doing so.65 However, it was the 26–27 September 1961 EEC summit of the Council of Ministers at which the EEC member states voted to “postpone negotiations with Turkey until free and democratic elections were held,”66 which resonated the loudest throughout Turkey. Later on it was revealed that at this meeting the French had suggested “suspending indefinitely all future dialogue with Turkey on the basis that the fundamental standards of democracy were not being implemented in this country.”67 In Turkey, the French reaction was seen as a response to the political executions of Menderes, Zorlu, and finance minister Hasan Polatkan a week earlier, which De Gaulle had personally attempted to prevent.68 The Germans, on the other hand, had opposed the French wording of the Council declaration, arguing that, “Turkish democracy would be fostered by bringing Turkey into Europe rather than pushing her away.”69 Within Turkey, the EEC’s reaction caused a stir, becoming a major campaign issue in the first post-coup elections that were held on 15 October 1961. In a piece published in Cumhuriyet on 29 September 1961, Nadir Nadi pointed out that the question of resuming negotiations with Turkey was not discussed but tabled at the Council of Ministers meeting, even though it was on the official agenda.70 According to Nadi: The meaning of this is clear: Despite our new liberal constitution, despite a set date for elections, Turkey is still ruled by a military-backed regime. The Council of Ministers’ decision to table discussion of Turkish membership is a testament to the political and social dimensions and intentions of the EEC. To even be able to sit and talk with the “6” as to Turkey’s involvement in this project we need first to found a stable democratic 65

66 67 68 69

70

Though as Christopher Brewin notes, the EP had no effective rights of consultation regarding Article 238 of the Treaty of Rome (establishing the terms of Association with the EEC) until the Isoglucose case in 1979 where the European Court of Justice ruled that the Council of Ministers was not entitled to treat consultation of the EP as a trivial formality. Christopher Brewin, “A Changing Turkey: Europe’s Dilemma,” Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans. 5.2 (2003): 137–45. EEC Doc R/405f/61. Ibid. ¨ Ortak Pazar For an insider’s account based on firsthand interviews, see Birand, Turkiye’nin Macerası 1959–1985. EEC Doc R/405f/61. It is interesting to note that as early as 1961, both avenues of thought concerning democracy and Enlargement had already been advanced. The first, arguing for integration of candidate countries to shore up their fledging democratic traditions, was later used in the Mediterranean enlargement of Greece, Spain, and Portugal. The second, stricter French response, arguing for a no-tolerance policy on democratic infringements, would serve as the basis for political requirements in the Copenhagen Criteria of 1993. A graduate of Galatasaray High School and Faculty of Law in Lausanne, Nadir Nadi was an RPP member of the TGNA and served as representative of the TGNA in the Council of Europe.

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vision of Turkey’s place in the state order with a government that believes in Ataturk’s ¨ West. The 15 October election, in this regard, takes on a newfound importance.71

˙ ˙ on The leader of the RPP, Ismet In ¨ u, ¨ also picked up on the EEC’s response, presenting his democratic credentials as an asset to Turkey in its relations with the west: It was the RPP who after the Second World War oversaw the transition of the nation’s political ideals to what we call the new life-style of democracy, adopting all of the standards and necessities of this system that has brought us closer to the West.72

˙ on In ¨ u¨ also sought to discredit the neo-DP parties of the right running in the 15 October election in much the same way: By strenuously opposing the anti-democratic tendencies of an invalid DP government that was eroding the esteem and regard of our country in the West, the RPP played a crucial role in proving to Western Europeans that the Turkish people preserved the shared mentality of Western Civilization.73

˙ on These statements by In ¨ u¨ and Nadi are telling of the depth to which, even in its infancy, the EEC-Turkish dialogue had penetrated Turkish political culture and through it the ways in which the elite segment of Turkey understood and imagined itself. In accordance with the Civilizational logic, Turks held themselves accountable to the “civilized” nations; seeking admittance to their ranks, Turkey endeavored to gain endorsement from an external authority. This is evidence of the dramaturgical nature of the ethical relationship, whereby Turkey signified itself through the eyes – capable of bestowing judgment, approbation, and censure – of its audience. To be sure, the EEC was prepared for, and even initiated, this tutelary role. Yet without the willingness of a Turkish elite attuned and receptive to European judgment, the EEC’s pronouncements would have had little currency within Turkey’s political culture. 12 September 1963 Following the restoration of democratic rule in December 1961, negotiations with the EEC resumed in March 1962. The final text of the association agreement was worked out in five meetings between March 1962 and July 1963.74 Within the country as a whole, Turkey’s relations with the EEC – initiated in a cloud of secrecy, and negotiated during a period of political turmoil that gripped the attention of the nation – had flown relatively low on the radar of Turkish public consciousness. Outside of a few isolated incidents, in particular the proclamations of government programs and the 15 October elections, the 71 72 73 74

Nadir Nadi, Cumhuriyet, 29 September 1961. ˙ ˙ on Ismet In ¨ u, ¨ Dıs¸ Politika (Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1963), 33. Ibid., 11. European Community, No.VIII, August 1963, p. 3, Aquis, No. 481.

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EEC remained by and large a concern of the Turkish elite. Media coverage had been limited to press releases of major developments and the scattered editorials surrounding them. All this was to change in September 1963 as the country prepared to host the signing of the Ankara Agreement. Although the signing of the Agreement propelled Turkish-EEC relations to the forefront of Turkish political culture, where they have remained up to the present day, the manner in which the Agreement was presented was laid out in the years preceding it. This chapter has so far traced the ways in which various segments of the Turkish elite approached and spoke about the Common Market and illustrated how Turkey’s relations with the EEC were couched in and promulgated a historical-conceptual framework I have termed the Civilizational logic. The signing of the Ankara Agreement on 12 September 1963 was effectually the elaborate and ostentatious peroration of this logic, showcasing Turkey’s achievements in “reaching the level of contemporary civilization.” It stands as a crowning event both for the Civilizational logic and within the history of Turkish-EEC relations. The signing ceremony was held in a special room within the Turkish Grand National Assembly. It was attended by the EEC Commission president, Walter Hallstein, the EEC Council president, Joseph Luns, the six foreign ministers of ˙ ˙ on the EEC member-states, the Turkish Prime Minister Ismet In ¨ u, ¨ the Turkish Foreign Minister F.C. Erkin, and important personages in the Turkish government, opposition, and diplomatic corps. In addition to these figures, the room was packed with members of the domestic and foreign media.75 The Turkish press had been prepping the public for the event in the days beforehand, giving detailed reports of the planned festivities and the arrivals and itineraries of foreign dignitaries.76 Foreign Minister Erkin opened the evening with a moving talk that stressed how, “this agreement crowns the fundamental westernization revolutions of Ataturk ¨ by tightly binding Turkey to Western Europe and the highest standards of civilization that it represents.” After nominating the Ankara Agreement as the final consummation of Ataturk’s vision, Erkin went on to corral Turkey’s ¨ Ottoman past into his teleological history: the Magnificent, rising above the doctriIn the seventeenth century, Sultan Suleyman ¨ naire and religious strife of the continent, sought to create a sincere understanding between Turkey and Europe, one based on cooperation and friendship. In these gestures he expressed the true character and intentions of the Turkish people which you see before you here today.77

For their part, the Europeans had done some homework, and came prepared with speeches in keeping with the evening’s significance for Turkey. EEC 75 76 77

˙ ¨ ˘ 201. Tekeli and Ilkim, Turkiye ve Avrupa Toplulugu, ¨ Hurriyet 11, 12 September 1963; Cumhuriyet, 12 September 1963; Ulus, 11–12 September 1963. Turkiye Ticaret Odası, Discours, 11. ¨

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Council President and Dutch Foreign Minister Dr. Luns stated that, “By deciding to become a member of the European Economic Community, Turkey has taken a giant step on the path paved by their [sic] father and beloved 78 Ataturk.” The EEC Commission President, Walter Hallstein, began his talk ¨ with the following words: We today are witnesses to an event of great political importance. Turkey is a part of Europe. This is the most profound meaning of today’s event. Before all else it is a testament to the accomplishments of a man whose legacy lives in every stride of this nation. Turkey is a part of Europe . . . one day the final step is to be taken: Turkey is to be a full member of the Community. This wish, and the fact that it is shared by us and our Turkish friends alike, is the strongest expression of our community of interest.79

Turkish newspapers the following day seemed at pains to outshine each other. Hurriyet headlined with, “Historical Agreement Signed Yesterday. We’ve Joined the Common Market!” and went on to exclaim how, “This event is the most productive and concrete step in Turkey’s 150-year effort to westernize and be considered an equal member of Western Civilization.”80 Milliyet had these words covering half the front page, “Turkey’s Europeanness Has Been Validated.”81 Aks¸am Gazetesi, “Turkey Is Inescapably Part of Europe!”82 (emphasis in original) The longer articles and commentaries in the news media expounded upon ¨ the headlines. Vecihi Unal of Aks¸am Gazetesi wrote, “Integration into the European Economic Community is the marker of our Europeanness, or more broadly, of our resoluteness to Westernize and the positive reception of this ¨ commentary resolution by Europe as a whole.”83 What is striking in Unal’s is his certification of “Europeanness” by two markers: first, Turkey’s selfdetermination (in all senses of the term) to Europeanize; second, European ¨ recognition of this determination. For Unal, European validation was seen as a constituent component in the realization of the Turkish project, attesting to Europe’s central role in passing judgment on the success or failure of this project. He continued his article with the implications of the Ankara Agreement: Becoming a member of the Common Market means sharing a common economic, political, and cultural philosophy with the free and independent nations of Europe – it means the realization of Ataturk’s, and therefore our ideal. By integrating into the ¨ Common Market, no longer will Europe be alien to us, nor will we be Europhiles admiring Europe from afar, but we will now actually partake and be part of that lifestyle. And lastly, becoming a member of the Common Market means an end to the 78 79 80 81 82 83

Ibid., 13. Ibid., 19. ¨ Hurriyet, 13 September 1963. Milliyet, 13 September 1963. Aks¸am, 13 September 1963. Ibid.

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discussion, still being held today both inside and outside Turkey, as to whether we are a European or Asian people.84

¨ Unal’s framing of the Ankara Agreement as the realization of Ataturk’s ideal ¨ was a clear indication of how Turkish-EEC relations had become linked to the Turkish project of westernization. The Ankara Agreement, within this context, marked an end to the liminal status of the Turk, caught since the nineteenth century between inclusion into the European system of states and exclusion from the European Community. In an article in Aks¸am on 15 September entitled “Turkey Now an Inseparable ˘ Part of Europe,” Turhan Feyzioglu, a high-ranking member of the RPP,85 argued that: More important than the short-term benefits of joining the EEC is the significance of this agreement as representing the latest victory in Turkey’s long standing efforts to become a European State. Turkey’s ambition to become an associate member of the EEC was based not on simple short-term calculations of foreign trade, but rather on the desire to join an integration movement with whose members we share common political, cultural, economic, and spiritual characteristics.86 (author’s original emphasis)

The two major institutions in Turkish civil society also gave their endorsement. ˙ ¸ union leader Seyfi Demirsoy declared that, “In the name of all Turkish Turk¨ Is workers, we wish to congratulate those who have worked to bring about today’s agreement.”87 The Turkish Union of Chambers (TOB) President Behc¸et ˘ glu ˘ stated, “I am convinced that the Common Market, outside of its Osmanago economic benefits, will undoubtedly raise the cultural level of our society and introduce many positive social developments to Turkey.”88 Coverage of the EEC continued for days afterward and headlined in all major newspapers well into late September. The general tone sobered somewhat from the initial euphoria of 12 September, but not by much. As the three power centers of Turkish politics – the DP (now represented by its successor parties), the RPP, and the armed forces – had all had a hand in negotiating the Ankara Agreement, it appeared to be in everybody’s interest to look favorably on the EEC. As Cihad Baban, a columnist for the semiofficial RPP newspaper Ulus, wrote, “Membership in the Community [EEC] is not a victory for the RPP but rather one for and by all the political parties. The Ankara Agreement represents Turkey’s national interests and will surely benefit the entire Turkish population.”89 84 85

86 87 88 89

Ibid. ˘ completed a law degree at Istanbul University and studied in Paris and Turhan Feyzioglu London. He became Dean of the Social Sciences Faculty in Istanbul until forced to resign by Menderes in 1957. Aks¸am, 15 September 1963. Aks¸am, 13 September 1963. Cumhuriyet, 12 September 1963. Ulus, 28 September 1963.

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The signing of the Ankara Agreement had a number of effects on Turkish understandings of the EEC, Europe, and Turkey’s place within it. First, for most Turks, the agreement equated the idea of Europe with the EEC. In 1963, this was far from a self-evident or even logical connection. Alongside its membership in NATO (1952), Turkey was a member of two pan-European institutions that confirmed Turkey’s European credentials, the OECD (1948) and the Council of Europe (1949), all inclusive of more “European” states than the EEC. Yet, for reasons that will be explained later, these events had prompted nothing close to the reaction given the EEC by the Turkish elite and media. When Turks opened their newspapers on 13 September 1963, they were told that they had, seemingly overnight, become Europeans. The language used to talk about an economic organization of six states had been far more monumental and historically laden than the language surrounding Turkish membership in larger and, geostrategically speaking, more significant organizations. The reason for this, as this chapter has shown, is that Turkish integration into the EEC was signified in civilizational terms, as the consummation of Ataturk’s ¨ project to “raise Turkey to the level of contemporary civilization.” Why were Turkish-EEC relations signaled out for this coronary role? Why did the Civilizational logic inform Turkish understandings of the EEC but not of NATO or the Council of Europe? The answers to these questions lie within the temporal structure of Turkey’s membership to the organizations in question. Given the relative backwardness of the Turkish economy, Turkey was in no position to become a full member of the EEC in 1963. The Ankara Agreement reflected this economic reality and envisioned a time, some twenty-two years later, at which Turkey would presumably apply for accession. The deferral of Turkey’s integration into the EEC guaranteed a protracted and, as it still stands today, incomplete process. The economic necessity of a protracted integration set the EEC apart from Turkey’s other postwar efforts to join the west. Insofar as Turkey’s integration into the EEC, not to mention the project of European integration itself, was perceived as a “process,” rather than an “event,” it harbored a temporal affinity with the Civilizational logic. This processional quality was embedded into the Treaty of Rome, itself a road map for the realization of a future Common Market. In fact, the first, second, and fifth paragraphs of the Ankara Agreement, adapted almost word for word from the Treaty of Rome, remark in different ways on the processional nature of European unification.90 The Civilizational logic was predicated upon the imperative to “raise Turkey to the level of contemporary civilization.” It was not a transitional or temporary logic to be discarded upon successful modernization, but rather defined an open-ended project. In an oft-quoted passage, Ataturk ¨ stated that, “The law of 90

˘ Tevfik Sarac¸oglu, TC-AET Arasında Bir Ortakık Yaratan Antlas¸ma – Kitap II (Istanbul: Akbank Kult ¨ ur ¨ Yayınları, 1981), 29.

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revolution is above and trumps all extant law. The forward-looking revolution we have begun will not stop or pause for even one moment. This must and always will be the case for the generations of Turks that follow us.”91 The Civilizational logic implied eternal procession: the Turkish Republic and Turkishness were defined not as being such a state or people, possessing inherent and immutable characteristics, but as perpetually becoming. The preceding analysis offers a possible structural explanation to the puzzling question of why the EEC, among all the postwar western organizations Turkey solicited, became the focal point of the Civilizational logic. Turkey’s memberships in NATO, OECD, and the Council of Europe were all marked by relatively short, if not instantaneous, periods of integration. As bounded events, however momentous, they were at odds with a logic predicated on process. When the Civilizational logic was used to describe them, Turkish membership in NATO, OECD, and the Council of Europe were noted as individual milestones within a larger project.92 On the other hand, the Ankara Agreement, the very negotiation of which had stretched over four turbulent years, was essentially the formal blueprint for an elongated process of integration. Thus, it was not by coincidence that, on or shortly after 12 September 1963, several members of the Turkish elite pointed out that Turkey still had much work ahead of it. Foreign Minister Feridun Cemal Erkin, who had opened the signing ceremony by lauding the Ankara Agreement as the culmination of Ataturk’s vision, concluded his speech in a ¨ much more sober and cautionary tone: We are well aware that our signature will not actualize the proposed aims of this agreement, that only through great sacrifice and hard work will we achieve any of these. . . . Our road is long, much longer than the path set by the Treaty of Rome for the original member states of the Community.93

˘ remarked, “The real victory lies in the creation Likewise, Turhan Feyzioglu of a Turkey that has reached the level of Europe’s advanced countries. This victory will require much greater effort, sweat, and sacrifice, on behalf of the Turkish people.”94 An editorial in Aks¸am Gazetesi the following day claimed: This agreement once more and most powerfully underscores the fact that Europe’s borders pass through our southern and eastern boundaries. Now, we the Turkish people, must shoulder and carry the responsibility of this truth – demonstrating to the Europeans who knelt in honor before our Father that we, all thirty million, are up to the task he lay before us.95 91 92 93 94 95

¨ Soylevleri, ¨ Kemal Ataturk, Ataturk 117. ¨ ˙ on See, for example, In ¨ u, ¨ Dıs¸ Politika, 28. Ticaret Odası, Discours, 7. Turkiye ¨ ˙ ¨ ˘ 203. Tekeli and Ilkim, Turkiye ve Avrupa Toplulugu, Aks¸am, 15 September 1963.

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These and other statements, seemingly out of place amid a festive celebration, were products of, if not stipulated by, the logic structuring Turkish-EEC relations from 1959 to 1963. They attest not so much to the economic factors necessitating a protracted integration (these could and would have been easily omitted that evening), but rather to the requirements of an open-ended processional logic through which Turkish-EEC relations had been signified. The coupling of the EEC with the Civilizational logic within the Turkish social-imaginary had two important consequences. First, it catapulted the significance of Turkey’s integration with the EEC in the minds of Turks who came to see this integration as the benchmark of the nation’s success. Without this initial coupling, the EEC could not have had the effect on Turkish self-understanding it has enjoyed since. In such an atmosphere, criticism of the Ankara Agreement or the merits of Turkey’s relations with the EEC became tantamount to treason. Second, and converse, the Ankara Agreement also anchored the Civilizational logic within a concrete historical relation. This latter point, as we shall see in the following chapter, turned the EEC into an opening through which a later generation would challenge the Civilizational logic itself.

kafka’s parable: before the law For all its accomplishments, the Ankara Agreement left an equal number of issues unresolved. Despite the spate of speeches and articles to the contrary, the Agreement did not bring Turkey much closer to ending its liminal status on the margins of Europe. Part of the problem was the uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding the notion of association. The terms “association,” “associate member,” and “associate membership” were vague concepts with little practical meaning when Greece and Turkey had first petitioned the EEC in 1959. The Treaty of Rome had stipulated two avenues by which the EEC could enter into relations with a third country. The first was Article 237 of the treaty concerning accession into the Community, which read as follows: Any European State may apply to become a member of the Community. . . . The conditions for admission and the adjustments to this treaty necessitated thereby shall be the subject of an agreement between the Member States and the applicant State.96

The second was an association agreement as laid out in Article 238 of the treaty: The Community may conclude with one or more States or international organizations agreements establishing an association involving reciprocal rights and obligations, common action and special procedures.97 96 97

http://www.eurotreaties.com/rometreaty.pdf, p. 78 (last accessed 17 May 2013). Ibid.

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As first envisioned, Article 238 was written to govern trade agreements with the EEC’s overseas colonies in Africa and the Far East. The Treaty of Rome had not foreseen the possibility of relations with European countries that wished to join the Community yet were economically unready to do so. Thus the Greek and Turkish applications, while falling under an “association agreement” as laid out by Article 238, were negotiated to loosely refer to a middle ground in EEC relations with third countries, somewhere in between accession and a trade agreement. At the time, these agreements were seen as transitional steps, preparing the countries for future full membership.98 Indeed, Article 28 of the Ankara Agreement stated: The Contracting Parties shall examine the possibility of accession of Turkey to the Community as soon as the operation of this Agreement has advanced far enough to justify envisaging full acceptance by Turkey of the obligations arising out of the Treaty establishing the Community.99

While including explicit mention of accession, this clause had been carefully worded to imply consideration at an unspecified future date, and then only as a “possibility.” A few years later the European Commission clarified this language in a publication entitled Turkey-EEC Relations 1963–1967, published in both English and Turkish, defining association as, “a permanent, general, and institutionalized bond for cooperation representing a participation by the third country in the objectives of the Communities.”100 According to the publication: This association formula is totally different from other association agreements the Community has entered into. In the case of Turkey, as for Greece, the association formula of Article 238 was used as a form of pre-accession. Article 28 of Turkey’s Association Agreement provides that the Contracting Parties will examine the possibility of Turkey’s accession to the Community. Or to put it differently, association is considered as a preliminary to an eventual accession.101

While the Commission’s report served, at that moment, to clear up confusion surrounding the long-term implications of association, it also drew attention away from a more fundamental, if operational, feature of Turkey’s relations with the EEC. As an associate member, Turkey was not permitted to take part in, or even observe, any institution “internal” to the EEC. Moreover, the Association Council, the main body through which Turkish-EEC relations 98

99 100 101

As a whole, the Ankara Agreement was modeled closely on the Greek association agreement. ˘ Many articles, in fact, were pulled word for word from the Greek treaty. As Tevik Sarac¸oglu wrote, “The EEC wanted these similarities itself, first and foremost for political reasons.” This was especially true of the preface, in which the words, Greek and Greece were simply replaced ˘ with Turk and Turkey. Sarac¸oglu, TC-AET Antlas¸ma, 29. Official Journal of the European Communities (OJ) No. C113/2.24.12/1973. European Commission, Turkey-EEC Relations 1963–1967 (Brussels: EC, 1968). Ibid.

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occurred, was structured as a forum between two contracting parties, Turkey and the EEC. This implied that Turkey would be treated separately as an external sovereign third party on the international law model, and not as an associate member in a “club” on the constitutional model. As Christopher Brewin points out, “These rules [governing association] made it crystal clear that, as with ex-colonies, the Community as a unit would establish its own common position before meeting with Turkey.”102 The very structure of association implicitly fostered an “us” versus “them” relationship. Given Turkey’s full participation within NATO, the OECD, and the Council of Europe, the Ankara Agreement represented, at least in this regard, a silent yet great step backward for Ataturk’s project. In marked contrast to the grandiloquent testi¨ monies to joining the European “club,” the framework of association further assured Turkey’s liminal status as a member “of” not “in” Europe. The Ankara Agreement was also to present long-term difficulties regarding political integration with the EEC. Although negotiated concurrently, the Greek and Turkish applications had been conducted in a spirit of rivalry, not cooperation. Neither Greek nor Turkish officials saw in the EEC an opportunity to emulate the Franco-German discourse of equality and reconciliation.103 There was no better evidence for this claim than the fact that a Greek delegation was not present at the signing ceremony in Ankara, and no Turk attended the ceremonies celebrating the Treaty of Athens. Though by no means a cause of future Greco-Turkish animosity, the association agreements were a lost opportunity to resolve disputes under the umbrella of the EEC. The EEC’s reaction to the 1974 Cyprus crisis, an event that had large implications for TurkishEEC relations, would potentially have been very different if the association negotiations had been conducted in a spirit of cooperation. Perhaps most importantly, the Ankara Agreement failed to acknowledge the apparent contradictions between the economic policies required for Turkey’s integration into the Common Market and the five-year development plans of the newly founded Turkish State Planning Organization (SPO). The EEC was driven, at least economically, on the principle of liberalization. The creation of a common market required the elimination of barriers to the free movement of goods, capital, and people within its borders. This meant that countries or regions would gradually concentrate on industries in which they held a comparative advantage. The SPO, on the other hand, was founded on the development of the national economy through heavy state investment and intervention. A creation of the military administration, the SPO was entrusted to bring about a just and equitable “social state” as envisioned by the NUC. Its guiding principle was a variant of import-substitution – that is, the local production of goods that Turkey had previously purchased abroad. This implied, at least in theory, 102 103

Christopher Brewin, “Association Status and the Path to Membership,” in Turkey and the European Union: 2004 and Beyond (West Lafayette, IN: Duke University Press, 2004), 9. Ibid., 8.

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a high tariff rate for industrial goods in order to protect infant industries being set up nationally. Within a few years, these paradoxical paths of economic liberalization and state-directed industrialization, unresolved by the Ankara Agreement, would coalesce, with much higher stakes, around Turkey’s relations with the EEC.104 From the discontent bred of this incongruity would come a different way of understanding Turkish-EEC relations, one whose structuring principle was based not on invitation but on antagonism, a new Nationalist logic to challenge the Civilizational one that informed Turkish attitudes for the first four years of our story.

104

For a brief summary of these countervailing views, see Atila Eralp, “Turkey and the European Community in the Changing Post-war International System,” in C. Balkır and A. M. Williams (eds.) Turkey and Europe, 29.

2 ˙ of the Iceberg (1963–1968) The TIP

Europe has the privilege of being the good example, for it incarnates in its purity the Telos of all historicity: universality, omnitemporality, infinite traditionality, and so forth. . . . The empirical types of non-European societies, then, are only more or less historical: at the lower limit, they tend toward nonhistoricity. – Jacques Derrida1 We [Turks] have never lived through or established a meaningful or true civilized age. For this reason we do not have a national history. – Kemal Ataturk ¨ 2 Before Marxism we could not criticize the West unless we got permission from the West. Marxism gave us this permission. It smashed the chains that tied our consciousness and broke the spell of Europe. – Cemil Meric¸3

On 23 September, eleven days after the signing of the Ankara Agreement, the 4 ˘ Workers Party of Turkey (WPT) representative to the Senate, Niyazi Agırnaslı, delivered a speech to a uniformly hostile Turkish Grand National Assembly. Quieting the violent boos, shouts, and fist banging of the other party 1 2 3

4

Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1992), 14. ¨ Soylevleri, ¨ Kemal Ataturk, Ataturk 358. ¨ Serdar Poyraz, “Thinking about Turkish Modernization: Cemil Meric¸ on Turkish Language, Culture, and Intellectuals,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26/3 (2006): 439. ˘ an ex-CKMP senator who defected to the WPT in February Until October 1965, Niyazi Agırnaslı, 1963, was the sole representative of the Turkish Workers Party in the Turkish Grand National Assembly.

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representatives, the TGNA president introduced Niyazi Bey as follows: “Despite your unanimous approval and the government’s signature [claps, ˘ shouts of “Bravo”], Niyazi Agırnaslı from Ankara has requested to speak on Turkey’s relations with the Common Market. He has, by law, a right to do so.”5 ˘ Agırnaslı began his speech by stressing the economic costs to associate membership in a cool, nonideological tone. He quoted certain figures and conclusions that he assured the TGNA “were taken from renowned and self-labeled liberal capitalists” and added to these estimates the future “potential loss” of industries abandoned or not invested in because of an expected customs ˘ then turned to the idea of political integration, union with the EEC.6 Agırnaslı which he felt was a very different matter and one that must “involve the entire nation.” He stressed that, “just as we [Turkey] will not cease to be European if we do not enter the Common Market, we will not become European by joining ˘ it.” To this end, Agırnaslı pointed out how Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, and the United Kingdom were all fully European nations that lay outside the EEC. Arguing that economic and political integration had little in common with one another, the WPT senator displayed remarkable historical acumen by supporting this claim with reference to several past attempts at political unification from the French to the Italian. He concluded by stating that, “In fact, the only historical precedent [of political and economic integration working in tandem] was the 1830 Customs Union of Germanic states. However, as we all know well, there were many other factors involved in the German case, so much so that the Customs Union could hardly be said to have played a significant role.”7 On 14 September 1963, two days after the signing of the Ankara Agreement, the WPT had distributed a notice that read as follows: NO TO THE COMMON MARKET! We are opposed with all our might and being to the Common Market agreement and the air of celebration [bayram] forced upon its signing . . . The Common Market is incommensurable with our essential national interests and the spirit of national struggle [kuvayi milliye ruhu] these are based on. Our politics must be national through and through. Meaning that no thought, no concern, must affect our decisions save those of the interests of our poor nation and its working people. Whereas, as the writ of this agreement is gradually born out, the livelihood of two million plus peasant families will slowly vanish, those of our craftsmen, even faster. Our infant industry, especially our heavy industry, will disappear in the face of untethered European competition. All this will result in a vast migration of unemployed workers into our towns, whose swelling numbers will fight and claw at the chance to sell, for next to nothing, their labor to a France, a Germany, or a Belgium . . . for all these reason and more, WE SAY NO!8 5 6 7 8

Turkiye Buy ¨ ¨ uk ¨ Millet Meclisi Tutanak Dergisi, D:2 T: 14 C:1 23/September/1963 pp. 421–53. Ibid. Ibid. ˙ Sadun Aren, WPT Olaylari, 1961–1971 (Istanbul: Cem Yayınları, 1993), 64–66.

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These two statements, on the same subject, by the same party, taking identical stances, and delivered nine days apart, exhibit a striking contrast in content and ˘ style. Agırnaslı’s speech before the TGNA, which adopted the rhetoric, if not the spirit, of the Civilizational logic, sought to disassociate the conceptual identification of Europe with the EEC. To do so it distinguished between economic integration and the political project of Europe, arguing that outside of the qualified German exception some 135 years ago, the two had never been related. The propaganda notice, on the other hand, involved an altogether different way of speaking about the EEC and Turkey’s relations with it. It stated how the Common Market was incommensurable with the national interests of Turkey; national interests that were founded on the spirit of Turkey’s struggle for independence. It nominated the Turkish nation as a poor and laboring people who owed the little they had to a hard-fought political and financial sovereignty. The notice foretold of dire consequences to come with Turkey’s economic association with Europe and called for a national politics, from which, presumably, the ˘ country’s leaders had strayed. In contrast to Agırnaslı’s speech, the propaganda notice was marked by antagonism toward western economic penetration, highlighting essential sites of confrontation and contradiction between Turkish and European interests. The WPT was the first political party to voice opposition to Turkish integration with the EEC. It was also the first party to challenge the hegemony of the Civilizational logic in structuring the Turkish social-imaginary. These two precedents, I will show, were intricately linked. These precedents also inaugurated a period of ideological politics within Turkey, lasting approximately seventeen years until the military coup in 1980, a period that would call Turkey’s relationship with the EEC into serious question and, in so doing, challenge the official narrative used to speak about and imagine Turkey since 1945. This chapter is devoted to the birth of anti-EEC sentiment within Turkey. Its task is to understand the emergence, in the early 1960s, of a radically different language of nationalism used to speak about the EEC. Leaving aside, for the moment, the significance of expressing opposition to the Common ˘ Market through the Civilizational logic (Agırnaslı’s speech), it focuses on the origins of the nationalist discourse found in the propaganda notice. To understand this new language, the chapter first examines the national ideology of the Civilizational logic, tracing the evolution of the official ideology of Turkish nationalism since the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923. Second, it considers in detail the nationalism of the Workers Party of Turkey, both situating it historically as a response to the Civilizational logic and outlining its ideology and foreign policy within the context of Turkish politics in the 1960s.

modernist nationalism and the civilizational logic The previous chapter, in outlining the worldview with which the postwar Turkish elite understood the EEC, scarcely mentioned the category of the

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nation. More precisely, the Turkish nation was implicitly characterized as an ongoing and invitational project of bringing the European other into the self. The first part of this chapter examines the role and position of the national within the Civilizational logic in greater detail. It asks how the men that sought to integrate Turkey into the European Common Market understood the Turkish nation, and traces the historical development of this official national understanding. It is a partial narrative, given that the Civilizational logic selectively appropriated strains of interwar national thinking. It is therefore not a history of the development of interwar Turkish nationalism, a history that would describe the deep ambivalences of Turkish nationalism vis-`a-vis the project of Europeanization, but one that examines how the Civilizational logic came to reconcile the two. Reconciliation of Turkey’s national understanding with European civilization forms the teleological leitmotif of official Turkish nationalism. Though wildly different and at times contradictory to one another, the various adventures in nationalist thinking detailed in the following sections all bear the mark of this conciliatory effort – not to mention the difficulties involved in carrying it out. Reconciling the Turkish national-imaginary with the invitational project of Europeanization was no easy task. The Turkish nation was, after all, the product of a war of independence against the European powers. Wariness of European imperial intentions had a long historical register, outstripped only by a religious enmity that stretched back further still. This guardedness toward European civilization was an ever-present feature of late-Ottoman debates on nationalism and continued to inform nationalist thought, particularly the concept of national sovereignty, well into the Republican period. Overcoming these impulses in Turkish nationalist thought required a violent radicalism and a certain amount of creativity – two qualities that, as we shall see, the Kemalist regime possessed in spades. Nowhere were these qualities more apparent than in the Kemalist regime’s relationship to the past. How the regime (dis)engaged with history, the ways this regime sought to understand, create, or negate its past, was central to its efforts to reconcile national understanding with the invitational project of Europeanization. The successive attempts at reconciliation taken up by the Kemalist regime each involved a different relationship to the past. The following three sections trace the history of these attempts from the founding of the Turkish Republic to the immediate postwar period. Civilization and the Modular Nation-State The vagaries of interwar Turkish nationalism have provided fertile ground for scholars of nationalism and national identity. Notoriously resistant to the classical binary typologies (eastern/western and ethnic/civic) of nationalism, and incongruous, by virtue of its noncolonial past, to postcolonial theories, the interwar period has spurred new approaches that have challenged the

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field well beyond the borders of Turkey. Not surprisingly, the incommensurability of the empirical has led to a lively and theoretically rich debate on the national understanding of the Kemalist elite (not to mention the nationalisms of those Anatolians who found themselves at odds with this elite). It is beyond the scope of this book to engage with this debate here. One point of agreement among the various positions, however, an agreement that will serve as our point of departure, has been over the modernity of interwar Turkish nationalism. This agreement is surprising because within the historiography of other nonwestern cases, nation and modernity have usually been put into tension with one another. National identity is often seen to curb and contain the unwanted effects of modernity, even, as Harry Harootunian describes, to “overcome modernity.”9 By contrast, many scholars of modern Turkey have remarked on the radicalism of Turkish nationalism in the early years of the Republic. Likening the Turkish nationalists to the French Jacobins in their rejection of the Ottoman ancien regime, they stress that at least rhetorically, the Kemalists positioned their nation as an absolute break with the past.10 As Kevin Robbins has argued, “What was being attempted by the Kemalist elite was no less than the annihilation of the past. The new nation and state were born out of this fundamental disavowal. . . . [The Turkish nation] emerged as a state without history.”11 Res¸at Kasaba has commented on the Turkish nationalists’ fascination with speed as another modern marker of the Turkish nation. The new temporality of the Turkish nation was shot through with urgency and momentum and contrasted with the sluggishness and enervation of its Ottoman past. As Mustafa Kemal himself stated, “Our standards should be based not on the lethargic mentality of the past centuries but on the concepts of speed and movement that define our own century.”12 Ayhan Akman and others have attributed the “modernist nationalism” of the Turkish elite to the absence of direct colonial rule.13 Whereas the history of colonialism created an inherent tension between authenticity and imitation, modernization and tradition – tensions characteristic of postcolonial 9

10

11 12 13

See Meltam Ahıska, Occidentalism in Turkey: Questions of Modernity and National Understanding in Turkish Radio Broadcasting (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 42; and Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Res¸at Kasaba, “Kemalist Certainties and Modern Ambiguities,” in Rethinking Modernity and ˘ and Res¸at Kasaba (Washington DC: University National Identity in Turkey, eds. Sibel Bozdogan of Washington Press, 1997), 24; Ayhan Akam, “Modernist Nationalism: Statism and National Identity in Turkey,” Nationalities Papers, 32/1 (2004): 23–51. Kevin Robbins, “Interrupting Identities: Europe/Turkey,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 61–86. Kasaba, “Kemalist Certainties,” 6. ˙ See Akman, “Modernist Nationalism,” 27; and Ilber Ortaylı, “Batılılas¸ma Sorunu,” in Tanzi˙ ˙ ¨ mat’tan Cumhuriyete Turkiye Ansiklopedisi I (Istanbul: Iletisim, 1985), 138.

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nationalisms – the Turkish nation was free to embark on “an ambitious attempt at wholesale civilizational conversion.”14 Wholesale conversion required not only the erasure of the past, but the erasure of the social and cultural fabric linked with this past. The Turkish nation was to be cleared of these traditional vestiges so as to take on the characteristics of contemporary European civilization.15 This goal not only paved the future path and character of the nation, but, in a more fundamental sense, was constitutive of the nation. The Minister of Justice Mahmut Esat Bozkurt, who oversaw the adoption of the Swiss Code to replace Islamic law in 1926, declared in his inaugural speech, “The Turkish Revolution has decided to acquire Western civilization without conditions or limits. In doing so, we do not proceed according to our mood or our desire, but according to the ideal of our nation.”16 In the preface to the new Law Code (adopted with minor alterations from the Swiss Civil Code) he elaborated further, “The Turkish nation must at all costs conform to the requirements of modern civilization. For a nation that has decided to live, this is essential.”17 Within this context, the Turkish nation-state stood as the necessary modular unit for classification within contemporary human society. Ottoman capitulations to the non-Muslim millets and their external European guardians, as well as the national independence movements within Ottoman territory, had demonstrated the bankruptcy of multiethnic empire. For the Kemalists of the 1920s, the nation-state became an instrumental means to, and was justified by, an end: namely, to raise the people within its boundaries to the level of contemporary civilization. Turkey, at this stage, was neither promoted as the flagship of humanity nor prophesized as its preordained future. Having neither Allah nor Hegel on its side, the Turkish nation was humbly charged with developing

14

15

16

17

˘ argument Akman, “Modernist Nationalism,” 43. This view runs counter to Ays¸e Kadıoglu’s ˘ that presents a more classical adoption of the postcolonial tension. See Ays¸e Kadıoglu, “The Paradox of Turkish Nationalism and the Construction of Official Identity,” Middle Eastern Studies, 32/2 (1996): 177–193. To be sure, currents of radical modernism were not the sole voice within the Turkish Republican elite, but they did become the dominant one. For a history and typification of Turkish conservatism during the interwar period, see Nazim Irem, “Kemalist Modernizm ve Turk ¨ Gelenekc¸i-Muhafazakarlıgının Kokenleri,” Toplum ve Bilim, 74 (1997): 52–99. For an inter¨ esting analysis of Peyami Safa, one of the fathers of Turkish conservatism, see Suleyman Seyfi ¨ ¨ g˘ un, ˘ O Kult ve Peyami Safa’nın Yanılgısı,” Toplum ve ¨ “Turk ¨ Muhafazakarlıgının ¨ ur ¨ Kokleri ¨ Bilim, 74 (1997): 102–53. Mahmut Esat Bozkurt, one of the major theorists of Kemalism, would later become a leading ideologue of the racially charged Turkish ethno-nationalism that was promulgated in the 1930s, demonstrating the ease with which many members of the Kemalist elite shifted from one national emphasis to another. Hans-Lukas Kiser, “An Ethno-Nationalist Revolutionary and Theorist of Kemalism,” in Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-National Identities, ed. Hans-Lukas Kiser (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 25. Ibid., 24.

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itself to the level of contemporary civilization. To be Turkish meant, in effect, to be open to this modernizing mission. As Celal Nuri Bey, a deputy to the National Assembly, made clear: Our program is to unconditionally join European civilization. Our revolution is not an original revolution. What we do is to adopt a certain civilization and to convert to it. Our duty consists of conversion [ikbas]. With what methods has progressive Europe attained this level of development? Our job is to adopt these proven methods in their entirety.18

himself was aware of, and did not shy away from expressing, the Ataturk ¨ extreme radicality of founding a nation on such a premise. On the eve of the declaration of the Turkish Republic in 1923, he boldly claimed, “We [Turks] have never lived through or established a meaningful or true civilized age. For this reason we do not have a national history.”19 In the 1920s, the newly emergent nation was hallowed, to be sure, but it was also hollow. For the Kemalist elite, the Turkish nation, people, state, and culture were formal categories, empty shells divested of all particular content so as to enable them to acquire the newly instituted characteristics of the modern. Nowhere was this impulse stronger than in the newly minted capital of Turkey, Ankara. Meltem Ahıska has argued that military strategy alone was not the sole determinant of the decision to make Ankara the capital of the National Struggle. “Ankara represented the ‘ground zero’ of the nation . . . an empty space where national ideals and practices could be ascribed on the blank page – as opposed to the highly contested history of Istanbul – of this little barren town.”20 Members of the Istanbul elite taking up government posts in Ankara claimed that “life in the city was a draft,” that “it was vacant . . . like a desert,” and set themselves the task of “making it a clean, beautiful, green, magnificent, organized, and civilized city.”21 Far from maintaining a spiritual antimodernism at its core (as found in many postcolonial nationalisms), the Kemalist elite shared closer a affinity to the original colonizing ideology, one which notoriously refused to acknowledge already existing ways of life in the colonized territory as civilized.22 The 1930s and the Universal Uniqueness of the Turkish Nation The adoption of European civilization as the form and content of the Turkish nation in the 1920s reads as a textbook example of Benedict Anderson’s modular theory of nationalism. One is, however, immediately reminded of Partha 18 19 20 21 22

Cemil Meric¸, “Batılılas¸ma,” Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet´e Turkiye Ansiklopedisi I (Istanbul: Iletisim, 1985), 237. ¨ ¨ Soylevleri, 358. Ataturk, Ataturk ¨ Ahıska, Occidentalism in Turkey, 18–19. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 19.

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Chatterjee’s famous retort to Anderson’s theory, “If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined communities from certain ‘modular’ forms already made available to them by Europe or America, what do they have left to imagine?”23 The answer, at least for the Kemalist elite of the 1930s, turned out to be quite a lot, albeit not in the sense Chatterjee intended. Beginning in 1931, the Kemalist elite began to incorporate an ethnic basis into its national understanding.24 The task of harmonizing a new emphasis on the Turkish race with the civilizational imperative that informed the 1920s required the nation to be reimagined, often in ways, as we shall see, that pushed the limits of the fantastic. In the early 1930s, conspicuous efforts were directed toward establishing the Turkish nation on more “solid” ground, introducing ethnic strains popular in interwar Europe into Kemalist understandings of the nation. The new shift was first evident in the 1931 RPP program that defined millet as, “a social and political community of citizens connected to one another through language, culture, and ideals.”25 For the first time, reference was made to a unique and common set of cultural and linguistic traits as essential elements of the Turkish nation.26 That same year, Ataturk ¨ founded ¨ Tarih Tetkik Heyeti) and the Turkish Historical Research Committee (Turk ¨ Dil Tetkik Cemiyeti), the Society for Research on the Turkish Language (Turk two institutions responsible for propagating the new conceptualization of the nation throughout Turkish society. The work of the Turkish Historical Research Committee culminated in the first Turkish History Conference a year later, where the Turkish History Thesis was officially proclaimed, declared to be the possession of the Turkish nation, and turned into official state dogma. Its fundamental aim was to assert the existence of a Turkish nation that predated Ottoman and Islamic history. It traced the origins of the Turks to a proud and courageous people of the

23 24

25 26

Partha Chatterjee, “Whose Imagined Community?” in Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 1996), 216. Turkish scholars have focused on a number of reasons for the shift in the Turkish revolution, first made public at the Republican People’s Party conference of 1931. Chief among them: the lessons of the liberal party experiment and the Menemen incident, which underscored the lack of popular identification with the revolutionary regime; the ascendancy of authoritarian ethnic nationalisms across Europe; the training of certain Kemalist intellectuals in the experiences of fascist Italy; and the inclusion of former Turkish Communist Party members into the intellectual life of the revolution through the influential review Kadro (Cadre). ˘ Soner C¸agaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who Is a Turk? (New York: Routledge, 2006), 35. This stands in marked contrast to the early years of the Republic, which relied on a voluntaristic conception, the Turkish nation being comprised of all peoples who lived within the boundaries ˘ of the Turkish state, spoke Turkish, and considered themselves Turks. C¸agaptay, Who Is a Turk?, 31. These liberal and inclusive impulses have perhaps been best encapsulated in Ataturk’s ¨ definition of the nation, “The people of Turkey who have established the Turkish state are called ˙ ¨ un ¨ El Yazıları (Ankara: Turk the Turkish nation.” Afet Inan, Medeni Bilgiler ve Ataturk’ ¨ Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1969), 351.

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Mongolian steppe. The Turkish History Thesis argued that this Turkish nation was, “in fact the nation that dispersed culture to all other nations and was thus the origin of human civilization.”27 Turkish linguistic reform took a more gradual route toward a similar conclusion. The work of the Society for Research on the Turkish Language led initially to the Tarama Dergisi [the Search Journal] in 1934. Driven by a lexical xenophobia, it sought to expunge the Turkish language of all foreign (mostly Arabic) words. These “purifiers” or tasfiyeciler soon gave way to the Sun Language Theory (Gunes ¨ ¸ Dil Teorisi) adopted from the Viennese linguist, Hermann Kverich; a theory that claimed Turkish to be the origin of all languages, thereby obviating the need to purge Turkish of what was essentially its own.28 The development of the linguistic and historical ideology of the Turkish nation in the early 1930s manifests a dual move. In both cases, an initial gesture of exclusion and singling out is followed quickly thereafter by an opposite act at once expansive, inclusive, and encompassing. In the first move, Turkish history and language were declared to be unique, forming the immutable basis of the Turkish nation. This particularity was then sustained and elevated to the category of the universal through the second move, which declared that all races, peoples, nations, and languages essentially derived from Turks. In this way, the Turkish nation, now extolled as the origin and purveyor of human civilization, became at once distinct and universal.29 At first glance, this dual move seems reminiscent of postcolonial nationalisms, marked by the effort to simultaneously westernize and maintain a sense of ˘ authenticity. In fact, some Turkish scholars, chief among them Ays¸e Kadıoglu, have argued that the central aim of these Eastern nationalisms – to transform the nation culturally while at the same time retain its distinctiveness – forms the contradictory leitmotif in Turkish nationalism as it evolved alongside Turkish modernization.30 Looked at more closely, however, the problematic return of a westernized elite to its own culture in an act of self-nativization did not occur in the Turkish case.31 While the Kemalist elite sought to reconcile westernization with the uniqueness of Turkish culture, this distinctiveness was not predicated on the customs and social practices of the Anatolian people but rather on a 27

28 29

30 31

¨ The main outlines for the Turkish History Thesis were laid out by Afet Inan and others in Turk Tarihinin Ana Hatları (Ankara: Turk ¨ Tarihi Tetkik Heyeti, 1932). For a more recent analysis, see Seperos Vryonis, The Turkish State and History: Clio Meets the Grey Wolf (New York: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1990), 59–75. For an excellent recent analysis of the Sun Language Theory, see Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). In the Turkish History Thesis, the two moves were instantaneous whereas the linguistic ideology initially flirted with an exclusionary Turkish language before sublimating all other languages to Turkish. ˘ “The Paradox of Turkish Nationalism.” Kadıoglu, This argument has also been made by Eissenstat. See Howard Lee Eissenstat, “The Limits of Imagination: Debating the Nation and Constructing the State in Early Turkish Nationalism” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2007), 173.

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created and abstracted set of characteristics commensurate with European values. As Zehra Arat has argued, “the cultural westernization discourse of the 1930s claimed that ‘we [Turks] are the real Westerners.’ According to this discourse, the Islamic, Arabic, and Farsi influences made us [Turks] forget our Western qualities.”32 During these years, countless studies were commissioned that aimed to uncover the habits and history of the pre-Ottoman, pre-Islamic Turks. Titles such as On the Folk Culture of Turks in the Middle Ages, The Roots and Spread of Turkishness, Sports and Activities of the Ancient Turks, and Dress and Manners of the Ancient Turks all sought, through a teleologically driven anthropology, to uncover the unadulterated history and culture of the Turkic people.33 In 1934, the Ministry of Culture inaugurated a journal entitled Turkish History, Archeology, and Ethnography, its contents conspicuously bypassing the near thousand years of Islamic and Ottoman influences on the Turks.34 Turkishness, as defined by the ethno-national impulses of the 1930s, became completely divorced from Turkey’s Ottoman and Islamic roots in its social makeup, linguistic and historical traditions, and geography. A new Turkishness invented and promoted as national; signified as native yet intended to supplant a traditional Ottoman past. In this regard, what was left out of these fantastic imaginings was more telling than what was put in. As part of the effort to “scientifically” trace the origin of all things to Turkish civilization, the former minister of education, Res¸it Pas¸a, authored a book titled, The National Religion of the Turk: Islam. The book claimed that Islam was originally a Turkish religion and that both the Prophet Abraham and the Prophet Muhammad were of Turkish origin.35 No more improbable than other works commissioned during this period, it nevertheless implied continuity with Turkey’s Ottoman past, and for this reason, was omitted from the Kemalist history textbooks of the 1930s.36

32 33

34

35 36

Zehra Arat, “Introduction: Politics of Representation and Identity” in Deconstructing Images of “the Turkish Woman,” ed. Zehra Arat (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 15. ¨ ¨ Sporları Uzerine Arastırmalar (Ankara: Cumhuriyet MatSee Halim Baki Kunter, Eski Turk ¨ ¸ e ve Yabanci Sozlerin ¨ baası, 1938); Ragip Ozdem, Tarihsel Bakimdan Ozturkc Fonetik Ayrac¸lari ¨ ¨ Tarihinin Ilk Devir(Istanbul: Istanbul Universitesi Yayımları, 1938); S¸emsettin Gunaltay, Turk ¨ ¨ Halkedebiyati leri (Istanbul: Millˆı Mecmua Basım Evi, 1937); Mehmet Fuat Kopr ¨ ul ¨ u, ¨ Turk ¨ ¨ ¨ ur ¨ u¨ Uzerine Ansiklopedisi: Ortac¸ag˘ ve Yenic¸ag˘ Turklerinin Halk Kult (Istanbul: Burhaneddin ¨ u¨ g˘ un ¨ Kokleri ¨ Basımevi, 1935); Candar Avni, Turkl ve Yayılıs¸ı (Ankara: Cumhuriyet Matbaası, ¨ Kıyafetleri ve Guzel ¨ 1934); and Muharrem Feyzi, Eski Turk Giyim Tarzları (Istanbul: Zaman Kitaphanesi, 1932). ˘ ¨ Tarih, Arkeologya ve Etnografya Dergisi (1934–39). Studies that did treat Turkey’s Turk Ottoman past focused on either the early military successes of Turkish commanders or on the period of Ottoman decline in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, placing the blame for Turkey’s present belatedness on the world stage squarely on the shoulders of a decadent and inertial Ottoman culture. Cemal S¸ener, Anadilde Ibadet: Turkc¸e Ibadet (Istanbul: Ant Yayınları, 1998), 83–84. Tuba Kanci, “Imagining the Turkish Men and Women: Nationalism, Modernism and Militarism in Primary School Textbooks, 1928–2000” (PhD diss., Sabanci University, 2007), 35.

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Even in the creation of its own past, Kemalist nationalism was epistemologically and relationally modern. Epistemologically, because Turkishness in its language, history, and culture was researched and known by the methods and disciplines of modern social science including anthropology, linguistics, ethnography, and sociology. Relationally, because it stood in antithesis to an inherited, socially embedded, and learned culture. Despite this modernity, it imparted a sense of the native by inventing a Turkishness that was historically and linguistically unique. In a letter to Walter Benjamin written in 1937, the German-Jewish philologist Erich Auerbach, teaching in Istanbul University at the time, described Kemalism as a, “fanatically anti-traditional nationalism: the rejection of all Mohammedan cultural heritage and the establishment of a fantastic relation to primal Turkish identity.”37 Stathis Gourgouris makes a relevant distinction between the Hobsbawmian “invention” of tradition, a process inculcating certain values through repetition (implying continuity with the past), and the “creation” of tradition, an imaginary act instituting a new way to express culture or to render it comprehensible.38 Within this schema, Kemalist attempts to reformulate the Turkish nation in the 1930s fall into the latter camp, the “creation” of a tradition, resulting in a radical reconfiguration of the national imaginary.39 The period of national consolidation in the 1930s did not sublimate customary culture, practices, language, or historical understanding, but rather violently suppressed them. In Turkey, the process of nationalization stands in marked contrast to Hobsbawm’s description of the movement from “the customary to the national” whereby regional customs are subsumed and sublimated as “national folklore.”40 This movement did not occur in the Turkish case. By promoting a created tradition of the pre-Islamic and pre-Ottoman Turks, the Kemalist elite of the 1930s actively antagonized the relationship between the customary and the national. Thus the official ideology of the Kemalist elite became doubly alienated from the practices and rituals of the Anatolian population: first by denying a role for it within the national project, and second by fabricating a nativism more attuned to the requirements of contemporary civilization than to nationalizing the practices of its own population. Nevertheless, it is important not to overstate the modernity of Kemalist nationalism. The arguments of the Turkish History Thesis and Sun Language 37 38 39 40

Karlheinz Barck, “Walter Benjamin and Erich Auerbach: Fragments of a Correspondence,” Diacritics, 22/3–4 (1992): 81–83. Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 83. The moment of this “creation” marked the end of the revolutionary project, the consolidation and disciplining of its destructive/creative power. Gourgouris, Dream Nation, 84. Gourgouris argues that this sublimation to a national folklore creates an epistemological shift wherein practices of social organization are castrated by their nomination and promotion as “tradition.”

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Theory were “modern” in the sense that they allowed (at least in theory) the transfer of social-imaginary signification from a now shunned and repressed tradition to the new culture of the Turkish nation-state. Yet rather than revel in the sociocultural dislocations caused by Europeanization (in true modernist fashion), the Kemalist elite sought to buttress these dislocations with a created nativist tradition, providing the Anatolian population with a sense of pride and distinctiveness. That it did not do this in “customary” fashion – by sublimating the customary in the national – would become the central flaw of the Kemalist system. A flaw that, as we shall see, would come back to haunt it in the years ahead. Postwar Revisionism In the years following World War II, changes in the western standards of contemporary civilization cast dubious light on the ethno-national emphasis of the 1930s. The racial implications behind the Turkish History Thesis and the Sun Language Theory seemed the products of a tainted era and were replaced by newer studies that sought to uncover, in the pre-Ottoman culture and social habits of Turks, values and habits that conformed to the prevailing western winds. Accordingly, Turkish researchers, who had previously examined the skulls of 130,000 Turks to prove the “whiteness” of the Turkish race, now claimed that democracy and feminism had their origins in ancient Turkic tribes.41 These newer studies had an even shorter shelf life than their equally dubious predecessors, but they are telling of the extent to which nativist foundations were reformulated in alignment with western standards that had suddenly shifted course after the war. Competing with these initial revisionist efforts seeking to realign Turkish nativism with new western standards were semiofficial attempts to trace the Roman and Greek influences on the peoples of Anatolia.42 This new “humandeath, sought to do away with the ist” impulse, begun shortly after Ataturk’s ¨ nativist component of Turkish nationalism altogether. If the humanist strains of Greco-Roman culture were the roots of contemporary civilization, then Anatolian culture too, it was argued, was steeped in these traditions. Emphasizing the territorial rather than ethnic links between Turkey and Europe, the new impulse nevertheless continued the fundamental historical narrative set in the 1930s: that of an original (Turkish or Anatolian) culture compatible with westernization, subsequently adulterated by centuries of Ottoman and Islamic influence. For the new humanists, recovering this lost culture required the relatively simpler task of translating Greek and Latin texts, sparking the birth 41 42

Kanci, “Imagining the Turkish Men and Women,” 233; Zehra Arat, “Educating the Daughters of the Republic,” in Deconstructing Images, 167. ¨ Tarih Tezinden Turk¨ I˙slam ˆ Sentezine (Istanbul: Etienne Copeaux, Tarih Ders Kitaplarında Turk Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1998), 54–55.

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of the Classics Movement in Turkey. Led by the historian Arif Mufit ¨ Mansel, the new strain in national understanding found its way into school textbooks, the first year of high-school history becoming devoted entirely to the study of Greek and Roman civilization.43 Having begun the Turkish revolution by repudiating its past, the Kemalist elite in the 1930s took a nativist turn, legitimizing westernization as a return to an originary Turkishness. Once you begin writing a national history, there is no going back. The new humanist revisionism, compelled to ground the nation historically, grounded Turkishness in a shared historical culture invented by European nationalisms in the nineteenth century. While these three moves seem at first glance to be radically at odds with one another, they all were informed by a common impulse: the construction (or negation) of a national history in order to reconcile the Turkish nation with the invitational impulse at the heart of the Civilizational logic. This reconciliation was made possible in each case by divesting the national of any antagonistic relation with the west. In the first years of the Republic, the synthesis of westernization and the national was enacted via a radical break with Turkey’s Ottoman and Islamic past, and the equally radical attempt to replace the social and cultural fabric linked to this past with European institutions, values, and practices. In this phase, as we have seen, the proper national subject was one open to this modernizing mission. The 1930s witnessed a shift in the national imagination, the radicality of the initial years tempered by the creation of a nativist tradition that posited Turks as the “first humans,” the “first nation,” and the “cradle of all civilizations.”44 In this way, the modernizing mission signified not only the invitation of the European other but at the same time a return to oneself: both universal and distinct, western and national. The postwar climate brought with it two strands of revisionism: the first replaced the ethnic elements in nativist thinking with the updated characteristics of the modern; the second substituted the insistence on uniqueness with a historical lineage to a common Greco-Roman culture. This chapter has so far traced the dominant strains of nationalist thought as they developed in the years following the establishment of the Republic. The reconciliation of the Turkish nation with the project of Europeanization required a leveling of the complexities and tensions that existed within nationalist thinking in the interwar period. In tracing this reconciliation, I have purposefully left out the rich debates that preceded each of the end variations and the ambiguities involved in putting them into practice. I have had even less to say about “unofficial” national understandings that developed outside of the Kemalist regime. The remainder of the book revisits these tensions and alternate trajectories, hermeneutically, as they were resurrected by the new political ideologies opposing Turkey’s integration into the EEC. It shows numerous 43 44

Ibid., 55. Kanci, “Imagining the Turkish Men and Women,” 104–08.

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times over that these ideologies grounded their opposition in strains of national thought bypassed by the Civilizational logic. The Workers Party of Turkey was the first group to do so, and consequently, to whom our analysis now turns.

ataturk revised: tip and the reformulation ¨ of turkish nationalism The Workers Party of Turkey was by no means a nationally competitive party. From its inception in 1961 to its disbandment by military decree a decade later, the WPT never managed to draw more than 3 percent of the national vote. At its height in 1965, it held 15 of the 450 seats in the TGNA.45 Despite its existence on the margins of Turkey’s political culture, the WPT occupies a privileged place within our story. Not only was it the first political group in Turkey to oppose the EEC; it also inaugurated a wholly new way of talking about it, based on an understanding of Turkey radically at odds with the Civilizational logic. How this new national understanding emerged and how it informed the WPT’s attitude toward the Common Market are the questions guiding the remainder of this chapter. The WPT in Context The history of the Turkish left preceding the 1960 coup is a long and bitter story of bans, ostracism, and government repression. As early as 1921, the Kemalist regime felt confident enough to move against leftist groups. It crushed the Green Army (Yes¸il Ordu), a guerilla peasant force founded by dissident nationalist veterans seeking to expropriate village merchants and notables, and drowned the USSR-based Turkish Communist Party before it could land in Trabzon off the Black Sea coast.46 The 1925 Law for Maintenance of Order, the 1926 Penal Code (outlawing strikes), and the 1938 Law of Associations (banning class-based activity) forced left-leaning groups and parties in Turkey to either embrace apolitical, anti-class, and pro-regime attitudes or operate underground

45

46

Despite a poor showing at the polls, the WPT represented the first mass political movement of the post-war left and thus wielded significance well beyond its electoral strength. There were several interrelated reasons for this. Various groups of the Turkish right bestowed a certain notoriety on the WPT by invoking the specter of world communism. This direct engagement with a relatively minor party drew national attention to the WPT, giving it a much broader audience than it could have held on its own. For its own part, the WPT asked questions that had never before been posed on a national level in Turkish politics. More precisely, it politicized domains, including Turkey’s recent history and foreign policy, which had previously been regarded as apolitical. By doing so, the WPT forced parties across the political spectrum to follow suit. Ahmet Samim, “The Tragedy of the Turkish Left,” New Left Review, 126 (1981): 60–85. ˘ For an excellent recent analysis of the short-lived Green Army, see Necip Hablemitoglu, Millˆı ˙ ¨ Mucadele’de Yes¸il Ordu Cemiyeti (Istanbul: Birharf Yayınları, 2006).

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and in secret.47 The postwar transition to a multiparty democracy proved to be equally resistant to socialist politics. Two leftist parties (TSP and TSEKP) were both banned in 1946, less than six months after their founding, and the Marxist-oriented Fatherland Party (Vatan Partisi), formed during the Menderes era, underwent constant government harassment until it was forcibly dissolved in 1957. It was not until the 1960 military coup and subsequent liberalization that leftist groups became relatively free to pursue their agendas within Turkey. Taking advantage of this more open climate, a group of trade union leaders came together to form the Workers Party of Turkey in 1961. Historic for being the first political party formed from outside of the traditional Turkish elite, its initial members all had working-class backgrounds with no formal higher education.48 In 1962, they solicited the aid of a small band of leftist intellectuals who joined the party and assumed leadership. Led by Mehmet Ali Aybar, the WPT quickly refashioned itself from a special-interest party of workers’ rights into a broad-based socialist party encompassing workers, craftsmen, intellectuals, and the agricultural poor.49 The ideology of the WPT was conditioned by the political context present at the party’s birth, plagued by the problem of presenting a socialist agenda in a virulently anti-Soviet climate. The Cold War and Turkey’s historically negative perception of Russia precluded the possibility of a pro-Soviet movement.50 In fact, discrediting Turkish socialism as a Soviet and anti-Turkish import had been, and continued to be, a favored tactic of the right. Added to this, the WPT’s legal status, especially in its first years, remained in doubt. Party leaders lived in perpetual anxiety of falling afoul of the Political Parties Law of 1965 or the infamous amendments to the constitution, articles 141 and 142, which criminalized “class based” political activity that “aimed at the domination of one social class over the others.” In such an atmosphere, it became crucial to present the party platform as a national homegrown ideology that was born of, and addressed itself to, Turkey’s particular problems; one that maintained a safe distance from 47

48 49

50

Erdal Yavuz, “The State of the Industrial Workforce 1923–40,” in Workers and the Working Class in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, 1839–1950, eds. Donald Quataert and Erik Zucher (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 95–126. ¨ Igor Lipovsky, The Socialist Movement in Turkey 1960–1980 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), 11. Mehmet Ali Aybar was a born-and-bred member of the Turkish Republican elite. Matriculating from Galatasaray High School in 1926, Aybar went on to Istanbul University’s Faculty of Law, where he received his law and doctoral degrees. An accomplished track-runner on the Turkish national team in addition to his political renown, fluent in German and French, Aybar’s background, erudition, and stature commanded respect within Turkish society and put a unique stamp on the development of socialism in postwar Turkey. The anticommunism of the 1940s, from the Navy Cadet’s Trial, the imprisonment of Hikmet Kıvılcımlı, the exile of Turkish communist poet Nazım Hikmet, and the assassination of Sabahattin Ali, occluded the possibility of internationalism for the Turkish left, forcing it to prove its nationalist credentials.

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Moscow. As Aybar made clear, “We firmly refuse any intrusion, by any international organization who in the name of socialism, seeks to ‘offer advice’ to our national parties. Each people must construct their own socialism based on the specific conditions and problems of their country.”51 The uniqueness of Turkey’s situation, for Aybar, lay in its past. Having been both an empire and imperialized country at the same time, Turkey was heir to economic and social conditions that differed from both western and underdeveloped nations. These conditions required a uniquely Turkish socialist response. According to Aybar’s (ironically prosaically titled) theory, “Socialist Revolution,” class struggle in Turkey took a different form than in the west, where a large proletariat dialectically opposed its domestic bourgeoisie. In Turkey, a loose assortment of the laboring classes, including industrial workers, small and landless peasantry, as well as apprentices and craftsmen, confronted the triad of foreign capital, landowners, and a bureaucratic class under foreign tutelage. The peculiarities of Aybar’s socioeconomic analysis of Turkey’s class conflict are less important to our story than its two fundamental consequences: first, that any homegrown ideology unique to Turkey had to contend with the legacy of its founder, Ataturk; and second, that socialist struggle was to ¨ be pursued not only against domestic opponents, but taken into the arena of Turkish foreign policy as well. The shared worldview of the Civilizational logic had produced near-total consensus in both of these areas. The following two sections examine how the WPT challenged this consensus, introducing a radically new way of understanding Turkey and its place within the world. The WPT and the War(s) of Independence The opening pages of both the 1961 and 1964 WPT programs contained an excerpt from a speech Ataturk ¨ had given to the Turkish National Assembly on 1 December 1921: Let us know who we are. We are a laboring and poor people . . . Our society has no place for those that lie on their backs or on the backs of others. So what is Populism? It is the social doctrine that bases its law on the labor of our society. Gentlemen, Populism is the appropriate doctrine of a people who, in order to protect their independence must wage a national war against an imperialism that seeks to destroy our nation, against a capitalism that aims to swallow us whole.52

There are a number of significant claims in this excerpt worth noting. First, it underscored how Ataturk ¨ had understood Turkey, not in terms of a modernizing mission, but as a nation of “laboring and poor people,” a nation that had no room for those that did not labor. Second, against the narrative of 51 52

¨ ˘ Turkiye ¨ I˙s¸c¸i Partisi, 1961–1971 (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Artun Unsal, Umuttan Yalnızlıga: Yayınları, 2002), 257. ¨ Turkiye I˙s¸ci Partisi Programı (Ankara: The WPT, 1961).

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reconciliation that underlay the Civilizational logic, it understood the Turkish nation in antagonistic relation to the west, a nation that emerged through its resistance to international capitalism. Yet most significant of all was that no one in Turkey remembered this speech until Aybar dug it out of obscurity. It had, as Aybar himself later noted, “been put into a deep sleep among the dusty books of history.”53 The self-narrative of the Civilizational logic had erased from historical memory an understanding of Europe as dangerous to Turkey. In unearthing this speech, Aybar was resurrecting a different Ataturk, not one ¨ who had invited European civilization to stand in as benchmark and arbiter of the Turkish project, but an Ataturk ¨ that saw Europe as a fundamental threat to the very independence of the Turkish nation. Instead of basing the WPT’s socialist agenda at odds with Ataturk, as many ¨ of the WPT’s leftist predecessors had done (not least because of their repression by the Kemalist regime itself), Mehmet Ali Aybar opted to appropriate his legacy. In a speech on 10 November 1964, on the occasion of the twenty-sixth anniversary of Ataturk’s death, Aybar spoke of the War of Independence as the ¨ struggle of a, “People who took up arms not only against a foreign enemy occupation but at the same time against the established order of world oppression and autocracy; against capitalism and imperialism.” In this way, the national struggle was recast as the Turkish contribution in the global struggle against capital. “In doing so,” Aybar continued, “they [the Turkish people] opened the path to freedom for all the captive peoples of the world.”54 To back his address to the Russian people, reading, Aybar quoted at length from Ataturk’s ¨ who, like Turkey, had recently and successfully consolidated their revolution: The contemporary world situation, the effects of the First World War, is not just felt in Russia and Turkey but has left an imprint on the minds of all peoples. It has awakened an awareness of the ineluctable victory of progressive movements and ideas. The oppressed nations of the world will one day destroy their oppressors. On this day there will no longer be oppressor and oppressed, but a social order befitting humanity. Our nations [Russia and Turkey] will then take pride in taking the first steps toward this goal.55

Such controversial if not incendiary statements, backed by forgotten Ataturk ¨ quotes and spoken a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, sent shockwaves through the established consensus of the Turkish elite. Here was an Ataturk ¨ emphasizing the darker side of European civilization, masters of a bankrupt and outmoded global order based on oppression. As Aybar would insist time and again throughout the 1960s, “This populist understanding of Turkey, standing up against a capitalist and imperialist world order, forms the essence of Ataturk’s political philosophy.” Ataturk’s struggle for national independence, ¨ ¨ 53 54 55

Mehmet Ali Aybar, WPT Tarihi (Istanbul: BDS Yayınları, 1988), 178. I have found no evidence in the postwar period that would contradict Aybar’s claim. ¨ Death (Ankara: The Mehmet Ali Aybar, Speech Given on the 26th Anniversary of Ataturk’s WPT, 1964). Ibid.

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Aybar claimed, was first and foremost a struggle to protect the Turkish people against this invidious world order. The WPT’s Foreign Policy and the EEC It was this antagonistic understanding of “national independence” that lay at the heart of the WPT’s foreign policy, an understanding that had been erased in the efforts to reconcile Europeanization with the Turkish nation. More precisely, Aybar felt, the term had been stripped of its original intent, become a “meaningless phrase, invoked with pride on national holidays.” He poetically noted how the politicians of Turkey’s two main political parties (the RPP and the JP) constantly spoke of national independence while practicing a politics of “national surrender.”56 Their unquestioned aspirations to join the western orbit at any price had once again brought Turkey under the sway of imperialistic powers. The postwar Turkish elite were seen as having abandoned Ataturk’s main principles of nonalignment and economic sovereignty and open¨ ing the door to western imperialism that Ataturk ¨ had fought so hard to shut. Against such a politics, Aybar presented his contemporaries with the following imperative: death should mark the start of a reawakening; one The 26th anniversary of Ataturk’s ¨ which reaches back to the pure Populist politics of Ataturk ¨ and courageously applies them to the conditions of today.57

The Workers’ Party of Turkey was not defining a new struggle; it was simply “reawakening” the original one. By linking Turkey’s current situation to its besiegement by European powers on the eve of the National Struggle, Aybar cast contemporary Turkey in a moment of existential crisis requiring, once again, a revolutionary politics. The WPT was the first party to politicize Turkey’s foreign policy. Until that time, Turkey’s external relations had been an uncontested arena outside the purview of domestic politics.58 So much so that, despite four changes of government, Turkey’s western orientation was never questioned or even publicly debated by the postwar Turkish elite. Aybar himself remarked on this 56 57 58

Aybar, WPT Tarihi, 23. Aybar, Speech. The exception to this rule occurred during World War II when pan-Turkist elements within the state elite saw an opportune window for their ideas following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Led by the Ambassador to Germany, Husrev Gerede and Chief of the General ¨ Staff Marshall Fevzi C ¸ akmak, this faction became to first to criticize the Inon ¨ u¨ government’s position of neutrality in the war and longer-term Kemalist visions of Turkey’s Westernization and position in European diplomacy. See John Vanderlippe, The Politics of Turkish Democracy: I˙smet I˙nonu¨ and the Formation of the Multi-Party System, 1938–1950 (Albany: SUNY Series ¨ in the Middle East, 2005), 67; Cemil Koc¸ak, Turkiyede Milli S¸ef Donemi (Ankara: Iletis¸im, 1986), 293–302.

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silence, calling for foreign policy issues to be discussed within Turkey, “In democracies, like all other issues, foreign policy is also a subject of discussion. We too, need to lift the taboo against criticisms of Turkish foreign policy.”59 Throughout the 1960s, the WPT challenged what it saw as Turkey’s increasing political and economic dependence on the west. It argued that Turkey had detoured dangerously from the nonaligned foreign policy that Ataturk had ¨ practiced and preached as necessary to maintaining Turkey’s independence. At the root of the problem were the series of bilateral and international treaties that Turkey had signed to cement its place in the postwar western orbit. For Aybar, these treaties were the principle vehicle for western imperialism: Today, the cooperation we see between nations [referring to the Allied Powers] has been cemented by a number of treaties and agreements. These are nothing other than the consolidation of efforts to enslave more efficiently the oppressed nations of the world, to exploit the labor of these nations for their own profit. These treaties are worthless pieces of paper. Treaties that are bound by injustice will have no effect on resolute states. [Oppressed] nations have realized that only by their abrogation can humanity attain happiness.60

The unstated yet obvious reference was to the 1920 Treaty of Sevres that partitioned much of Anatolia among the European powers and internationalized the straights. Just as the Treaty of Sevres had served as the catalyst for the National Struggle, Turkey’s “second War of Independence” against the west, Aybar believed, would begin with the abrogation of its present commitments. In this spirit, the WPT advocated immediate withdrawal from all international organizations, including NATO, the OECD, the GATT, and the EEC. By rescinding the treaties that bound Turkey to these organizations, Turkey would be free to pursue its own national interests. Geopolitically, this implied nonalignment and peaceful coexistence with the Soviet bloc and the capitalist west. Economically, it implied financial autarky and high tariff barriers that would enable an import-substitution-based industrialization. Aybar’s speech during the parliamentary debate over the Justice Party’s 1965 government program underscored these ideas: Foreign Capital cannot invest in the proper industrialization of a developing economy. This is against its fundamental interests. Foreign investment is necessarily directed toward sectors that work to the advantage of the already industrialized states, i.e., international transportation hubs, tourism, and export-oriented agricultural production. The Government’s program seems to have the view that the organizations of international capitalism, such as GATT, OECD, and above all the EEC, share the goal of our country’s economic development. Yet, these organizations, as it is well known, are essentially concerned with organizing and integrating the economies of advanced 59 60

¨ u, ¨ 20 August 1962. Onc Aybar, Speech.

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industrial countries. For us, development must mean industrialization and the development of labor power in Turkey. This can only be brought about through a policy of import-substitution. There is no other way to become a contemporary society free from foreign exploitation.61

Aybar’s statement expounded on many of the themes central to the newly emergent economic field of dependency theory: the economic re-territorialization of peripheral economies to suit the needs of the core and the unequal geography of globalization that perpetuated, rather than eliminated, the relative backwardness of developing countries. From this vantage point, the invitational impulse at the heart of the Civilizational logic appeared to be another variation of a now-discredited modernization theory. Rather than remain increasingly dependent on the western political and economic system, the WPT argued for Turkey to take its rightful place among the postcolonial nations. Aybar never tired of drawing links between Turkey’s War of Independence and the decolonization struggles that reached their height in the early 1960s. As early as 1961, the WPT program stated that, “The Turkish nation was the first in history to begin, carry out, and successfully conclude the struggle against colonialism.”62 Citing evidence from nationalist movements in the colonial world, which had drawn inspiration from Ataturk, ¨ Aybar claimed that, “The nationalist Kemalists, emerging victorious from the War of Independence, became the flag for all anti-imperialist struggles.”63 As new in the Turkish experience as these ideas were, it is important not to overstate their influence. Outside of party members and sympathizers, the WPT’s platform had very little immediate impact on Turkish political culture. The party itself quickly fell prey to internal dissonance and finally splintered after bitter disagreement over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.64 While helped organize the radical union some of its members, led by Kemal Sulker, ¨ ˙ (Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions), others spread the WPT’s DISK ideas to a new generation of leftist student movements including Dev-Genc¸, Dev-Sol, THKP/C, and TKP-ML. Yet their true legacy lies elsewhere. The WPT was the first major political movement in postwar Turkey to challenge the Civilizational logic on both the legacy of Ataturk ¨ and its monopoly over foreign policy. The postwar elite had cast Turkey’s efforts to integrate into the western system as the natural outgrowth of the invitational impulse at the heart of the Kemalist revolution. The Ankara Agreement, as discussed in the previous chapter, was signified as 61 62 63 64

TBMM Tutanak Dergisi, D:2, T:1, C:1, 7. November 1965, 167–68. ¨ Turkiye I˙s¸c¸i Partisi Programı. ˘ Mehmet Ali Aybar, Bagımsızlık, Demokrasi, Sosyalizm; Sec¸meler, 1945–1967 (Istanbul: Gerc¸ek Yayınevi, 1968), 423. Mehmet Ali Aybar had sided with the invasion, and was opposed by many high-ranking members of his party led by Behice Boran, who a year later replaced Aybar as party president ¨ in 1970, becoming the first female party leader in Turkish history. See Unsal, Umuttan.

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the culmination and coronation of these efforts. The WPT’s reading of recent Turkish history blasted through the processional temporality of the Civilizational logic. Against the narrative of the Turkish nation gradually progressing to the level of contemporary civilization, it saw Turkey as sandwiched between two periods of colonization: one narrowly averted, the other soon to come. By doing so, the WPT linked Turkey’s present struggle against imperialism with Turkey’s War of Independence, underscoring how the Civilizational logic threatened both. Its revisionist efforts to reconcile the Turkish nation with the project of Europeanization had all but erased the antagonistic nature of the National Struggle from historical memory while simultaneously blinding the Turkish people to the present imperial threat. Faced with this dual erasure, the reinterpretation of Ataturk ¨ and a foreign policy reorientation became two sides of the same struggle, a struggle to rescue the memory of the first War of Independence against the west in order to begin the second. Aybar’s Workers Party of Turkey was the first in what would be a long line of characters to challenge the Civilizational logic’s understanding of the Turkish nation and its place within the world. The antagonistic impulse toward the west that underlay Aybar’s opposition to the EEC formed the tip of a large iceberg – the stirrings of a Nationalist logic that would soon spread well beyond its humble origins on the radical left fringe of Turkish society.

3 Voices from a Threatened Nation (1968–1980)

The first object of desire is to be recognized by the other . . . yet, the fundamental problem of a false self remains: Does the subject not become engaged in an evergrowing dispossession of that being of his? For in this labor which he undertakes to reconstruct for another, he rediscovers the fundamental alienation that made him construct it like another, and which has always destined it to be taken from him by another. – Jacques Lacan1 We will seek out another world for ourselves. ˙ ˙ on – Ismet In ¨ u¨ 2

In the mid-1960s, the great majority of Turks did not share in the WPT’s assessment of the Common Market. More interesting, however, was that Turks had seemingly stopped talking about the EEC altogether. As Mehmet Ali Birand noted, “The Ankara Agreement, signed with much pomp and splendor, was at once forgotten.”3 Selim Ilkin concurred, claiming that “the Ankara Agreement was almost totally ignored after its ratification. It is difficult to find any comprehensive study or discussion on the problem prior to 16 May 1967, when Turkey expressed its desire to enter the second phase of the Agreement.”4 This was in 1 2 3 4

´ A Selection (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1977), 42, 58 (emphasis in Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: original). ˙ Ismet Pas¸a’s response to the 1964 letter by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson prohibiting the use of U.S.-supplied weapons without U.S. consent. Aybar, WPT Tarihi, 185. ¨ Ortak Pazar Macerası, 269. Birand, Turkiye’nin Selim Ilkin, “A History of Turkey’s Association with the European Community,” in Ahmet Evin and Geoffrey Denton, eds., Turkey and the European Community (Opdalen: Leske Buldrich 1990), 39.

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part attributable to the self-congratulatory framing of the Ankara Agreement. Newspaper headlines claiming that “Turkey joins the Common Market!” or “Is inescapably part of Europe!” fueled the impression that the Association Agreement marked the end, not the beginning, of integration. The sense of accomplishment, coupled with rising tensions in the Turko-U.S. alliance, conflict in Cyprus, and the imperatives of the Cold War, served to place the EEC on the back burner. Although some leftist groups including the WPT and the ¨ continued to talk about socialist intellectuals clustered around the journal Yon the Common Market, Turkish integration into the EEC had fallen off the public radar. The demotion did not last long. By 1968, Turkey had once again turned its eyes to Europe. A number of factors, both internal and external, led to this shift. Global developments in the mid-1960s brought about a marked decrease in Turkey’s strategic significance for the Cold War. In the early years of the conflict, the still uncertain boundaries of the European front, Turkish participation in Korea, and the deployment of medium-range Jupiter missiles on Turkish soil had made Turkey an indispensable ally of Washington. Yet by the mid-1960s, the situation had changed dramatically. The Cold War shift away from Europe to East Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, an increased focus on ICBM’s, and the secret deal between Kennedy and Khrushchev, struck during the Cuban Missile Crisis to remove nuclear weapons from Turkey, drew American attention away from Anatolia. Corollary to these geostrategic developments was the gradual decline in U.S. aid to Turkey, forcing Turkey to look toward a fully recovered Europe for financial assistance. Domestically, by mid-decade, an increasing anti-American tide was making an overtly pro-American stance politically more difficult. Even within the JP government and the diplomatic corps, there was growing realization that a one-dimensional foreign policy had created an overdependence on the United States, which, as the Cyprus crisis would show, could not be relied on to guarantee Turkey’s interests. As Turkish-U.S. relations were weathering the first of its many storms, Turkish-European relations seemed to be tightening. The EEC member-states continued to be Turkey’s top trading partners. Added to this, the early 1960s marked the beginning of a significant Turkish migration to the Common Market, particularly to the labor-starved West German economy. The year 1960 brought the first 7,000 “guest-workers” to Germany, a number that would swell to 1.5 million by 1980.5 While Turkish workers were flocking to Europe, European capital was moving the other way. The 1960s saw a large increase in European direct foreign investment to Turkey, helping finance, among other projects, the construction of the first bridge across the Bosphorus. These developments rekindled Turkish interest in Europe and were

5

Ahmed Al-Shahi and Richard Lawless, Middle East and North African Immigrants in Europe (New York: Routledge, 2005), 111.

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in part responsible for Demirel’s decision to enter into the second phase of the agreement in 1968. The beginning of negotiations for this second phase marked the end to the four-year hiatus and the start of a radically different era in Turkish-EEC relations. The liberalization of Turkish society after 1960 introduced new movements, institutions, groups, and ideologies that began, by mid-decade, to weigh in on Turkey’s foreign affairs. By the time Turkey reengaged with the EEC, their integration gathered the attention and participation of a much broader swath of Turkish society. During the initial phase of Turkish-EEC relations (1959–63), public debate on the Common Market had been dominated by politicians of the two major parties, the diplomatic corps, a few businessmen and economists, journalists, and the military establishment. By 1970, this group had expanded to include trade unions, student associations, the trade, finance, and planning ministries, industrial and professional organizations, returning guest workers, historians, sociologists, political scientists, rotary clubs, religious leaders, and the judiciary. As the decade progressed, segments from both the initial enthusiasts and the newly formed political sites began to stand alongside the Workers’ Party of Turkey in opposition to the EEC. This opposition became a force in its own right, threatening at different points to derail Turkish-EEC relations altogether. Of concern to us, however, is not so much the effect of this opposition on Turkish-EEC relations as how this opposition arose, how it was expressed, and how it propagated alternate imaginations of Turkey. From 1968 to 1980, opposition to the Common Market was centered through the nation. It was experienced, understood, and performed within a new nationalist imagination. This commonality underlay all opposition to the EEC. Like the reformulation of Turkish nationalism by the Workers’ Party of Turkey examined earlier, the new nationalisms, whatever their political stripe or provenance, all shared the view that the nation was in crisis. Uniting the various strands of nationalist thought was the reintroduction of the idea of survival; that the Turkish nation, however understood, was on the brink of a death that needed to be averted. As we shall see, Turkish debates over joining the Common Market were central to reawakening this sense of anxiety and urgency. These new nationalisms were the product of what may be called a nationalist moment in the late 1960s. A variety of developments that coalesced during the decade both made possible a national opposition to the EEC and conditioned the form this opposition took. The privatization of nationalism, the politicization of Turkey’s foreign policy, and the absence of a statistical enterprise, I argue, were central to the making of this moment. The first part of this chapter examines the interactions and combinations of these processes in detail, thus establishing the conditions and context for the nationalist opposition to the EEC. The second part of the chapter examines the various ways of imagining the nation that arose through this opposition.

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This chapter is an intellectual history of nationalist thought between 1968 and 1980 as it was expressed through Turkish reactions to the Common Market. It describes the historical conditions that framed and made possible this reaction, and the particular ways it was manifest, throughout the entire period of Turkish opposition to the Common Market. The following three chapters resume a chronological account of Turkish-EEC relations, detailing how the various strains of nationalist thought were taken up by particular groups and institutions within Turkey, how they interacted with each other and the Civilizational logic, and how they altered and were themselves altered by subsequent developments in Turkish-EEC relations.

the institutional and epistemic birth of the nationalist logic Privatization of Nationalism Turkey’s transition to a multiparty regime put an end to the state monopoly on the interpretation of nationalism. After 1945, civil groups became relatively free to propagate alternate understandings of the Turkish nation and its history, a freedom that increased even further following the 1960 military coup. The new nationalisms that mushroomed across the political spectrum and among the newly formed sites of civil society brought a fundamental challenge to the official narrative of reconciliation that underlay the Civilizational logic. Their emergence marks the first precondition of nationalist opposition to the EEC. The privatization of nationalism was not, from a historical perspective, something new. The 1908 Young Turk revolution had ushered in a period of open discussion on nationalism among Ottoman intellectuals. During the War of Liberation, nationalism had formed the empty signifier for a whole host of ideologies, from extreme leftism to Islamism, and was instrumental in uniting these under the common goal of establishing an independent nationstate. Open discussion of Turkish nationalism continued into the initial years of the Republic, and it was only with the consolidation of Kemalist rule that prohibitions on alternative understandings of the nation came into force. The Republican Party made nationalism a party principle in 1931 and incorporated it into the constitution in 1934. Once dogmatized, the Kemalist Regime jealously guarded its monopoly on nationalist thought. Nationalist currents, particularly those of a conservative, antimodern, Islamist, or Pan-Turanist bent were closely monitored and forcibly shut down when they became too threatening.6 6

Both the Pan-Turanist movement led by Nihal Atsız and the Islamic-based traditionalist nationalC ¸ etinsaya, “Rethinking Nationalism of Zeki Velidi Togan were pushed into isolation. Gokhan ¨ ism and Islam: Some Preliminary Notes on the Roots of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis in Modern Turkish Political Thought,” Muslim World, 3–4 (1999): 360–63.

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Scholars such as Tamer Balcı have traced the roots of the post-1945 privatization of nationalism to the Cold War. In a forceful analysis, Balcı claimed that the Turkish state opened up its monopoly in order to enlist conservative and Islamic strains of nationalist thought in the fight against communism.7 Ironically, this very privatization, while successfully combating internationalist communism, also made possible the emergence of the Turkish “national left” (ulusal sol). Regardless of the cause, by the mid-1960s, hundreds of clubs, societies, associations, hearths, publishing houses, and student groups had taken advantage of the new liberalized climate and were openly debating and formulating new national identities. The main beneficiaries of this privatization, especially in the first two decades of the postwar era, were the conservative strains of national thought that had been sidelined by the Civilizational logic. By the early 1960s, the conservative revival had coalesced around two major camps. The more extreme version centered on the Anatolianism of Nurettin Topc¸u who rejected Turkish modernization outright, grounding Turkish national identity in Islam and the soil. The second, more moderate wing attempted to synthesize traditional Ottoman values with the necessity of technological modernization. A much broader move¨ Ocaklaı (Turkish ment, it included both older organizations such as the Turk ˘ (Society of Hearths) and newly formed ones such as the Milliyetc¸iler Dernegi ¨ ¨ ˘ (Society for the Struggle against Nationalists), Komunizmle Mucadele Dernegi ˘ Communism), and beginning in the 1970s, the all-important Aydınlar Ocagı (Hearth of Intellectuals). Members of these organizations largely supported the economically liberal but socially conservative Justice Party, while the more radical strains drifted toward the ultranationalist National Action Party (NAP) and Islamist National Salvation Party (NSP). The intellectual worldview of these organizations was also heavily influenced by a number of conservative nationalist reviews that came into their own in the postwar years. These reviews, chief ¨ Yurdu (Turkish Homeland), Turk ¨ Kult ¨ ur ¨ u¨ (Turkish Culamong them Turk ture), Tohum (Seed), and Haraket (Movement), provided a vital link between conservative intellectuals who reimagined the Turkish nation and the wider nationalist organizations that propagated their ideas. Against this conservative revival in national thinking, the privatization of nationalism also begat a motley crew of ideologies that sought to ground the nation on a more social and democratic basis. Condemning the “black nationalism” (kara miliyetc¸ilik)8 of the conservatives as obfuscatory, mystical, and antimodern, these progressive thinkers were united in the belief that

7 8

Tamer Balcı, “From Nationalization of Islam to Privatization of Nationalism: Islam and Turkish National Identity,” History Studies, 1/1 (2009): 82–107. The term “black nationalism” (kara milliyetc¸ilik) was first coined by Falih Rıfkı Atay, the ¨ publisher of Dunya, and became a catchphrase of the progressive nationalists against their reactionary counterparts. Kemal Karpat, “Ideology in Turkey after the Revolution of 1960: Nationalism and Socialism,” The Turkish Yearbook of International Relations, VI (1965): 90.

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Kemalist Turkey was the first true Turkish state.9 They ranged from secular nationalists, to socialists, to the few proponents of Islamic socialism in ¨ Devrim Ocakları (Turkish Turkey. The first group centered around the Turk ¨ Reform Hearth), dailies such as Dunya (World) and Cumhuriyet (Republic), and the revived Halk Evleri (People’s Houses). This last institution, forcibly closed by Menderes only to be reopened after the 1960 revolution, sought national identity in the folklore, day-to-day life, and experiences of contemporary individuals and communities. In this way it addressed the previously mentioned flaw in Kemalist nationalism by incorporating the “customary” into the national.10 While the secular nationalists lent their support to the newly refashioned RPP, a more radical wing gradually split off to form the backbone of the “national left” in Turkey. This wing found voice in dailies and journals ¨ ¨ Ulke, ¨ ur ¨ Dernegi ˘ (Socialist like Vatan, Yon, and I˙mece, and the Sosyalist Kult Culture Society), whose stated aim was to provide socialist education within the framework of “nationalistic, patriotic, and democratic ideas.” Faithful to the original revolutionary spirit of Turkish nationalism, the national left felt that Turkish modernization, so far focused on the political and cultural, remained incomplete without a complimentary revolution of the social structure.11 “True nationalism,” wrote the socialist novelist Yas¸ar Kemal in 1960, “consists of preventing a minority from exploiting the majority.”12 The privatization of nationalism also played a large role in spreading nationalist thought within the universities where conservative student groups such as ¨ ˘ (National Union of Turkish Students) or the the Turk Milli Talebe Birligi ¨ Genc¸lik Dernegi ˘ (Turkish Youth Association) competed with left-leaning Turk ¨ ¨ Milli Talebe Fedorganizations such as the Fikir Kulubleri (Idea Clubs), Turk erasyonu (Turkish National Student Federation), and Dev-Genc¸ (Revolutionary Youth) to claim the allegiance of the newly politicized student body. The privatization of nationalism brought about a drastic increase in the number of interlocutors engaged in national thinking. The sheer variety of nationalist thought also explicitly politicized the act of defining the nation, for there were now many different Turkish nations competing for political allegiance. Yet, most significantly, privatization ushered in a period of historical

9

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11 12

The underlying assumption behind this view, first put forth by Turkish nationalists in the late nineteenth century, and one often invoked by Ataturk ¨ himself, was that the Ottoman elite were a cosmopolitan group identifying with no social group or national culture and thus could not, as the conservative nationalists claimed, be counted as a Turkish state. Karpat, “Ideology in Turkey after the Revolution of 1960,” 91. The People’s Houses were established in 1931 and had 478 branches throughout Turkey until they were closed down by the Menderes government in 1951. They were reestablished ˘ after the revolution, and reverted back under the new name Union of Culture (Kult ¨ ur ¨ Birligi) to their original name in 1963. ¨ un ¨ Sosyal ¸ etin Altan, Ataturk’ Some went as far as to claim that Ataturk ¨ was a socialist. See C ˙ ¨ us ¨ ¸ leri (Ankara: Inkıl Gor ap ˆ Kitabevi, 1965). Cumhuriyet, 21 August 1960.

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reflection. Broad segments of the Turkish elite, especially in the wake of the 1960 revolution, began to take stock of the forty-year trajectory of the Turkish Republic, inquiring into its origins, mistakes, and direction. Privatization marked the birth of a critical self-appraisal of the national project across the political spectrum, one that would continue unabated until the 1980 military coup. Foreign Policy and Turkish Public Opinion Though breathtaking in number and array, the horizon of the new nationalisms was initially confined to the domestic arena. The first two decades of the privatization of nationalism were marked by a deep insularity. The abstracted communist threat notwithstanding, the new nationalisms took little notice of Turkey’s position within the new global order and displayed near-total ignorance of emerging nationalist currents around the world. The root of this insularity lay in the long-standing practice of excluding Turkish foreign policy from political debate. It was not until the early 1960s that leftist groups including the ¨ began challenging WPT and the intellectuals clustered around the journal Yon Turkey’s global role and direction, but even then they constituted a minority, both numerically and ideationally. For the vast majority of the Turkish elite, Turkey’s external relations remained outside and above the fray of Turkish politics. The two major parties held identical ambitions of cementing Turkey’s place in the Western orbit, and mainstream public opinion either displayed unquestioning support of government policy or at most a certain questioning of the methods used.13 All this was to change by 1965. Two key events, both involving the island of Cyprus, brought Turkish foreign policy into political purview. The Republic of Cyprus came into existence on 15 August 1960, with the guarantee that the rights of the minority Turkish population (about 20 percent) would be protected by Greece, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Within three years, the president of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios, sought amendments to the constitution, sparking Turkish protests and communal violence. On 13 March 1964, in an effort to protect the Turkish minority in Cyprus, Turkish ˙ ˙ on prime-minister Ismet In ¨ u¨ threatened unilateral action unless an immediate cease-fire was declared, the siege lifted from Turkish districts, freedom of communication restored to Turks on the island, and Turkish hostages released.14 ˙ on The U.S. president’s response to In ¨ u, ¨ effectively forbidding intervention, served as a wake-up call to Turks. The “Johnson letter,” as it came to be known, informed the Turkish government that weapons provided by Washington could not be used without U.S. consent. Furthermore, it warned that 13 14

¨ Duygu Sezer, Kamu Oyu ve Dıs¸ Politika (Ankara: A.U.S.B.F., 1972), 235. Ankara had initially sought a joint intervention with her co-guarantors, Britain and Greece, to protect the rights of the Turkish minority. Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey, 140.

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the Atlantic Alliance would not come to Turkey’s aid in the event of Soviet intervention if Turkey were to take any steps without the full consent and understanding of its NATO allies.15 The letter was not officially released until 13 January 1965, but word of its contents leaked almost immediately to the press, sparking anti-American demonstrations throughout the country that would continue on and off until the 1980 military coup.16 More importantly, the Johnson letter underscored how Turkish and U.S. foreign policy were not always aligned, and made painfully clear that U.S. objectives would take precedence over Turkish ones when they were not. In the months following the letter, Turks came to realize that their inclusion under Washington’s nuclear umbrella had come at a large cost: the right of Turkey to decide its own foreign policy, especially regarding its regional concerns. The second event to draw Turkey’s external relations into the political arena was the UN General Assembly’s declaration of December 1965, wherein the UN rejected the Turkish proposal on Cyprus. President Makarios had specifically referred the issue to the Assembly, where he enjoyed the support of the nonaligned nations and in which Turkey was totally isolated. For Turks, the General Assembly’s declaration dealt a further blow to their international outlook. Not only had a one-dimensional foreign policy backfired in Turkey’s dealing with the United States but it had also cost Turkey its standing among other members of the international community. The reaction in Turkey was swift and far-reaching. By 1965, journalists and intellectuals were no longer satisfied in criticizing the government’s handling of the Cyprus issue but had moved beyond Cyprus to the larger question of Turkey’s national interests and their relation to foreign policy. Cyprus was now viewed as one part of this general problematic. As Duygu Sezer noted: For the first time the general direction of Turkey’s foreign policy was served up to public scrutiny. In this respect 1965 was a watershed year where the Turkish press approached the country’s external relations through a very wide-angled interpretive lens, spanning 20 years of foreign policy since 1945.17

The common conclusion was that Turkey, not paying heed to its own national realities, had become dependent on a foreign nation (the United States) and in doing so had sacrificed its national independence and sovereignty. Yet this, for most writers of the political mainstream, was seen as something to be fixed while still remaining within the western orbit; perhaps along the lines, as some suggested, of de Gaulle’s France. The government, partly as a response to these criticisms, partly reeling from its own impotence, ordered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to reexamine the country’s foreign relations; meanwhile the 15 16 17

¨ Hurriyet, 13 January 1966. Once the gates had been opened, U.S. intervention in Vietnam and its support of Israel during the 1967 Middle East War added further fuel to anti-American sentiment within Turkey. Sezer, Kamu Oyu ve Dıs¸ Politika, 251.

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general staff created a new division of the TAF totally independent of NATO, to be used solely in the national interest.18 Despite such moves, the government never seriously contemplated a fundamental realignment of Turkish foreign policy. Coming just a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis and still some ways before detente, Turkey was forced to take the American punch squarely in the ´ face. The bravado evident in Inonu’s response to Johnson – “[Since this is the case] We will seek out another world for ourselves” – reveals equally the desire to reexamine Turkey’s place within the global order as well as the limits to such an undertaking. Nevertheless, the damage had been done. After Cyprus, the floodgates that for twenty years had shut off Turkey’s external relations from political debate suddenly opened. The Cyprus crisis bolstered the ranks and prestige of both the radical nationalist and leftist intelligentsia who had argued for a “national” foreign policy independent of the two Cold War camps. Their incessant criticisms of Turkey’s external relations pushed the two mainstream parties into detailing their own positions. From the mid-1960s onward, the questioning of Turkey’s role and position within the world became a constant feature of Turkish political debate, fueling, and in turn further fueled by, Turkey’s growing awareness of the world around it.19 The most significant impact of this development was to impart a global dimension to the new nationalisms, allowing nationalist thought to be expressed in relation to the world order. By the late 1960s, nationalist thought in Turkey had taken a global turn, reinterpreting both Turkish history and the future of the Turkish project within a global context. Economy, Ideology, and the EEC We have so far examined two conditions for the emergence of a nationalist opposition to the EEC: the privatization of nationalism, which allowed for alternate imaginings of the Turkish nation, and the politicization of Turkish foreign policy, which lent these new nationalisms a global dimension. While 18 19

Nasuh Uslu, The Cyprus Question as an Issue of Turkish Foreign Policy and Turkish-American Relations, 1959–2003 (New York: Nova Science Pub. Inc, 2003), 72. Added to these developments was the diversification of interests within the Turkish bureaucracy itself. By the mid-1960, government ministries charged with overseeing various aspects of the economy began to assert themselves over Turkey’s foreign policy. Turkey’s external relations, previously the exclusive domain of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, became a contested site for divergent and increasingly politicized bureaucratic agendas. With an increase in Turkey’s trade deficit came an increase in the need for foreign funds. As the Finance Ministry became more and more dependent on international sources of income, it made a concerted push for greater involvement in Turkey’s external relations. Likewise, Turkey’s ongoing integration into the world economy augmented the jurisdiction of the Trade Ministry over foreign affairs. But above all, as we shall see, it was the newly founded State Planning Organization that posed the greatest bureaucratic challenge to the MFA. The net effect of these differing bureaucratic agendas was to spark an intragovernmental debate over what foreign policy was best for Turkey.

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these two conditions made it possible to criticize Turkey’s integration into the Common Market, they do not, in themselves, explain why this integration came to be viewed as an existential threat to the nation. To understand how this occurred, it is necessary to take a closer look at the language Turks used to describe integration itself. Despite the grandiose rhetoric that had accompanied the signing of the Ankara Agreement, the EEC, from a European perspective, was, and continued to be, primarily an economic organization.20 It took Turks a little longer to realize this. Once the smoke, political confetti, and civilizational claims of the Ankara Agreement had cleared and the actual business of economic integration got under way, Turkey began to view the EEC in a very different light. In this context, the Turkish government’s decision in May 1967 to advance to the transitional phase of the Ankara Agreement heralded a new era in TurkishEEC relations. Based on the terms of the original treaty, this second phase required that Turkey and the EEC agree on an Additional Protocol that would oversee Turkey’s integration into the European Customs Union. For the EEC, this was to be a purely technical document, outlining a timetable for the mutual reduction of tariffs between Turkey and the Common Market states. It was a document to be understood through statistical projections and assessments, negotiated using charts and tables. By contrast, within Turkey, the often technical discussions over economic integration became charged with ideological rhetoric. This ideological discourse formed a common thread among all antiEEC groups and stood as a key feature of Turkish opposition. Absent this ideological charge, it is difficult to imagine how negotiations over the exact volume of exportable dried fruits or importable aluminium could seem so vital to the survival of the nation. Negotiations for the Additional Protocol would have remained at a technical level of discussion, depoliticized, as was the case among the “six,” by its relegation to a technocratic elite. But such technical discussions required quantitative knowledge about both the present state and projected future of the Turkish economy. It required, in effect, the existence of a sophisticated statistical enterprise that was, at best, underdeveloped in Turkey. The lack of quantitative knowledge about the Turkish economy had been an issue in Turkey’s international dealings before, first brought up by the Economic Cooperation Agency (ECA) in charge of administering Marshall Plan funds in applicant countries. In fact, ECA officials had remarked numerous times on the problems this lack had

20

For an excellent account of the early years of the EEC, see Pier Ludlow, The European Community and the Crises of the 1960s (London: Routledge, 2006). Other works include John Gillingham, European Integration, 1950–2003: Super-State or New Market Economy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jeffery William Vanke, “Europeanism and the European Economic Community, 1954–66” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1999); Allan Williams, The European Community: the Contradictions of Integration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

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caused. In the correspondence between two ECA officials dated 1953, Elmer A. Starch, the chief of the Agricultural Group in Turkey, confided that: We have been working entirely in the dark as to the economic impacts of the various programs which we have initiated. We have done the best we could to guess, but when someone asks us “what is the impact of tractor importation on the Turkish economy?” we have nothing but opinion to offer. The Ministry [of Agriculture] has a goal of doubling the agricultural production in ten years. I believe it is a possibility, but we have no information which would give us a sound basis to know where we should hit our iron!21

As Burcak Kozat has noted, although social and agricultural censuses had been periodically conducted since the fourteenth century, and a semiautonomous statistics institute was founded in 1926, Turkish authorities could not provide the detailed information that the ECA needed to appraise Turkey’s macroeconomic needs and demands.22 Turkish bureaucrats themselves often complained about the lack of quantitative data regarding the state of the economy.23 In 1960, when the newly founded State Planning Organization (SPO) petitioned the Finance Ministry as to Turkey’s financial obligations, the economists of the SPO remarked how “they had no idea how much foreign debt Turkey had or when she needed to pay it back and on what terms.”24 Certain figures were provided to the SPO for individual countries, but even these came without documentation. Producing such numbers was in fact one of the initial tasks of the SPO, which set out to “take the first inventory of Turkey.”25 Yet, the integration of the Turkish economy with the EEC demanded statistical knowledge of an altogether different nature, and carried with it much higher stakes than the proper allocation of external funds. Negotiations for the Additional Protocol involved the creation of decades-long timetables for the removal of Turkish tariffs on imports from the EEC. They thus required knowledge not only about the present state of the Turkish economy, but a quantitative sectoral analysis of its future potential. Only with such data would it be possible to 21 22

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Burc¸ak Keskin Kozat, “Negotiating Modernization Through U.S. Foreign Assistance: Turkey’s Marshall Plan 1948–1952” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2007), 241–42. Some Turkish Foreign Ministry staff even confessed to “inventing statistics” on crucial issues by combining the existing, incomplete figures with their estimates about economic trends. In their memoirs, they subsequently acclaimed such deeds of theirs as “bold, pioneering endeavors in ¨ us ¨ ¸ tu¨ Zorlu’nun Oyk ¨ u: ¨ revolutionizing Turkish economic diplomacy”; Semih Gunver, Fatin Rus ¨ ¨ ¨ Z Zorro Gibi (Istanbul: Bilgi, 1985), 37; Melih Esenbel, Turkiye’nin Batı’ile Ittifaka Yonelis ¸i (Istanbul: Isis, 2000), 64. Yavuzalp, Menderes’le Anılar (Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1991), 89; Feridun Cemal See Ercument ¨ Erkin, Anılar (Ankara: Turk ¨ Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1992), 132, as quoted in Burc¸ak Keskin Kozat, “Negotiating Modernization,” 241. ˘ ¨ ¨ in Planlı Kalkınma Seruveni: 1960’larda Turkiye’de Planlama Deneyimi, Ayhan C¸ilingiroglu, ¨ ed. Farhi Aral (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi Universitesi Yayınları, 2003), 34. Ibid., 56.

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decide which industries (both those currently existing and those to be initiated later) needed protection from the industrialized economies of the Common Market. By the early 1970s, the private sector, led by the pro-EEC I˙ktisadi Kalkınma Vakfı (Economic Development Fund), had begun to conduct some initial studies, examining the effect of integration on the sugar, dairy, automotive, and home appliance industries, yet these were quite rudimentary by European standards. As late as 1974, an exasperated Foreign Minister Turan Gunes ¨ ¸ observed, The EEC is founded not just on an economic philosophy but the detailed, quantitative knowledge of one’s national economy. While the member states fill volumes over, say, the subject of tomato paste, no one in Turkey has any idea what the Turkish economy will be like in ten years. What will its aluminum industry look like? Its prospects in chemicals? Heavy industry? No one is doing research on these matters, there are no statistics to speak of. No calculations exist as to the financial and economic cost of tariff reduction. In short, we have no verifiable data by which to judge the costs and benefits of EEC integration.26

Gunes ¨ ¸ ’s frustration was not only with the lack of a trained Turkish technocratic elite needed to carry out such evaluations. His frustration was equally directed to the “radical speculators,” those who had made integration into the EEC an ideological matter in the absence of this technocratic elite. What the Foreign Minister wanted was for Turks to talk about and approach the EEC in the same manner as the emerging Eurocrats in Brussels: in effect to leave negotiations to quantitative experts reaching compromise through technical discussion. This, however, was far from the Turkish reality. The rules and language of diplomatic negotiation had changed, requiring new skills and breeding. As Oral Sander scathingly noted in his 1978 critique of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “In an age when diplomacy is conducted by Common Market technocrats too busy to tuck their shirts in, our diplomats look more as if they belonged at the 1815 Conference of Vienna.”27 The EEC became an ideological problem within Turkey precisely because Turkey lacked a sophisticated statistical enterprise. As Mehmet Ali Birand remarked regarding Turkish debate on the Common Market in the 1970s, “Outside of a few level headed economists, everyone else seemed to be ‘practicing literature’ (edebiyat yapiyordu).”28 In the absence of a technical discourse, Turkish integration was subject to the comment and debate of a much broader swath of the Turkish elite, to people whose authority rested not on statistical arguments but those of politics, culture, and history. Just as Turkish support for the EEC had been expressed in civilizational terms as the consummation of the Turkish project, the opening up of debate to a nontechnical sociopolitical 26 27 28

¨ ¨ uk ¨ Avrupa Kavgası, 231. Birand, Turkiyein Buy Milliyet, 5 March 1978. ¨ ¨ uk ¨ Avrupa Kavgası, 231. Birand, Turkiyein Buy

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elite centered Turkish opposition to the Common Market on equally ideological ground, one that saw integration as a fundamental threat to the Turkish nation. The Existential Present of the Turkish Nation The privatization of Turkish nationalism, its global turn in the wake of the Cyprus crisis, and the continued use of ideological rhetoric to understand Turkish integration into Europe, provided the institutional and epistemic possibility for nationalist opposition to the EEC. These conditions were exogenous to Turkish-EEC relations and were largely in place before significant Turkish opposition arose in the fall of 1968. But it was the actual process of opposition, one that stretched from 1968 through 1980, that fundamentally altered how Turkey was understood. The EEC furnished a unique stage for the new nationalisms, providing them with a concrete target, a material, contemporary, and ongoing threat, one that demanded the immediate self-assertion of the nation to salvage itself. This stage lent the new nationalisms a sense of urgency, and in doing so effectively changed the temporality in which the nation was imagined. This final section examines the radical shift in the temporality of national imagination that emerged through nationalist opposition to the Common Market. Postwar Anglo-American scholars, led by Bernard Lewis and Daniel Lerner, were quick to categorize Ataturk’s aim of raising Turkey to the level of contem¨ porary civilization as an exemplary application of the newly emergent modernization theory.29 The theory understood modernization as a universal process involving the cultural, political, and economic transition of societies from traditional to modern. Within this global framework, societies were hierarchically and linearly ranked according to their distance from the “standards of contemporary civilization” as centered in and normatively defined by the already modernized Euro-American world. Understood in these terms, the Civilizational logic that structured the worldview of Turkey’s postwar elite was not just the welcoming of Europe (as other) into the self but also the welcoming of modernity as a project of self-transformation. Yet the importation of this modernity, much like the financial loans that followed in its wake, carried with it a number of conditions – conditions that made the Turkish experience of modernity fundamentally different from the European experience. First, the Civilizational logic required an acceptance of contemporary European society as the end-goal of modernity. Reified as the “west,” modernity became situated at a spatial and temporal distance from 29

For classical examples of modernization theory applied to Turkey in the postwar period, see Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (Glencoe: Macmillan Pub Co, 1958); Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); and Roderic Davison, Turkey (Englewood Cliffs: The Eothen Press, 1968).

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Turkey, whose task it became to annul this geographic and temporal gap.30 In this way, as Rebecca Karl has pointed out, “the west became the geopolitical category through which the historical predicate of modernity was translated into a geographic one.”31 In other words, the Civilizational logic required understanding modernity as something that had happened “outside of” Turkey, constituting an other which subsequently was invited “in.” Second, the Civilizational logic conditioned the way Turks could approach their past. It required a denial of the historical specificity of Turkey’s Ottoman legacy, or more precisely, colored this legacy as a vestige of a traditional culture that Turkey needed to overcome. These conditions, by predefining how Turks understood their past and future, requisitioned contemporary Turkey, shrinking its present to a transitional phase between the traditional and the modern. Nationalist opposition to the EEC blasted through this processional temporality of the Civilizational logic. It did so by grasping integration into the Common Market as a moment of danger for the Turkish nation. By underscoring the immediate threat posed by the EEC, the new nationalisms arrested the “homogenous course of history” that had consigned the present to a set of predetermined moments within the teleology of westernization. In this way, opposition to the EEC reconfigured the time of the nation, charging the present with a sense of existential urgency. Integration into the Common Market, especially as it progressed into the second transitional stage, demanded immediate action, a rearguard attack to thwart the impending demise of Turkey. The shared view that Turkey was on the brink of survival allowed the new nationalisms to critically pose a set of questions about the past and future of Turkish society. What kind of society have we formed? Where did this society come from? In what direction is this society headed? And is this something that we, as society, want? To ask such questions was to reorient modernity from something that had happened in Europe earlier and to which Turkey would “modernize” toward, to an understanding of Turkey as part of modernity. This questioning represented an internalization of modernity; not as something brought in or “adopted” but as a project of radical self-alteration that was taking place within Turkey. In this sense, one can argue that the new nationalisms actualized the experience of modernity as experienced by Europeans themselves, an experience otherwise denied by the Europeans’ translation of modernity into a predetermined and linear “modernization” imposed on the non-western world. Linear modernization had effectively occluded Turkey from participation in the experience of modernity proper. This is a crucial 30

31

For the idea of the non-contemporaneousness of geographically diverse but chronologically simultaneous times, which develops in the context of colonial experience, see Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde(London: Verso, 1995). Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 18.

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point, because the rejection of modernization has often been confused with the rejection of “western” modernity or the conceptual formation of “alternate” or “multiple” modernities. The new nationalisms, seen in this context, did not represent a turn away from western modernity but rather its full (untruncated) internalization to the non-western world.32 Stated another way, the new nationalisms approached Turkey and the Turkish project not as a struggle with or against modernity (as the Civilizational logic had done), but rather as Turkey’s, and their, struggle of modernity.33

the three tongues of the nation From 1968 to 1980, opposition to the Common Market became the central site through which various segments within Turkish society propagated new representations of what and who Turkey was, as well as its role and place in the world. The logic of this site, the structure governing the ways opposition to the EEC was articulated, I called the Nationalist logic. The Nationalist logic refers to a specific way of constituting the self – a discourse of nationalism based on the antagonistic constitution of the self and other. The Nationalist logic thus describes a particular terrain through which social identification occurred. It erects a discursive frontier (in this instance between the Turkish nation and the EEC) simultaneously positing an enemy (EEC) and a threatened self-identity (the Turkish nation), which, though allegedly present beforehand, only takes shape retroactively through the encounter. Through this encounter, the other becomes defined as what prevents me from being totally myself; the self, as that which is threatened by the other. The concept of the Nationalist logic is a strictly formal one; all of its features exclusively relate to a specific mode of constitution, independent of the actual contents that are articulated. Privileging the form over the content of Turkish opposition to the EEC presents several advantages. First, it underscores how the various understandings of the nation were not formulated exogenously and later brought to bear on Turkish-EEC relations, but rather emerged through the encounter itself, as that which was threatened by integration into the

32

33

ˇ zek’s argument stands here along with Fredric Jameson’s notion of the singularity of moderZiˇ nity, not because modernity is, let us say stupidly, a “Western invention” (and therefore no Other can have it), but because its core historical characteristic is the interrogation and (re)invention of its ephemeral and singular intersection with history. If anything may be said to characterize modernity as a specific social-historical formation, it is precisely that it remains inordinately open to its own undoing. In other words, modernity is constituted on the basis of an internal antagonism that sustains the possibility of a self-generated otherness that may (and often does) alter entirely the generating self. The singularity of modernity resides in actualizing the capacity for self-alteration on a historical scale, which is the quintessential condition for social autonomy, but it is also bound by no guarantee and, therefore, may just as well produce the destruction of autonomy. Karl, Staging the World, 19.

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Common Market. In this manner, the Nationalist logic highlights the constitutive character of Turkish-EEC relations on the national imaginary. Second, it avoids the na¨ıve sociologism that reduces political forms to the pre-constituted unity of the group. Third, it addresses and explains the prevalence of the Nationalist logic across the entire sociopolitical spectrum, and how it could emerge from any point – trade unions, political parties, universities, industrial and occupational organizations, the media, military, and bureaucracy – in the socio-institutional structure. The Nationalist logic does not define the particular policies of these social groupings but rather serves as the terrain on which these policies are articulated. Fourth, it helps us better understand an idiosyncratic feature of the opposition to the EEC, namely the circulation of signifiers and symbols of opposition among groups with divergent ideologies and projects. The antagonistic structure of the Nationalist logic demarked the category of the nation as a problem, allowing the new nationalisms to present themselves as solutions to this nationalist problematic. Each solution had a particular mode of appeal, a way of erecting its discursive frontier, that instituted distinct understandings of the Turkish nation. The three appeals will be explored in detail within this chapter; here it is sufficient to identify them briefly: The Turkish Nation-State: Statist appeals that signified the EEC as politically supranational and economically liberal, a threat to Turkey’s unity, independence, territorial integrity, or economic autonomy, conceptualized Turkey as a developing independent state. The Turkish Nation-People: Populist appeals that signified the EEC as an elitist and imperialistic creation, an agent of big business and foreign capital, constituted Turkey as the Turkish people, sovereign in the Republican sense, who were exploited, antielitist, and democratic. Turkish Occidentalism: Nativist appeals that signified the EEC as culturally western, Christian, Zionist, unjust, materialistic, immoral, and homogenizing constituted the Turks as having a distinct spirit, heritage, customs, language, history, traditions and religion that would be eroded within the EEC.

These three solutions to the nationalist problematic were based on three distinct historical-conceptual traditions. These traditions do not coincide with the historical traditions of specific political movements (Islamic, socialist, secular, etc.) within Turkey. Rather, they were categories of speaking about the nation, each demarcated by the antagonistic frontier they drew between the Turkey and the EEC. Groups from across the political spectrum, the bureaucracy, and civil society appealed to these categories in their opposition to the EEC. These appeals were not expressed by distinct sociopolitical groups or institutions. In fact, most anti-EEC movements were constituted by a combination of these appeals. Cutting across the political spectrum as well as state and civil institutions, these appeals bypassed categorical territories and social definitions

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and forged unforeseen synchronicities between various social sectors. Taken together, the three appeals represent three variations of nationalist thought in opposition to the Common Market and the Civilizational logic that structured Turkish support for it. Developing the State Development has been a constituent feature of the modern Turkish state since its inception. The Kemalist revolution charged the Turkish state with overseeing the economic, political/legal, and territorial development of the nation. Whether this development should proceed through an invitational or antagonistic relation with the “more developed” western states has been the constant tension within the history of developmentalist ideology in Turkey. The Civilizational logic had resolved this tension in favor of invitation. Ataturk’s vision of “reaching the level of contemporary civilization” implied ¨ (1) an acceptance of the western framework as modern, universal, and independent of cultures, and (2) a realization that Turkey was behind and needed to adopt western ways to “catch up” to it on these terms. In the space between these ideas lay the invitational path of national development. European law codes, political categories, and alphabet were directly incorporated by the Kemalist regime, and European dress, music, and scientific practices actively promoted by the state. In the postwar period, especially subsequent to the 1950 election that brought Adnan Menderes and the Democrat Party to power, this trend accelerated radically. Western (read American liberal) economic practices were adopted to facilitate foreign direct investment, western financial aid was actively solicited as a path to development, and western advisors brought in to oversee it. The new nationalisms that sprung up in the aftermath of the 1960 military coup recalibrated the terms of national development toward its other pole. For many, this recalibration did not imply a rejection of the west as the benchmark of the national project, but rather reawakened past arguments over its role in Turkish development. As Tarık Tunaya, one of the intellectuals who helped turn the coup into a socio-institutional and political revolution, wrote in his seminal 1960 study, Westernization Movements in Turkey’s Political History, “Turkey had to westernize in spite of the West. It carried out a war of independence against the West so as to be able to join the West.”34 Nevertheless, this “in spite of” and “against” the west implied a fundamentally different approach to national development than that of the Civilizational logic. It was a recognition that Turkish national development had to maintain, at least temporarily, an antagonistic relation with its more developed neighbors. Reformulated in this

34

˙ ¨ Siyasi Hayatında Batılılas¸ma Hareketleri (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi Tarık Tunaya, Turkiyenin ¨ Universitesi Yayınları, 1960), 107.

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manner, development became a vital process in the ongoing struggle to secure Turkish sovereignty against western encroachment. The notion of development also formed a central component of the more conservative strains of nationalist thought which rejected the western framework altogether. It is interesting to note that the resistance to all things western as the condition for a true national development, a feeling common among certain Islamic and ultranationalist circles, did not, ironically enough, include the very western notion of development itself.35 Their views on the final goal of development aside, all statist nationalisms were united in reimagining the state as the only legitimate form of the nation capable of guaranteeing Turkey’s economic, judicial/political, and territorial sovereignty from the imperialistic intentions of the west. Statist opposition to the EEC, for obvious reasons, was most concerned with the deleterious effects the Common Market would have on Turkey’s economic development. Although generally regarded as its fundamental register, the idea of economic development, even in the west, is a recent phenomenon. According to the OED, the economic-evolutionary usage of “development” dates only to 1871.36 Within Turkey, the ideological framework and practice of economic development has had a winding and conflicted history, revolving around the twin concepts of industrialization and planning.37 Aside from the few conservative peasantists who anchored Turkish national identity in the moral economy of agricultural life, few in Turkey have questioned the centrality of industrialization for economic development.38 What became a cause for intense debate, however, was the role of the west in achieving it. The economic destitution of Anatolia at the birth of the Republic had made the Ottoman debates on this issue rather moot. A decade of warfare had left the Turkish economy in ruins, a situation made even worse by the exodus, forced removal, or destruction of non-Muslim minorities who had controlled the lion’s share of commerce and industry under the empire. Without a national bourgeoisie, basic infrastructure, or domestic capital, the young republic was forced to look outward to industrialize. The quick rapprochement with the west following the Turkish War of Independence, the assumption of the substantial Ottoman debt to demonstrate Turkey’s financial creditability and political 35 36 37

38

Nor, for that matter, did it extend to the more fundamental category of the nation itself, the most quintessential of western creations, but this is of course a much longer story. Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 27. For a review of Turkish economic development and policies during the first decades of the ¨ ¨ Republic, see Necat Erder, Planlı Kalkınma Seruveni: 1960’larda Turkiye’de Planlama Deney¨ ¨ ¨ imi (Istanbul: Bilgi Universitesi, 2003); Seriye Sezen, Devletc¸ilikten Ozelles ¸ tirmeye Turkiye’de Planlama (Ankara: TODAIE, 1996). For an overview of Turkish peasantist ideology, particularly in the thought and teachings of ˘ “The Role of Religion and Geography in Turkish glu, Nurettin Topc¸u, see M. Asım Karaomerlio ¨ Nationalism,” Spatial Conceptions of the Nation (2010): 93–109.

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willingness to honor its global obligations, and the stipulated lowering of barriers to foreign investment during the 1920s linked Turkish economic development to the global economy. The global depression, simultaneously increasing protectionist/interventionist impulses within capitalist states and international prestige for the planned industrialization of the Soviet Union, brought about a statist turn in Turkish economic policy. In 1932, S¸evket Aydemir, a member of the left´ leaning Kadro movement and early ideologue of the Etatist tradition in modern Turkey, remarked on this global trend: Regardless of the kind of definition adopted (the Soviet, the European, or a peculiar one for developing nations), it is certain that economic planning has become the most fundamental characteristic of the world economy. The socio-economic systems of the future will be “planned systems.”39

´ The 1930s Etatist movement revived two nineteenth-century currents, Comtian radical positivism and economic nationalism, linking sovereign economic development to the nation understood as a rationally planned project. Both traditions had been translated to Turkish soil by the Young Turks following the 1908 revolution and both were antithetical to liberalism.40 In an early instance of what would later be called dependency theory, the ideologues of ´ Etatism insisted that only a rationally planned industrialization could rescue an underdeveloped nation from permanent peripheral status within the global imperial economy. ´ Significantly, the move to Etatism began with a series of government measures between 1929 and 1931, “to bring foreign trade under state control with a view to protectionism.”41 The Kemalists’ belief that national industrial development required strict state control of its foreign trade regime reflected their understanding of the Ottoman Empire’s failure to do the same. In doing ´ so, Etatism not only cemented state-directed industrialization as an essential feature of Turkish nationalism, but also underscored how national industrialization was at odds with, and threatened by, the interests of foreign capital.42 These ideas, as we shall see, would be revived time and again by the statist opposition to the EEC. 39 40 41 42

¨ Sadık Unay, Neoliberal Globalization and Institutional Reform: The Political Economy of Development Planning in Turkey (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2006), 85. ¨ ˙ ˘ ¸ Yayıncılık, 1994). ¨ Erol Ozbilgen, Pozitivizmin Kıskacında Turkiye (Istanbul: Agac Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey, 97. The Kemalists also made efforts to embed these ideas into the cultural life of the nation. As part of the wider effort to raise a “national economic consciousness,” the Kemalists introduced the national tradition of “Local Goods Week” in 1929. On the occasion of its inaugural address, given at the Istanbul branch of the National Industry Association, Ataturk ¨ proclaimed, “The Turkish Fatherland, Turkish industry, is elevated and developed by Turkish labor. Turks; buy Turkish goods, use Turkish goods, so that Turkish money remains on Turkish soil.”

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It is important not to exaggerate the reach of Turkey’s first attempt at ´ state-directed economic development. Etatism in Turkey was, for all its lofty rhetoric, a very rudimentary undertaking in both method and means. The First and Second Industrial Plans that it gave birth to were limited to the public sector, created no new institutions, and, unlike postwar endeavors, drew up no specific targets for economic growth, trade, or investment.43 In sum, the first two industrialization plans managed to construct twenty state-owned factories ´ in a span of nine years. Yet for all its shortcomings, Etatism represented the first attempt at planned development in the world following the Soviet Union.44 It also meant that Turkey’s initial foray into industrialization had come about through planning, giving birth to a discourse unique among developing nations whose first experiences with industrialization typically took place in a later, more pro-market environment.45 The liberalization of the Turkish economy after 1950 spelled the death knell ´ of Etatist ideology. Adnan Menderes, the DP prime minister throughout the 1950s, was a vocal and unequivocal opponent of planning, claiming on more than one occasion that “our plan is not to have a plan.”46 The government’s aversion to planning went so far as to oppose the annual economic programs requested by the Americans as a condition of Marshall Aid, putting the DP at odds even with the liberal-corporatist agenda of the United States.47 Under Menderes, Turkish industrialization would not only proceed unplanned, but was to develop within and with the aid of the global capitalist economy.48 By mid-decade, most obstructions to the functioning of foreign capital had been lifted, including the repatriation of profits, restrictions on the transfer of foreign exchange, and previous bans on the exploitation of natural and mineral resources, especially oil. As Menderes so succinctly declared, “No national economy had developed without foreign capital. Therefore we consider it our patriotic duty to pass the Law to Encourage Foreign Investment.”49

43

44 45 46 47 48

49

See Ergin Gunc ¨ ¸ e, “Early Planning Experiences in Turkey,” in Planning in Turkey, eds. Ilkin and Inanc¸ (Ankara: METU Publications: 1963; H. C¸etin, “Cumhuriyet Doneminde Planlama ¨ ¨ ˘ Dergisi, 32 (1973): 23–45. Deneyleri,” Mulkiyeler Birligi Korkut Boratav, Turkiye Iktisat Tarihi: 1908–1985 (Istanbul: Gerc¸ek Yayınları, 1988). ¨ Unay, Neoliberal Globalization, 168. ˘ Burhan Oguz, Yas¸adıklarım, Dinlediklerim: Tarihi ve Toplumsal Anılar (Istanbul: Simurg, 2000), 448. A trend also observed in other recipients of Marshall Aid, notably Italy and Ireland. Kozat, “Negotiating,” 264. The trend had begun even earlier with the legalization of opposition parties, including the shortlived National Development Party (Milli Kalkınma Partisi), which began to challenge the etatism ´ of the RPP with calls for the restoration of free enterprise and market. As the NDP’s leader Nuri Demirag˘ put it, his party was founded “in order to end the thousand and one miseries, calamities, and injustices that the people have suffered from the etatist administration.” These ´ sentiments were given further fuel with the introduction of Marshall Aid bringing with it American pressure to reform the Turkish economy “so as to make it more palatable to foreign investment.” Ahmad, Turkish Experiment in Democracy, 123. Ibid., 132.

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Yet, with the precipitous drop in agricultural prices in 1954, Turkey’s experiment in liberalism, in what would become a recurrent trend for export-led development in peripheral economies, began to spiral. The now all-too-familiar cycle of huge current account imbalances forcing inflationary policies, highinterest short-term loans, and towering deficits finally culminated in a 1958 IMF-imposed devaluation and stabilization program with concomitant restrictions on Turkey’s internal spending and external accounts.50 As the economic ´ tradition, attacking the crisis deepened, critics of the DP resurrected the Etatist very “irrationality” of the government’s economic policies. Citing the shortsighted borrowing, haphazard and politically motivated subsidies, and inflationary policies of the DP era, these critics contended that the nation was off its course – that is, not developing according to a plan.51 An early and leading current of this criticism centered on the journal Forum52 and was soon picked ˙ on up by the RPP opposition, whose leader In ¨ u¨ “insist[ed] on the need for an orderly plan and programme.”53 Such arguments also made their way into many of the backroom debates of officers in the Turkish Armed Forces and played a role in prompting these officers to carry out the 1960 coup. Regarding economic development, the single most important outcome of the 1960 military coup was the creation of the State Planning Organization (SPO) charged with overseeing the economic, social, and cultural development of the nation according to a plan.54 Enshrined into the new constitution, planning was now to become a constituent feature of the Turkish Republic, linking the idea of state planning once again to the national project. As we shall see in the next chapter, the SPO would come to form a significant center of opposition to the EEC, arguing that the trade liberalization required by integration would cripple the SPO’s ability to plan and direct the industrialization of the nation. More significantly, the newest institution of the state served as an anchor for statist criticisms of the Common Market from across the political spectrum, as socialists, secular nationalists, Islamists, and ultranationalists alike united in the belief that the Common Market posed a fundamental threat to the planned ´ industrial development of Turkey. In doing so they revived the Etatist currents of national industrialization and planning that sat in antagonistic tension with western liberal capitalism. Their views of economic development formed the earliest and most persistent strain of nationalist opposition to the EEC. 50 51 52 53 54

See Anne Krueger, Foreign Trade Regimes and Economic Development: Turkey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974). Ahmad, The Turkish Experiment, 123–40. See Osman Okyar, “Turkiye’de Devletc¸ilik ve Liberalizm,” Forum, 1, 8 (15 July 1954); Osman ¨ Okyar, “Planlı Iktisat Rejimi,” Forum, 2, 16 (15 November 1954). ¨ u¨ 1950–1956 (Istanbul: Sıralar Matbassı, 1956), Sabahat Erdemir, ed., Muhalefette I˙smet I˙non 330. Article 129 of the 1961 constitution stated: “Economic, social, and cultural, development is based on a plan. Development is carried out according to this plan.” Milli Birlik Komitesi, Constitution of the Turkish Republic: 1961, S. Balkan and K. Karpat trans., Ankara, 1961, http://www.anayasa.gen.tr/1961constitution-text.pdf.

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The index of development and its policy concomitant, planning, were not simply restricted to the economic domain; statist opposition to the EEC also had recourse to developmentalist ideology as it concerned the political and juridical sovereignty of the Turkish nation-state. In this vein, opposition to the Common Market focused on the EEC as the putative first step in the creation of a supranational political entity. The threat that a future “United States of Europe” would supersede the nation as the preeminent unit of political organization fostered an understanding of Turkey as a politically sovereign and independent nation-state. While this sentiment was shared by many groups within the EEC member and applicant states, Turkish opposition stood out for its focus on development. Commenting on the legal integration between Turkey and EEC, Hasan Ceyhan, educational expert for the Turkish Miners Union and author of a lengthy study to inform the proletariat on Turkish-EEC relations, argued that paradoxically, in “under-developed” countries such as Turkey, Law takes on a revolutionary aspect because it stipulates not what is, but what should be. Yet our legal system, which goes beyond the existing, will be hollowed out of its revolutionary potential through integration with developed nations that require stable and static constitutions.55

Ceyhan claimed that Turkey’s legal system was founded on the regulation of Turkey’s development, on determining the parameters of what Turkey ought to be, not on the regulation of life in present-day Turkey. He quoted passages from the 1961 constitution, which charged various institutions of the state with developing the country on a social basis and argued that the convergence of EEC and Turkish law would deprive Turkey of this future-oriented dimension of law, thereby impinging on the juridical sovereignty of the Turkish nation˙ state. Kemal Turkler, the president of the revolutionary trade union DISK, in a ¨ statement on 24 November 1970 in response to the signing of the Additional Protocol, similarly referenced this developmentalist ideology: Turkey, by accepting membership in the Common Market, has both legally and practically blocked off the road leading to the economic and social reforms as prescribed by the Constitution.56

The register of development, most often understood temporally as the development of the Turkish nation over time, also operated on a geographic dimension. Here statist opposition to the EEC focused on the nation-state as the only guarantor of Turkey’s territorial sovereignty. Theorists of empire have pointed out how the “world’s spaces,” especially in the non-western globe, were first de-territorialized, stripped of their preceding signification, and then re-territorialized according to the demands of western colonial administrations. 55 56

¨ Hasan Ceyhan, Ortak Pazar ve Turkiye (Istanbul: MMO, 1974), 114. ¨ Kemal Turkler’s statement as reprinted in Ceyhan, Ortak Pazar ve Turkiye, 6. ¨

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Though this process has most often been used to describe the dismantling and reorientation of precolonial trade routes, infrastructure, and economies, it is possible to speak of re-territorialization in a neocolonial context. Within Turkey, the establishment of NATO military bases, the eradication of poppy fields, and the Ford Foundation–funded Middle East Technical University (an American-style campus on the outskirts of Ankara) are all examples worth mentioning. The anticolonial appeals that decried such intrusions propagated an understanding of Turkey as a geographically sovereign state, free to develop the territory within its borders. The threat of foreign re-territorialization, whether for economic or geostrategic exploitation, became a constitutive part of the Turkish imagination. Various groups had raised the issue of the territorial sovereignty of the nation-state in the 1960s in response to the establishment of U.S. military bases within Turkey. Within the Cold War context, the real and imagined threat of Soviet aggression had muted many of these objections and confined their circulation mostly to the radical left. Insofar as Turkish membership in the EEC would compel the liberalization of travel, settlement, and investment, it presented a much greater target for neocolonial resistance, one that reached a much wider audience. As Ahmet C¸iftci, an Islamic intellectual whose groundbreaking book, The Common Market in All Its Aspects, influenced Islamic political leader Necmettin Erbakan to speak out against the Common Market soon after, noted, “Neither Turkish industry nor Turkey, neither the Turkish nation nor the Turkish flag will remain after integration.” Speaking of Turkish territory and the flag that marked it, C¸iftci argued: “This ground will become a colony of the European federal state. The Turkish nation will dissolve within the European nation, its flag replaced by that of the European federal flag.”57 The same response could be heard on the left as well. The Workers’ Party of Turkey leader Behice Boran argued: The Treaty of Rome is nothing more than a cartel. For Turkey to join such a union, and in doing so expect any advantage, is akin to the sheep dreaming of survival inside a wolf’s mouth. As long as we remain within the Common Market’s sphere, Turkey will export cheap goods, import expensive ones, paying for the difference by selling off its over/underground resources.58

57 58

¨ uyle ¨ Ortak Pazar (Istanbul: Yeni C ¸ ag˘ Yayınları, 1970), 162. Ahmet C¸iftc¸i, Her Yon Behice Boran became the leader of the WPT in 1969 after disagreements over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia within the party led to the departure of its founder and former leader Mehmet Ali Aybar. Turkey’s first female political party leader, Boran studied sociology in the United States and was introduced to Marxism in these years. Returning to Turkey, Boran joined the clandestine Communist Party of Turkey (TKP). In 1950, she was sentenced to fifteen months in prison for protesting against Turkey’s participation in the Korean War, during which she gave birth to a son, Dursun (literally: let it stop). Between 1965 and 1969, Boran served as one ¨ of the WPT’s deputies in the TGNA. Behice Boran, Turkiye ve Sosyalizm Sorunları (Istanbul: Gun ¨ Yayınları, 1988).

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Or, as the Chamber of Mechanical Engineers remarked, “Membership in the EEC will turn Turkey into nothing but a vacation spot and a natural resource depot for the Europeans.”59 At stake for both C ¸ iftci and Boran was the sovereign right to the territorial development of Turkey, a right threatened by Turkey’s integration into the Common Market. But it was above all the nationalist right that cast the EEC as an existential threat to the territorial integrity of the Turkish nation-state. In a 1970 article for an ultranationalist weekly, titled “Our Common Market Adventure,” Kamil Turan wrote: “The role of Turkey within the Common Market is to die in order that Europe may live.” According to Turan, European states, having lost both the markets for their goods and the depots for their natural resources along with their colonies, were in search of new markets. “Crowded out by the superpowers, they have become desperate. This is why they need Turkey – ¸ , the leader of the Nationalto turn it into a new colony.”60 Alparslan Turkes ¨ ist Action Party, similarly cast the EEC as the grouping of western European states necessary to advance their imperial interests vis-`a-vis the superpowers. In his treatise on foreign policy, Dıs¸ Meselerimiz, Turkes ¸ claimed that the ¨ contemporary world did not operate on or display the ideals of civilization, peace, humanism, and brotherhood that Ataturk ¨ had envisioned Turkey joining. “Rather, the contemporary world is based around the principle of ‘might is right’ where every nation seeks to appropriate for itself the wealth, resources, markets, and ultimately the other nations of the world.”61 The western capitalist states had already laid the groundwork for this appropriation through a gradual process of cultural imperialism. Their weapons, he claimed, were the “press, broadcasts, and schools that act upon our thoughts – and the novels, music, sculpture, plays, clothes, lifestyles and customs that prey upon our souls.”62 With these tools, the new imperialism had guiled the Turkish elite into the willful surrender of the nation, without the need to fire a single shot. Safeguarding Turkey’s interests required a tremendous expansion of the functions and competence of the national state to restrict imperialist intrusion in cultural fields so as to secure its territorial integrity. This meant, first and foremost, vigilantly resisting efforts by Turkey’s alienated ruling elite to integrate into the Common Market.63 Whether concerned with the economic, political/juridical, or territorial development of the nation, statist opposition to the EEC drew heavily on the previous 150 years of Ottoman/Turkish history. The Additional Protocol, as an agreement binding Turkey to the gradual opening up of its internal market, resonated quite forcefully with Turkey’s historical memory. By comparing 59 60 61 62 63

¨ 211. Ceyhan, Ortak Pazar ve Turkiye, Kamil Turan, “Ortak Pazar Maceramız,” Devlet, 29 December 1969. Alparslan Turkes ¸ , Dıs¸ Meselemiz (Istanbul: Berikan Basım Yayım, 1974), 73. ¨ Ibid., 10. Milliyetc¸i Haraket Partisi, Parti Programı (Ankara: MHP, 1971).

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the Common Market to the nineteenth-century Ottoman capitulations, the struggle for national indestatist appeals likened their opposition to Ataturk’s ¨ pendence. The trade unionist Hasan Ceyhan, in his 1970 union-commissioned treatise on the Common Market, abstracted that “capitalism has entered underdeveloped countries either directly through the use of military power or indirectly, using the masks of civilization, culture, education, and aid – the way it, in the end, gained entrance to the Ottoman State.” This indirect imperialism paved the path, Ceyhan argued, for forty years of European loans from the 1839 Trade Agreement through the eventual bankruptcy of the Ottoman Empire, which led to the loss of Ottoman financial and economic sovereignty. Succinctly put, “The history of European-Ottoman relations is at the same time the history of European imperialism’s expansion into the Ottoman Empire, one culminating in the Treaty of Sevres.”64 Ceyhan went on to recontextualize the War of Independence as an anti-imperialist struggle against the west. Quoting from Ataturk’s speech at the Izmir Economic Conference in 1923, he high¨ lighted the parts especially relevant to contemporary Turkish-EEC relations: Full independence requires that national sovereignty be strengthened by economic sovereignty . . . A state that is prevented from regulating the taxation etc. of its customs, cannot be called an independent state. For this reason, the Ottoman State and government were nothing more than the Gendarmes of foreign capital.65

In the opening remarks to the Islamic publication, Parliament and the Common Market, the National Order Party’s (NOP) youth organization leader similarly evoked Turkey’s historical context: The Independence we fought so valiantly for will be handed back over to the Jews and Christians as they buy out our land, our factories, and colonize our soil . . . Following the words of the great Sultan Fatih Mehmed who said, “May God, the Great Prophet and I curse anyone who sells one handful of this country,” we will never allow, under the garb of trade, our nation to be abandoned to foreign exploiters.66

The religious undertones of the text, the references to infidels and the citation from Sultan Fatih Mehmed rather than Mustafa Kemal Ataturk ¨ differed from those of the left-leaning trade unionist, but the overall message was the same. This section detailed how one strand of opposition to the EEC coalesced around the idea of development, and how this idea lay at the heart of Turkish conceptions of its economic, political/legal, and territorial sovereignty. This reassertion of the nation as the prerogative and competence of the state formed the basis for one solution to the nationalist problematic. The next section examines the reformulation of the nation around another category, the Turkish people. 64 65 66

¨ 25. Ceyhan, Ortak Pazar ve Turkiye, Ibid., 29. Milli Nizam Partisi, Mecliste Ortak Pazar (Izmir: MNP, 1971), 55.

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The Nation-People Antonio Gramsci remarked how in his native Italy, the term “national” was ideologically restricted and in no case coincided with the term “popular” because, “in Italy the intellectuals are distant from the people, i.e. from the ‘nation.’ They are instead tied to a tradition that has never been broken by a strong national or popular movement from below.”67 This argument has found great currency among Turkish scholars, who have long maintained that by comparison to European social-historical development, Ottoman and Turkish society has been marked by a center-heavy strong state tradition. Advanced in various garbs by the founding fathers of modern Turkish historical sociology, Metin Heper, S¸erif Mardin, and Kemal Karpat, the critique of the statist tradition continues to inform both left-liberal and neoliberal politics in Turkey to this day.68 More important for our purposes was the circulation of such arguments in the political culture of the 1970s. In the early 1970s, both the radical and mainstream Turkish left distanced themselves from statist rhetoric and began to embrace various forms of revolutionary or democratic populist politics. Around the same time, the use of Islam within politics branched out from its rhetorical role under the right-of-center economic liberalisms of Menderes (DP) and Demirel (JP) and became a properly populist Islamic politics in its own right.69 The new populist conception of the nation came to form a significant source of opposition to the Common Market. Populist criticism of the EEC centered around the effects of Turkish membership on the Turkish people, signifying the EEC as an elitist imperialistic creation serving the interests of European big business and finance capital. In doing so, populist appeals championed the Turkish people as the true political subjects of Turkey, democratic and sovereign in the republican sense. Despite the claims of the dominant historiography, populist conceptions of the nation have had a long history within the Turkish Republic. During the National Struggle, they were instrumental in galvanizing the population against

67 68

69

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 208. For an excellent and incisive critique of this position as mired in an orientalist problematic, one that conceptualizes western history as continuous progress in terms of the development of civil society (taken both as an analytical ideal-type and, in turn, a political ideal) and consequently analyzes Ottoman and Turkish history through the departures from this normative model, see Ali Rıza Gungen and S¸afak Erten, “Approaches of S¸erif Mardin and Metin Heper on State and ¨ Civil Society in Turkey,” Journal of Historical Studies, 3 (2005): 1–14. The equivalence of the nation with its people, or what Gramsci called the “nation-people,” lay at the core of Turkish populist thought. The linking of these two concepts traces back to Rousseau’s notion of the inalienable sovereignty of the general will, through the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man (sovereignty resides essentially in the nation) and the unimplemented Jacobin constitution of 1793 (sovereignty resides in the people). As in German, Russian, and the Slavic languages in general, the Turkish word millet carries this dual meaning of “people” and “nation.”

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both foreign aggressors and the Ottoman state. To this day, the “making of modern Turkey” by the voluntaristic coming together of the Anatolian people to fight for the right to be in charge of their own society stands as a foundational trope of the Turkish Republic. More surprising, however, is how these antistatist populist appeals continued after the consolidation of the Kemalist regime. In 1933 at Bursa, a few days after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, Ataturk ¨ wrote a speech to the Turkish youth: The youth of Turkey are the owners and guardians of the revolution and the republic. Whenever they see the spirit of these threatened, they will not say, “This country has a Police, an Army, a Gendarme, a Judiciary” but rather they will be compelled to intervene. With hands, stones, sticks, or arms, with whatever is available they will protect their being. The police will arrest them, the youth will think, “these police are not the police of the revolution and Republic.” They will be tried and sentenced and again they will think, “we need also to fix and recalibrate the judiciary.” When they are thrown in prison, they will neither resort to legal routes of redress nor plead injustice or ˙ innocence in letters and telegraphs to Ismet Pas¸a or myself. Rather the youth of Turkey will say, “I have acted according to the imperatives of my beliefs and principles. I was right to intervene. If I feel I was brought here unjustly, I am bound to understand and eradicate the root cause and nature of this injustice.” This is what I think of Turkey’s youth.70

This speech was given in Bursa a few days after a confrontation between 100 religious conservatives who had refused to obey the new law requiring the call to prayer to be delivered in Turkish and the youth of Bursa who were bent on enforcing this law. Moved by the revolutionary spirit of the Bursa youth, Ataturk urged them to take the Turkish revolution into their ¨ own hands, even if this meant falling afoul of conservative elements within the state apparatus. The lines asking the youth not to appeal to himself or the vice president are particularly noteworthy in that they explicitly annul the paternalistic relationship between a ruler and his subjects. Against the common belief of seeing an unjust state bureaucracy as betraying the true interests of the benevolent Sultan – “if only the Sultan knew what was being perpetrated in his name” – Ataturk ¨ urged the youth to themselves become active political subjects, both intervening and later “eradicating the roots of this injustice.” The radicality of this gesture cannot be overemphasized. In contrast to the populist appeals urging the Anatolian people to rise up against foreign invaders and a defunct empire, Ataturk, in this speech, made the superordinately more ¨ profound plea for the Turkish youth to continue the revolution against the calcification of their (and Ataturk’s) own state.71 ¨ 70 71

http://www.68dayanisma.org/?page=duyurularv&event=1&ID=1004 (accessed May 27, 2013). Nation-people appeals have, since the American and French revolutions, formed the backbone of revolutionary struggles. Much rarer has been their continuation following the consolidation of revolutionary regimes. One only need think of Washington’s reaction to the Whiskey rebellion, the last paragraph of the unimplemented 1793 Jacobin constitution authorizing the

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This difference is the principle reason Ataturk’s Bursa speech went unpub¨ lished until 1947, nine years after his death, when it was printed once and subsequently censored. It was not until 1975 that Cafer Tanrıverdi, a journalist from Kayseri, published it in a local newspaper and was arrested. The date is significant as it coincides with and helped legitimize the revival of nationpeople appeals within Turkey. At his trial, Tanrıverdi, with the help of the president of the Turkish History Foundation, Enver Ziya Karal, gave evidence that Ataturk ¨ had in fact penned these words. His acquittal legalized the speech within Turkey, but for reasons that it might “incite the Turkish youth to anarchism,” it does not appear in any Turkish textbooks or even within the giant five-volume collection of Ataturk’s sayings. ¨ The more immediate obstacle facing the revival of nation-people appeals was not the paternalistic and conservative vestiges among the Turkish population, but the continuing alienation of Turkish intellectuals from the very people in whose name the revolution was being carried out. The popular backlash against a “revolution for the people, in spite of them” had led to the Democrat Party’s landslide victory against the RPP in 1950. Yet, for many Turkish intellectuals, the counterrevolutionary policies of the DP government only reconfirmed suspicions that the still conservative population could not be trusted to safeguard the revolution. Vedat Nedim Tor, ¨ a former Marxist writing for the review Forum, underscored the statist current still very much active among the Turkish elite: A poor and backward nation like us has neither the time nor the energy to play the game of democracy. We are yearning for the regime which will take us to social, economic, and cultural development by the shortest and fastest road possible.72

Before nation-people appeals could be revived in the political realm, the distance between intellectuals and the Turkish population needed to be breached. The postwar literary movement of social realism, which highlighted the plight of the peasantry, and the large influx of city intellectuals sent as teachers to villages as part of their military service helped bridge this gap, laying the groundwork for the populist politics of the 1970s.73 The turn to nation-people appeals had its most dramatic effect on the Turkish left, a longtime proponent of the statist tradition. Following the 1960 coup, smaller parties such as the WPT eschewed statism for an explicitly populist agenda, but it was the ascendency of Bulent Ecevit as leader of the RPP ¨ that brought nation-people appeals to the forefront of Turkish political culture. Ecevit’s populism was part of a general effort to refashion the RPP from

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popular dissolution of a government that dares act against the people, or the Bolshevik response to the 1921 Kronstadt uprising, to appreciate its significance. Vedat Nedim Tor, ¨ “Rejim Buhranından Kurtukabilecekmiyiz?” Forum, 15 August 1960, 7–8. Kemal Karpat, “Social Themes in Contemporary Turkish Literature,” MEJ, 25/1 (1961): 153–68.

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a “state party” to a left-of-center “people’s party” in the hopes of igniting its popular appeal. During the single-party era, the RPP had perceived the people as an object-effect of the Republican state, as human clay to be molded and fashioned into a civilized (western) citizenry. Against the state-directed creation of the new (wo)man, Ecevit emphasized the active subjectivity of the people, their capacity for self-governance and freedom from tutelage, whether foreign or domestic. Whereas, “In the past there were Turkish intellectuals who carried out revolution ‘for the people, in spite of them,’” Ecevit claimed, “ . . . in today’s Turkey, it is impossible to do anything ‘in spite of the people.’”74 The RPP under Ecevit would not try to “teach” the people anything; rather it would go to the people to learn from them. On more than one occasion, Ecevit argued that, “There is no level of understanding, in fact no appeal, beyond the level of understanding of the Turkish people.”75 Ecevit went so far as to draw explicit parallels between Turkey’s ruling elite and colonial administrations, decrying, “the village intellectuals who coop themselves up in their houses, clubs, and associations. In much the same way as was the practice in colonies, they lead lives outside and alien to the lives of the people.”76 Yet, populist rhetoric, while proving an indispensible tool for electoral gain, remained confined to the relatively new domain of parliamentary politics. Turkey’s “experiment in democracy” was in 1968, barely two decades old, open to charges of demagoguery, interrupted by coup, and to most observers far from successful. As long as there existed significant currents within the Turkish elite that questioned the reach if not the very validity of this politics, nation-people appeals would remain as a subset of the national, restricted to the political culture of an institution that was itself contested within the Turkish social-imaginary. In order to stand in for and signify the totality of the Turkish project, nation-people appeals needed to expand their reach to other facets of the national. It is here where the realm of international relations, the long-hallowed prerogative of the nation-state, proved crucial. Ecevit, in a foreign policy speech before the Turkish Grand National Assembly, stressed this new dimension of populist appeals: In our age, the importance and influence of public opinion upon international relations is ever increasing. To this extent, international relations is no longer considered and administered through the diplomatic relations between one state and another state. From this age onwards, international relations must also be understood as the relations of one people to another – I am here speaking of a relationship growing in increasing importance alongside the usual relationship.77

The “peoples to peoples” relationship did not, as it would today, refer to the world of international NGOs, but rather to the power of public opinion 74 75 76 77

Barıs¸ Gazetesi, 2 January 1977. Barıs¸ Gazetesi, 2 December 1974. Barıs¸ Gazetesi, 30 June 1972. ¨ Bulent Ecevit, Turkiyen’nin Uluslararasi I˙lis¸ikleri (Ankara: CHP, 1979), 7–8. ¨

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formed through open and critical debate. Public opinion was, for Ecevit, the mechanism through which the nation-people would assert themselves on the international stage. As we shall see, Ecevit and others elevated the category of public opinion as the supreme defender of the Turkey’s national interest in its international dealings. To give but one example from 1974, before demanding a renegotiation of the AP, the prime minister stated that: When discussing and negotiating with foreigners, a government that is not under the pressure of its own public opinion and cannot give this impression to the world . . . can never fully protect the country’s interests. The full pressure or resistance of public opinion in foreign policy, which can only be established through the actual praxis of free and open discussion, creates the strongest conditions of bargaining by making the bargainer beholden to the people. The idea that by repressing debate, Turkey, because it is speaking with a single voice, increases its bargaining strength vis-`a-vis foreign powers has been shown time and time again to be false. Just contrasting Inon ¨ u¨ at Lausanne with the Additional Protocol signed by the 12 March government makes this clear enough.78

The notion that “a government not beholden to the people” was incapable of securing the national interest (and therefore illegitimate) was a central theme in Ecevit’s thought. In this context, the reference to the negotiations of the Lausanne Treaty became particularly apropos. For Ecevit, the ˙ on ˙ on success of In ¨ u¨ against his counterpart Lord Curzon lay not in In ¨ u’s ¨ diplomatic acumen (if feigning deafness can be considered a negotiating skill), but rather in his insistence that any and all concessions on his original mandate (full and unconditional sovereignty) needed to first be approved by the Turkish National Assembly. In doing so, Ecevit underscored both the constituent role of the nation-people (as opposed to the state apparatus) in gaining international recognition for the Turkish nation as well as the illegitimacy of 12 March military government as an international negotiator for lacking such popular support. The lawyer and journalist Ali Gevgilili, in a 1970 article in Milliyet addressed to the EEC delegation currently negotiating the Additional Protocol, similarly underscored the importance of public opinion within international relations:79 It cannot be doubted that the strength and durability of [the Additional Protocol’s] outcome will be based on the support it finds in the court of public opinion. History has repeatedly shown that diplomatic agreements that do not reflect the true interests of their peoples and societies invariably end up rotting on dusty shelves, tossed into the dustbin of history by the true children of the nation. The treaties of Sevres and Lausanne serve as clear reminders of this principle. Yet it seems as if the European nations, with their centuries old values of democracy, have opted to deal with diplomats rather than with the Turkish people whose creative and intellectual spirit, be it on the left or the 78 79

Bulent Ecevit, Dıs¸ Politika (Ankara: CHP, 1974), 5. ¨ Ali Gevgilili, born in 1938, became a journalist-writer for the daily Milliyet after graduating ˙ ˙ from Izmir Private Turkish College (1955) and Istanbul University, Faculty of Law.

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right, is largely opposed to a premature integration. If Europe wants to make Turkey a model of how an underdeveloped country can successfully integrate with its developed neighbors, then they should approach these negotiations with the intent of speaking to the hearts of the Turkish people.80

Like the SPO and its supporters, Gevgilili too felt that the diplomats charged with negotiating the AP were not acting on behalf of Turkey’s national interests. Yet rather than perceiving these diplomats as undermining the nation understood as an independent and developing nation-state, Gevgilili posited the Turkish people as the true and unmediated political subjects of Turkey. In fact, Gevgilili set up an internal division between the state apparatus (here the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and the people, imagining the nation as the “creative and intellectual spirit” of the latter. Gevgilili, while a supporter of the RPP, also pointed out how this popular opposition went beyond political affiliation, “be it on the left or right,” positioning public opinion over international relations as a suprapolitical category signifying the nation-people as a whole. Finally, the historical references to the treaty of Sevres (negotiated by the Ottoman state) and Lausanne (negotiated by the National Assembly) served to ground historically the importance of public opinion in Turkey’s international relations, reformulating the war of independence as a popular revolt against an Ottoman state that had betrayed the interests of the people. In the absence of pressure from public opinion, populist appeals perceived Turkish-EEC relations as a threat to the Turkish nation, identified not as a developing nation-state but as a nation who lived by its own labor and lacked the power to exert influence on society and government. Bypassing the issues of economic or territorial sovereignty, populist appeals spoke directly to the effects of the EEC on plight of the Turkish people. In a statement following the ˙ signing of the Additional Protocol in November 1970, DISK’s leader Kemal Turkler warned that, ¨ Turkey’s relationship with the Common Market will become one of “master-country” to “vassal-country.” Within this scenario, a labor-exporting Turkey will become a laboring class servicing the lowest skilled needs of the Common Market; while the Common Market will become the employer that uses this labor.81

These appeals, structured by the Nationalist logic, constructed an antagonistic frontier between the Turkish people and its enemies. At times an internal frontier between the Turkish people and those who oppressed them was maintained, for instance in the CME’s assertion that trade liberalization with the EEC would require constant devaluations of the lira, “increasing the already lopsided income distribution of our country by benefiting a few parasites at the expense of the Turkish people.”82 This “comprador mentality,” where Turkish 80 81 82

Milliyet, 22 July 1970. ¨ 3. Ceyhan, Ortak Pazar ve Turkiye, ¨ Chamber of Mechanical Engineers, Ortak Pazar ve Turkiye, 211.

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integration into the Common Market was seen as the conspired outcome of foreign capitalists and their domestic collaborators, became a forceful narrative of populist nationalisms across the political spectrum. As the Islamist intellectual Sabahattin Zaim noted, “In our democracy, a small clique of unauthorized illegitimate decisions have been made concerning the Common Market – in secret from, and essentially bargaining away the great Turkish people.”83 The ¨ unel expressed similar thoughts on the AP negotiaRPP’s Vice-Secretary Ust ¨ tions, accusing the JP government of: Conceding away the Turkish people’s hard earned labors for a few pennies worth of credits. For a government that has lost credibility and legitimacy this is unthinkable. The people demand a more honest order with the Common Market. We will not allow Turkey to become encircled by the colonizing aspirations of foreign capital.84

In other cases, the internal frontier was displaced to an external one between Turkey as a whole (now including the former domestic oppressors) and the EEC. An editorial in the daily Aks¸am, published in January 1970 opined: We are becoming the Common Market’s market. Given that the Turkish people are already being exploited both internally and externally – any further step towards EEC membership will only exasperate the situation so that even our industrialists will be forced to join the ranks, beside our people, of the exploited.85

Regardless of where the self/other frontier was drawn, the appeals that imagined Turkey as its people exhibited a temporality distinct from those that understood Turkey as a nation-state. For the latter, contemporary Turkey lay sandwiched between a semicolonial past and an impending recolonized future. Statist opposition to the EEC connected the collective memory of Ottoman capitulations to the contemporary threat to Turkey’s sovereign development presented by integration. The site of integration grasped in a moment of danger simultaneously reawakened the memory of Sevres, the war, and Lausanne as an anti-imperialist struggle for national independence and related this history to opposition to the Common Market. Populist appeals, by contrast, imagined Turkey as a presently subjugated society that could liberate itself through assuming true democratic power. Turkey was imagined as a project or process of self-realization for the “nationpeople” masses. Foreign policy, especially Turkey’s relations with the EEC, would serve as the site for such a realization, enabling the masses to selfharness the collective symbols, histories, and traditions of Turkey, and so fashion themselves into a political subject. These ideas were evident in Ali Gevgilili’s address to the EEC when he claimed that the Turkish people would sooner or later rise up to discard a protocol negotiated against their interests. Much like 83 84 85

¨ ¨ ¸ terek Pazar ve Turkiye (Istanbul: Gerc¸ek Yayınevi, 1970), 23. Sabahattin Zaim, Mus Milliyet, 29 July 1970. Aks¸am, 31 January 1970.

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the nation-state appeals, populist opposition to the EEC also underscored the centrality of the war of independence. Yet while the former marked the war as the struggle for and birth of the Turkish state, the populist appeals reread it as the struggle for the emancipation of the Turkish people. Kemal Turkler’s ¨ statement in response to the signing of the AP, echoing the argument first made by the Workers’ Party of Turkey, drew explicit attention to this difference: The Turkish people fought against not only the western armies, but also against a system that lay behind these armies, against an unjust world order. This unique aspect of the war finds its succinct expression in the words of its leader, Mustafa Kemal: “Efendiler, we, to protect this right, to secure our independence in its entirety, as our nation, are the people who have seen as our lawful duty to carry out a national struggle against an imperialism that seeks to destroy us, against a capitalism that aims to swallow us whole.”86

Populist appeals recast the war of independence as an emancipatory moment against an invidious world order – the moment wherein the Turkish people created/asserted themselves as a political and sovereign subject. Yet following World War II, an illegitimate ruling caste had hijacked the administration of the country. In this context, Turkey’s integration with the EEC was perceived as the latest capitulation of the people’s sovereignty, already compromised by (and as a result of) this domestic usurpation by a comprador elite. Westernization and Its (Dis)contents On 22 December 1969, an article in the weekly Devlet entitled “The Contemporary Civilization Game” began with the famous dictum “Know Thyself” ˘ which the author, Mehmet Erdogan, a lawyer from the southeastern province of Gaziantep, erroneously ascribed to Aristotle. The article went on to argue that: We’ve been fooled by the Contemporary Civilization game for the past 150 years. It’s nothing but the name of an inferiority complex given to Asians by the Europeans. Europeanization has alienated us from our identity, distanced us from our true surroundings by making us abandon our culture for another culture parading around as civilization. Real Contemporary Civilization is to return to oneself, to protect and above all, understand and know ourselves.87

It was part of a four-week special series of the review devoted exclusively to the Common Market (which the article concluded by rejecting in the most vehement terms). While the “us” referred to in the article was clearly the Turkish nation, the “culture” and “identity” it needed to understand, protect, and return to connoted Turkey as possessing certain particular characteristics that 86 87

¨ 27. Ceyhan, Ortak Pazar ve Turkiye, ˘ Mehmet Erdogan, “Muasır Medeniyet Oyunu,” Devlet, 22 December 1969.

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it had “abandoned” or been “distanced” and “alienated” from. The Turkey referred to as “us” was not just another developing nation-state or a subjugated “nation-people” mass seeking to claim its sovereignty; it was uniquely, distinctly, essentially, Turkish. Of what this distinct and essential “Turkishness” consisted, the article was less clear. “Turkishness,” for the author, seemed comprised of all those characteristics that were opposed to Europe and/or had been repressed by the Europeanization of Turkey over the last 150 years. It was structured by an ontological relation of antagonism wherein the presence of the “other” was seen as preventing Turkey from being totally itself. The creation of a frontier (in this instance between Turkey and Europe) simultaneously posited an enemy (Europe) and a threatened self-identity, which, although allegedly present beforehand, only took shape retroactively through the encounter. Essentialist appeals, much more than the other solutions to the nationalist problematic, directly confronted the invitational impulse at the heart of the Civilizational logic. They were in fact the direct dialectical outgrowth of this logic. Turkishness, as the Islamist intellectual Nurettin Topc¸u put it, was a “struggle to not look like the west” (batı’ya benzememe davası).88 This negative and referential subjectivization is the obverse and outgrowth of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century process of European self-identification known as Orientalism.89 The “object” of this third appeal of the Nationalist logic becomes an essentialized “occident,” while the Turk is taken to possess a subjectivity that he himself is in charge of. On this level then, the third appeal of the Nationalist logic accepted and adopted the Orientalist conception of an essential distinction between “East” and “West,” the same typology created by a western transcendent studying subject, and hence the same “objectifying” procedures of knowledge – now of course gazing upon and dissecting the west itself. This “Occidentalism of the non-west” was constituted by a reversing of roles: where, in the words of the Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi, “The West becomes the Other, the Orient is restored to the Self.”90 This reversal is perhaps most evident in the article’s Aristotelian injunction to “know thyself.” The term was made famous in Plato’s Phaedrus Dialogue, where Socrates is quoted as saying, “But I have no leisure for [mythology or other far-flung topics] at all; and the reason, my friend, is this: I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself; so it seems to me

88 89 90

Cemil Aydın, “Between Occidentalism and the Global Left: Islamist Critiques of the West in Turkey,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 104/3 (2006): 452. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, Vintage, 1978) and Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World (Totowa: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 38. Meltem Ahıska, Occidentalism in Turkey: Questions of Modernity and National Identity in Turkish Radio Broadcasting (New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2010), 5. Hanafi has argued that “Occidentalism defends national character, national culture, and national life-style . . . and stands as an ideology for the ruled as opposed to the ideology of the ruler.”

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ridiculous, when I do not yet know that, to investigate irrelevant things.”91 From its Greek origins, the dictum “know thyself” was picked up by and has had a long history in Islamic (particularly Sufi) thought, used to admonish those who seek answers from the outside when the truth is located in the inner self. ˘ This, presumably, is also Erdogan’s interpretation of the Delphic injunction, chastising those Turks who have sought understanding in the lures of a foreign and self-alienating European civilization. “Knowing thyself” thus becomes, for ˘ Erdogan, the true path to Turkish subjectivity, long denied the Turk by the epistemological framework of European Orientalism.92 The motif appears time and again in early essentialist appeals of the Nationalist logic. In the interwar period, such appeals were for the most part conservative reactions to the Kemalist project of Europeanization, calling for a traditionalist, usually Islamic, “spiritualism” as the inviolable core of Turkishness against the decadent, soulless, immoral, positivist, and Masonic west.93 By contrast, the new Occidentalist nationalism that arose in opposition to the EEC had a modernist bent, employing, rather than rejecting, the western categories of reason, rationality, and development. In fact, the new Occidentalist current of the late-1960s argued that the EEC supporters were irrationally acting against Turkey’s rational national interests. As Sabri Akdeniz, a faculty member of the Higher Islam Institute, claimed in a 1970 piece entitled “While Being Dragged toward the Common Market Precipice”: For two to three hundred years Turkish leaders and intellectuals have, in the face of Europe, been plagued by an inferiority complex. This is why they yearn to liken themselves to the Europeans, why they are consumed by this need. This diseased behavior was referred to as “Europeanization” in the Tanzimat period; today we call it “westernization.” It is a disease that cripples the rational faculties of the mind and feeds off emotion. It is this disease which motivates these men to integrate Turkey into the Common Market.

Integration into the Common Market was linked, as in the Civilizational logic, to the historical process of “westernization,” yet now defined within a psychological epistemology (imported from Europe) as an “inferiority complex,” a “diseased behavior” that “crippled the rational faculties of the mind” grounded in Reason’s antithesis: emotion. Rather than decry westernization as the search for “false gods” that alienated Turks from their “authentic” civilization, Akdeniz cast the Civilizational logic as a modern social disorder. It was a cunning 91 92

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Plato, Phaedrus, 230a. Though as Meltem Ahıska has pointed out, given the asymmetry in power between Turkey and Europe, the occidentalist imagination was never the mirror obverse of orientalist imaginary. Unlike its counterpart, Occidentalism of the non-west always included and was performed in front of an imagined western gaze. Ahıska, Occidentalism, 17. ¨ uk ¨ The writings of Necip Fazıl Kisakurek, especially his seminal work, The Great East (Buy ¨ ˘ Dogu), and Nurettin Topc¸u are representative of this trend.

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move turning the tables on the Kemalist oriental dichotomy between the modern and rational west and its oriental, conservative, and spiritual counterpart. Such a move shifted the locus of the enunciation of modernity to a non-western subject position. What was needed to resist the neocolonialism of the west was not an anti-western spiritualism but rather the very tools of western modernity itself. Otherwise, as Akdeniz went on to argue: With integration, our Turkishness will dissolve inside the Europeans. It will cease to exist (we will actually Europeanize), and after a while the name itself will even be forgotten. This is why the government that presides over Turkey’s inclusion into the Common Market will be signing its death warrant. Rather than see this as our biggest tragedy, the treacherous grandchildren of Cevdet Pas¸a, triumphantly celebrate the erasure of our Turkishness.94

The reorientation of Turkish Occidentalism from a spiritual antimodernism to modernist neocolonial critique was most evident in its evolving views on Turkish development. While earlier currents of Turkish Occidentalism were dominated by a romantic-poetic resistance to development, the new Occidentalisms of the late 1960s took a more nuanced stance. In his seminal study of 1970 entitled The Common Market and Turkey, Islamist economics professor Dr. Sabahaddin Zaim wrote: The Common Market and its internal supporters operate on principles and perspectives totally at odds with the existence of the Turkish people, their national customs [hars] and culture. Both the long and short term effects of entering into the transitional stage are incommensurable with our national culture and the essential foundations of TurkishIslamic society, meaning Turkish Nationalism, economic development, and our national welfare; in short, with all of Turkey’s national interests. The Turkish people have nothing in common with the Common Market states. They are Europeans – we are Asian. We are Muslims, they Christian. Our social and cultural institutions have been neglected by incompetent leaders – theirs on the other hand are cemented, advanced, and strong. If we join the EEC, the Turkish people will be infested by the imperialism of Western Christian culture.95

In the second paragraph Professor Zaim acknowledged the existence of a hierarchical scale of development on which Turkey found itself at a relative level of backwardness vis-`a-vis the member states. Yet, he made explicit that this development was not that of a singular and convergent modernity in which Turkey’s future is that of present-day Europe. Professor Zaim underscored the fundamental incongruity between Turkey and Europe’s social and cultural 94

95

Sabri Akdeniz, “Ortak Pazar Ucurumuna Sururklenirken . . . ,” in Ortak Pazar Dedikleri (Istanbul: MTTB, 1970). Abdullah Cevdet, an Ottoman Turkish Young Turk intellectual influential in the westernizing debates in the late Ottoman Empire. Cevdet is perhaps best known for his expression, “There is no second Civilization, Civilization means European Civilization, and it must be imported with both its roses and its thorns.” ¨ Sabahaddin Zaim, Ortak Pazar ve Turkiye, 17.

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institutions, while simultaneously asserting that the European Common Market states were at a relatively more advanced state of development regarding their own culture and society than Turkey was with hers. The double move of accepting the epistemological premises of development but arguing for distinct and nonconverging developmental paths allowed Professor Zaim to oppose the Common Market on the grounds of cultural imperialism while still claiming the equality if not superiority of Turkish culture. Looked at through this concept of development, the new Occidentalist appeals were attempts to restrict the Western notion of development to the economic sphere so as to protect or enable a sociocultural “development” of Turkey on its own terms. In this instance the western notion of economic development was preserved in order to negate western hegemony as an external sociocultural model to be emulated. This double move as it pertained to the idea of development was also evident in Occidentalist solutions from the Turkish left. In a work commissioned and ˙ published in 1974 by DISK, The Common Market and Turkey, Hasan Ceyhan claimed that cultural incompatibility between Europe and Turkey stemmed from the distinctiveness of the Turkish bourgeoisie based on its peculiar historical development. Ceyhan pointed out how “the internal and autonomous development of the European bourgeoisie made them a revolutionary and nationalistic class,” whereas the Turkish bourgeoisie was a class that required western capitalism to keep it erect, and thus wholly dependent on the west. Ceyhan proceeded with a rather straightforward Marxist interpretation of the Turkish bourgeoisie as a dependent class structurally incapable of sovereign rule which, as a result, rendered it “neither revolutionary nor nationalistic.” He then moved on to expound upon the essential incongruity between Turkish and European cultures: Western culture is founded upon Christian and Greco-Roman cultures. In contrast, Turkish culture stems from very different roots. Efforts to change Turkish civilization, while it may dig the grave of Turkish civilization, will not be able to transform Turkish society into a Western one.96

For Ceyhan, the historical asymmetry of Turkish and European socioeconomic development, an asymmetry brought about by European imperial practices, could never be corrected by “catching up” to western civilization. Instead Ceyhan urged Turks to embrace and develop the roots of their own civilization as the only means of competing with the west. At first glance, talk of Turkey as possessing a distinct history, culture, and traditions incompatible with the west seemed at odds with the political ideology of the left. Yet recourse to an essentialist solution was not limited to ˙ DISK. It was prevalent among many leftist groups, including the Chamber of Mechanical Engineers, which urged its readers to: 96

¨ 114. Hasan Ceyhan, Ortak Pazar ve Turkiye,

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not forget that we owe our presence on this land to the 900 years [1971 was the 900 year anniversary of Turks entering Anatolia] of struggle against the Greco-Roman/Christian civilizations to our north and west – by joining the Common Market we turn our backs on this historical legacy.

For the CME, the existing differences in “historical legacy, national culture, traditions, habits, religion, in effect, daily existence” between the two societies was most readily apparent in the alienation of Turkish migrant workers within the Common Market states of Europe.97 More than Islamist intellectuals, leftist Occidentalism tied essential incongruities of historical development between Turkey and Europe to contemporary critiques of capital, neocolonialism, and third-world dependency. Occidentalist nationalism differentiated itself from the other solutions of the Nationalist Logic by its reinterpretation of Turkish history, particularly in its silence regarding Turkey’s War of Independence. For both the nationstate and nation-people appeals the war was reformulated as a moment of radical rupture out of which emerged the independent Turkish Republic or the emancipatory impulse of the Turkish people. According to these appeals, the post–World War II governing elite had strayed from the nationalist antiimperialist logic that constituted the ideological core of the Turkish state and its people. Occidentalist appeals, by contrast, were marked by a total absence of historical rupture. Rather, they represented the history of Turkey from the Tanzimat to the present as a single epoch, seeing the continuity, if not the amplification, of western colonial thought, discourse, and governance between the Ottoman and Turkish periods. The ruling elite of the Republic, in this context, represented an intensification, in breadth and scope, of colonial thought under the guise of an independent nation-state. This reading maintained that the “revolutionary reforms” of the Turkish Republic were nothing less than the construction of a colonial state in so far as its social, political, pedagogical, institutional, and above all epistemic structures were based on the precise framework of knowledge correspondent to the structure of western colonial thought. At its extreme, the declaration of the Turkish Republic was understood as marking the true colonization of Turkey, which in the Ottoman period had been restricted to procuring certain political and economic concessions – in other words, as the moment wherein colonial thought assumed direct control and administration of the Turkish people. This kind of thinking was typified in the writings of Professor Is¸insu Okc¸u: ¨ For 45 years we have taught our children to spit on their past and their history – thinking all the while we were progressive westerners for it. This kind of treason is not to be found anywhere else on earth. We have forgotten that for 5000 years there has been 97

¨ 247. Chamber of Mechanical Engineers, Ortak Pazar ve Turkiye,

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ONE SINGLE TURKISH STATE under different names and instead begin our history from 1923. Our children are taught that the Ottoman period was nothing other than the history of ‘stupid, mad, childlike Sultans’ – and then we wonder how we got into this Common Market mess?98

The article referred to the deplorable uniqueness of the Civilizational logic found in Turkey and nowhere else – a mentality Okc¸u called treasonous and thus inconceivable as the official ideology of a nation-state. Okc¸u blamed this mentality for the historical amnesia of the Turkish Republic and for the illguided foreign policy that had entangled Turkey in the EEC. The essentialist appeal propagated a unique reading of Turkey’s recent past in light of Turkey’s present relations with the Common Market, one that was distinct from the nation-state and populist appeals outlined earlier. The concluding section of this chapter brings together the three oppositional appeals by treating each as particular solutions to a common nationalist problematic, one that arose out of a set of contradictory impulses within the Civilizational logic that preceded it. The Nation as Recovered Erasure This chapter has traced the intellectual history of the new nationalisms that framed Turkish opposition to the Common Market in the late 1960s and 1970s. It has schematized Turkish opposition conceptually, into three distinct nationalist appeals, based on the Turkish state, the Turkish people, and an essentialized Occidentalism. I have tried to show how these appeals were made possible by a new ontology of Turko-EEC relations, which I have termed the Nationalist logic. The appeals themselves are imaginary. By this I mean two things. They are imaginary in the sense that they are thematic constructions. They were not “housed” in or propagated by any particular self-defined group, but rather cut across the political spectrum and state/civil institutions. In this way, the conceptual appeals can be seen as being “forced” upon self-reflexive historical subjects. Yet it is precisely this quality of floating through various social groupings, the quality of being expressed by all but being the property of none, which allowed the appeals to function in the second positive sense of imaginary, as socio-imaginary constructions – that is, the ways Turks imagined themselves as a nation. These new ways of imagining Turkey were the product of a nationalist moment that came of age in the late 1960s. I argued that this moment emerged from the intersection of several political and ideological developments, namely the privatization of nationalism, its global turn in the wake of the Cyprus crisis, and the continued use of ideological rhetoric to understand Turkish integration into Europe. 98

Is¸insu Okc¸u, ¨ Devlet, 15 December 1969.

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The three solutions to the nationalist problematic were not latent expressions of social imaginations that had been repressed by the Civilizational logic but were rather structured and made possible by it. Nationalist opposition to the Common Market was in essence the revival of certain strains of national thinking that were advanced in the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, only to be abandoned by the Civilizational logic’s insistence on reconciliation between Europeanization and Turkish nationalism. The revival of economic and territorial nationalism vis-`a-vis market and state liberalization were structured by the contradiction between two notions of development found in Ataturk’s project. The first was an idea of national ¨ development taking place within the world community, where the economic, legal, and political regime of Turkey would be developed in the context of the international community of civilized nations. This notion of national development underlay much of Kemalist thinking and action during the early years of the Republic. The etatism of the 1930s brought with it an alternate under´ standing of development, wherein national development stood at odds with integration into the global community. While “joining the civilized nations of the world” remained the final goal, national development could only proceed along the principle of economic nationalism, protected from the deleterious interferences of the European nations. As Mehmet Ali Aybar noted: Our aim is not to cut off Turkey’s relations with the west. We are of the idea that only after we have struggled for and attained our independence, our economic development, and our identity, can we form truly equal relations with the West. Until that time, we run the very real risk of becoming yet another western satellite or colony.99

This second conceptualization of development imagined the nation-state as the sacrosanct institution of the Republic, which through planning of the legal, social, and economic development of the nation and the regulation of its territory and tariffs guaranteed the sovereignty of the nation against European imperialism. The subsequent abandonment of this antagonistic conception of development, both in theory and practice, by postwar Turkish governments occasioned its revival in the 1960s. The revival of the nation-people as a concept vis-`a-vis their own state was likewise structured by a contradiction between two notions of western modernity employed during the early years of the republic. On the one hand, modernity was understood as the sovereign self-alteration of a people brought together into a nation. This understanding underlay the “making of Turkey” by the voluntaristic coming together of the Anatolian people to fight for the right to be in charge of their own society. On the other hand, as the top-down reforms of the Kemalist regime made clear, modernity meant the realization of a sociocultural modernization project of the New Man wherein people were relegated to the status of objects to be fashioned, molded, and transformed 99

Millet Meclisi Tutanak Dergisi, D:2, T:1, C:1, 7.11.1965, 167–68.

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into a modern western citizenry. The Civilizational logic’s favoring of the latter conditioned the revival of populist nationalisms no longer content with a revolution carried out “for the people, in spite of them.” The essentialist appeals were also the by-products of interventions into the realms of religious and ethnic identification by the Kemalist state in the first two decades of the Turkish Republic. Yet the Islamic and ethnic Turkish dimensions of the essentialist appeals that arose in the late 1960s had different historical roots. The different historical trajectories explain why political Islam and ultranationalist movements, ideologies that gravitated toward one another as the decade progressed, initially began as distinct and incommensurate movements within the Turkish right. The creation of political Islam as a concept vis-`a-vis a secular state was structured by the inability of the Kemalist state to subsume and sublimate Islam as a national tradition in the Hobsbawmian sense. The state suppression of Islamic culture essentialized what it suppressed while simultaneously situating the state outside of this tradition as alien and external. On the other hand, the invention of a set of fixed attributes that defined Turkishness was structured by the labile conflation of two concepts: universal civilization and particular cultures. The first, stressed during the 1920s, was that of a singular global civilization that Turkey intended to join. The second was that of a particular national culture “invented” in the 1930s to provide a fabricated nativist foundation to the nation-state. While these two contradictory concepts had maintained a working balance during the single-party era, the second half of this combination, the invented ethnic and racial imaginary, was for the most part abandoned by Turkey’s postwar elite – thus creating the conditions for its political revival in the late 1960s. Their invention and subsequent abandonment rendered Turkishness into a latent nativism now essentialized and thought to have been betrayed by the ruling elite. All three cases underscore different variants of a single structural flaw: the Civilizational logic which structured the ideology of Turkey’s post–World War II elite was incapable of absorbing, explaining, or orienting the society it claimed to represent. This society did not exist or possess concrete and particular characteristics irrespective of or prior to the Kemalist era, but rather was a product of, and engendered by, Ataturk’s project for modern Turkey. ¨ Between 1968 and 1980, Turkish debates over integration with Europe highlighted the contradictions of the Turkish national project, a project that had created open conceptual areas, such as planning, the people, invented Turkishness, and Islam that had served to crystallize resistance to Europe, yet whose antagonistic elements were subsequently abandoned after World War II. These power vacuums became radical and imminent sites of nationalism, constructing centers of socio-imagination that contested the Civilizational logic’s hegemony to imagine Turkey.

4 The Additional Protocol A “National” Problem (1968–1971)

The state was connected to the nation-people through both the procedural forms of representative government and represented the nation-people by directing a program of economic development on behalf of the nation. – Partha Chatterjee1

On 9 December 1968, Turkey and the EEC officially began negotiations for the second, transitional phase, of the Ankara Agreement. The transitional phase involved the gradual reduction of tariffs between the two parties, the timetable for which was to be agreed on through an Additional Protocol.2 While the final agreement contained a complex three-tier list for trade goods, each with a separate schedule and rate, one thing was abundantly clear: the Additional Protocol was to require reductions in Turkey’s customs regime. For the first time in Turkish-EEC relations, Turkish integration into the European Common Market was to have a negative material impact on Turkey. The public announcement of the negotiations caused a large reaction throughout the country, sparking an intense debate that would wax and wane until 1974, when Turkey found itself once again embroiled in Cyprus. Yet unlike the debate over the Association Agreement a decade earlier, the Additional Protocol became the concern of a much larger swath of the Turkish population. In the 1970s, particular projects of all shapes and sizes, ranging from the Institute of Weights and Measures to visions of state socialism, began to reformulate their concerns in relation to Turkey’s integration into 1 2

Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 203. The European Community Commission, Second General Report (Brussels: ECC, 1968), 353– 54.

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Ecevit remarked the Common Market. As the former prime minister Bulent ¨ in 1975, “The EEC has caused deep divisions both within our state bureaucracy and in Turkish society at large. It can properly be called a “National Problem.’”3 The previous chapter presented a historical-conceptual account of the Nationalist logic, breaking nationalist opposition to the EEC into three distinct appeals to the nation. This approach, while delineating the thematic horizon of how Turkey was understood, put aside discussion of the way in which these imaginations were constructed or of how pervasive each became within Turkish society over the course of the decade. This chapter examines the evolution of the Nationalist appeals in opposition to the Common Market from 1968 to 1971. It details their origin within Turkish radical politics, the ambiguities involved in their promulgation and consolidation, and their relation to the still-hegemonic Civilizational logic. It is a history of propagation – or, more precisely, of the techniques, avenues, and dynamics of this propagation. This history requires investigation into the extent and manner of an appeal’s diffusion; it raises the question of the “legibility” or “readability” of an appeal as constitutive elements in the mechanics of propagation. The appeals that signified Turkey and the EEC were expressed by specific persons, groups, and institutions within particular historical and sociopolitical settings. Oftentimes two groups or institutions would put forth the same appeal, often employing the same rhetoric, but, due to their relative positions within Turkish sociopolitical culture, end up with vastly disparate results. Given this context, the chapter also traces the relationship between the Nationalist appeals and these movements and institutions by detailing how these appeals were carried, distorted, restrained, or propelled by the latter. This chapter is divided into three sections. It first introduces the emergence of the anti-EEC movements on the radical fringes of Turkish society. Next, it moves to an analysis of the interaction between these anti-EEC movements and segments of Turkey’s traditional elite. I argue that this interaction was structured by the confrontation of the Nationalist and Civilizational logics – a confrontation that further refined and empowered the Nationalist appeals. I then discuss how these Nationalist appeals ran up against a set of differential limits within Turkey that prohibited them from representing Turkish society in its totality. The chapter concludes with an analysis of two central socio-institutional sites around which the Nationalist appeals assembled – the State Planning Organization (SPO) and the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) – and traces how a characteristic peculiar to these institutions allowed the Nationalist appeals to overcome the differential limits that had impeded their political legibility.

3

Ecevit, Dıs¸ Politika, 83.

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the emergence of the anti-eec movements In 1967, few people in Turkey (or Europe, for that matter) surmised that Turkish-EEC relations would, in a few years’ time, become the site of an acrimonious and at times violent struggle over Turkey’s past, present, and future. Perhaps most unsuspecting of these future developments was Turkey’s Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel, whose announcement of Turkey’s intention ¨ to enter into the second phase of the Ankara Agreement echoed the words of ˙ ˙ on his predecessors Adnan Menderes and Ismet In ¨ u: ¨ Turkey is a country which a few centuries ago had welcomed the West into itself. This transition to a Western orientation was carried out through numerous reforms inspired by the West. Yet it was only with the foundation of modern Turkey that our western path was cemented. Politically, economically, and socially, the Great Ataturk ¨ paved the Turkish Republic’s road firmly towards the West. Since then Turkey has always considered and always will consider herself an inseparable part of Europe. The Turkish nation has always approached its association with the EEC through this context, and believes that only through such a framework can Turkey take its rightful place within the future of Europe and responsibly assume the duties that are demanded of it.4

That October, in the days before and following the decision of the Turkey-EEC Association Council to begin negotiations for the Additional Protocol, the daily Milliyet published a spate of opinion pieces that weighed in on the significance and likely effects of the second transitional phase. The contributors to the series, entitled “Turkey and the Common Market,” selected by the editors of the daily, were men who had been involved in and written or spoken about the EEC for quite some time. They included both the old-guard supporters, such as Aydın Yalc¸ın (now a member of the joint Turkish-EEC Parliamentary Committee), ˘ (Turkey’s permanent representative to the EEC), Osman Ziya Muezzinoglu Okyar (liberal economist and founding dean of Hacettepe’s Social Sciences ˘ Faculty), and Ertugrul Soysal (President of the Industrial Hearth), as well as detractors including Ali Sait Yuksel (head of the SPO’s EEC delegation), Besim ¨ ¨ unel Ust (former head of the SPO’s economic division), and Sadun Aren (MP ¨ from the WPT). The back-and-forth “dialogue” of the opinion pieces was noteworthy in a number of respects, the most striking of which was its very existence. The editors’ assumption that there should even be a dialogue, that Turkey’s further integration into the EEC was, in effect, an open question of public debate, was unthinkable the last time Turks had engaged with the EEC. The editors’ decision to “hold a debate” is, in this regard, a testament to the profound changes in both Turkey’s political culture and its questioning of foreign policy detailed in the previous chapter. 4

Turkiye-AET Ortaklık Konseyi, 16 May 1967. Turkish Republic Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives document number: 137.142’OG561 DEM.

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Equally noteworthy was that the discussion, for the first time, centered on the economics of integration. Neither side shied away from the larger implications posed by the transitional phase: all claimed that it would bring about wholesale changes in the orientation and functioning of the Turkish economy. Those favoring transition into the second phase argued that the removal of tariffs and financial restrictions between Turkey and the EEC would ensure the harmonious and rational development of the Turkish economy with the rest of the world, establishing sectors and industries that would be globally competitive. Aydın Yalc¸ın’s article, “The Common Market and Us,” the opening piece of the Milliyet series, was typical of this view. Since the Ankara Agreement, Yalc¸ın argued: Turkey has increasingly been swept towards an autarkic and self-enclosed economic order; a highly costly and artificial industrialization geared toward a domestic market and one that has turned a blind eye to the principles of international competitiveness. The dangers of this approach require a market based tonic, one provided only by the immediate transition into the second phase of the Agreement.5

This position was by and large shared and elaborated on by the other articles supporting the government’s decision, although interestingly enough, Ziya ˘ Muezzino glu, in a peace offering of sorts to critics in the State Planning Orga¨ nization, argued that “the benefits of the second phase will materialize to the extent to which the negotiations of the AP take into account the fundamental measures of our development plan.”6 The detractors, by contrast, viewed the identical implications from an altogether different light. To them, the financial and tariff barriers against the advanced states of the EEC were absolutely essential to Turkey’s industrialization. Their removal would, as Sadun Aren claimed, “stall Turkey’s efforts to establish capital intensive and productive industries while fostering its unproductive sectors,” a structural imbalance that equated to future trade and account deficits, national pauperization, and ultimately full dependency on the Common Market states.7 This position was similarly, albeit more softly, ¨ unel ¨ unel and Ali Sait Yuksel. Ust called for an argued in articles by Besim Ust ¨ ¨ ¨ extension of the first phase in order to give Turkish industries time to take root, while Yuksel, countering the putative assumption that the EEC represented ¨ international competition, claimed that paradoxically, the Common Market was fostering the cartelization (through fusion and combination) of the western European economies. It was these international cartels, and not, as was 5 6

7

Aydin Yalc¸in, “Ortak Pazar ve Biz,” Milliyet, 3 October 1968. ˘ ˘ Ziya Muezzino glu, “Yeni Donemin Es¸iginde,” Milliyet, 5 October 1968. For the other articles ¨ ¨ that shared Yalc¸ın’s opinion, see Osman Okyar, “Himaye ve Ortak Pazar,” Milliyet 10 October ˘ 1968; Ertugural Soysal, “Sanayici Goz Ortak Pazar ve Sanayimiz,” Milliyet, 13 October ¨ uyle ¨ 1968; Vural Savas¸, “Neden Ortak Pazart” Milliyet, 17 October 1968. ˙ ¸ kiler Degis ˘ ¸ meli,” Milliyet, 12 October 1968; “Ortak Pazar, Bu See Sadun Aren, “Iktisadi Ilis Halde Bizi Yıkar,” Milliyet, 4 October 1968.

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supposed, independent European industries operating on free-market principles, that Turkey’s infant industry would be faced with.8 Significantly, all three articles explicitly countered the charge that opposing further integration with the EEC meant closing off Turkey from the outside world. In fact, all three argued that rather than integrate into the Common Market, Turkey should pursue economic relations with other developing countries whose economies and concerns were similar to, rather than incompatible with, Turkey’s. The outlines of the discussion just summarized underscore just how much had changed in less than four years. With the exception of Aydın Yalc¸ın’s second article, which argued “that beyond its immediate merits, further integration stands as an opportunity to tie our fate with the fate of western Europe countries that Ataturk ¨ has set as our goal and model,” the civilizational framework was conspicuous by its absence.9 Though analysis of the EEC had clearly shifted to its economic dimension, the effects of integration were discussed not through quantitative economic arguments that assumed a common framework, but rather through the ideological clash between two visions of Turkey’s political economy, each replete with their own premises, assumptions, and historical traditions. On the whole, the parameters of the debate – and perhaps even more importantly, that Turkish integration was even a matter for debate – signaled a significant shift in Turkish perceptions of the EEC. Yet, as new to Turkish-EEC relations as these back-and-forth discussion were, barely a year passed before they were upstaged by an even more radical way of interpreting Turkish integration. In December 1969, the EEC-Turkey Association Council convened to begin negotiations for the Additional Protocol. The Justice Party government, having suffered a setback in the October 1969 general elections, sought to gain positive political capital from the event. As in September 1963, the government manufactured a broad public awareness of the negotiations through press conferences, official statements, interviews, and opinion pieces in the press.10 Yet unlike September 1963, when the publicity campaign had met with near-universal approval, the JP’s efforts in December 1969 sparked a wave of protests and campaigns across Turkey, all vehemently opposing Turkey’s association with the EEC. Just a few days after the first negotiation meeting, forty-seven “revolutionary organizations” led by the Middle East Technical University (METU) Association of Mechanical Engineers staged a “Week of Protest” under the banner “No to the Common Market and Assembly Industry.”11 Participating 8 9 10 11

“AET’de Trostles ¸ me ve Turk Ali Sait Yuksel, ¨ ¨ Sanayi,” Milliyet, 28 October 1968. ¨ Aydın Yalc¸ın, “Ortak Pazar’ın Faydaları,” Milliyet, 11 October 1968. ¨ See, for example, I˙stanbul Sanayi Odası Dergisi: Ortak Pazar Ozel Sayısı, 15 December 1969. Milliyet, 10, 11, 14 December 1969. Ulus, 10, 13, 15 December 1969. ¨ grenci ¨ Makina Muhendisligi ˘ O ˘ ˘ Ortak Pazar ve Dernegi, I. Uc¸ar and C. Evrensel, ODTU ¨ Montaj Sanayi (Ankara: MMOD, 1969). Work commissioned by the Middle East Technical

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organizations included miscellaneous “ideas clubs,” student groups of various university faculties (including veterinary, chemistry, dentistry, electrical, and social sciences departments), the Socialist Ataturkist Association, and the rev¨ 12 ˙ olutionary trade union DISK. The protest week culminated in a three-day march beginning in Izmit (an industrial and shipping center about 90 miles to the east of Istanbul) and ending in Istanbul’s Taksim Square. The mainly student protesters likened the EEC to a “corporation” created by “the six capitalist states out to exploit the Turkish people,” wearing shirts imprinted with the slogan, “They’re Partners, We’re the Market” [Onlar Ortak, Biz Pazar] (an ironic play on the double meaning of ortak as both “common” and “business partner”). A pamphlet created by one of the organizers, titled Foreign Capital, The Common Market, and Assembly Industry, expounded on the roots and effects of assembly industry for Turkish industrialization. It argued that assembly industry was a means for the capitalist economies of the EEC to “find a market for their surplus production” within the economies of the underdeveloped world. Its establishment in Turkey was leading to not only foreign ownership and direction of the Turkish economy, but the latter’s full dependency (in terms of the supply of intermediate products and technical knowledge) on the Common Market states.13 Interestingly, the brief appendix to this tiny pamphlet concluded with excerpts from both the 1838 English-Ottoman Trade Agreement and the U.S. Marshall Plan as historical reminders for why “entering the Common Market would be suicidal for Turkey.”14 Three weeks later, in January 1970, the Idealist Hearths Union (IHU), the youth arm of the ultranationalist National Action Party (NAP), began a similar campaign against Turkish integration. In its informational leaflet the IHU spoke of how “foreign capital investment would turn Turkey into a colony of the Common Market.” It pointed out how many of Turkey’s most important decisions, including her economic development and foreign trade regimes, would have to comply with the EEC, “eroding our national independence” and “making Brussels, not Ankara, our capital.”15 The notice went on to argue that “not even the slightest similarity exists in the cultural and social makeup of the Turkish and European peoples. This is why entering a community against

12 13 14 15

University Machine Engineering Student Association. To be sure, university students in mechanical engineering had a lot to lose with Turkish integration into the Common Market. High tariff barriers that protected Turkey’s nascent industries also ensured their job prospects. Opening Turkish industry to European competition threatened to make their skill set obsolete. ¨ For a full list of the participating organizations, see ITUOB, Yabancı Sermaye, Ortak Pazar, ve Montaj Sanayi (Istanbul: Tipo Nes¸riyat ve Basımevi, 1969), 25–26. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 27–28. ¨ u¨ Ocaklar Birligi, ¨ u¨ Ocaklar Birligi, ˘ Ortak Pazara Hayır (Ankara: Ulk ˘ 1970). Ulk

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the National Interests of the Turkish people will be disastrous.”16 It concluded with the following message: No To The Common Market No To Cultural Imperialism Not Assembly, But Heavy Industry National Economy. National Economy. National Economy. May God Protect The Turk.

Around the same time, the editors of Devlet, the semiofficial press organ of the NAP, not even a year old, devoted four entire issues (more than 100 articles) of their magazine to the Common Market and its dangers.17 Devlet, soliciting the aid of nationalist professionals and academics, offered a blend of theory and practice. Its overall aim was to guard against the threat of cultural imperialism posed by Turkey’s association with the EEC. Following such an emphasis, the editors called on their readers to approach Turkey’s “Local Goods Week”18 with a new mentality. They felt that to counter the new threats posed by the Common Market: Nationalist Turks must not only oppose the factories and goods of foreign origin but also its imported ideas. GOODS DO NOT MAKE IDEAS. BUT FOREIGN IDEAS CAN DESTROY A NATION. FIRST OPPOSE FOREIGN IDEAS, THEN FOREIGN CULTURE, THEN, LASTLY, FOREIGN GOODS.19

Opposition to the EEC also became a, if not the, platform for the entrance of a properly Islamic politics into Turkish political culture. Within months of the establishment of the National Order Party in January 1970, its youth organization published a booklet, entitled Parliament and the Common Market, arguing that: The Independence we fought so valiantly for will be handed back over to the Jews and Christians as they buy out our land, our factories, and colonize our soil. . . . Following the words of the great Sultan Fatih Mehmed who said, “May God, the Great Prophet 16 17 18

19

Ibid. Devlet, 15, 22, 29 December 1969, 5 January 1970. Significantly, the cover of its third issue featured a map of Turkey with the heading, “They Are Partners, We’re the Market.” Local Goods Week was a national tradition begun by Ataturk ¨ on 12 December 1929 as part of the transformation of the Turkish economy from liberalism to the etatism of the 1930s. ´ At the inaugural speech of Local Goods Week given at the Istanbul branch of the National ˙ ˘ Ataturk Industry Association (Istanbul Milli Sanayi Birligi), ¨ proclaimed: “The Turkish Fatherland, Turkish industry, is elevated by Turkish hands and Turkish history. Turks, buy Turkish ¨ goods, use Turkish goods, so that Turkish money remains on Turkish soil.” Ataturk, Ataturkun ¨ ¨ Soylevleri, 345. “Yerli Malı Haftası,” Devlet, 22 December 1969.

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and I curse anyone who sells one handful of this country,” we will never allow, under the garb of trade, our nation to be abandoned to foreign exploiters.20

The anti-EEC “campaigns” that sprang up in the wake of the first negotiation meeting occurred on the radical periphery of Turkish political culture, orchestrated by groups totally at odds, in composition and social practice, with their predecessors. It is worthwhile to pause for a moment and consider the differences between these protests and the Milliyet series that had taken up the same issue a year earlier. The demographic contrast was perhaps the most striking. The contributors to the Milliyet debate were Common Market “experts,” in their mid- to late forties, who occupied top positions within Turkey’s public and private institutional order.21 The radical protests, on the other hand, were organized and orchestrated by party youth groups and the newly politicized student body. Their opposition to the EEC not only signaled the addition of new institutional and organizational sites into the Common Market debate, but also marked the entrance of a new generation and breed of Turkish interlocutors. The entrance of a younger generation of interlocutors brought to TurkishEEC relations a new style of politics, one that likewise departed from the social practices and conventions of the previous generation. The contributors to the Milliyet series, whether opposed to or supporting integration, were all united by a certain working conception of the public, one evident, above all, in how and to whom they addressed their arguments. Though each of the authors was deeply embedded into Turkey’s institutional structure, none claimed themselves to be mouthpieces for the organizations they participated in, but rather presented themselves as private individuals speaking before an equally individuated public. They, as well as the editors of Milliyet, saw the daily as a neutral forum for the formation of a critical public opinion, one to be addressed and convinced through reasoned arguments. In these respects, the contributors, editors, and presumably the readers were informed by and helped create a liberal or bourgeois public sphere in the Habermasian sense.22 By contrast, the new anti-EEC protests operated on a radically different premise – one based on the new social practice of campaign. They were “orchestrated” and bounded political events that underscored the collectivity (whether on the streets or through the imagined community of those participating in Devlet’s new definition of the Local Goods Week) of the group who were joined through active resistance to the EEC. In doing so, they 20 21

22

Milli Nizam Partisi, Mecliste Ortak Pazar (Izmir: MNP, 1971), 55. Meaning that they were born either during World War I or Turkey’s War of Independence. ˙ on A middle generation, significantly younger than the initial interlocutors In ¨ u¨ (b. 1884) and Menderes (b. 1889), and older than the radical student and youth groups whose rank and file members at least, were in their twenties. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a ¨ Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).

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approached the Common Market not through reasoned arguments intended to sway a critical public opinion, but through an entirely different register, as a site for social mobilization. This social mobilization was collective through and through. Rather than mask their organizational allegiances, the anti-EEC protests explicitly foregrounded them. The protests were collectively authored and also gathered, through action and address, Turks into a collective entity (We nationalists, We revolutionaries, etc.). In doing so, they appealed to, and thereby helped create, an altogether different kind of public sphere. The social practices, ways of mobilization, and collective identity formation informing the protest movements were, of course, not new to Turkish politics. They had been used throughout the Republic as ways of rallying support for (or after 1948, against) the Kemalist regime. This method of organizing the Turkish social space was, however, quite novel to Turkish foreign policy. In fact, in its mode of mobilization and appeal, it was last employed between 1918 and 1923, first as a pan-Islamic resistance to European empire during the Great War and then as the guiding structure of the National Struggle. This is significant because both instances would serve as historical references in radical opposition to the EEC. While the performance of this new public in a sense predated Turkish opposition to the EEC, the EEC, I argue, nonetheless occupies a privileged position within its development. Just as Turkey’s first mass socialist movement (the WPT) had entered Turkey’s political culture through opposition to the EEC, the same held true for the radical right. Both the ultranationalist and Islamic anti-EEC campaigns were near coeval with the establishment of the MHP and MNP and their youth branches. The initial coevality becomes especially significant for our story, for opposition to the Common Market became one of the first issues by which these parties and their youth organizations defined their political horizon, drew their first line. Among the first interpellations (in the Althusserian sense) of ultranationalist or Islamic youth, at least in regard to mass political movements, occurred through opposition to the EEC. That the Common Market served as an early and foundational site for interpellation could be equally interpreted as historical coincidence (i.e., that the emergence of mass political movements of the Turkish radical right happened to occur at the same moment as a turning and decision point within Turkish-EEC relations) or as the natural and expected outcome of two political traditions that had historically developed in reaction to Turkish Europeanization. A third explanation, one considering only the dynamics of Turkey’s domestic political culture, is that the MHP and MNP saw in EEC opposition a way to distance themselves from the center-right JP. Here, unlike for instance antisocialist or anti-Soviet platforms, the EEC offered an obvious and much-needed wedge, allowing these groups to carve out a space to advocate for statist national industrialization beyond and outside the liberal/socialist binary of the Cold War. In all likelihood, it was a combination of all three. Finally, these three campaigns pose interesting questions about the interplay between anti-EEC appeals and the movements/groups that espoused them.

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The three protests, occurring within weeks of each other, were nevertheless organized independently by groups that were socio-institutionally unrelated and politically opposed. Some came from Turkey’s ultranationalist, some from socialist, and some from Islamic political traditions. Despite these disparate origins, there were remarkable similarities in both the content and form of their opposition to the EEC. Each campaign expressed its positions as though it spoke or stood in for the true interests of Turkey. Moreover, each was based on an antagonistic relation, where the EEC was viewed as a vital threat to Turkey, the presence of the other that was prohibiting Turkey from realizing itself. Both of these aspects, and their correlation, were previously identified as constitutive of the Nationalist logic. This common ontological relation explains how, even at the moment of their emergence, certain terms, symbols, and appeals were able to float from one group to another. The opposition to assembly industry, for example, was employed by leftist students as well as the Idealist Hearths Union, both of whom believed that Turkey’s integration with the Common Market would increase this sector at the cost of Turkish industrialization proper (understood as heavy industry). In this and their call for a “national economy” vis-`a-vis the trade liberalism demanded by EEC, they echoed a conceptualization of Turkey that had been separately articulated by the State Planning Organization. Terms such as “cultural imperialism,” “national sovereignty,” and “capitulations” circulated freely between groups; even the socialist slogan “They’re Partners, We’re the Market” was co-opted by the radical right within weeks of its creation by the socialist protest. In addition to these active campaigns, opposition to the Common Market became the subject of countless articles and editorials in Turkey’s burgeoning radical press. In the weeks following 9 December 1969, anti-EEC rhetoric came into vogue. Party bulletins and their semiofficial news organs were flooded with news and opinion on the Common Market.23

treason, treason, everywhere! The preceding analysis underscores how the entrance of the new political movements into the Common Market debate brought with it a radically different conception of the Turkish social space, one based on the collective mobilization and interpellation of Turks defined through their opposition to the EEC.24 It drew new lines and frontiers, and identified new enemies, dividing the true Turkish nation from all those who oppressed it. As we shall see, the new cartography of the Turkish social space both cut across and was bounded by existing 23

24

˙ ¸ c¸i Partisi, Ortak Pazari Bildirisi (Ankara: See Sabah, 14, 17, 20–22 December 1969. Turkiye Is ¨ The WPT, 1969). This was also a period in which many longer studies that would appear in 1970 and 1971 were commissioned. In this, it differed both from the unitary corporatist operation of the public sphere where all groups, parties, and institutions had joined together in common acclamation of the Ankara Agreement (1959–63), and from the public as the coming together of private individuals who presented and received reasoned arguments to form public opinion (the Milliyet series).

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cleavages formed through earlier contests around left/right, populist/statist, or secular/religious binaries. The new social space cut across existing cleavages to the extent that Turkish opposition directly critiqued the mentality of the Civilizational logic and those groups who had been motivated by it. The editors of the nationalist review, Ocak, stated as much in the preface to a 1971 special issue on the Common Market: Imprisoned by the cultural imperialism of the west, the intellectual elite of our day, whether civilian or military, view the world from the mentality of the Tanzimat. Oriented by the very imperialism to which they are bound, their heads degenerated by the alienating slogans of their captives, they are incapable of thinking for themselves.25

To the radical opposition, this civilizational mentality amounted to treason. By nominating the Civilizational logic as treasonous, the anti-EEC groups, by extension, branded all those who acted according to its principles as traitors to the nation – that is, people who were not recognized as a national subject within their national understanding. Given that the Civilizational logic had informed the worldview, not of a few misguided men in Turkey, but its entire social, bureaucratic, and political leadership, this implied a total indictment of Turkey’s postwar elite. The wholesale confrontation was one face of a greater assault on the old political and institutional centers of power in Turkish society, one that redrew Turkey’s social space as a contest between the young and the old, between the calcification of anachronistic ideas and the vitality of their own movements. The Turkish variant of a confrontation that came to define the 1968 movements raging, in different contexts, across the globe. Because of its former ubiquity, the critique of the Civilizational logic went directly to the core of this confrontation, implicating the entirety of the old Turkish elite who, as Mehmet Ali Aybar once claimed, “practiced a politics of national surrender.” The favorite target among the old guard was the Turkish Foreign Service, a group of men relentlessly attacked by the EEC opposition. Anti-EEC movements singled out the diplomats as an elitist caste “who had more in common with the Europeans they were selling Turkey to, than to the country itself.”26 ˘ Or as an ultranationalist critic, referencing then-Foreign Minister C¸aglayangil, who had stated that, “Turkey, following its established path of westernization, will seek to strengthen its ties with the Common Market,” remarked: ˘ mentality, regardFor over a century we have been Westernizing. Men of C¸aglayangil’s less of their capacity, have always spoken this way. In 100 years all we have gone is down. Like a never-healing wound, this westernization has lost us what precious little 25 26

Ocak, 37 (1971): 1. ¨ 1969). ¨ ur ¨ (Ankara: AU, Cengiz Uluc¸ay, Yeni Milli Kult

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we had – has turned into another ‘capitulation.’ Our national goal should be to be the best we can be, not to chase after a foreign mentality we blindly imitate.27

Similarly, Kamil Turan, writing in a special Common Market edition of Devlet which appeared in 1969, noted: Thanks to the Europeanization fashion that has gripped our country, we have placed all we have and don’t have on the scales of the Common Market. Our diplomats, rather than think of the Turkish nation’s independence or higher interests, have committed themselves to a European wedding no matter the price.28

Though the diplomatic corps had negotiated the Ankara Agreement, it had been initiated and signed by the DP and RPP, respectively. They, and the DP’s successor, the JP, were thereby equally complicit in undermining the nation. Coinciding with the anti-EEC campaigns, the daily Sabah ran a series of articles ˙ accusing the leaders of these parties of selling out the country. Ismet Pas¸a, the great hero of Turkey’s Independence War, chief negotiator of the Lausanne Treaty, and “National Leader,” was not exempt from the sword: ˙ on The personal pride which In ¨ u¨ displayed when signing his name to the [Ankara] agreement essentially binding Turkey to Europe reminds us of his opposition to commence our Independence War and his wish to consign Turkey to an American Mandate system. It seems that finally the Pas¸a, in 1963, succeeded in realizing his half century long dream.29

˙ on The reference was to an alleged claim that In ¨ u¨ had entertained the idea of an American mandate over Turkey along the same lines as was being worked ˙ on out for the Philippines. By linking In ¨ u’s ¨ initial reluctance to opt for war and ˙ on independence to the Common Market, the daily was characterizing both In ¨ u¨ as a traitor and the signing of the Ankara Agreement as a treasonous act. The assumption that the traditional elite approached the EEC through a treasonous civilizational lens was so strong that it was conjured up even in its absence. Another article in Sabah, this time taking aim at the JP, warned: The Cosmopolitan and Masonic minded JP government has been trying to convince you that the EEC is primarily an economic organization and they have been at pains to hide its political and ideological dimensions.30

Using a rhetorical technique standard to anti-Semitism, the article cast the JP as an antinational group that employed secret tactics and subterfuge to hoodwink the Turkish people. Yet, more interestingly, the article claimed that the JP remained motivated by the Civilizational logic even when it had consciously 27 28 29 30

¨ une,” Emperyelizim ve Ortak Pazar Ust Devlet, 22 December 1969. Is¸ınsu Okc¸u, “Kulturel ¨ ¨ Kamil Turan, “Ortak Pazar Maceramız,” Devlet, 29 December 1969. Sabah, 21 December 1969. Sabah, 21 December 1969.

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dropped such language precisely because it had become vulnerable to nationalist criticism. Alongside the Foreign Service and the mainstream parties, Turkey’s pro-EEC business and industrial associations also came under attack. Radical groups of all stripes, from socialists to ultraconservative nationalists and Islamists, denounced such associations as national traitors, drawing a line between the Turkish people and the “wealthy cosmopolitan Turkish businessmen who sup¸ iftc¸i, referring ported and financed Turkey’s bid to join the EEC.”31 As Ahmet C ˘ to Ertugrul Soysal (president of the Istanbul Industrial Hearth) and his cronies, remarked: For these men, [concepts such as] Country, Nation, Belief, National Culture, in short, their national social values, have become distorted if not already bankrupt. Men like ˘ Ertugrul Bey can, when they please, sell their factories and move to Paris or Switzerland. But lo and behold in our Anatolia, there live a destitute people who have attached their all to their country, who make up 99.9 percent of the population. Their ancestors of a thousand years rest here; this soil has been watered with their blood. They have been taught for generations that to abandon this soil carries the stain of dishonor, immorality, even faithlessness. This soil, that Ertugrul Soysal and his partners now dedicate their full efforts to selling to the Europeans.32

The accusation was clear: these industrial associations, whose members formed but a fraction of the Turkish population, were not economically bound to Turkey, and therefore had no inherent stake in its well-being. They stood in marked contrast to the real sovereigns of Turkey, a destitute people with ancestral bonds, with ties of blood and soil. Taken together, these indictments enacted a division of the Turkish social space, where an elitist, westernized, comprador, and treasonous caste was pitted against the true Turkish nation. The indictments were expressions of the new nationalisms of the 1960s, ways through which the latter confronted and negated the civilizational mentality of the old elite, in effect symbolically banishing this elite from the social space of the new nation. The EEC not only served as a privileged platform for this expression, but also revealed the profound affinities among the national imaginations of political projects that were, in different contexts, radically opposed to one another. Maverick and fresh as they may have been, the initial broadsides of the Nationalist logic drew limited purview within Turkish society. There were several reasons for this, all involving the efficacy of the logic itself. The efficacy of a Nationalist appeal, or what can be called its legibility or readability within Turkish society, was marked by its ability to subsume the positions and grievances of particular groups under a single banner signifying the totality of Turkey’s national interests. An appeal’s legibility rested, in short, on its 31 32

¨ ve Sosyalizm. Boran, Turkiye ¨ uyle ¨ C ¸ iftc¸i, Her Yon Ortak Pazar.

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synecdochic ability – the ability of a particular part to stand in for and signify the whole. Synecdoche thus describes a process where a particular appeal, without entirely abandoning its own particularity, starts also functioning as a universal signifier, one that represents and stands in for the totality of appeals (in the same way as gold, without ceasing to be a particular commodity, is transformed into the universal representation of value). The process by which a particular appeal comes to stand in for the formal category of the universal, is what Laclau and others have called hegemony.33 Perhaps the most successful historical example of this hegemonic process within Turkish history occurred during the war of independence, when a particular demand (the establishment of a sovereign Turkish state) was able to subsume and unite a multiplicity of appeals (from Islam to socialism) under the universal banner of the “National Struggle.” The circulation of signifiers and slogans between various anti-EEC groups (all employing a neocolonial vocabulary), the identification of the same domestic enemies (the MFA, mainstream parties, business associations, etc.), and the geographic overlap of their projects (that the Turkish variants of socialism and political Islam both operated within a national horizon) all attest to the synecdochic ability of the Nationalist Logic. Yet, at decade’s turn, there remained several barriers that impeded the legibility of Nationalist opposition to the EEC. In 1969, opposition to the Common Market was still, numerically, a small if growing minority. More than 85 percent of the population had, as recently as the October 1969 election, supported pro-EEC parties (though this number was to drop dramatically with the shift in RPP policy regarding the Additional Protocol). Making matters worse were the differential solutions of the nationalist problematic, creating different appeals on which EEC opposition was based. The multiplicity of solutions (analyzed in the previous chapter as the nation-state, nation-people, or occidentalist appeals) impeded the process of hegemony by differentiating the threat the EEC posed to the nation. The most significant barrier, however, especially in these early years, was the preexisting cleavages of the Turkish social space. The new cartography of the nationalist opposition to the EEC had to contend with already established grooves, those that delimited Turkish society as a struggle between the left and right, between secularists and Islamists, between statists and populists, or between antidemocratic and parliamentary forces. A great illustration of the how the Nationalist logic interacted with these preexisting cleavages was provided by the editors of the Devlet, who, prefacing their first special EEC issue, remarked that “certain other forces [referring to the socialists] are already engaged in criticizing the Common Market on economic grounds.” While the editors felt this to be an important undertaking (an implicit and rare acknowledgement of socialists as national subjects within 33

Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 217.

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the ultranationalist imaginary), they nonetheless called on true nationalists to “focus their attentions on the cultural aspects of EEC imperialism and its threat to Turkey’s national interests.”34 Some thirty-five years later, the Nationalist logic that underlay and made possible this somewhat muted recognition of a shared agenda by an ultranationalist group toward their sworn domestic enemy would overcome the cleavages between these groups. In a poignant example, during an anti-EU demonstration in 2005, the leaders of the Turkish Communist Party and the National Action Party were seen walking arm in arm in a show of solidarity. In 1969, however, the enmity between the radical right and left prohibited such unification. In fact, in this instance, the different appeals of the Nationalist logic served as the basis for their separation (evident in the editors’ differentiation between the socialists, who employed the nationpeople appeal) and the true nationalist movement (which approached the EEC as a threat to an essentialized Turkishness). Another anti-EEC article published a few weeks later in the same magazine calling upon all nationalists to “Fight Not for the People of the World, But for Turkishness” confirmed the resilience of the old divisions that the Nationalist logic had yet to overcome.35 In 1969, the combination of all these obstacles severely limited the initial legibility of the Nationalist appeals. The following sections describe how two key institutions within the Turkish Republic allowed opposition to the EEC to overcome these barriers, helping consolidate the three solutions to the nationalist problematic and the various groups and movements who espoused them.

instituting turkey: the spo and the tgna The deep enmity and distrust between the various sociopolitical groups that voiced opposition to the Common Market not only prohibited them from forming a unified or coordinated front, but worse, allowed the mainstream pro-EEC groups to marginalize them as the opinions of radical movements. As long as opposition to the EEC was seen as the product of the “communist threat,” an “Islamic resurgence,” or the work of “fascist agitators,” it could easily be dismissed as the grievance of particular and marginal groups. Yet, in a little over two years, EEC opposition effectively overcame the particularities of its sociopolitical origins and was widely recognized as representing the national will of Turkish society. The nationalization of EEC opposition from 1969 to 1971 is the history of the struggle for hegemony between the Civilizational and Nationalist logics. This struggle, though discursive in the sense of demarking the linguistic terrain of how Turkey could be talked about, took place around and through two institutional sites: the State Planning Organization and the Turkish Grand National Assembly. The remainder of this chapter 34 35

Devlet, 15 December 1969. Devlet, 22 December 1969.

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examines the role of these sites in the Nationalist logic’s hegemonic bid to signify Turkish-EEC relations. Negotiating the Additional Protocol: The State Planning Organization The JP government’s decision to enter into the second phase of the Ankara Agreement was made after extensive consultation and pressure from top-level diplomats within the MFA, and kept secret from the State Planning Organization. Prime Minister Demirel’s announcement of Turkey’s decision, in May 1967, was met with shock that quickly turned to deep reservation from the technocrats in the SPO and marked the beginning of an inter-bureaucratic struggle between the “diplomats” and the “planners” over Turkey’s relations with the Common Market. How did the SPO, an institution established in 1960 by a military government staunchly committed to the Turkish membership in the European project, come, seven years later, to abruptly and feverishly resist Turkish integration? What was the basis of this opposition? How did the SPO’s anti-EEC stance relate to other oppositional groups? What effect did the SPO’s stance have on the legibility of the Nationalist logic? These are the questions guiding this section. To answer them, we need first examine the global and domestic circumstances that led to the creation of the SPO and trace its subsequent development. Planning the Globe Over From the perspective of the post-1980s liberalization of the global economy, it is hard not to see the idea of planning in general, and of national planning in particular, as diametrically opposed to free trade and market liberalism. Yet in the decades following World War II, planning, in various garbs, had emerged as the preeminent paradigm of economic development. In Europe, Turkey’s historic benchmark, state interventions into the economy begun during World War II were continued into the peace in many countries. During the first postwar decade, planning was instituted nationally, to varying degrees of intensity, in Norway, Holland, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and France, the latter case later becoming a model for many developing nations, including Turkey.36 Nationalization of strategic industries, the creation of the welfare state, and theories of social citizenship redefined the state’s role within the now patently “national” economy. Added to this were the newly socialized countries of Eastern Europe, which had, by 1950, all begun to implement national five-year plans on the Soviet model. Planning was by no means a monopoly of national economies. The resumption of international trade, far from being left to market forces, was, in many areas, carried out deliberately either by national governments or supranational 36

¨ Planlama, 45. Sezen, Turkiye’de

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organizations. Both the Marshall Plan and COMECON were experiments in international planning designed to oversee the coordination and “recovery” of Western and Eastern European economies. By the late 1950s, regional initiatives such as the Association for Southeast Asia (ASA), the forerunner to ASEAN, the Latin American Free Trade Association (LAFTA), and the EEC, had been established to promote the economic and social development of their respective regions. Planning had also become popular in the decolonizing world, propelled by the neo-Keynesian consensus among the founding theoreticians and practitioners of development theory.37 These initiatives were all fueled by and themselves helped foster the ascendancy of development and planning within the discipline of economics itself.38 Far from being opposed by the west, planning initiatives in developing countries drew support from western states and financial sectors seeking accountability and the rational management of foreign investment and aid. Though initially a U.S.-driven initiative, the postwar push toward development investment had, with U.S. prodding, spread to the German miracle as well. By 1956, a large national campaign had established the term Entwicklungshilfe in the German national consciousness.39 By 1960, the idea of national planning had the full support of the IMF, World Bank, the OECD Consortium, and USAID; in fact, “planned development” had become the paradigm for underdeveloped countries.40 In 1961, the United Nations issued A Handbook of Public Administration, geared toward developing nations, which detailed the benefits to be gained from planning in the pursuit of economic growth.41 The reasoning behind such western initiatives was clear: planning was to provide the national framework for the distribution of western investment and aid, circumventing local corruption and ensuring that the flow of money was going toward a known, verifiable, and accountable purpose. At the birth of the SPO in Turkey, the culture of planning had achieved a global breadth. National planning had become the accepted framework for economic growth, a framework not at odds with western financial interests, but rather conceived of with the latter’s full blessing. This global culture of planning, near hegemonic in 1960, could not have matched more perfectly with the mentality of the military establishment that took power that same year. The new military government, the National Unity Committee (NUC), accused the DP of “straying from the intended path of the 37 38 39 40 41

¨ P.W. Preston, Development Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 154; Unay, Neoliberal Globalization, 10. ˙ ˙ ¨ ¨ ˘ II (Ankara: Umit Ilhan Tekeli and Selim Ilkin, Turkiye ve Avrupa Toplulugu Yayıncılık, 1993), 12–13. The first fruit of this shift in regard to Turkey was the visit of the West German Economics Minister Professor Erhard to Ankara in 1959. Aral, Planlı Kalkınma, 23. Sezen, Devetc¸ilikten, 47. United Nations, A Handbook of Public Administration (New York: United Nations Press Office, 1961), 93.

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reforms.”42 This stateTurkish project” and “becoming hostile to Ataturk’s ¨ ment, part of the first report issued by the Constitutional Commission led by Professor Onar, reasserted an understanding of the nation as a rational and directed progression, presumed to be lacking from the populist reign of the DP. These military men perceived Turkey as a long-term project that needed to be planned. Thus the coup simultaneously laid out a plan for Turkey’s future, claimed that this plan was a constitutional feature of the Turkish Republic, and justified itself on the grounds that the DP had placed this plan into jeopardy. The State Planning Organization, a centerpiece of the military government’s sociopolitical revolution, was instituted in 1960 and charged with the comprehensive development of the nation according to a plan. Cemal Gursel, Chief of ¨ Staff and leader of the NUC, did not mince words on this issue: “From now on it will not be possible for anyone in this country to just ‘do things as they please.’ Every public initiative will be evaluated by the planning agency . . . which will decide whether to accept or reject its implementation.”43 The plan was to ensure Turkish economic development based on a variant of import substitution industrialization (ISI), directing investments and resources toward the local production of goods that Turkey currently imported. While Turkey was one of the first countries to adopt ISI as its national planning principle (at around the same time as Japan), by the early 1960s, many Asian countries (including India and Korea) had turned to ISI as the preferred planning strategy for developing their postcolonial economies. The State Planning Organization was a military creation through and through. It was first of all, like the takeover itself, an intervention into the core operation of the state. Not a week into the coup, A. Koopman, assistant to Dutch planner Jan Timbergen brought in to advise the Turkish planners, remarked on this very fact: “The task of setting up a planning institution had been made much simpler by the military coup since elected governments may be reluctant to make changes that may, in the future, bind them.”44 And in theory, this held true. The SPO would design five-year plans for the comprehensive development of the country, shielding investment and resource allocation from policy shifts that inexplicably spiked around election time. Even so, moderate segments within the NUC were wary of creating “a state within a state” (ironic, given the TAF’s own position). After a long and bitter internal debate regarding the autonomy of the SPO vis-`a-vis Turkey’s democratic institutions, the NUC opted to subordinate national planning to elected governments: the SPO was duly attached to the vice-prime minister’s office and charged with “designing 42 43 44

Ahmad, Turkish Experiment, 163. ˘ Kalkınma Arayıs¸ları (Istanbul: Altın Kenan Mortan and Cemil C ¸ akmaklı, Gec¸mis¸ten-Gelecege Kitaplar Yayınevei, 1987), 78. ¨ ˘ ¨ Cemal Mıhc¸ıoglu, Devlet Planlama Tes¸kilatının Kurulus¸ Gunleri (Ankara: AUSBF Yayınları, 1983), 229–57.

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a plan for the realization of objectives decided by the government.”45 Not surprisingly, the SPO’s initial ambition to establish comprehensive national planning soon met with political resistance from the JP, setting off a series of conflicts between the planners and the government leading to the gutting of the SPO’s top cadre through resignation and/or removal.46 By 1966, just six years into Turkey’s experiment in national planning, Prime Minister Suleyman ¨ Demirel (JP) claimed that “there is no place for planning within developed countries” and that “planning has no role in the development of free and democratic nations.”47 Most commentators on the SPO have viewed these losses as the death rattle of Turkish planning, tracing how the initial ambitions of the planners became the political casualty of power politics and vested interests.48 Mortan and C¸akmaklı have gone so far as to categorize post-1965 Turkey as “Turkey’s search [for development] without a plan (plansız arayıs¸ı).”49 From a strictly economic point of view, these analyses are correct. Yet, a few years after these events, the SPO as cultural institution became a powerful force within the Turkish social-imaginary. It gained in symbolic terms what it had lost in economic power. It was, I argue, the SPO’s involvement in the debate over Turkish membership in the EEC that repowered the SPO symbolically. This involvement recast Turkish planning in a global setting; a setting where the development of Turkey’s rationally planned “national economy” came into open conflict with her economic integration into the Common Market. The SPO first became concerned with Turkish-EEC integration after the government’s announcement to enter into the second phase.50 By this date, 45 46 47 48

49 50

¨ ¨ ¨ us ¨ ¸ um ¨ u¨ (Istanbul: Akc¸ay, Kapitalizmi Planlamak: Turkiye’de Planlama ve DPT’nin Don Umit Sosyal Aras¸tırmalar Vakfı, 2007), 78. ¨ 6 February 1963, 4 March 1966; Forum, 1 October 1963; Cumhuriyet, 18 November See Yon, 1965. Cumhuriyet, 4 February 1966. ¨ Yalcın Kuc (Istanbul: Tekin Yayınları, 1978); Akc¸ay, Kapi¨ ¸ uk, ¨ Planlama, Kalkınma, ve Turkiye ¨ talizmi Planlamak; Unay, Neoliberal Globalization; Mortan and C¸akmaklı, Kalkınma Arayıs¸ı; Sezen, Devletc¸ilikten. Mortan and C¸akmaklı, Kalkınma Arayıs¸ı, 233. This second phase would require tariff reductions on Turkey’s part, thus making explicit the incommensurability between the trade liberalization demanded by the Common Market and the economics of import-substitution-based industrialization being carried out by the State Planning Organization. This begs the question of why the initial planners did not raise objections to the EEC much earlier, say, during the initial negotiations of the Ankara Agreement, when this contradiction first appeared. The reason for this was temporal. The two plans referred, in effect, to two distinct periods in Turkey’s future. The First Five Year Plan was designed within a fifteen-year developmental time frame, while the Association Agreement between Turkey and the EEC envisioned full membership some two decades later. Furthermore, the first stage of the Association Agreement required no concessions on Turkey’s part, thus placing no immediate stipulations on Turkish economic policy. In fact, it was widely believed that once Turkish industry became globally competitive, integration with Europe would provide privileged access to European markets. This reasoning, and reassurances of the possibility of withdrawal if

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the planners had become enmeshed in a broad range of foreign and domestic issues. In addition to directing state industrial investment, the SPO concerned itself with state subsidies and taxation, foreign trade, investment and loans, infrastructure, interest rates, the money supply, and the labor force. Directing the industrialization of the country through import substitution also embroiled the SPO within Turkey’s regulated and highly politicized import regime. All available foreign exchange resources were to be spent and distributed among the different sectors of the economy in accordance with the government and SPO’s development programs and goals.51 It was hardly surprising that when the path of European integration stipulated a severe reduction in Turkish tariffs, the SPO would take an avid interest in Turkey’s relations with the EEC. The SPO noted as much in a series of reports on the Common Market a few months after the foreign minister’s announcement. It stated in unambiguous terms that, “Turkey, in order to become a full member of the EEC, first needs to industrialize. Only through industrialization can the advantages of membership be maximized and its disadvantages minimized.”52 In the same report, the SPO made clear just what kind of industrialization it meant: it argued not for the establishment of assembly industry, where Turkey would presumably have a comparative local advantage within a liberalized Common Market, but rather heavy or “main” industry, “metallurgy, machines, oil, and chemicals” – an industrialization model that would require high tariffs in these sectors well into the future. These first retorts brought the SPO into direct confrontation with the sacred cow of the Turkish state establishment – the diplomatic corps. For the next decade the Common Market became an incendiary issue between the planners and the diplomats within the Turkish state bureaucracy. As one commentator put it, “The Additional Protocol was not so much negotiated by Turkey and the EEC as it was between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the SPO. The real battle took place within these corridors.”53 Analysis of the SPO’s opposition to the EEC and its main domestic proponent, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reveals a significant discrepancy between the self-perception of the planners as technocratic experts and the ideological language they invoked against the Common Market. The planners thought of themselves, both by vocation and orientation, as technocrats. They saw themselves as the final products of Ataturk’s project, a new generation of civil ¨

51 52 53

Turkey was not economically competitive come accession, were largely responsible for the few ˘ in Planlı Kalkınma, lines allotted to EEC integration within the plan itself. See Karaosmanoglu, 62 and DPT, Kalkınma Planı – Birinci Bes¸ Yil (Ankara: Bas¸bankanlık Devlet Matbaası, 1963). Henri Barkey, The State and the Industrialization Crisis in Turkey (Boulder: Westview Press 1990), 70. ¨ ˘ Hazırlayıcı Sanayiles¸me I˙htiyacı, Gerekc¸e, 1968. gini DPT, Turkiye’nin Ortak Pazar Tam Uyeli ˙ DPT Archives: 538-IPD 211. A. Cemal, Cumhurriyet, 22 March 1974.

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servants that had been trained by the “standards of contemporary civilization” insofar as these standards meant western scientific and technical expertise. As one of their inner cadre pointed out, “The SPO was essentially made up of technicians and engineers. We approached the EEC with tables and charts, spoke of it through numbers.”54 It was the diplomats, the SPO argued, who, “in the grip of a cheap and sentimental politics,” were “preventing the industrialization, growth, and development of the country.”55 Tellingly, however, the SPO’s main response to the EEC was not the statistical kind of economics conducted by planning and economics ministries in Europe, but one based on ideological arguments of political economy. A major strain of SPO opposition to Turkish-EEC integration was anchored in notions of economic independence and national sovereignty. While it acknowledged that European social democracy allowed for a certain amount of planning as part of the “mixed economy,” it shrewdly perceived that “liberalism, as the fundamental engine of European integration, would soon do away with national maneuverability.”56 The planners felt that for a relatively underdeveloped country, this harmonization of policy would be devastating. A second reservation raised by the planners regarded the related issue of unequal development. Here the SPO resurrected arguments made thirty years ago by the Kadro movement during Turkey’s initial foray into planning dur´ ing the 1930s. The ideologues of the Etatism had perceived a bipolar world divided into industrialized and nonindustrialized nations. Inequality in industrialization, the Kadro movement believed, was the source of continued global exploitation and colonialism.57 Modern Turkey had, through its national war of independence, taken an important first step toward ending this inequality, but only through a “second, revolutionary, state-directed industrialization” would it achieve parity with, and thus avoid being recolonized by, the industrialized nations of the world.58 The ideas of Kadro shared much in common with the field of dependency theory popular during the 1960s; the SPO merely applied this shared understanding of unequal global development to Turkey’s contemporary relations with the Common Market. Accordingly, the EEC “six” were viewed as advanced industrial economies and contrasted sharply with Turkey’s underdevelopment. Integration into a customs union under these conditions, the SPO argued, would “permanently inhibit Turkey’s industrialization,” turning it into a colony of the west. Instead, the SPO, especially its Islamic wing, suggested further economic integration with the organization for Regional Cooperation and Development (RCD), founded in 1964 between 54 55 56 57 58

¨ – Avrupa Birligi I˙lis¸kileri, 135. C ¸ alıs¸, Turkiye ¨ unl ¨ C ¸ os¸kun Ur S¸artları (Ankara: DPT: 1970). ¨ u, ¨ Ortak Pazara Gec¸is¸ Donemi ¨ unl Ur ¨ u, ¨ Ortak Pazara, 17. Sezen, Devletc¸ilikten, 152. Mustafa Turkes ¸ , “The Ideology of the Kadro Movement: A Patriotic Leftist Movement in ¨ Turkey,” in Turkey Before and After Ataturk, ed. S. Kedourie (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 97–170.

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Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey. The SPO claimed that, “integration with countries sharing a similar level of economic development could go hand in hand with industrialization.”59 This last point is of interest as it undermines a common misconception about the SPO, namely that the planners desired a closed autarkic economy based on ISI or that they felt economic planning to be wholly described by import substitution policies. As Ali Sait Yuksel, the SPO’s Com¨ mon Market expert, made clear in 1970: An industrializing Turkey needs to find markets for its exports. These markets exist in Asia, in Africa, in the Middle East, in short, in the third world. Turkey needs to lead the drive for integration so that we may all benefit from the balanced trade arising from economies of equal relative development.60

For the planners, the liberal principle of trade through comparative advantage needed not necessarily hinder Turkish industrialization. It is possible to view these reservations through an institutional account of the SPO, either by attributing anti-EEC rhetoric to the early politicization of ¨ the SPO by socialists and Islamists brought in under Turgut Ozal’s leadership or, alternately, by seeing the planners’ opposition as a self-interested posture to maintain their reach within institutional power-politics.61 The structure of the SPO’s arguments, however, suggests another interpretation. Turkey’s integration into the EEC posed a threat to the SPO, to be sure, but this threat was signified as one that threatened the development of the entire nation. Since developmentalism was presumably a process done for and affecting the whole of society, it was premised on one consciousness or one will: that of the nation as a whole. The SPO, in an informational communique´ outlining its purpose and functions, echoed these thoughts: Today, planning has become a necessity for any responsible and efficient state administration. For under-developed or developing nations in particular, planning has been universally acknowledged in both political and technical circles as the only means to economic and social development.62

In July 1973, the SPO released a Long Term Strategy Report that summarized the basics of its third five-year plan, and was intended for a broad audience both within the bureaucracy and civil society. Its opening message read as follows: The Plan: Takes into account every individual, every sector, The WHOLE COUNTRY and the ENTIRE NATION. 59 60 61 62

¨ DPT, Ortak Pazar Gec¸is¸ Donemi Sorunları (Ankara: DPT, 1970). ¨ Durumu Hakkında Not, 1970. DPT Ali Sait Yuksel, Ortak Pazar I˙le Munasebetlerimizin ¨ ¨ archive 337.142 09561 YUK. ¨ ¸ en, Devletin Yokus¸u (Ankara: Doruk Yayınları, 1996), 205. Ali Nejat Olc DPT, Devlet Planlama Tes¸kilatı Hakında Bilgi, 1961. DPT archive 338.9’060’561 DEV b.

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Turkish integration into the EEC, to the extent that it breached the autonomy of the SPO, was thus, by the above logic, seen as undermining the economic sovereignty and independence of the Turkish nation. When one of the SPO’s Common Market experts likened the diplomats in the MFA to Mustafa Res¸it Pas¸a,64 and the Additional Protocol to the 1838 Turkish-English Trade Agreement (which, it was pointed out, “had effectively dismantled Ottoman industrialization”), he reproduced this global historical argument.65 So did the SPO delegates who, at an inter-ministry coordination meeting in 1969, “threatened to take the pro-EEC men in the MFA to Kızılay Meydanı [Ankara’s central public square] and hang them all!” as national traitors.66 The war of words between the planners and the diplomats raged throughout the late 1960s into the early 1970s. As one diplomat returning from his tour of duty as part of Turkey’s permanent delegation to the EEC remarked: When I arrived in Turkey, I realized that the conversation on Turkey’s relations with Europe had reached a much larger and serious dimension than what we were doing in Brussels. There was almost a total state of war between the two sides.67 [The SPO] kept insisting that our national interests be defended against the capitalist-imperialist intentions of Europe.68

In its opposition to the EEC, the SPO articulated an understanding of Turkey as a developing nation-state whose sovereignty was based on the autonomy of its national economy. In its function of economic planning, the SPO situated itself above and outside of politics and thereby constituted the nation as a whole. Yet to ignore the political dimension of the SPO is also impossible. The SPO entered politics not so much through its inter-bureaucratic battle with the MFA, but, more importantly, through how it came to be signified within Turkish society at large. As Ian Roxborough argued in 1979, import-substitution politics put the state at the forefront of “protecting” and developing the nation, and thus fostered nationalism as an ideology that stood as a populist image against its alternative, caving into globalization.69 To the extent that the SPO was referenced as representing Turkey’s national interests by other anti-EEC 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

DPT, Uzun Vadeli Yeni Strateji, 1974. DPT archive 338.9’060’561 BAS d. Ottoman foreign minister who presided over the Anglo-Turkish Trade Agreement. ¨ C ¸ alıs¸, Turkiye – Avrupa, 134. Keskin, Avrupa Yollarında, 93. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 90. Ian Roxborough, Theories of Underdevelopment (London: The Macmillan Press, 1979).

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groups within the sociopolitical structure it operated on both a political and suprapolitical level. Specifically, the SPO was drawn into the political arena by various anti-EEC groups precisely because of its subject-position above politics as a constituent element of the Turkish nation. Between the signing of the AP in March 1970 and the military intervention a year later, the SPO became a major reference point for anti-EEC movements within Turkey. Islamists, radical nationalists, and socialists all clamored to appropriate the SPO to their own particular agendas. More importantly, the left-wing of the Republican Peoples Party led by Bulent Ecevit and Besim ¨ ¨ unel Ust was becoming increasingly vocal in its support of the SPO’s position. ¨ ¨ unel, Ust the vice general secretary of RPP and former head of the economic ¨ division of the SPO, had been one of the first to raise reservations about the ¨ unel Common Market. In the 1959–63 period, Ust had urged a thorough anal¨ ysis of the economic implications involved in integration before embarking too hastily into an association.70 In 1968, he had been among those who had first debated the pros and cons of advancing to the second stage in the pages of Milliyet. But by 1969, his tone had changed measurably, becoming much more assertive and uncompromising, drawing stark lines where once he had resorted to reasoned argument. He now claimed that Turkey was totally unprepared to enter and should therefore postpone the transitional period for twelve years. ¨ unel If the government, Ust derided, acting on, “non-economical, anachronis¨ tic, and baseless desires, enters into the second phase, Turkish industry and the Turkish people will face a great loss. Our national interests will become indefensible.”71 Whatever the ideological or political reasons were for forging the Association Agreement: The decision to enter the second phase must be an economic one, and as such should be left in the hands of qualified economic experts in the SPO. These experts, having assessed the ramifications of the Additional Protocol (AP) to the development of Turkey, all state that the country is not ready.72

For their part, the ultranationalists praised “the nationalists in the SPO for defending the true national interests of Turkey,”73 while professional organizations such as the CME argued that “further integration with the Common Market would restrict the competence of the SPO to develop the Turkish economy since the EEC is founded upon a liberal economic order incommensurable with the idea of planning.”74 Meanwhile, Behice Boran, the new leader of the 70 71 72 73 74

¨ unel, ¨ ¨ ¸ terek Pazarı’nın Turk ¨ Ekonomisi Uzerinde Muhtemel Tepkileri See Besim Ust Avrupa Mus ¨ ˘ 1962). (Ankara: Turkiye Ticaret Odalari Birligi, ¨ Milliyet, 17 March 1970. Ibid. Devlet, 22 December 1969. Odası Ortak Pazar Komisyonu, Ortak Pazar ve Turkiye (Istanbul: MMO, Makina Muhendisler ¨ 1970).

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Workers’ Party of Turkey, tried to discredit the JP by underscoring the latter’s growing irritation with the recalcitrant SPO: The JP government, frustrated by the SPO’s refusal to sacrifice Turkey’s national interests, has covertly tried to undermine its sovereignty. At an inter-ministry budget meeting a few months ago, a JP minister remarked that, “Our Common Market policy must not be made to comply with the Plan, but rather, the Plan be drawn in accordance with our Common Market policy.”75

Here, as was often the case, Behice Boran went directly to the socioeconomic heart of the issue, exposing, through the JP’s own words, the underlying incommensurabilty between Turkey’s Common Market policy and the SPO’s plan for Turkey’s national development. She would have to wait another eleven years for the final clause of the last sentence to come true. By the end of 1970, the SPO had become the fulcrum around which opposition to the EEC began to turn. It provided a firm base that grouped together the various anti-EEC camps under a unified demand to uphold the development of the national economy. Overlapping these developments was a similar process of coalescence around another institution, the Turkish Grand National Assembly, which would anchor an altogether different solution to the nationalist problematic. Ratifying the Additional Protocol: The Turkish Grand National Assembly Erbakan’s First Interpellation, May 1970 By 1970, EEC opposition had entrenched itself within radical political parties and their press organs, student dormitories, and a key institution of the Turkish bureaucracy. Despite these advances, it had yet to find voice or expression within the TGNA, a body dominated by the pro-EEC RPP and JP, who together controlled 89 percent or 399/450 seats within the assembly.76 The egress came in May 1970 when Necmettin Erbakan, the leader of Turkey’s first Islamic party, brought an interpellation against the Demirel government over its handling of Turkey’s relations with the EEC. Utilizing a provision of the 1961 constitution that permitted a Member of Parliament to call for a vote of confidence in the government, Erbakan thrust the Common Market, but more pertinently, the appeals of the Nationalist logic, into the spotlight of Turkish politics. Necmettin Erbakan was elected to the TGNA as an independent deputy from Konya in the October 1969 general elections.77 In January 1970, Erbakan, 75 76 77

Millet Meclisi Tutanak Dergisi D:2 T:4 C:34 19.12.1969, 52. http://www.tbmm.gov.tr/develop/owa/secim_sorgu.secimdeki_partiler?p_secim_yili=1969. Necmettin Erbakan was born in Sinop, a small city on the Black Sea coast in northern Turkey. He entered politics in 1969, since which he has founded three parties, all of which were disbanded by military tribunals. He served as vice-prime minister under the Ecevit and Demirel governments in the 1970s and became prime minister himself in 1996. Under heavy pressure

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along with seventeen of his friends, founded the National Order Party (NOP). The NOP managed to form a three-deputy party group in parliament when two members of the Justice Party defected a few weeks later. Like the left had done through the WPT eight years before, Islamic politics’ initial splash on the political scene also came via the Common Market. Barely three months after its formation, Erbakan’s NOP arraigned the government with dereliction of duty in its dealings with the EEC. Among the charges Erbakan cited were failure to heed the recommendations of experts in the SPO, failure to consult the TGNA before beginning negotiations for the Additional Protocol, and acting against Turkey’s historical and cultural national interests.78 The three charges precisely correspond to the three appeals of the Nationalist logic detailed in the previous chapter. Erbakan, in uniting them, had done his homework, symbolizing through these specific charges the possible solutions to the nationalist problematic. While the last charge appealed to a set of essentialized cultural and historical attributes, the two institutions mentioned by Erbakan, the SPO and TGNA, served as concrete historical sites through which Turkey was materialized, respectively, as a nation-state and a nation-people. In his philippic before the TGNA, Erbakan framed the EEC within the broader context of European history. In his opening remarks, he claimed that: The Common Market is a new system of colonization, adapted to the requirements of our age, by the West European states who have for centuries been following a path of colonization.79

Yet unlike the Turkish left who attributed European colonialism to the capitalist mode of production, Erbakan argued that “the exploitative colonialism of the Western nations stems from and is a result of their belonging to the Jewish, Christian, and Greek civilizations.” He contrasted this with Turkey’s resum e´ ´ on the world stage: The Ottoman Empire also brought together many countries within its jurisdiction. However it never acted according to the mentality of the Western exploiters because its foundation was that of Islamic Civilization.80

Here Erbakan explicitly contested the putative conception of Civilization at the heart of the Civilizational logic. The Civilizational logic was premised on the distinction between culture and civilization, where each peoples possessed an idiosyncratic culture consisting of their customs, habits, language, and so forth, whereas Civilization was singular and universal within a given age. To be a part of contemporary Civilization was to partake in and thus have a history;

78 79 80

from the Turkish military, Erbakan stepped down from this position in 1997 in what has been referred to as a postmodern coup. Millet Meclis Tutanak Dergisi D:3 T:4 C:1 15/May/1970, 737–53. Ibid. Ibid.

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anything less meant being quashed by it. By contrast, Erbakan suggested that there were multiple civilizations, and that these competing civilizations should not be judged by their domination of the world, but rather through a moral register of how they treated those under their dominion. It was an ingenious re-presentation of imperial history, holding the very index of plurality now reigning in the EEC states as the index by which to judge Turkey’s and Europe’s own past. Seen in this light, Europe’s colonial history, based on an essentialized difference, stood as morally inferior to Islamic civilization. This civilizational incommensurability, Erbakan argued, was, above all, the reason to withdraw Turkey’s application to the EEC. “Before all else, Turkey’s social makeup, historical conscience and progression, as well as worldview, prevent it from forming any sort of political union with the Western European countries.”81 Perhaps as important as Erbakan’s introduction of the Nationalist logic to the TGNA was the response of the governing Justice Party to the interpellation. The JP was under no obligation to defend itself. Demirel’s party alone controlled 56 percent of the Assembly’s seats, making Erbakan’s interpellation a purely symbolic gesture whose defeat was inevitable as long as the JP held party rank. Yet rather than ignore Erbakan, the JP hoped to draw the major opposition party (RPP) to its side, thus marginalizing the gathering anti-EEC movement not only within the TGNA but symbolically throughout Turkey as well. Proponents of the Civilizational logic, while fumbling in their retorts to leftist or nationalist opposition over the Common Market, found, in Erbakan, a much easier target for their arguments. Within the mantra of “reaching the level of contemporary civilization,” political Islam had been characterized as backward, conservative, hidebound, irrational, and anachronistic. Aydın Yalc¸ın, a JP deputy and head of the Joint Parliamentary Commission between Turkey and the European Parliament, was quick to jump on this much-used dichotomy between the modern and the traditional: and secular The radical-right has, simply by ignoring public opinion or the Ataturkist ¨ Turkish Republic, as in all matters, looked at the EEC from the framework of certain antediluvian ideas carried over from the Middle Ages. They speak of an Islamic Union as an alternative to the Common Market. These men seem to have forgotten how 50 years ago Turkey learned through bitter experience the bankruptcy of such ideas as its hardest historical lesson.82

Yet efforts to marginalize the growing EEC opposition could not be handled by the appeals of the Civilizational logic alone. The Justice Party had begun to realize that the anti-EEC groups, through their use of the Nationalist logic, had cleared a new discursive playing field on which the signifier of “national” was 81 82

Ibid. Ibid.

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being contested. In the JP’s responses to Erbakan’s interpellation it is possible to detect the pro-EEC camp’s shift away from the Civilizational logic to the new national pitch. The continuation of Aydın Yalc¸ın’s speech to the TGNA quoted above emphasized the new cant: Since 1958, all of the Turkish governments that have come and gone have regarded the issue of the Common Market as a national goal, a national cause. Recently the radical left and right fringes of Turkish society have begun to question the very premises on which our relations with the EEC were founded. Yet for those outside these radical circles, those that believe in a democratic system, a Western system, those that have accepted the secular and Ataturkist principles of our Republic; among these other ¨ national parties, there is not the slightest hesitation.83

Another JP deputy, Cahit Karakas¸, followed up Yalc¸ın’s remarks by arguing that because all parties had developed Turkey’s association with the Common Market, “EEC-Turkish relations had ceased to be the politics of a single party or government and had become a properly national politics.”84 The preceding quotes no doubt testify to the JP’s explicit efforts to recruit Turkey’s other major party, the RPP, in a grand united pro-EEC coalition.85 How exactly the national dimension fit in and what, if anything, this signifier meant was less clear. The government’s Common Market policy was deemed national on the basis of conservative arguments relying on tradition and established policy, or clumsily welded to other, now contested, signifiers such as democracy and Ataturkism. Compared to the Nationalist logic, whose antag¨ onistic ontology toward the EEC was daily creating new and particular ways of imagining the Turkish nation, the JP’s signification of the term national was ringing all too hollow. The Opposition Widens Erbakan’s interpellation, though easily defeated, had demonstrated two things: first, that the EEC could become a means to further weaken the JP government, and second, that the Nationalist logic could be used as an effective tool in doing this. Throughout the summer and fall of 1970, attacks on the Common Market and its supporters in the JP increased in number. Erbakan and company continued their assault on the EEC, employing more dramatic rhetoric than that used during his TGNA speech. The NOP leader argued that “the EEC is a three story building. On the top floor sit the Jews, below them the Americans, and 83 84 85

Ibid. Ibid. The Demirel government was also reeling from a major political setback and in need of opposition support. In February 1970, just months after its electoral triumph, the government was brought down when dissidents within Demirel’s own party voted against the budget. While he was reappointed by the president, Demirel never fully recovered from this event. See Ahmad, Turkish Experiment, 202

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finally on the bottom, the Europeans. They’re inviting us into the basement as the building super [kapıcı].”86 The Nation Party (NP) also joined the other radical parties in the TGNA in their opposition to the EEC. In July 1970, NP General Secretary Fehmi ˘ stated, “Our true national worldview and culture is based on Cumalıoglu the Turkish-Islamic traditions that have for 1000 glorious years of history made us a leader and example to the world. By joining the Common Market we will lose our identity and with it our Nation.”87 More importantly, the more radical faction of the RPP was becoming increasingly vocal in its objections to the EEC. Led by general secretary Bulent Ecevit and vice-general secretary ¨ ¨ unel, ˙ Ust this wing began to contest the tacit approval of its leader, Ismet ¨ ˙ on ¨ unel In claimed that, “the present agreement [the Additional Protocol] ¨ u. ¨ Ust ¨ will turn Turkey into a country that, hands laid open, is permanently forced to open itself to the outside.”88 Significantly, the mainstream press began to give voice to the dissident faction within the RPP. An article in Milliyet entitled “The RPP to Reject Common Market” quoted the vice-general secretary as saying: The RPP is determined to resist with all its strength any agreement that will deter Turkey’s industrialization, endanger its economic independence, and is otherwise counter to our National Interests. The agreement can only be signed with a bravado born of ignorance.89

The very next day, a popular columnist and avid RPP supporter, Ali Gevgilili, in an ominously titled article, “The Economic Knot Tightens,” helped cement the RPP’s new position: The government has made a decision that will affect not the present but the future state of Turkey for generations to come. They have effectively (con)signed the people of Asia Minor to hegemony by the Western European powers.90

Added to this, cracks were beginning to appear within the once solidly proEEC business community. The Izmir Industrial Hearth became Turkey’s first major industrial association to oppose entry into the Common Market.91 It was quickly joined and soon overtaken by the Eskis¸ehir Chamber of Industry, which became an outspoken critic of the EEC. The Chamber was of the opinion that, “membership in the Common Market conflicts with Turkey’s desire 86

87

88 89 90 91

¨ uk ¨ Avrupa Kavgası, 203. In Turkey, the kapıcı is a lower-class super¨ Buy Birand, Turkiye’nin intendent (usually a recent migrant from Eastern Anatolia) of the building, who attends to the small tasks of the apartment (cleaning, trash collection, market shopping, etc.). The year 1971 was, incidentally, the 900-year anniversary of the battle of Malazgirt between the Seljuk Turks and the Byzantine Empire in 1071. The Turkish victory marks their first entry into Anatolia and remains a powerful historical event in the Turkish social-imaginary. Fehmi ˘ Cumalıoglu, interview with Devlet, 23 July 1970. Milliyet, 29 July 1970. Ibid. ˙ ˘ Dugum Daralıyor,” Milliyet, 30 July 1970. Ali Gevgilili, “Itisadi ¨ C ¸ alis¸, Turkiye – Avrupa Birligi I˙lis¸kileri, 143.

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for industrialization. . . . Therefore as industrialists with social awareness, we must use our influence [to prevent such membership].”92 These regional organizations were joined by institutes on the national level such as the Center for National Productivity, which claimed that, “membership in the Common Market would increase the already sizeable advantages enjoyed by the technologically advanced countries of Europe to the detriment of Turkey.”93 In a survey taken in 1970 of Turkish businessmen, 52 percent supported Turkish membership in the EEC, but an alarming 38 percent of those questioned were opposed.94 Nevertheless, in the midst of mounting criticism, the negotiations for the Additional Protocol carried on and were concluded on 22 July 1970. The government began to make preparations for the signing ceremony scheduled to take place in Brussels on 23 November. Seven years prior, the signing of the Ankara Agreement had served to unite the country under a single shared agenda. Politically weakened and incapable of capping the increasingly violent and instable domestic situation,95 Demirel hoped for a similar effect with the Additional Protocol. As part of this effort, in addition to the regular publicity channels, the JP government, in cooperation with the European Commission and the Turkish Union of Chambers (TOB), organized an exhibit entitled “Turkey in the Common Market,” intended to raise public awareness of the benefits of the EEC. Scheduled to coincide with the signing of the Additional Protocol, it opened in Ankara on 17 November 1970. The exhibit was comprised of artistic models and dioramas representing various aspects of Turkey’s relationship with the EEC. One outstanding piece depicted historical attempts to build a bridge over the Bosphorus; it began in 490 BC, when the Persian Emperor Darius commissioned his navy to tie together boats and rafts for his army to march across, and ended with a model of the Bosphorus Bridge (then under construction) that had been partially funded by the EEC.96 A day before the official signing ceremony, an ultranationalist group broke into the TOB building and smashed the exhibit. It was later revealed that the police had been present and had turned a blind eye to the incident.97 While 92 93 94 95

96 97

Ilkin, “A History of Turkey’s Association,” 41. ¨ Birand, Turkiyeʾnin Ortak Pazar Macerası, 203. ˙ I.A. ˙ ¨ ˘ S¸oral, Ozel ¨ Mutes ¨ ¸ ebbisler (Ankara: Ankara I.T. Kesimde Turk Yayınları, 1974). Erdogan By the end of 1969, domestic instability had begun a rapid acceleration from which it was not to recover until the military coup of 12 March 1971. The 1969 election had effectively disenfranchised many of the smaller parties. Alienated from democratic politics, many of their supporters embraced more radical means to address their grievances. The JP government’s economic policies, encouraging foreign investment by suppressing wages, led to rising prices and spiraling inflation, which further polarized the universities and the working class. By the summer of 1970, student protests, strikes, and street violence had forced the government to declare martial law. http://www.wan-press.org/article3122.html. ¨ 89. Keskin, Avrupa Yollarında Turkiye,

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the Turkish police and judiciary had been known for their sympathy for and leniency toward transgressions by the radical right, it was usually within the context of the Cold War left-right dichotomy. The tacit permission of at least some ranking members of the Ankara police ostensibly implied that they viewed the Common Market (much like socialism) as a threat to Turkey, highlighting an instance of anti-EEC sentiment within the state’s security apparatus. The act of vandalism against a joint venture between Turkey and the EEC made the headlines of the Turkish press the following day and created a potentially embarrassing international situation. The EEC took the incident rather lightly, however. The head of the Turkey Bureau within the European Commission, Hans Andresen, upon hearing the news, replied, “Good for them. You can’t buy this kind of publicity.” In fact, as Yıldırım Keskin noted, “When the exhibit reopened a few weeks later, there were lines reaching around the block.”98 The TGNA and the Nationalist Logic Anti-EEC rhetoric increased markedly after the signing of the Additional Protocol. The AP was considered an international treaty and therefore required ratification by the TGNA in order to take effect. The public discussion now shifted attention to the upcoming parliamentary vote, centering the Common Market debate on the TGNA. The TGNA, apart from the obvious claim to being Turkey’s preeminent political forum, provided the ideal site for the opposition to express its reservations. There were two reasons for this, both of which underscored an affinity between the TGNA ratification process and the Nationalist logic structuring the appeals against it. First, the Assembly had the potential to occupy a privileged symbolic position within Turkey. The TGNA was, at least constitutionally, the central institution of the Turkish Republic; it stood as the both physical and emblematic embodiment of republicanism. Given its historic role in the War of Independence, the TGNA was also regarded as the forefather and basis of the future Turkish state.99 Turkey’s first constitution, adopted in the midst of war in January 1921, proclaimed that, “Sovereignty belongs absolutely and unconditionally to the nation,”100 and entrusted the TGNA, “the sole and only true representative of the nation,” with lawmaking and administrative powers (the first constitution did not envision separate executive or judicial branches.) In this more fundamental sense, the TGNA was not an institution of the state, but rather the reverse; the Turkish state was an institution born out of the TGNA. Even the Treaty of Lausanne, which

98 99

100

Ibid. 23 April 1920, the first meeting of the TGNA, is a national holiday yearly celebrated as the National Sovereignty and Children’s Day. The official history of the TGNA states that “With the creation of the Turkish Grand National Assembly, the Turkish State was born.” See http://www.tbmm.gov.tr/tarihce/kb5.htm for a detailed account. To this day, the proclamation remains the official mantra of the TGNA.

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internationally recognized the sovereignty and independence of Turkey, was negotiated and officially signed by the “Government of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey.” During the early years of the Republic, however, the TGNA was pushed to the sidelines by the institutions of state-making that it had officially sanctioned. A radical westernization agenda to be carried out against (at least in the minds of most Kemalists) a conservative and hence unwilling population, coupled with the authoritarian wave sweeping interwar Europe, stacked the deck against republicanism. Until 1950, the TGNA served as little more than a rubber stamp for a single-party dictatorship feverishly creating a state apparatus that had grown all too accustomed to developing autonomously. With the transition to multiparty democracy, this state apparatus came into open conflict with the TGNA. The DP government, although holding an overwhelming majority of seats within the Assembly,101 nonetheless felt that its reforms were being undermined, if not sabotaged, by the RPP-dominated bureaucracy. The DP chairman, Adnan Menderes, began to discursively delineate Turkey’s “national interests,” which the DP represented on account of its electoral mandate, from the “illegitimate authority” of an elite bureaucratic caste alienated from the people. This delineation reasserted the autonomy of the TGNA as sole representative of the national interest, an autonomy that had atrophied for lack of any concrete other to assert itself against. Formally, it was the first significant attempt in the TGNA since 1923 to signify or imagine the national through an antagonistic (albeit domestically) ontology. Menderes was able to articulate a particular understanding of Turkey, conceptualized as populist and republican, through the creation of an internal frontier between the nation-people and an elitist authoritarian bureaucracy. The TGNA became the site through which this frontier was drawn. In 1960, this same state apparatus struck back against Menderes by overthrowing the DP government and abolishing the TGNA through a military coup. The leaders of the National Unity Committee claimed that the DP government had abused its electoral mandate, had established a “tyranny of the majority,” and was leading the country away from Ataturk’s intended reforms. ¨ The TGNA was identified as a site of party politics and internecine struggle that had eroded national unity. For the first half of the 1960s, republicanism and its institutional embodiment, the TGNA, lived in symbolic abeyance, taking a back seat to a state-directed program of top-down reform. More importantly, a precedent had been set. That democratic legitimacy had been successfully challenged by a supra-parliamentary authority claiming to speak for another (extra-parliamentary) nation would haunt the TGNA for years to come. 101

The elections of the 1950s, based on majority list voting, were characterized by the majority party receiving disproportionate representation within the assembly. For example, in the 1954 election, the DP received 57% of the votes yet was awarded 93% of the TGNA seats. See http://www.tesav.org.tr/sunus.htm for details.

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Yet the leaders of the National Unity Council also created the conditions for the TGNA’s future resurgence. The 1961 constitution gave the TGNA exclusive power to ratify foreign policy including, but not limited to, treaties, declarations of war, troop deployments, and the stationing of foreign soldiers on Turkish soil. As Metin Tamkoc¸ has argued, this authority removed the Turkish bureaucratic-military elite’s monopoly over foreign policy by forcing Turkey’s external relations into the purview of the nation’s elected representatives. Between 1965 and 1975, Turkish Foreign Ministers were forced into making a total of forty-five appearances in the TGNA to explain and justify their policies to the assembly.102 Although Erbakan’s first interpellation regarding the EEC reintroduced the TGNA as the site where the national was imagined (i.e., the site of national politics), the assembly really came to the fore in the months leading up to the ratification vote. On the surface, the opposition used the ratification vote to further weaken and isolate Demirel’s Justice Party. This it accomplished by symbolically separating the TGNA from the government. Unlike Menderes, who had used his electoral mandate to dichotomize the social space into Turkey’s popular will (hence the expression of Turkey’s national interests) and an elitist authoritarian bureaucracy, the anti-EEC opposition in 1970 used the TGNA to antagonize the ruling government. To do so, in spite of the plain fact that the JP commanded an absolute majority (256/450 or 57 percent) of seats within the TGNA, required, as we shall see, some conceptual gymnastics. Ali Sait Yuksel ¨ of the SPO claimed that the JP government, by rushing into the EEC, had signed a document discordant with the country’s interests. “The repercussions of its [JP] actions,” Yuksel wrote, “would be borne by the villagers, urbanites, ¨ intellectuals, and soldiers of the entire nation. In the upcoming parliamentary vote the deputies bear the responsibility of putting the interests of the Turkish banked on a personal people above those of their party.”103 Here Yuksel ¨ appeal, urging defections from the JP by offering the existential choice of siding with the “interests of the Turkish people” against rote party affiliation. A far more interesting somersault was attempted by the president of the MTTB,104 Burhaneddin Kayhan, who warned MPs that:

102 103 104

Metin Tamkoc¸, The Warrior Diplomats: Guardians of the National Security and Modernization of Turkey (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1976). Yuksel, Ortak Pazar Dedikleri, 23. ¨ ˘ was founded in 1916 by university students dissatisfied with the Milli Turk ¨ Talebe Birligi political future of the empire and especially concerned with the loss of Balkan lands. Between 1960 and 1965, the MTTB was in the hands of leftist university students, becoming a conservative organization after the election of Rasim Cinisli as general minister in 1965. In 1970, the MTTB underwent yet another shift in emphasis, reinventing itself as a national Islamic association following the ascendancy of Burhaneddin Kayhan to the MTTB leadership. See Robert Bianchi, Interest Groups and Political Development in Turkey (Princeton: Princeton University ¨ Press, 1984) and Seyfettin Aslan, “Gec¸mis¸ten Gun Baski Gruplari,” C.U. ¨ um ¨ uze ¨ Turkiye’de ¨ I˙ktisadi ve I˙dari Bilimler Dergisi, 5/1 (1974).

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The Additional Protocol, silently signed in Brussels, is to be presented to the [TGNA] for ratification this November. November therefore looms among the select turning points in Turkish history. On the eve of this historic moment, we urge the delegates to approach this decision responsibly, considering the gravity of its effects on Turkey’s historical, Religious, National, political, and economic situation.105

Kayhan went on to argue that, “Turkey’s national interests lay in rejecting the AP, thereby putting an end to the superfluous zealotry of a handful of diplomats and deputies [the JP bloc] who have turned a deaf ear to the will of Turkish public opinion.”106 Here, Kayhan marked a clear boundary between the majority of the TGNA (the JP bloc) and the “will of Turkish public opinion,” which for him operated in a different register than the composition of the TGNA through elections, one that privileged the classical over the representative form of republicanism. To be sure, there were several radical antiEEC groups who made precisely such arguments, but these were revolutionary groups who had long ago abandoned the parliamentary system. Kayhan, by contrast, did not deny the validity of the TGNA as institution, just its claim to fully represent and stand in for the people’s will. ˙ Most, however, refused to acknowledge the contradiction altogether. Ismet C ¸ onkar, an Islamist economist, in a piece written just before the AP ratification vote, addressed members of parliament and “all responsible Turks.” C ¸ onkar felt that the foundations of Turkey’s involvement with the Common Market lay in a “false western admiration” of Turkey’s leadership; a leadership who, having “turned their backs on the true civilization of Islam since the Tanzimat, have strayed from Turkey’s essential persona.” He argued that “only by courageously following a national politics that owns up to its true nature, history, culture, and civilization” could a nation be respected within world politics. C ¸ onkar claimed that: For Turkey to become a full member of the EEC, it would have to: 1) Sacrifice Islamic culture and civilization; 2) Sacrifice its National interests in the interests of the EEC states; 3) And forever renounce the historical struggle Islamic culture and civilization has waged with Christian culture and civilization.

He urged “all Turks who have a firm understanding of the religion, history, culture, and civilization of the Muslim Turkish state to join forces so as to prevent the suicide of their country.”107 However they rationalized it, in these and countless other writings and speeches of the period, opposition to the Common Market fashioned an internal frontier between the JP government and Turkey’s true national interests. For the months preceding the planned ratification vote, the TGNA became the premier site around which this frontier was drawn. In this regard, the TGNA 105 106 107

Burhaneddin Kayhan, “Ortak Pazar ve Turkiye,” in Ortak Pazar Dedikleri, 4 Ibid., 5. Conkar “Turkiye – Ortak Pazar Mucadelesi,” in Ortak Pazar Dedikleri, 43. ¨ ¨

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served a function similar to the State Planning Organization. To the extent that it was referenced by anti-EEC groups within Turkey, the TGNA qua institution, much like the SPO, also signified the totality of Turkey. Even more so than the SPO, the Turkish Grand National Assembly occupied a discursive position both within and outside of politics. In fact, the Assembly epitomized this duality. On the one hand, the TGNA was wholly within politics, at any particular instant occupied by, or in the hands of, a variety of sociopolitical groups. Yet insofar as the TGNA served as the abstract empty forum in which politics took place, it repositioned itself outside the political as the procedural form and hypostatization of republican government. Historical Constellations An outstanding feature of the Common Market debate preceding the ratification vote was the frequency with which Turkey’s past was invoked. As previously mentioned, the Nationalist logic had always tried to counter the official version of Turkish history that emphasized 150 years of westernization and rapprochement with the west following the war. The debate surrounding the ratification vote witnessed a significant increase in both the scope and intensity of this trend. The Chamber of Mechanical Engineers, for example, likened the JP government to those who had opposed the War of Independence and welcomed western tutelage. Citing Demirel’s speeches on the Common Market, especially those structured by the Civilizational logic, the CME pointed out: How fifty years ago, there were those who spoke in a similar vein; the same mentality that willed its own subjugation by inviting a mandate to modernize it. Much like the people of the Philippines, they felt incapable of modernizing on their own. This is an idea that does not believe in the nation, in national will and power.108

After a lengthy discussion of Ataturk ¨ who, according to the CME, had not only freed Turkey but pointed the way for all national liberation struggles, the CME urged the TGNA to follow in the tradition of its founders, who had “believed that the Turkish people should possess cultural, political, and economic sovereignty,” by voting against the Additional Protocol. In addition to the War of Independence, numerous comparisons were made between the Additional Protocol and the Ottoman capitulations, particularly the 1838 trade agreement with England. But above all it was the twin treaties of Sevres and Lausanne, with their historical lessons now rewritten, that circulated widest throughout the ratification debate. The Additional Protocol was contextualized as the new Treaty of Sevres, viewed as the greatest of all capitulations by a weakened and illegitimate Sultan who now drew comparisons to a similarly weak and illegitimate Justice Party. An article on the ratification vote published in Milliyet, in a thinly veiled reference to Demirel and the MFA’s 108

Chamber of Mechanical Engineers, Ortak Pazar ve Turkiye, 247.

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remarks on the negotiation of the conduct of the negotiating, quoted Ataturk’s ¨ Treaty of Sevres: Neither the Sultan nor the cabinet can be trusted to protect the dignity or independence of the nation or state . . . how could it be deemed possible that a crowd of madmen, united by neither a moral or spiritual bond to the people or the nation as a whole, be trusted to protect their interests?109

On the other hand, the Treaty of Lausanne, hitherto seen as the result of the ˙ War of Independence or the diplomatic victory of Ismet Pas¸a over his British counterpart Lord Curzon, was now recast in a republican light. It was pointed ˙ out how Ismet Pas¸a responded to each of Lord Curzon’s demands with the same remark, “that without the explicit approval of the TGNA in Ankara, any concession would be a breach of National Sovereignty.” Unlike Sevres, which was conducted behind the back of the Turkish people and against its national interests, the Treaty of Lausanne, it was argued, was at each moment negotiated with the Turkish nation as represented by the TGNA. The exponential increase in the frequency of these historical analogies can be explained by examining the unique temporality occasioned by the ratification vote. Within the Civilizational logic, the ratification of the Additional Protocol was contextualized as yet another milestone in the processional history of Turkey’s integration with Europe. On the other hand, for the Nationalist logic, the ratification vote was perceived as a moment of existential danger. The Nationalist logic had, to be sure, always regarded the Common Market as a threat to the nation. In fact the nationalist appeals all propagated an understanding of Turkey as that which was threatened by integration with the EEC. Yet for the most part, this threat had been abstract and projected. The ratification vote rendered the danger immediate and concrete; it, “loomed among the select turning points in Turkish history.” Walter Benjamin’s historical writings, although in reference to the rise of fascism in interwar Germany, offer a connection between the immediacy of the threat presented by the ratification vote and the intensity of historical allusions in the debate preceding it. Benjamin felt that the past must be grasped as it appears at a moment of present danger. The danger was twofold, threatening both the present receivers and the historical tradition they seized with oblivion. As Benjamin wrote, “This present danger allows him to grasp the constellation, which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history.”110 Against the teleology of Westernization, which constituted the official “homogenous course of history,” the Nationalist logic formed diverse constellations between the Additional Protocol and specific instances 109 110

Milliyet, 16 August 1970. Walter Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (London: Schocken, 1999), 251.

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and events of Turkey’s past. In this manner the Nationalist logic was able to cast the AP as a moment of crisis, one that demanded the self-assertion of a nation to salvage itself, a nation (re)imagined by and as this appeal itself.

. . . and then the coup The SPO and TGNA both held privileged discursive positions outside of politics, which were subsequently politicized by the various anti-EEC movements. The SPO and TGNA’s dualism in regard to the category of the political served to increase the efficacy of the Nationalist appeals. The two institutions channeled the disparate opposition to the EEC through a common site on which the frontier between the national and its others was erected. Though each served as the arena around which EEC-Turkish relations, and through this Turkey itself was questioned, contested, and understood, the two institutions occasioned different solutions to the nationalist problematic. The appeals that involved the SPO conceptualized Turkey as a developing nationstate, whose national sovereignty was based on the autonomy of its national economy, now threatened by integration into the Common Market. On the other hand, the anti-EEC appeals that referenced the TGNA vote imagined Turkey as the Turkish people, constituting the nation-people masses as the true political subjects of Turkey, democratic and sovereign in the republican sense. While the SPO became the locus for statist appeals, the TGNA, as a site of popular opposition to the Common Market, reintroduced populism and republicanism as constituent parts of Turkey’s self-definition. In both instances, the institutions emerged as nodal points for the Nationalist logic, becoming concrete social-imaginary sites for the abandoned or denied face of Ataturk’s contradictory project. Debates over the Additional Protocol ¨ were crucial to this emergence. Both the TGNA and the SPO were initially contested within and as a project of modernization – bounded by the discussion and coordination of domestic development. Within this domestic context, most commentators have rightly seen the institutions as historically opposed to one another. The TGNA under Menderes has usually been characterized as the site through which democratic populist legitimacy was asserted over the bureaucratic-military elite (BME), and within this dialectical totality the SPO and its 5 year plans were intended by the BME to anchor populist and shortsighted politics as the BME’s historically conditioned response. In this purely domestic context, the TGNA and SPO represented two antithetical visions of the nation – the latest reformulation of the historical statist-populist divide – where the nation-people imaginary was pitted against the nation-state. Turkish opposition to the AP erased this binary, uniting both institutions as different solutions to the same nationalist problematic. Going against their domestically conditioned opposition, anti-EEC groups had recourse to both the SPO and the TGNA to ground their opposition as national. This doublepronged attack was most evident in the critiques, leveled by all oppositional

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groups, against the JP, accusing the government of simultaneously engaging in negotiations against the people’s will (without first consulting the TGNA) or the recommendations of the SPO (the nation defined as the planned state). It was, in fact, the necessary co-optation of both these supra-political sites, each with their antithetical traditions, that allowed the Nationalist logic to recast both as national instruments against an imperial world order. Here it is apropos to return for a moment to the opening quote of the chapter, in which Partha Chatterjee argued that the postcolonial state, “was connected to the nation-people through both the procedural forms of representative government and represented the nation-people by directing a program of economic development on behalf of the nation.”111 By 1971, both the TGNA and the SPO had not only become institutional centers of opposition to the EEC, but more fundamentally, through this opposition, they became institutions that bridged the state with its people within the social space of the new national imaginary. Yet, the institutionalization of the nation-state and nation-people appeals, while profoundly increasing their legibility, did so at a certain violence to the appeals themselves. To be sure, the two institutions, a national planning agency (based on the French Commissariat Gen ´ eral ´ du Plan) and a representative parliament, were forms directly adopted from the west. More fundamentally, however, it is difficult to find any creative innovation or slippage in their translation and application within Turkey. Their symbolic usage was near-identical to, and in fact mimicking, usages observed in various European historical contexts. The SPO’s program for industrial development did not envision the creation of economic institutions or practices different from those in the west, such as ideas of Islamic interest-free banking then gaining currency in other parts of the Middle East. Nor did the institution of the Turkish nation-people differ in any respect from western representative democracy (say, along the lines of Ataturk’s ¨ Bursa speech, itself perhaps an instance of radical Jacobinism). To a certain extent, all acts of institutionalization are inherently violent, silencing alternate conceptions in favor of the one it embodies. Yet was there something more at work here? Was the exact symmetry with European forms in some way necessary to counter Europeanization? The path of most commonality (and therefore least resistance)? Or just circumstance? What to make of this modal straightjacket? These are questions I leave for theorists. As a historian, that the SPO crystallized the nation-state imaginary was, after the 1960 coup, a given. That the TGNA served as the site around which the nation-people coalesced, less so. But let us continue with our story. By the end of 1970, the increased activity and propagation of anti-EEC opposition was beginning to have an effect on not just the government but on the course of Turkish-EEC relations as well. As a career diplomat involved in these relations noted, “Every morning I would 111

Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 203.

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glance at the daily newspapers placed on my bureau and think that no one began their day with as much harassment as I did.”112 Prime Minister Demirel, worried about the gathering opposition to the Additional Protocol in the press and political parties, decided to delay its presentation to the TGNA.113 In December 1970, Necmettin Erbakan, taking advantage of the delay, brought a second interpellation against the JP government. Erbakan accused the JP government of “acting against the interests of the National Will” and argued that the Additional Protocol was not simply a follow-up on the Ankara Agreement but, “the red-line to entry into the Common Market. An agreement such as this should have been put forth by the TGNA before, not after, its terms were negotiated.” Erbakan concluded by stating, “Outside of the JP leadership, no one in Turkey wants to join the EEC.”114 In the weeks following Erbakan’s second attempt, the JP government ordered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to begin a heavy propaganda campaign to convince the opposition parties and Turkish society of the Common Market’s numerous merits. Recruiting the aid of the Istanbul Development Trust (IDF), the MFA organized several informational meetings among Turkish businessmen. It spoke at universities and military academies and invited leaders of the opposition parties to the MFA. These preparations complete, the JP government presented the Additional Protocol to the TGNA on 16 December 1970. At this time, the possibility of every party outside of the JP voting against the AP was, according to S¸aban C¸alıs¸, very real indeed.115 On 8 January of the following year, the TGNA voted to create a Temporary Committee to examine the terms of the AP.116 The Temporary Committee first met on 28 February 1971 and decided to gather the opinions of various organizations and institutions in the private and public sectors. Less than two weeks later, on 12 March 1971, these deliberations and debates were interrupted, as Turkey was paralyzed by its second military coup.

112 113

114 115 116

¨ 91. Keskin, Avrupa Yollarında Turkiye, The JP government and MFA had previously agreed to present the document for ratification on 28 November 1970. The date was postponed twice until it was finally handed over to the TGNA on 16 December 1970. Millet Meclis Tutanak Dergisi D:3 T:2 C:9 11.12.1970, 233–67. ¨ – Avrupa Birligi I˙lis¸kileri, 158. C ¸ alis¸, Turkiye The Temporary Committee was stacked with members of the Turkey-EEC Joint Parliamentary Commission (JPC), all pro-Common Market deputies, and led by the JPC president and JP deputy Aydin Yalc¸in.

5 Intervention, Invasion, Isolation (1971–1974)

Turkey has also to decide whether it is prepared to make the necessary concessions to pass from pre-association with the EEC to full association. Most industrialists and many politicians are in favor of throwing their lot with Europe, but the bulk of the population lives both geographically and psychologically on the Asian mainland. Perhaps the bridge now being built across the Bosphorus by an AngloGerman consortium will help bridge the psychological gap with Europe too. – The Economist, 13 June 1970

Between the military intervention of 12 March 1971 and the Cyprus crisis of 1974, Turkish-EEC relations and Turkish perceptions of them were encroached upon by outside forces. In three short years, these relations weathered Turkey’s second military restructuring, the first postwar economic downturn, and the political fallout from Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus. During these years, the struggle between the Civilizational and Nationalist logics over Turkish understandings of the Common Market, always affected by external events, became overwhelmed by them. Though Turkish-EEC relations continued to draw attention from members of the Turkish elite, this attention was heavily colored by domestic and international developments. During this period, Turkish attitudes toward integration had less of an impact on Turkish understandings of themselves and their project, while, conversely, external developments had a much greater impact on Turkish attitudes toward the Common Market. This short chapter analyzes these external forces and how they affected, at least temporarily, the way Turks thought about their relationship with the Common Market. It is divided into two parts. The first describes TurkishEEC relations during the two years of military rule that began on 12 March 1971 and ended two weeks before the October 1973 general elections. Unlike 157

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the first military coup, which had not fundamentally altered how the EEC was spoken about or who was doing the speaking, Turkey’s second military coup brought an abrupt moratorium on a lively and broad debate. The second part details the external and internal crises in 1974 and examines their effects on Turkish perceptions of the Common Market. Highlighted by Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus and the domestic economic effects of the oil shock, the crises of 1974 combined to create a deep sense of isolation, uncertainty, and disillusionment within Turkey. Even though these crises had their origins outside of Turkish-EEC relations, their impact on the final chapter of our story would be very great indeed.

martial cpr: resuscitating the additional protocol For more than two years, from the coup of 12 March 1971 to the general elections in October 1973, civilian rule was suspended in Turkey and the country was run by a military-backed government. The impact of the coup on Turkish-EEC relations was broad and immediate, beginning with the silencing of the lively civilian debate over the merits of the Additional Protocol. Yet, the coup also reintroduced the voice of the military establishment, which as a result of the coup, now became the dominant Turkish authority on EEC relations. This voice, with an eye toward the west and mindful of Europe’s distaste for military rule, was at pains to justify itself before contemporary civilization. The military commanders of the 12 March coup, with the example of the Greek junta before them, were reluctant to assume power directly. They did not abolish the TGNA as they had done in 1960 or would do again in 1980, but rather formed an above-party puppet government to carry out “necessary reforms.”1 In their 12 March memorandum, the military commanders put the sole responsibility for the coup on the anarchic situation created by the government and parliament: The Parliament and the Government . . . have driven our country into anarchy and fratricidal strife. They have caused the public to lose all hope of rising to the level of contemporary civilization which was set for us by Ataturk ¨ as a goal and have failed to realize the reforms stipulated by the Constitution. The future of the Turkish Republic is therefore seriously threatened.2

1

2

It is impossible to say how seriously the High Military High Command took Turkey’s relations with Europe in general or the Common Market in particular into account in their decision to maintain at least a structure of parliamentary rule following the coup. Just three weeks before, on 19 February in Istanbul, the Turkish-born General Secretary of the European Commission, Emile Noel, had issued a stern warning to Turkey: “Confronted with any sort of regime change in Turkey, everything [implying the Ankara Agreement] will be put on hold until the restoration of a democratic system. A regime that is not democratic has no business within a democratic community of states.” Economic Development Trust, “Emile Noel’in Ankara’da Konus¸ması,” IKV Document Series, 43 (1971). Milliyet, 13 March 1971.

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The most striking aspect of this memorandum was the language used to justify the coup. The military commanders legitimized their intervention on the grounds that not the present state of Turkey but its future had been threatened; likewise, that, the present government and parliament had violated the constitution and Ataturk’s vision of reaching the level of contemporary civilization by swerving from the intended or projected path of the Republic. In the following two years, the military regime unilaterally decided on what precisely this intended or projected path was to be. Here, the processional character of the Civilizational logic, wherein Turkey was defined not by what it was but by what it ought to be, informed the 12 March coup as well. But unlike the 1960 coup, which had created a sociopolitical framework to match the most liberal societies of “contemporary civilization,” leaving open the future path of the Turkish project, the 1971 military regime carried out a systematic program of repression – a restorative operation that it hoped, against all odds, would erase Turkey’s political and social conflicts in the name of united consensus. Throughout its rule, the TAF went to great lengths to reassure Turkey’s commitment to Europe. The Turkish Armed Forces believed very strongly that European civilization was what Turkey had to fashion itself after and to which it was held accountable. In announcing its proposed amendments to the constitution, the most infamous of which were the extraordinary powers given to the ˙ government to curb lawlessness, Ismail Arar, the cabinet spokesmen, stated: “Amendments similar to what we are asking already exist in the constitutions of France, West Germany, and Italy.” Nihat Erim, the military-appointed prime minister, pointed out how the restriction of human rights when the exercise of these rights threatened public order or the “secular” and “classless” unity of the Turkish State (Article 11) was based on Article 17 of the European Human Rights Convention.3 As Feroz Ahmad wrote, “Seeking sanction for its measures by reference to European example was a favorite device of the Erim government.”4 Taken together, these comments by the military government form an almost textbook example of Bakhtin’s definition of dialogical speech: When considering my utterance I try actively to determine its response. Moreover I try to act in accordance with the response I anticipate, so this anticipated response in turn, exerts an active influence on my utterance (I parry objections that I foresee, I offer all kinds of provisos, etc).5

It stands as a negative, yet nonetheless telling instance of Turkey’s dramaturgical relationship with Europe. Domestically, the military regime maintained a tight grip on the country. Martial law was declared on 27 April 1971 and was renewed every two months 3 4 5

Nihat Erim, “The Turkish Experience in Light of Recent Developments,” Middle East Journal, 26, 3 (Fall 1972): 245. Ankara Radio, 23 April 1971, SWB iv/3667/c/1, in Ahmad, Turkish Experiment in Democracy, 321. Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres, and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 95.

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for more than two years. The history of state repression in these years is a long and sad tale beyond the scope of this study. Of concern to us are the restrictions imposed by martial law on the propagation of voices within Turkish society, namely the freedoms of press, speech, and association. Within days of the coup, political youth organizations were banned and political meetings of trade unions and professional groups were forbidden. On 28 April 1971, left-wing and radical journals including Worker-Peasant, Consciousness, Left Turkey, and Revolution were proscribed, their leaders arrested, and bookshops prosecuted for selling forbidden publications.6 Many of these initial measures were made permanent through multiple amendments to the 1961 Constitution. The amendments were to cover almost all the institutions of the Turkish state and society: the unions, press, radio and television, universities, the TGNA, and the judiciary. Their primary aim was to broadly limit the rights and freedoms provided by the 1961 Constitution so that, as the commanders made clear, “the integrity of the State with its country and nation, the Republic, national security, public order and morals could be protected.”7 In addition to these sweeping “reforms,” the Erim government also took a number of steps that had a direct impact on Turkish-EEC relations. The TAF, concerned that the military coup would lead to a deterioration of relations with Europe, made clear that it wished to see a swift ratification of the Additional Protocol. One of the principle forces contesting an easy ratification, the SPO, was of particular concern to the Erim government, who viewed its opposition to the Common Market and overtures to a customs union with the Muslim nations of the RCD as a rebuke of the secular state. In the summer of 1971, the military commanders overhauled the SPO’s personnel, replacing those the TAF found to have excessive Islamic or leftist tendencies with those who supported their proEEC outlook.8 They then charged this group of men working directly under the Erim government with defining the basic principles of the third Five Year Development Plan. Drawing up the outlines and principles of the Third Plan, to be implemented in 1973 (as fate would have it, on the same day as the Additional Protocol went into effect), was declared to be “one of the most important tasks of the [Erim] Government.”9 As Erim himself claimed, “The particular importance of this task lay in maximizing the transitional period before becoming a full member of the European Common Market in twenty-two years time.”10 Implicit in such declarations was the subordination of the Plan to the principles and realities of the Common Market. 6

7 8 9 10

By 1973, the Erim and Melen governments had pacified the trade unions and universities, closed down the leftist press, parties, and civil organizations, incarcerated and tortured their members, and declared that the “Turkish Republic was closed to socialism.” See Ahmad, Turkish Experiment in Democracy, 289–306. Ahmad, Turkish Experiment in Democracy, 295. ¨ ¨ uk ¨ Avrupa Kavgası 1959–2004, 231. Birand, Turkiye’nin Buuy ¨ ¸ unc ¨ ¸ u¨ Bes¸ Yıl Kalkınma Planı (Ankara: DPT, 1971). DPT, Uc Nihat Erim, “The Turkish Experience in Light of Recent Developments,” 250.

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The Temporary Committee set up to examine the opinions of the public and private sectors ignored the objections raised in earlier SPO reports. The head of the Committee, the ardently pro-EEC Aydın Yalc¸ın, was able to marginalize the institution that had only a few months prior evinced the national, dismissing the SPO with the following remarks, “The State Planning Organization has acted like a ‘state within a state;’ they have exceeded the authority given to them as an advisory body by acting on political and ideological precepts.”11 In this way, the SPO was demoted from its previous symbolic position as representing the sovereignty of the Turkish state as the development of its national economy to a mere technocratic agency whose primary task lay in preparing Turkey for full membership in the EEC. With the SPO effectively sidelined, the Erim government moved quickly toward parliamentary ratification. The discussion and vote in the Assembly went much more smoothly than anyone had expected. By the time the Temporary Commission brought the Additional Protocol to the Assembly floor, the military regime’s clampdown on radical activities had reached the TGNA. Within months of the coup, the leftist Workers’ Party of Turkey was shut down and its leaders imprisoned, while the National Order Party was deemed unconstitutional and its president, Erbakan, forced to flee to Switzerland. Within this climate of state repression, few in the TGNA dared to go against the wishes of the military. This gave the pro-EEC members of parliament the freedom to speak with impunity. When even mild calls for slight revisions to the AP were made by members of the RPP, the pro-EEC groups within the TGNA responded with arguments of the Civilizational logic that had seemed ineffectual a few months ago. “Integration with the European Economic Community is the natural result of Turkey’s efforts since the Tanzimat to join contemporary civilization and freedom.”12 The vote, conducted on 5 July 1971, a day when many deputies were absent from the TGNA, passed with 151 “yes” votes, 65 “no” votes, and 218 abstentions.13 The military commanders silenced the various sociopolitical groups that had articulated opposition to the Common Market and marginalized or co-opted the two institutional sites that had served as platforms for the Nationalist logic. The Turkish Armed Forces had made clear that, much like the SPO and the TGNA, it too occupied a privileged discursive position as the true representative of Turkey, above and outside of politics. The TAF was “not a caste by themselves but a cross-section of the nation.”14 Yet unlike the SPO and TGNA, which had functioned as sites around and through which the social space was

11 12 13 14

TBMM Tutanak Dergisi D:3 T:2 C:15 1.7.1972, s.134. In addition, Yalc¸ın had also led the TGNA temporary committee on the Additional Protocol. TBMM Tutanak Dergisi D:3 T:2 C:15 1.7.1972, s.127. These were the figures for the Lower House. In the Senate, the vote totals were as follows: 107 yes, 25 no, and 48 abstentions. TBMM Tutanak Dergisi D:3 T:2 C:15 1.7.1972, s.198. Nihat Erim, “The Turkish Experience in Light of Recent Developments,” 237.

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dichotomized, the TAF blurred Turkey’s internal frontiers and sought a higher level of integration of this social space with the institutional system – a transformist operation, in the Gramscian sense. The 12 March coup imposed the idea of “the inviolable unity and indivisibility of the nation” upon a differentiated society. To the extent that this idea proscribed the expression of internal divisions of Turkey’s sociopolitical groups (including opposition to the EEC), it bore resemblance to English Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s project of “one nation.” To the extent that this idea reduced the SPO to a mere technocratic agency charged with preparing Turkey for full EEC membership, it corresponded to late-twentieth-century Western attempts at substituting politics with administration. With opposition to the Common Market silenced, the Civilizational logic once again rose to preeminence. Pro-EEC groups, in retreat during the debate leading up to the Additional Protocol, were quick to take advantage of the opening created by the military coup. We have seen how these groups were able to marginalize the nationalist voices in the parliament and bureaucracy. What remains is to detail their endeavors in the broader area of Turkish public opinion. The pro-EEC business community immediately set out to capitalize on the new political climate. In September 1971, a few months after the ratification vote, the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce and Istanbul Industrial Hearth jointly organized a two-day conference on the state of Turkish-EEC relations. The keynote address was given by the military-appointed foreign minister, Osman Olcay, and is noteworthy for detailing the position and mentality with which the Erim government approached both the Common Market and the private sector.15 Olcay began his address by celebrating the immense support and contribution of the business community, particularly the Economic Development Fund (EDF), in Turkey’s membership bid to the EEC. Rather than focus on the economic or political benefits of the association, Olcay stated that it was more important to discuss the EEC within the wider framework that every government, since the inception of the Republic, had approached Turkey’s relationship with Europe. “Our Association with the EEC is the natural consequence of the western oriented foreign policy established by Ataturk. The ¨ goal: to join the societies with which we share the same principles, the same lifestyles, and the same mode of democratic governance.”16 Olcay then acknowledged that the Additional Protocol had come under some criticisms, which he differentiated into two major strains. The first were those that categorically objected to the establishment and development of relations 15

16

Olcay, before taking up the Foreign Ministry under the Erim government, had served as the Ambassador to mid-level states such as India and Finland, and, significant from the military perspective, acted as first assistant to the general-secretary of NATO. ˙ ¨ Kalkınma Vakfı, Ortak Pazar ve Turkiye I˙lis¸kileri: Konferans (Istanbul: IKV Yayınları, Iktisadi 1971), 3.

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with the west. Olcay felt that “the very existence of the Ankara Agreement not to mention Turkish public opinion’s near total support of it in 1963, makes it unnecessary to engage” with this “doctrinaire” group. A clear rebuff to the radical opposition, this comment matches rhetorically what the Erim government was carrying out in practice, namely the systematic eradication of the new political and institutional centers that had emerged after 1960. As such, it represented the symbolic complement to the legal banishment of these new centers from the social space of the nation, a social space once again defined by corporatist cohesion and consensus, joined by a single civilizational aim: in short, a society epitomized in and through its unified support of the Ankara Agreement eight years before.17 The second group, according to Olcay, was comprised of those who had raised certain economic reservations about the AP, particularly criticisms that Turkey had entered into the transitional phase too early. Given that this group included men from both the left-wing of the RPP as well as some industrial organizations (both members of the traditional elite), Olcay felt the need to address these reservations and spent the remainder of his talk doing so. He began by stressing the political exigency of cementing Turkey’s association at a time when the EEC, following de Gaulle’s departure, had embarked on a rapid expansion, beginning Enlargement talks with four EFTA members and signing bilateral trade and association agreements with its neighbors. It was therefore imperative, Olcay argued, to further Turkish integration before these developments could impact Turkish-EEC negotiations.18 More inter˙ Sabri esting than arguments borrowed verbatim from his predecessor Ihsan ˘ C ¸ aglayangil was Olcay’s claim that the Additional Protocol would, far from deterring Turkish industrialization, be of immense benefit to it. According to Olcay, “We are all aware that the principle problems of Turkish economic development are to be solved through the differentiation and expansion of our exports . . . requiring investment into export-oriented industries.”19 It was as clear an indication of the TAF’s new position regarding Turkey’s political economy as any, signaling a shift away from ISI and lingering Etatist sentiments toward the full endorsement of the JP’s economic platform.20 Olcay concluded his address by stressing the crucial “national role of Turkey’s exporters and export-oriented industrialists in bringing Turkey to the level of contemporary civilization.”21 17

18 19 20 21

Here Turkish-EEC relations held particular significance for the military because not only did they form a basis for the “grand coalition” between the RPP and JP sought by the military leaders, but also, by offering a blueprint for Turkey’s economic development agreed on by both parties, they had the potential to end the domestic disputes and internecine political fighting that had, in military minds, brought this development to a standstill. ¨ I˙lis¸kileri: Konferans, 4–6. IKV, Ortak Pazar ve Turkiye Ibid., 8. Ahmad, Turkish Experiment in Democracy, 175. ¨ IKV, Ortak Pazar ve Turkiye I˙lis¸kileri: Konferans, 8.

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With the explicit endorsement of the military regime, the business community became an increasingly vocal and engaged interlocutor in Turkish-EEC relations. They organized conferences, increased contacts with their European counterparts, and drew constant attention to the benefits of the EEC through articles and interviews in the Turkish press. Much of this activity was spearheaded by the Economic Development Fund, whose relentless efforts at promoting the Common Market only intensified after the coup. Among its numerous publications on the EEC, in September 1973, timed to coincide with the tenyear anniversary of the signing of the Ankara Agreement, the EDF reprinted a collection of news articles, editorials, and public speeches that were written or given on or around 12 September 1963. In its introductory remarks the EDF commented on the purpose of the collection, “assembled in order to reflect the state of public opinion [on the Common Market] and remind us of the leading ideas behind those days.”22 In doing so, the EDF aimed to resurrect the language and spirit of the Civilizational logic that had structured Turkish imaginations of the EEC a decade prior with such fervor. Simultaneous with the publication of this collection, the EDF convened a two-day conference, The Tenth Anniversary of Turkish-EEC Association, on the tenth and eleventh of September. The conference was widely promoted by the EDF and the mainstream press. The participants included top-level technocrats and mid-level statesmen from both Turkey and the EEC, who were welcomed by an opening address from the new Turkish foreign minister, 23 The assembled cast represented notable members of the Haluk Bayulken. ¨ old Turkish guard, including the former foreign minister Hasan Is¸ık and the ˘ former finance minister and EEC permanent representative Ziya Muezzino glu, ¨ alongside a newer generation of Common Market supporters, all giving talks before a receptive audience. The seminar offered a chance for Turkey’s initial enthusiasts to re-present the circumstances and motivations that had led to the Ankara Agreement, and offers a chance to examine the framework in which ˘ they did so. Ziya Muezzino glu, in particular, tried to recapture some of the ¨ language of a decade ago, drawing parallels between Turkish-EEC relations and the civilizational project Turkey was charged with: As we celebrate the fiftieth year anniversary of Turkey’s independence and its unfailing pursuit to join the West at the level of contemporary civilization, we also mark the tenth anniversary of Republican Turkey’s most ambitious effort yet in this endeavor; celebrating a decade of association with the European Economic Community.24 22 23 24

¨ (Istanbul: IKV IKV, Ankara Antlas¸ması Imzalanması Sırasında Basınımızdan Bazı Ozetler Yayınları, 1973). also a military-appointed foreign minister, replaced Olcay in 1971 and served Haluk Bayulken, ¨ for nearly three years in this post for all three military governments (Erim, Melen, Talu). ˘ 10 Yıl Seminer (Istanbul: IKV Yayınları, 1973). ¨ Ortaklıgı IKV, Turkiye-AET

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˘ stated that the parallels between Turkey’s domestic situation and Muezzino glu ¨ its relations with the Common Market did not end there. He argued that both the first Five Year Plan, which began in 1963, and the third Five Year Plan, envisioned as the first steps in a new development strategy, coincided with the date the two major agreements Turkey had signed with the EEC went into effect, suggesting the interdependence of Turkey’s national development goals and the EEC.25 ˘ invocation of the Civilizational logic proved to However, Muezzino glu’s ¨ be the exception. Most speakers took a more guarded approach, more often feeling the need to justify rather than celebrate the Ankara Agreement. While continuing to lend support to Turkish association, they provided defensive explanations, as if responding to public questions of “what went wrong” or “are these associations still valid today?” Fueled by the upcoming October 1973 elections (and with them the full restoration of civilian rule), the antiEEC sentiment that had spread virutically throughout Turkey on the eve of the coup was beginning to make its presence felt at its end. As one commentator remarked, “One could feel the outside political situation creeping into the room.”26 The remarks of Turkey’s former foreign minister, Hasan Is¸ık, were reflective of this new tone. He spoke of two charges that had frequently been leveled at those who had initiated the Turkish-EEC association, charges “which were in danger of becoming assumed as fact.”27 The first of these concerned Turkey’s initial decision to apply – an accusation that the Menderes government, driven by fear of the Greek application that same summer, had jumped hastily into a faulty agreement. The second false accusation, Is¸ık contended, was that Turkey had willingly breached Ataturk’s primary policy of neutrality and nonalignment ¨ in foreign affairs. Interestingly, Is¸ık, who had glorified the Ankara Agreement as Turkey’s crowning achievement in reaching the standards of contemporary civilization a decade earlier, now defensively framed his retort in the language of the opposition: That at a time when everybody was forming economic blocs from the Comecon to the EEC and EFTA, a non-aligned stance of isolation would not have been in the nation’s interests. As western society was beginning to organize itself into a new level of political and economic organization, Turkey was faced, forced to, in fact, join one of these integration projects.28

The EDF had been careful to minimize the participation of the SPO in the conference, yet could hardly afford to exclude it altogether. The one SPO speaker, 25 26 27 28

Ibid., 63. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 25.

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¨ Necati Ozfırat, tried to make the best of a bad situation. In his opening remarks he commented on how the conference represented a tiny slice of Turkish public opinion and vowed to fight for the primacy of Turkish economic development above all external considerations.29 In this vein, he asked why Turkey had “rushed into the second phase of the Ankara Agreement three years before its ¨ time?” “Turkey,” Ozfırat argued, “could have enjoyed three additional years of the initial phase where it had no economic responsibilities and where its ¨ industries remained protected.” But most importantly for Ozfırat and the SPO, “waiting an additional three years would have allowed Turkey to coordinate the concessions required by the transitional phrase within the framework of ¨ remarks were an early instance of what the third Five Year Plan.”30 Ozfırat’s would become the SPO’s central line of argument through the remainder of the decade, as it increasingly raised the call for a renegotiation of the terms of the ¨ Additional Protocol. Yet for the moment, Ozfırat’s voice was drowned out by pro-EEC voices at the conference. Aside from the TAF’s forced recalibration of Turkish political culture, the resurgence of the Civilizational logic was aided by two political/cultural developments within the Common Market in the early 1970s. Both of these developments drew attention away from the economic aspects of the EEC, which were becoming increasingly harder to justify in civilizational terms. With the departure of de Gaulle and upcoming Enlargement of the “six” to the “nine”, the Commission began to prod the EEC Council to make plans for deeper integration between the member states. At the Paris Summit in October 1972, member heads of state agreed to increase political integration with new “Common Policies” and move toward replacing the EEC with a European Union by 1980. This was soon followed by a Declaration of European Identity, issued at the December 1973 Copenhagen Summit, which included the three new members of the EEC. The Declaration defined European identity as drawing on both a present shared set of “common values and principles” that derived from “European Civilization” as well as future ambitions based on “the increasing convergence of attitudes to life and the determination to take part in the construction of a United Europe.” The declaration stated the Nine’s “determination to defend the principles of representative democracy, of the rule of law, of social justice . . . and of respect for human rights, all of which are fundamental elements of the European Identity.”31 It also mentioned how “the construction of a United Europe, which the EEC is now undertaking, is open to all European nations who share the same ideals and objectives.”32 These initiatives were seemingly supported by the citizens of the member-states. A Euro-poll conducted in the summer of 1970 found that only 20 percent of 29 30 31 32

Ibid., 64. Ibid., 65. EC, Bulletin of the European Communities No 12 (December 1973): 118–22. Ibid., 121.

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those questioned opposed the creation of a supranational EEC government that would “determine the economic, foreign, and defense policies of their country.”33 Although the initial enthusiasm following the EEC’s first enlargement would soon give way to a period of stagnation commonly referred to as “Eurosclerosis,” the Paris and Copenhagen summits seemed to confirm what many in Turkey had either hoped for or feared for some time, namely the evolution of the EEC from an economic bloc to a politically united European Union. These summits drew the attention of pro-EEC voices within Turkey who pointed out that Turkey was being left out of, and thus falling behind, her lifelong dream of joining contemporary civilization. The reverberations of the Paris summit of October 1972 within the Turkish press were especially telling. Less than two years previous, news of a European Union would have undoubtedly further fueled the anti-EEC opposition. Yet, as a testament to the far-reaching effects of the military coup, there was no such uproar. The articulations of the Nationalist logic had, for the moment at least, been all but silenced. Professor Aydın Yalc¸ın’s article in Milliyet exemplified the reaction of the Turkish press to the Paris Summit: The importance of the multi-lateral institutions Turkey joined in the aftermath of WWII, namely; NATO and the European Council, especially in terms of their symbolic function of representing us as a part of Europe, are now being eclipsed by the EEC. Yet Turkey today finds herself on the margins of these European developments. In these upcoming years we must guard against any actions that could stall or freeze our political, social, economic, and spiritual integration with Europe. Only if both sides of the Association believe without qualification that the Turkish Nation’s place is openly and firmly within Europe, will we, 22 years later, take our place within this world. Otherwise, just as in the 1920s and 30s we will once again follow on the path of isolation. If the European groups, which for various reasons, oppose Turkish membership in the Common Market join forces with the radical left and right in our own country – Turkey will be left alone in the world, to an extent unfathomable by this generation.34

The “Declaration of European Identity” agreed to at the Copenhagen Summit drew a similar if less harrowing response. Nurettin Tursan, a retired gen¨ eral, called attention to the Declaration as “a move by Pompidieu to proclaim contextualized Europe as an entity and to demonstrate its strength.”35 Tursan ¨ this development within the Arab-Israeli war, the status of the Western European Union, and Europe’s growing disenchantment with NATO and American unilateralism. Within this context, Tursan remarked: ¨ Europe is undergoing fundamental changes. It is not enough for a few persons in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to be aware of these developments. If we want to take our place within Europe, we have to inform our nation of the social and political 33 34 35

The Economist, 13 June 1970. Milliyet, 24 October 1972. Nurettin Tursan, “Ekonomi, Politka,” Milliyet, 22 January 1974. ¨

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developments occurring in Europe. Otherwise, there is a possibility that, after all of our efforts, we may find ourselves outside of the EEC.36

Kamuran Inan, alongside Aydın Yalc¸ın the other co-chair of the Turkish-EEC Joint Parliamentary Committee, went even further than the retired general, stating in a piece in Milliyet: The Copenhagen Summit has accepted a ‘Declaration of European Identity’ so that they may speak with a single voice in world affairs. We joined the Common Market for cultural and political reasons and we were even willing to give up certain economic concessions for this cultural and political union. Now the EEC is finally declaring its cultural and political unity, but we have done nothing to further these non-economic ties with this organization. Our place is in Europe. Let’s make certain it is not built without us.37

These statements were united by a shared idea and betrayed a common fear. All three articles recognized that the “contemporary civilization” was coalescing around a single European project and that the EEC was undoubtedly its orchestrating vehicle. While clearly welcomed, these developments also created a sense of urgency within the civilizational discourse that had not been there before. The rather ambiguous ties of association, once celebrated as cementing Turkey’s place within the newly formed EEC, now seemed, with the acceleration of the European project, not nearly so strong. The gradual and processional temporality of the Civilizational logic, one that viewed Turkish history as an inevitable westward march toward contemporary civilization, was suddenly upended when this inevitability came into question. In all three articles, exhortation replaced a previous tone of certainty. For the first time in the postwar period, the Civilizational logic understood the contingency of its own project. The developments in Europe were, in this regard, a call to arms – the recognition that unless something was done immediately, Turkey could potentially drift off course. Paradoxically, the loss of assurance and the recognition of uncertainty proved to be a blessing in disguise. Uncertainty helped the civilizational discourse unhinge Turkey’s present as an eventless transition from Turkey’s past to its preordained future, opening this present as a moment of danger and decision. The subtle yet crucial shift from self-assured complacency to recruitment is evident in all three articles, the moment where the Civilizational logic, stepping down from its rusted throne, engaged with its counterpart on an even playing field. The three articles also acknowledged the end of an era. For two years, the 12 March coup had silenced or marginalized opposition to the Common Market, reenergizing the pro-EEC voices and through them the civilizational framework for imagining Turkey, Europe, and their integration. By doing so, the coup had managed to rescue and ratify the Additional Protocol. Yet in 36 37

Ibid., 7. Kamuran Iran, “Avrupada Yeni Gelis¸meler,” Milliyet, 8 February 1974.

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little more than a year, economic recession in Europe, the formation of a center-left-Islamist government coalition in Turkey, and a new crisis in Cyprus culminating in the Turkish invasion of the island proved that the collective warnings of Yalc¸ın, Tursan, and Inan would become prophetic sooner than ¨ they had feared.

hard lessons abroad, crisis at home The years 1972–74 mark a rupture point in Turkish-EEC relations. Within the span of two years, several developments both within Turkey and the EEC coalesced to fundamentally alter the ways they related to each other. Domestically, the oil shocks and the ensuing economic downturn marked the beginnings of both an increasingly violent and acrimonious sociopolitical climate and a rising financial dependence on the west. These were compounded by changing international dynamics that affected Turkey’s position within the world and monumentally affected how Turks perceived their position within the world. A Changing Europe The early to mid-1970s was a conflicted period in the project of European unification. Politically, the member-states of the EEC were undergoing structural shifts. Reliance on the dollar led to the importation of American inflation, a situation made worse in 1971 after Nixon uncoupled the U.S. currency from the fixed exchange rate with gold set out by the Bretton Woods system. Inflation reduced the effectiveness of governments’ management tools in their state-guided economies, and this, coupled with surging food and energy prices, led to regime changes and significant decreases in the welfare state.38 Despite these developments, the EEC continued to grow, both through enlargement in Europe and by expanding its economic reach throughout the world. The biggest change in the EEC was its expansion from the group of six to nine. The United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark, and Norway, whose applications had twice been vetoed by de Gaulle, began negotiations for full membership following the French president’s death on 10 November 1970. The negotiations were concluded and signed on 22 January 1972 and they officially joined the community in 1 January 1973.39 The enlargement of the Community spawned attempts to forge a deeper integration between member-states, a process that resulted in the political declarations of the Paris and Copenhagen summits described in the previous section. Added to these, the EEC also began a concerted effort to expand its economic reach throughout the world, 38 39

John Gillingham, European Integration, 1950–2003, Superstate or New Market Economy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 87–90. In September 1972, a referendum held in Norway rejected the country’s integration with the EEC, so only the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Denmark were included in this first expansion.

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negotiating a series of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements with third countries. In July 1972, the EEC put into effect what was called the General Preferences (GP) system that reduced or removed customs duties on select imports from the “77,” a group of underdeveloped countries (twenty of which, as Turkey soon would point out, had a per capita GDP greater than Turkey). The EEC also signed free-trade agreements with the remaining EFTA countries, which, after the defection of its powerhorse (United Kingdom) had ceased to be a viable economic entity. Whatever few industrial goods Turkey either exported or planned to export to the Common Market would now face competition from these developed nations. The net effect of these agreements was to reduce the preferential status Turkey enjoyed in its exports to the Common Market. Finally, and most controversial in Turkey, was the EEC’s Mediterranean Policy (MP). In an effort to secure a stable supply of food and energy as well as markets for its growing economy, the EEC opened up its trade borders to the countries of the Mediterranean, including Spain, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Malta, Cyprus, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Yugoslavia. The MP, which, as Turks would try to argue, violated the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), further eroded the preferential terms of the Ankara Agreement and its Additional Protocol, especially as many of these countries exported the same agricultural products as Turkey. As Turks gradually came abreast of these developments, feelings of betrayal became more widespread, and even under the military-backed government, public calls for a “revision of the Additional Protocol to reflect the new realities” were made.40 However, by the end of 1973, events at home and abroad began to dramatically alter the tenor of Turkey’s reaction. Externally, the EEC was no longer the fledgling economic bloc that had eagerly welcomed Turkey a decade earlier. With the addition of Denmark, Ireland, and particularly the United Kingdom, the EEC had, by the early 1970s, become the largest economic unit on the globe, home to 40 percent of the world’s trade and 30 percent of its capital reserves.41 This, coupled with mounting European criticism of state repression and human rights abuses in Turkey, left Turkey in a disadvantageous bargaining position. The Invasion of Cyprus All of these developments were quickly overshadowed, however, by the latest conflict in Cyprus, one that precipitated a sudden and long-standing shift in Turko-European relations. A little more than a year after the restoration of civilian rule, Turkey found itself once again embroiled on the island. On 20 July 1974, in an effort to protect the Turkish community in Cyprus, Prime Minister 40 41

TBMM Tutanak Dergisi D:3 T:4 C:34 21.2.1973, s.551. Haluk Bayulken, ¨ Peter M. R. Stirk, A History of European Integration since 1914 (London: Pinter Pub Ltd., 1996), 134.

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Ecevit ordered a Turkish invasion of the island’s northern section. The Bulent ¨ “Turkish aggression,” while catapulting Ecevit’s popularity in Turkey, had broad economic, political, and cultural consequences for Turkey’s relations with the west. Politically, the invasion proved to be disastrous for Turkey. With the exception of Libya, it was officially condemned by every Western and Middle-Eastern state. The EEC, which had hitherto refrained from involvement in the Cyprus question in particular and Turkish-Greek disputes more broadly, came down firmly against Turkey.42 The U.S. Congress went a step further and imposed an arms embargo, causing tremendous strains to Turkey’s membership in the Atlantic Alliance. The symbolic significance of the Turkish invasion was, in hindsight, more far-reaching. Aside from official and diplomatic approbation, the invasion was also widely criticized by the Western press. Here, the language and imagery were of an entirely different character than the official recriminations, recirculating and popularizing the age-old image of the Barbaric and Terrible Turk menacing Europe. It prompted what observers have called the reemergence of the “Lord Byron syndrome,” wherein Greece, now sagaciously promoting herself as the cradle of western civilization, was once again seen as under assault by its Asiatic neighbor.43 News that hawkish elements in the Turkish Armed Forces had formed an “Attila the Hun” faction within the military added more fuel to the crusader/jihadist dichotomy resurfacing from the European unconscious.44 In a public opinion survey of the EEC “nine” taken a few months after the invasion, only 5 percent of those polled favored full Turkish membership in the EEC.45 The symbolic recalibration of the European social-imaginary into a culturally distinct and incompatible division between the Turkish east and European west reemerged, publicly, in the late twentieth century through Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus. While the economic and political implications of the invasion have passed or been transformed, the consequences of the invasion in the ideological domain persist to this day. The European reaction in many ways was the death knell of the Civilizational logic. As the sea change in European popular consciousness filtered into domestic awareness, it became increasingly difficult to frame the Turkish project of integration into a civilization that itself explicitly ostracized Turkey. The 42

43 44 45

See “Statement on Cyprus by the European Commission,” in Information Bulletin of Community Spokesman No. 182, 17/7/74 for the Commission response; “Statement on Cyprus by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the Nine,” in Information Bulletin of Community Spokesman No. 182, 17/7/74 for the Council of Ministers response; and “Steps to Safeguard the Independence and Freedom of Cyprus,” EP Documents 243/74 and 245/74 of 13/9/74, for the views of the European Parliament. ˘ glu, ˘ “Turkey’s Image Abroad,” Dıs¸is¸leri Akademisi Dergesi (May 1973): 104–13. Faruk Logo For an excellent analysis of the ideological dimension in European responses to the invasion, ¨ ˘ Ilis¸kileri, 177–79. see C¸alıs¸, Turkiye-Avrupa Birligi This survey was carried out by J. Rene Rabier and reported in The Economist, 3 October 1977.

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European reaction by no means put an end to the pro-EEC efforts within Turkey. It did, however, make it very difficult to express Turkish integration as the invitation of contemporary civilization into the country, especially as this civilization came to be increasingly defined through Turkish exclusion. For the moment at least, the reaction of Europe and the United States to Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus contributed to a profound and broadly felt sense of Turkish disillusionment with the west. As we shall see in the following chapter, geostrategic prerogatives made sure that this disillusionment did not translate to a full policy departure from Turkey’s postwar global alignment, but western estrangement forced Turkey to turn its attentions elsewhere. The Makings of an Organic Crisis If the invasion of Cyprus and subsequent western estrangement led Turkey to explore alternate global associations, the upheavals that began in 1973 and continued through 1980 made Turkey’s financial and economic dependence on the Western global system abundantly clear. The seven years between the coups witnessed the worst socioeconomic crisis in Turkey’s history. The oil shock of 1973, the consequent drying up of remittance money from Turkish workers in Europe, interest payments on outstanding short-term loans, and the worldwide crash in agricultural prices created a severe foreign currency shortage within Turkey.46 By 1975, the IMF-demanded devaluations of the lira and Turkey’s inability to import necessary industrial resources, especially oil, translated the financial crisis into an economic one. High GDP growth rates, fueled by state-directed industrialization in the 1960s, evaporated after 1975 and turned negative after 1978. Inflation, largely fueled by wage increases and foreign debt service, reached 25 percent in 1974, 35 percent by 1977, and was in the triple digits by 1980. Unemployment figures, aided by the ebbing of Turkish guest workers to Europe, soon followed, rising from single digits to 13 percent by 1974 and 20 percent by 1977.47 For those that could find work, the 60–70 percent average yearly rise in consumer prices meant that, for most workers, purchasing power for basic commodities greatly decreased.48 These economic troubles did nothing to temper the spread of revolution˙ witnessed a huge increase in ary ideologies. The radical trade union DISK membership, boasting members as high as 750,000 by the mid-1970s. These

46 47 48

Remittances had accounted for nearly 15 percent of foreign capital imports and were an important resource in paying for Turkish industrialization. Utku Utkulu, “The Turkish Economy: Past and Present,” in Turkey since 1970: Politics, Economics and Society, ed. Debbie Lovatt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 18. Aryeh Shmuelevitz, Republican Turkey: Aspects of Internal Affairs and International Relations (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1999), 120.

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˙ to exercise a large influence outside the workplace, numbers enabled DISK both in its dealings with the RPP and on the streets. The universities turned increasingly radical, with many graduates, given the dismal state of the skilled labor market, staying on campus to direct and partake in student politics. The mid-1970s also brought a shift in the quality and quantity of domestic political violence. The increased activities of the “commandoes” or Grey Wolves, as the militants of the ultranationalist NAP’s youth movement were called, added to and far surpassed those of various leftist groups, making political violence a regular and escalating part of Turkish life. The figures logarithmically rose from 34 political killings in 1975, to 262 in 1977, and finally to the shocking and oft-quoted number of 20 a day by the summer of 1980.49 Yet, as a number of commentators have pointed out, there was a fundamental difference between the terrorism of the left in the early 1970s and that of the right in the mid to late 1970s.50 In the early 1970s, the left hoped to ignite a revolution by inciting workers with specific and targeted anti-western or anticapitalist actions, such as kidnapping American soldiers or prominent Turkish corporate figures. In the mid-1970s, the aim was to cause chaos and demoralization, to create a climate in which a law-and-order regime would be welcomed by the masses as the savior of the nation. This second form of terrorism proved to be far more successful in its aims. The combination of internal and external crises contributed to a sense of fundamental dislocation. The realization of Turkey’s economic dependence was coupled with deep feelings of anger and betrayal toward the west. After Cyprus, most Turks abandoned the trust they had placed in Europe and began to question Europe’s position within the Turkish social-imaginary as the benchmark and arbiter of the Turkish project. In a sense, the erosion of faith in the ineluctable march of European civilization that Europe itself experienced after World War I was brought home to Turks with the aftermath of Cyprus. Rather than leading to abjectness, this uprootedness, having the teleological ground crack, if not crumble, beneath their feet, cleared the way for expansive reformulations of how to understand Turkey. The dislocation Turks felt in this period not only gave credibility to interpretations that had seemed radical or adventurous only a few years prior (not to mention since), but also broadened the horizon of the possible, creating altogether new ways of imagining Turkey. After Cyprus, Turks were, in a sense, left to fend for themselves, both financially, economically, and politically, but above all to think and struggle over how to understand and define their collective project. As an astute member of 49

50

For an excellent account of the origins and development of political violence in the 1970s, see Sabri Sayari, “Political Violence and Terrorism in Turkey, 1976–80: A Retrospective Analysis,” Terrorism and Political Violence, 22/2 (2010): 198–215. See Sayari, “Political Violence,” Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey; Shmuelevitz, Republican Turkey: Aspects of Internal Affairs and International Relations.

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Turkey’s diplomatic corps remarked on Turkey’s peculiar situation among the constellations of global states and peoples: In the councils of the West an imperceptible but nonetheless effective curtain separates her [Turkey] from the other members. She is still the newcomer with a different background. As a member of the Afro-Asian group the same psychological barrier affects Turkey in assemblies of non-European nations who regard her more European than Eastern and look upon her presence among themselves as anomalous. With respect to the Muslim group, Turkey, vitally secular in her new instincts, does not regard herself as part of the group, nor is acknowledged as such by that group. She also lacks the instinctive acceptance from which countries belonging to an ethnic grouping such as the Arabs, or the cultural groupings such as the Latin Americans, do benefit. Nor do the anti-colonials, like India, who make a cult of anti-Westernism, find her a kindred soul. In short Turkey is a lone wolf without instinctive allies or friends.51

Without an obvious beacon to turn to, Turkey was freed, at least ideologically, to determine its own path. The limits to this freedom, and what Turks made of it in the short span of time before Turkey’s third and most devastating military coup, takes up the final chapter of our story.

51

Eren, Turkey Today and Tomorrow, 246.

6 From Periphery to Core (1974–1980)

The sovereign nation-state defines itself or is constituted by its power to distinguish between the public enemy (feind) and the friend (freund). If it fails to do so, the state will immediately be challenged by some other authority who will take on the burden. – Carl Schmitt1

In September 1973, two weeks before the scheduled elections that were to restore civilian rule in Turkey, the TAF released its two-and-a-half-year grip on over the country, lifted martial law, and retreated once again to the barracks. It was to return exactly seven years later, on 12 September 1980, to carry out another military coup, the third Turkey had experienced in two decades. The seven years in between have often been described as the most turbulent and crisis-ridden period in modern Turkish history: the “Vimar” years of the Turkish Republic. Like Weimar Germany, the years bracketed by two periods of authoritarian rule were also marked by an intense dynamism and a sense of immanent self-alteration. The deep dislocations of the mid- to late 1970s, fueled by international isolation and economic collapse, caused many Turks to question and discard inherited assumptions about their country, spurring new ways of imagining Turkey and its place and trajectory in the world. By contrast, Turkish-EEC relations had entered a period of deep stagnation. The political will that hitherto had driven integration evaporated overnight, replaced by seeming indifference and recrimination on the part of Europeans and Turks respectively. Paradoxically, the stalemate in relations created a wide clearing where Turks could reexamine both the framework of and motivations for their association with the Common Market. From academic debates to party 1

Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George D. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 14.

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platforms, from inter-bureaucratic struggles to student dormitories, TurkishEEC relations became one of the most talked about and contested subjects within Turkey. Tellingly, in 1977, a 300-page compilation of rather technical documents issued by the Ankara EEC office, entitled Turkey-EEC Relations, ranked fifth among nonfiction books on the nation’s best-seller list.2 The ways in which Turks spoke about the EEC witnessed yet another shift. The Nationalist logic, effectively silenced for two years, spent little time reasserting itself. Within a few years, the Civilizational logic was in retreat. By decade’s end, it had become an endangered species, enduring silently in the few remaining safe harbors. These seven years marked the gradual eclipse of the civilizational worldview and the ascendancy of the Nationalist logic as the predominant way of imagining Turkey. The aim of this chapter is to trace the hegemonic consolidation of the Nationalist logic within Turkish society over the period from 1974 to 1980 and to detail why and how Turkish-EEC relations were pivotal to this ascendancy. Toward this end, it explores a number of different arenas through which the Nationalist logic reimagined the Turkish project. Uniting these arenas was a common enemy. Whether as a thoroughly researched academic critique of Turkish westernization by a right-wing historian or in the political battles of the SPO against Common Market supporters inside the MFA, the national foil was invariably the mentality of the Civilizational logic. It was against this invitational gesture, from its most specific manifestations, such as asking for and accepting foreign financial aid, to its broadest sense of inviting European civilization to stand as the ultimate aim of the Turkish project that the nation was rearticulated. The personages, groups, and movements that surface in this chapter, irrespective of their disparate political or socioinstitutional affiliations, were all united by this common impulse.3 Accordingly, the chapter outlines the infiltration of the Nationalist logic into the pores of Turkish sociopolitical culture: examining its causes, particular sites of propagation, and effects on Turkish self-understandings. It begins as an intellectual history, tracing the contours of a national debate on Turkish westernization that refashioned the prevailing approaches to Turkish integration into the Common Market. The second section examines how these new ideas made their way into popular politics and were adopted, oftentimes in 2 3

Yankı, No: 306 (24–30 January 1977): 24. What made the situation more remarkable, however, was the dwindling number of adherents to the Civilizational mentality. To be sure, the JP and the remnants of the old guard maintained their allegiance to Turkey’s European trajectory and continued to speak of Turkish integration in Civilizational terms. Yet after Cyprus and the worsening economic crises, the volume of their voices was severely muted. In this light, it seemed that nationalist thought was in some sense beating a dead carcass or chasing shadows and ghosts. The general zeitgeist by the late 1970s certainly gave this impression. Yet the fact remained that the foreign policies of the old elite were left fundamentally unchanged by Nationalist thought. This impotence in the realm of government policy is the reason many commentators have by and large understated the importance of this period on the Turkish social-imaginary.

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a simplified or distilled manner, into the discourses of Turkey’s political parties. The final section examines specific controversies surrounding Turkish-EEC relations that drew notice or caused a considerable amount of discussion amid the other major developments and interruptions of the period.

the great westernization debate Global isolation, political paralysis, and economic crisis all combined by the mid-1970s to create a fundamental sense of disillusionment and frustration within Turkish society. The feeling that the Turkish project was headed in the wrong direction, perhaps even founded on the wrong principles, fueled a widespread introspective examination of Turkey’s recent past. Beginning in the aftermath of Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and continuing through the 1980 military coup, a wide-ranging discussion took place over the foundations of the Turkish project and its social, ideological, cultural, and economic relationship to the west. This discussion, which I call the “great westernization debate,” occurred at the broad sociocultural intersection of politics and academia. It was a politically charged and motivated historical inquiry that sought, in its own way, “to come to terms with the past.” Much like the ¨ German Vergangenheitsbewaltigung and a similar debate over the Armenian genocide that took shape within Turkey at the turn of the twenty-first century,4 the great westernization debate was an investigation into Turkish history in order to secure new foundations for Turkey’s future as well as for its relationship with its neighbors. Both the personages and the ideas they promoted have their own intellectual history, one that deserves, if not demands, to be written.5 This section limits itself to the question of how they reexamined Turkey’s recent past in light of its relationship with Europe as signified by the Common Market. It is therefore not a total engagement with the debate, nor even a complete summary, but rather a description of the ways it influenced and was influenced by Turkey’s association with the EEC. Turkey’s interrogative moment benefited from a vast influx of political literature from around the globe. On the left, poorly translated yet cheap editions of Asian and Latin American movements became readily available in the

4

5

Before, ironically, the U.S. Congress and the French National Assembly came out with their own declarations of genocide, arresting what was gearing up to be an open and critical historical debate. The individual characters and the ideas they promoted have been the subject of a number of historical works; yet, owing to the political and ideological polarization of Turkish society during the 1970s and after, they have almost exclusively been treated within the separate intellectual histories of Islamic thought, the Turkish left, or the secular (ultranationalist) right. There has been no systematic work done on the attitudes and ideas of the cross-political Turkish intelligentsia regarding the Turkish westernization project and Turkey’s relationship with Europe and the United States during this period. Through conducting such a project, it will be possible to trace how a set of individuals, coming from different political, institutional, and intellectual traditions, were drawn to and engaged with the same topic at roughly the same time.

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early 1970s, providing Turkish socialism with theoretical and empirical knowledge of anticolonial struggles and the nonaligned movement. These were coupled with translations of contemporary European social critics, introducing the Turkish left to western (non-Leninist) strains of twentieth-century Marxism. Herbet Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man appeared in Turkish in 1968, soon to be followed by translations of shorter works by Ernesto Laclau, Louis Althusser, and Etienne Balibar between 1975 and 1978.6 Around this time, Turkish Islamic thought also began to connect with currents beyond its borders. By the mid-1970s, translations of Middle Eastern and Asian Islamic thinkers including Sayyed Qutb of Egypt, Muhammad Iqbal and Abul-Ala Mawdudi of the Indian subcontinent, and Ali Shariati from Iran appeared on Turkish shelves for the first time.7 As Feroz Ahmad aptly noted, “The isolation of Turkey came to an end and the country became more aware of the world around it.”8 Significantly, the opening up of Turkey to external intellectual and political currents did not result in the internationalization of Turkish political or theoretical expression. Even though various Turks appropriated some of the vocabulary and ideas of these external currents, Turkish debates on its relationship with Europe and its own westernization remained within a nationalist imaginary. The Nationalist Right’s Embrace of Islam The intellectual trajectory of the nationalist right took an interesting turn in the 1960s with an increasing, if not always explicitly or intentionally formulated, embrace of Islam. While continuing to promote a racial ideology of the Turkic peoples, ultranationalists began to distance themselves from the western orientation of the Kemalist project and to turn to Islam as a powerful weapon in the cultural critique of the West. The intellectual origin of this shift traces back to an influential Pan-Turkist of the interwar period, Zeki Velidi Togan.9 Togan, the president and founder of the short-lived Bas¸kırdistan Republic (1917–20) following the Bolshevik seizure of power, became an outspoken proponent of Pan-Turkist thought

6 7 8 9

Birikim, last accessed 30 May 2013, http://www.birikimdergisi.com/birikim/okunabiliryazilar .aspx. ˙ ¨ ¨ ¸ unce ¨ Bulut, “Islamcılık, Tercume Faaliyetleri ve Yerlilik,” in Modern Turkiye’de Siyasi Dus Yucel ¨ ¨ ˙ ¸ im Yayınları, 2004), 903–26. Vol. 6 (Istanbul: Iletis Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey, 139. The theoretical mingling of nationalism and Islam predates the Republic, first articulated in by Balkan Turks in 1898 who declared that “Islam and nationalism had merged into a single construct.” While the positivist ideology of the Young Turks regime lent itself to more secular interpretations of nationalism, important figures during this period, including Abdullah Cevdet, ˘ glu, ˘ Ziya Gokalp, Ahmed Agao and Yusuf Akc¸ura, all stressed the compatibility of Islam and ¨ ˘ The Young Turks in Opposition (Oxford: Oxford Turkish nationalism. See M. S¸ukr ¨ u¨ Hanioglu, University Press, 1995), 211.

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upon his arrival to Turkey in 1925. His irredentist politics and views of Turkish nationalism, which embraced Turks of the Caucasus and Turkestan, put him in disfavor with the Kemalist regime.10 Forced in 1932 to resign his post at Istanbul University, Togan returned to prominence with the regime’s brief flirtation with Pan-Turkism following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. With the onset of the Cold War, while many of his students and colleagues maintained the secular and ethnic/racist bases of Pan-Turkism, Togan began to incorporate Islam into his views on Turkish nationalism. In 1953, he founded the Islamic Research Institute, claimed that the “Qur’an was the national holy book of the Turks,” and put forth the argument that Islamic culture and the Turkish state were united by the common threat and shared hatred of communism.11 Togan’s nationalist embrace of Islam was turned into political ideology by ˙ ˘ Kafesoglu, who sought to embed his mentor’s ideas into his student, Ibrahim the agenda of the Pan-Turkist Republican Peasants Nation Party. In 1969, ˘ challenged Alparslan Turkes Kafesoglu ¸ for the leadership of the party, lost, but ¨ was successful in incorporating Islamic elements into the previously secular party platform. The newly minted Nationalist Action Party that emerged from the 1969 congress adopted the slogan: “We are as Turkish as Tanri Mountain (the Central Asian peak of the Pan-Turkist homeland) and as Muslim as Hira Mountain (the Meccan peak where the Archangel Gabriel revealed the Qur’an to Muhammad).” The party also changed its flag from the grey wolf, a preIslamic Pan-Turkist symbol, to the three crescents, an Islamic symbol, over a red background. The three crescents had been used on Ottoman flags representing the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe, over which the empire had spread. A red background, signifying Turkish blood in place of the Ottoman green, completed, in the symbolic realm at least, the nationalist right’s embrace of Islam.12 The National Economy of the Islamic Right As some currents of the nationalist right had begun to distance themselves from the Kemalist regime by turning to Islam, the ideology of political Islam within Turkey was, in turn, becoming more nationalist. Islamic intellectual revival in the 1960s eschewed both the antimodernism of interwar Islamic traditionalists desiring a return to the golden age of Islam and earlier Ottoman pan-Islamic internationalist currents, favoring instead a political struggle for

10 11 12

Tamer Balcı, “From Nationalization of Islam to Privatization of Nationalism: Islam and Turkish National Identity,” History Studies, 1/1 (2009): 82–107. ¨ ¨ ¸ unce, ¨ Siyasi Dus 4: Gun ¨ Soysal, “Zeki Velidi Togan,” in ed. Tanın Bora, Modern Turkiye’de ˙ ¸ im Yayınları, 2002), 493. Milliyetc¸ilik (Istanbul: Iletis ¨ ¨ ¸ unce, ¨ Guven Bakırezer, “Nihal Atsız,” in ed. Tanın Bora, Modern Turkiye’de Siyasi Dus 4: ¨ ˙ ¸ im Yayınları, 2002). Milliyetc¸ilik (Istanbul: Iletis

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state control within the confines of the modern nation-state project.13 One of the main avenues by which religious orders accomplished this was to articulate Islamic ideology with reference to the organizing principle of national economic development strategies pursued by various Turkish governments.14 While their traditionalist precursors such as Nurettin Topc¸u and Necip Fazıl Kısakurek ¨ had rejected, in Spenglerian fashion, the technological soullessness of western civilization, Islamist political thought of the 1960s embraced the modernist ideas of progress and development. What Islamic thought of the 1960s rejected was the stimulation of mass consumerism as the basic economic development strategy imposed by the West. Mass consumerism, the intellectuals argued, created conditions of poverty among humankind instead of bringing prosperity to larger segments of the population. What was needed above all was a national developmental strategy based on Islamic values, one that would modernize Turkey without recourse to consumer desire. In this concern for an Islamic development strategy, Islamic intellectuals in the postwar era took their lead from Said Nursi. In a short piece titled Emirdag˘ Lahikası (the Emirdag˘ Appendix), published in 1959, he cried out against a western civilization that had brought nothing but “wastefulness, laziness, the desire for comfort, and vice.” Nursi argued: In the primitive state of nomadism (for example) people only needed three or four things. And those who could not obtain these three or four products were two out of ten. The present tyrannical Western civilization has encouraged consumption, abuses, wastefulness and the appetites, and, in consequence, has made nonessentials into essential, and has made this so-called civil person in need of twenty things instead of four. And yet he can only obtain two of these twenty. He is still in need of eighteen where before he was in need of a few if that at all. It is in this above all, that contemporary civilization has impoverished humankind.15

The search for an Islamic development strategy within Turkish Islamic thought was further advanced in the teachings of Naqshbandi Shaykh Mehmet Zaid Kotku, who showed remarkable success in capturing the progressive discourse of secular nationalist intellectuals. Like many Kemalists of the 1960s, Shaykh Kotku emphasized the development of national heavy industry. He encouraged Necmettin Erbakan to establish a model Islamic industrial plant, which led to the founding of a factory making irrigation pumps.16 Yet, Shaykh Kotku put an Islamic stamp on the economic nationalism of the Kemalists, advising his 13

14 15 16

For a great intellectual history of Islamic thought in the Turkish Republic, see Cemil Aydin, “Between Occidentalism and the Global Left: Islamist Critiques of the West in Turkey,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 26/3 (2006): 446–61. ¨ See S¸erif Mardin, Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey: The Case of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989). Yıldız Atatsoy, “Islamic Revivalism and the Nation-State Project: Competing Claims for Modernity,” Social Compass, 44/1 (1997): 83. Ibid., 87.

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followers to refrain from using imported western consumer goods, create a national industry around Islamic products that would steer Turkish trade from West to East, and look into the prospect of interest-free Islamic banking, an idea that was then gaining popularity in the Middle East. These ideas were influential among his followers working in the State Planning Organization, who recast import-substitution strategies for heavy industrialization as an anti-western discourse; a way for Turkey to resist the economic and spiritual marginalization of Turkey.17 This last point underscores the advantages for Islamic thought of the shift toward national economic development. The earlier pan-Islamic or antimodernist currents of Turkish Islamic thought were plagued by their infeasibility. Both required a fundamental restructuring of the modern Turkish nation-state. The ideas of Kotku and Erbakan, by contrast, worked within the parameters of the Turkish national project. By turning national development into an anti-western project that aimed to both maintain the distinctiveness of Islamic culture and overcome the dependent status of Turkey within the world economy, Islamic thought gained renewed currency within Turkish political culture. Turkish-Islamic Synthesis In the postwar period, as the preceding sections have shown, certain currents within nationalist and Islamic intellectual traditions had started to gravitate toward each other. Their union as an explicit ideological expression took place in the early 1970s. The Turkish-Islamic Synthesis (TIS), as this fusion came to be called, was an attempt to create a common unified ideology of the Turkish political right. Eschewing the irredentist politics of PanTurkism and the internationalist elements of pan-Islam, the TIS constructed an anti-western nationalist ideology that stressed the Islamic identity of the Turks. The intellectual origins of this synthesis trace back to Nurettin Topc¸u and the journal Hareket (Movement) he founded in 1939. One of the offshoots of the journal, the influential nationalist publishing house Hareket Kitapalrı (Movement Books), most famous for a collection of essays entitled Turkish ˘ Nationalism and Westernization (1979) and Mehmet Dogan’s Treasonous Westernization (1975), defined its mission in 1979 as follows: In the centuries-long struggle between an imperialist West – replete with its minority western intellectual vassals within Turkey – and the Muslim Turk nation, we take our place beside the people. Our task lies in the publication of progressive works in this struggle.18 17

18

˘ Ersin Gurdo gan’s work during the 1960s in the State Planning Organization stands as an apt ¨ ˘ ¨ ur ¨ ve Sanayiles¸me (Istanbul: example of this Islamic industrial strategy. Ersin Gurdo gan, Kult ¨ ˙ Yayıncılık, 1992). Iz ¨ Milliyetc¸iligi ˘ ve Batılılas¸ma, ed. Ezel Erverdi (Istanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 1979), 6. Turk

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This struggle, one could claim, was ideologically initiated by Nurettin Topc¸u in the years after Ataturk’s death. A leading Turkish conservative, Topc¸u was ¨ born in 1909 and spent many years as a philosophy and history teacher in elite Turkish schools including Galatasaray and Robert Kolej.19 In the pages of the journal Hareket, which he published intermittently beginning in 1939, he investigated the philosophical roots of spiritual and mystical thought as a counterpoint to the mechanical and technological civilization he claimed was overtaking Turkey. He blamed the principles of this civilization – materialism, positivism, sociologism, and pragmatism – for “paralyzing the human soul in their steel claws.”20 Because of these controversial claims, the Kemalist authorities removed him from his post in Istanbul, reassigning him to Denizli, in the Aegean area of Turkey, where he met Said-I Nursi, a conservative Islamic thinker. After the war, Topc¸u began to actively link his spiritual and mystical philosophical investigations to Islam, contending that “the question of Turkish nationalism was inseparable from that of Islam, being as they were interwoven concepts.” This led Topc¸u to envision the creation of a New Order (Yeni Nizam), a national Islamic order chosen by Allah for his people, which would challenge the capitalist and communist camps.21 Until his death in 1975, Nurettin Topc¸u continued to publish and promote these ideas in his own journal as well as through his association with other right-wing organizations such as the Turkish Culture Hearth (Turk Kult ¨ ¨ ur ¨ ˘ Turkish Nationalists Society (Turk Ocagı), ¨ Milliyetc¸iler Cemiyeti), the Nation˘ and the Turkish Nationalists Associaalist Association (Milliyetc¸iler Dernegi), ˘ Yet it was in the successors and offshoots tion (Turkiye Milliyetc¸iler Dernegi). ¨ to his journal Hareket that his views lived on, carried by another generation. In 1966, Hareket began republication after a fourteen-year hiatus. Under the new leadership of Ezel Erverdi, the journal also founded its own publishing house, Hareket Yayınları (Movement Press), which began printing longer manuscripts by Topc¸u and other writers from the original journal, as well as publishing Turkish translations of foreign right-wing philosophical texts. In 1977, the publishing house changed its name to Dergah Yayınları (Convent Press) and its scope from a financial venture to one dedicated to academic works. As the premier publishing house for the right-wing intelligentsia, Dergah’s books were routinely assigned in university courses taught by right-wing sympathizers in the 1970s and were influential in raising a new generation of the nationalist right.22 In 1970, the leading advocates of the TIS, including many writers from ˘ a nationalist Dergah, founded the Hearth of Intellectuals (Aydınlar Ocagı), 19 20 21 22

˘ Nurettin Topc¸u’ya Armagan, ed. Ezel Erverdi (Istanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 1992). ¨ ur ¨ ve Medeniyet (Istanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 1998). Nurrettin Topc¸u, Kult ˘ Nurettin Topc¸u, Milliyetc¸iligimizin Esasları (Istanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 1978). ¨ Tarih Tezinden Turk ¨ I˙slam Sentezine: 1931– Etienne Copeaux, Tarih Ders Kitaplarında Turk ˙ ¸ im Yayınları, 2000), 83. 1991, Trans. Ali Berktay (Istanbul: Iletis

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think tank comprised of some 150 conservative journalists, academics, and intellectuals. This organization officially coined the term Turkish-Islamic Synthesis and produced for it a researched history that explicitly challenged the official narrative of the past laid out by the Kemalists in the 1930s. Its central thesis posited Turkishness as a synthesis between pre-Islamic Turkish culture and Islam. While praising the liberation struggle waged against the west under Ataturk, the Hearth accused Kemalism of turning its back on centuries of Turk¨ ish history, thus inflicting grievous damage on the development of national culture and leaving the country exposed to western imperialism.23 One of the Hearth’s most important contributions to the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis was the research and writing of its history. At the center of this effort ˘ Himself the president and cofounder of the Intellectual was Ibrahim Kafesoglu. ˘ had previously worked for Dergah.24 Hearth during the late 1970s, Kafesoglu ¨ ur ¨ u¨ (Turkish National Culture), was pub¨ Milli Kult His major work, Turk lished in 1977 through the Turkish Culture Research Institute, and rereleased with a few minor modifications in 1985 under the new title, Turkish-Islamic Synthesis. The study took a sociohistorical approach to the Turkish people similar to the studies conducted during and after the Turkish History Thesis in the 1930s. Both sets of studies were motivated by the desire to distill a set of attributes that, although appearing in different form throughout the ages, were essential characteristics of the Turkish people. Yet unlike the Kemalist studies that mostly ignored the thousand-year history of Turks after their con˘ version, Kafesoglu’s 1977 book included long sections on the interaction and intertwining of Turkish history with Islam. By stressing the interdependence of ˘ and his cohorts in the Hearth drew conTurkish and Islamic culture, Kafesoglu tinuity between modern Turkey and its Ottoman past, in the process implicitly critiquing the official Kemalist project for distancing Turks from both their historical roots and their culture. To outside observers, the synthesis between religion and ethnic nationalism explicitly formulated in the 1970s could hardly have seemed surprising. More striking to these observers would be why it took the Turkish political right so long to enunciate and unify behind a substantial ideology that put, as it were, “Allah on the nation’s side.” This delay is readily explained by the radical secularism of the modern Turkish state. What does beg the question, however, is how smoothly and seamlessly the religious and radical secular nationalist traditions managed to blend. There was essentially no recalibration, or real synthesis, of methods, aim, or rhetoric of the type that usually accompanies the merging of two ideological traditions with distinct histories and trajectories. It 23 24

Erkan Akin, “The Turkish-Islamic Synthesis,” Middle East Report, 153 (1988): 18. ˘ was born in 1914 and entered Ankara University’s Language and History Ibrahim Kafesoglu Department, which was at the vanguard of promoting racial theories about the Turkish language and history as directed by the Kemalist state. In 1970 he cofounded the Intellectual Hearth, which quickly became a prominent nationalist conservative think tank.

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seemed, as the president of the Intellectuals Hearth, Professor Suleyman Yalc¸ın, ¨ ˘ wrote in the preface to Kafesoglu’s book, that, “Islam so well fit the body and life of the Turk, almost as if it had been specifically measured and cut for the purpose.”25 This ease was a direct result of the structure of expression underlying Islamic and secular ultranationalist thought, both employing a nativist solution of the Nationalist logic. With the Turkish-Islamic synthesis intellectually formulated, the question became how the Turkish right would incorporate it. Between 1975 and 1980, Turkish-EEC relations became a crucial and divisive wedge within the National Front (Milli Cephe) governments, highlighting differences between the majority center-right JP and its ultranationalist (National Action Party) and Islamic (National Salvation Party) flanks. While the JP sought to harness the TurkishIslamic synthesis as a cultural bulwark against the left, the NAP and NSP prompted and promoted its anti-western elements. The rhetoric of the synthesis regarding the Common Market exposed a stark contrast between the pro-trade, pro-market, pro-European JP and the anti-western, national industrialization policies advocated by the radical nationalist and Islamic right. Synthesis at Work: Two Rightist Critiques of Europe and the EEC The fruits of the synthesis were readily discerned in the publications of two ¨ ˘ influential works by Dursun Ozer and Mehmet Dogan regarding TurkishEuropean relations. Unlike in earlier periods, where right-wing critique of the Common Market had been disjointed, these works stood on unified theoretical foundations that combined the previous ideological platforms of the Islamic and ultranationalist right. Published by Dergah and Hareket Yayınlar, respectively, they provide insight into how these right-wing publishing houses promoted the new synthesis. ¨ Durgun Ozer, in his 1979 work Westernization and the Common Market in Turkish Economic History, took a dual-sided approach to Turkish-EEC relations, historically addressing both Turkish and European motivations for ¨ a European Common Market. Analyzing the Turkish side, Ozer argued that since its inception, the Turkish Republic had pursued successively contradictory policies in the economic domain, each lasting roughly a decade or so, all of ¨ which had been left unfinished. Ozer traced the Republic’s economic trajectory through the liberalism of the 1920s, the etatism of the 1930s, Menderes’s ´ unbridled capitalism during the 1950s that led to the 1960s experiment in mixed economy, to the contemporary populist political economics of 1978. ¨ This economic vagary, in Ozer’s opinion, “attests to a void or absence within Turkey. Not a void in power and/or government, but a more fundamental void ¨ in the notion of the state.” Ozer argued that, “Turkey has, since its inception, 25

¨ uken ˘ ¨ I˙slam Sentezi (Istanbul: Ot Yalc¸in in forward to Ibrahim Kafesoglu, TurkSuleyman ¨ ¨ Nes¸riyat, 1985), xi.

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tried to fill this void through foreign alliances, the most important of which is the Common Market.”26 Having argued that Turkey’s efforts to join the Common Market were a ¨ symptom of the ideological bankruptcy of the Turkish state, Ozer went on to elucidate the historical roots of the Common Market within Europe. He claimed that the West had historically approached Turkey from the mentality of the “Oriental Question” and that the very notion of Europe, “originated from ¨ interpreted the its relations with the Ottoman Empire.”27 In this vein, Ozer Congress of Vienna as the first modern ideological attempt to create a unified ¨ Europe through the exclusion of the Turk. According to Ozer, the competitive nationalism of post-1815 Europe simultaneously enabled the survival of the Ottoman Empire while proscribing the realization of a “European Union.” Only after two world wars and the colonization of the continent by the USSR and the United States did Europeans awake to the idea that a united Europe was necessary to reassert their lost hegemony. ¨ Ozer’s study then delved with acumen into the early years of the “European project,” providing a detailed account of the motivations of the EEC’s founders: Jean Monnet and Franz-Joseph Strauss both realized that Europe had to be created anew, not as the combination or association of national sovereignties as attempted before. They understood that economic union would have to precede, and was seen as a first stage, in the total political and territorial integration of a single Europe.28

¨ this new Europe, having its historical-conceptual origins in the OriFor Ozer, ental Question, could never, for this reason, regard Turkey as anything more than a market to be exploited. It was only in this capacity that Turkey could ever join the European Community. ¨ According to Ozer, both the European and the Turkish motivations for Turkish-EEC integration were faulty and pathological. The reason Turkey had even gone this far down this path was the alien and alienating ideology of westernization that had gripped Turkey over the past fifty years. This ideology ¨ had also led Turkey, Ozer concluded, to overlook its true neighbors in the Muslim Middle East with which it shared essential cultural and historic bonds. It was to these neighbors that Turkey should again turn, taking its place as the rightful leader of the East.29 Another intellectual that made extensive use of the Turkish-Islamic Syn˘ 30 His seminal study, Treasonous Westernization, thesis was Mehmet Dogan. 26 27 28 29 30

¨ ˙ ¨ Miliyetciligi ˘ ve Dursun Ozer, “Tukiye’nin Iktisadiyatinda Ortak Pazar ve Batılılas¸ma,” in Turk ¨ Batılılas¸ma, 86. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 101. ˘ was born in Ankara in 1947 and graduated from SBF in 1972 and worked Mehmet Dogan ¨ Tarih Kurumu for the Turkish History Foundation Center for New Turkey Research (Turk

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published by Hareket Yayınları in 1975, was an influential and widely refer˘ enced work of this period.31 Dogan’s major thesis posited that the principle tool of western imperialism in exploiting the Turkish people had been the creation of a western-oriented intellectual elite within Turkey. This Turkish elite, ˘ which Dogan termed the “Bureaucrats,” had, since their initial acquiescence to the capitulations in the late Ottoman period, directly catered to the interest ˘ of the west. Yet for Dogan, the treason of the Bureaucrats did not end with the formation of a Turkish national state, but paradoxically intensified in the Republican period. After 1923, the Bureaucrats enforced upon the Turkish people a radical project of westernization, which, through various ideological conceits, they were able to legitimize as the national ideology of the Turks, carried out in the “national interests” of its people. ˘ According to Dogan, the “national struggle” forced the Bureaucrats to invoke Islam and populism in order to galvanize all segments of the Turk˘ ish population. To secure their hold on power after the war, Dogan argued, the Bureaucrats needed to do away with these competing claims to the national identity and makeup of Turkish society.32 The consolidation of power in the hands of the Bureaucrats was accomplished, he claimed, through the fabrication of a paradoxical notion of “Turkism” (Turkc later known as Kemalism. ¨ ¸ ul ¨ uk), ¨ ˘ According to Dogan, Turkism contained two sets of contradictions. First, it was both nationalist and western. Second, it traced its origins in a national history and, in the same stroke, repudiated 1,000 years of Turkish history after its contact with Islam. Turkism was the attempt to synthesize these contradictions. In an illuminating ideological history of the Republic’s early years, ˘ demonstrated how Turkism was able to overcome these contradictions Dogan through the equation of two sets of terms: “nationalism/Westernization” and ˘ interpreted Ataturk “Civilization/culture.” With this last argument, Dogan ¨ and his successors within the bureaucratic-military elite as continuing a project of self-colonization on behalf of the west and against the Turkish people. ˘ However, Dogan’s true innovation lay in his conceptualization of this selfcolonization, focusing on the concept of “aid” as the key term or master signifier around which the material and ideological practices of Turkish westernization revolved. The history of Westernization is the history of the Bureaucrats seeking “aid” – whether financial, technological, social, legal, or cultural in form – to construct its educational systems, its industry, its constitution, its civil society, etc.33

31

32 33

¨ Aras¸tırma Merkezi) between 1972 and 1974 before coming to work for Dergah Yeni Turkiye publishing house in 1975. This is somewhat surprising owing to both the radicalism of the text’s claims and the intellec˘ ˘ tual complexity of Dogan’s central argument. Mehmet Dogan, Batılılas¸ma Ihaneti (Istanbul: Hareket Yayınları, 1975). Ibid., 45. Ibid., 83.

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˘ the radical notion of “rejecting aid” in the broadConsequently, for Dogan, est sense “marks the entrance to the realm of nationalization.”34 Of all the ˘ nationalist intellectuals examined in this study, Dogan, with his analysis of westernization through the notion of aid, comes closest to highlighting the invitational gesture at the root of the Civilizational logic. His insistence that the repudiation of this notion is prerequisite to a true nationalism, conversely, best captures the antagonistic essence of the Nationalist logic. ˘ Yet for Dogan, the politically popular but practically impossible act of repudiating aid was not enough to restore a national politics. He claimed that the Bureaucrats had, “destroyed, repressed, or eradicated, every local institution (culture, language, custom, religion) that stood ground against Western imperialism.”35 The treasonous westernization of the Bureaucrats had nearly erased the Turkish nation. The implications of this erasure led him to a radical conceptualization of the “true” Turkish nation and the politics for its realization. He pointed out, “[The nation] remains, today, as a silent muted trace of lost customs, language, and traditions of the people.”36 The only means to resuscitate this trace was by a thorough critical history of the Bureaucrats’ project – a history that located the true nation in the society they dismissed ˘ and dismantled as anachronistic. For Dogan, the Turkish nation could not be faithfully realized outside of a complete revolution of Turkish society, expung˘ ing it of its Western elements. In carrying out this revolutionary purge, Dogan warned, western notions such as “populism,” “democracy,” or even “nationalism,” as they existed in their present contexts, could not be employed in the conceptualization of the Turkish nation or the practice of its revolutionary actualization. ˘ departed from the mainstream 1970s anti-EEC groups. Whereas Here Dogan the latter sought a reinterpretation or rereading of Ataturk ¨ as the basis for their ˘ situated Ataturk nationalisms, Dogan ¨ at the root of the problem. Whereas this opposition had coalesced around Western institutions of the nation such as ˘ the Turkish Assembly and the State Planning Organization, Dogan rejected these as institutional imports founded on western notions of parliamentary ˘ democracy and economic development. For Dogan, the path to the true nation lay in uncovering, through the historical study of the Bureaucrats’ repression, the lost Turko-Islamic civilization. In claiming that the national struggle was carried out by the Turkish people whose populist and religious claims to national identity were subsequently ˘ rebuked by the bureaucratic elite, Mehmet Dogan’s work can be credited with independently formulating what later came to known worldwide as subaltern studies. Published in 1975, Treasonous Westernization is a testament to the intellectual depth of the Turkish radical right; its startling affinity with the 34 35 36

Ibid., 84. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 97.

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progressive leftist impulse informing an important strand of postcolonial theory should give these scholars, both within Turkey and globally, pause for reflection.37 Ecevit’s Ambivalence toward the West While the Turkish right was undergoing ideological consolidation, the radical left, at least politically, was in tatters. The important, if modest, electoral strides made by the WPT in the 1960s were totally wiped out with the dismantling of the party and the severe repression of the military government that disproportionately targeted leftist organizations and intellectuals. Leaving aside the student movements, two major foci of leftist activity emerged after the coup: ˙ one centered on the revolutionary trade union DISK and the other around the newly reenergized RPP, led by Bulent Ecevit.38 ¨ Ecevit was that rare breed of politician who was also an intellectual, Bulent ¨ historian, and ideologue in his own right. His political views regarding the west were complex, theoretical, and, for these reasons, often misinterpreted. Yet having led the government thrice as well as the principle political opposition numerous times during the 1970s, Ecevit commanded a platform for his ideas that few intellectuals could approach. Much like Ataturk, Ecevit grasped the ¨ contradictions and ambiguities of Turkey’s relationship with Europe, seeing it as Turkey’s greatest paradox. For him, Turkey’s relations with the west could not be simplified into the simple categories of rejection or integration. Ecevit believed that the underlying socioeconomic conditions that governed the western states’ relationship with the non-western world required Turkey to possess a more nuanced attitude toward the west. Ecevit felt that the west was in crisis, that the universal ideals of freedom, social justice, and democracy it birthed had become endangered by the profitdriven imperatives of its “liberal capitalist” economic system. Taking a neoLeninist perspective, Ecevit argued that rather than resolving this contradiction, the west had simply exported the problem through its relations with the developing world. The rise of multinational entities (chief among them the Common Market and IMF) was, for Ecevit, the latest vehicle through which the west’s internal crisis was being thrown onto the shoulders of the non-western world. The spread of democratic and free regimes in Asia and Africa thus were at odds with the economic interests of these multinational entities, because democratic 37

38

This point becomes all the more salient when considering the homogeneity of the repressed Turkish nation in right-wing ideology at the expense and exclusion of minority religious and ethnic groups, especially the Kurds. A “child of the Republic,” Ecevit was born in Istanbul in 1925. He matriculated from the Department of Literature at Robert Kolej in 1944 before going on to London University where he studied Sanskrit and art history. In 1957, a year before he was elected to the TGNA, Ecevit traveled to Harvard as a researcher in Middle Eastern and Ottoman history; Turkiye’de Kim Kimdir 1977 (Istanbul: Tanıtım Yayınları, 1977).

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regimes in the third world would guard against the exploitation of their labor and resources: It is such that the West, which fosters and takes pride in the functioning of democracy and social justice in their own countries, is, from an economic standpoint, forced to deny these privileges to the developing world.39

For Ecevit, this created an inherent contradiction between the ideological and material relationships the west fostered with the rest of the world. As these new multinational entities, Ecevit claimed: Largely determined the foreign relations of Western states, the ‘natural affinity’ between the peoples of the developing world and the Western countries, an affinity derived from “shared aspirations for freedom and social justice,” has been trumped by economic forces that demanded a compliant population.40

This was the main reason, he argued, for both the increasing authoritarianism in new postcolonial states (tacitly approved by western governments) as well as the alarming anti-western sentiment within Turkey and throughout much of the developing world. Ecevit’s ambivalence toward the west was an exemplary expression of the dynamic interplay between the Civilizational and Nationalist logics. According to him, while the west remained the pulpit from which the normative standards of contemporary civilization were delivered, it was at the same time the source of their denial to the non-western world. A developing country like Turkey, therefore, could not “invite” Europe in without reservation. Ecevit criticized promoters of the Civilizational logic as being too na¨ıve and ingenuine, as failing to perceive the fundamental contradiction between the west’s putatively universal ideal of a free enlightened self-determining society and the practice of its transmission to the non-western world. In this vein, he repeatedly spoke out against Demirel’s Justice Party, arguing from the opposition that, “the liberalcapitalist oriented government [JP], because of its unquestioning allegiance to an invidious ideology, cannot truly champion the nation, freedom, or social justice.”41 original position, one In effect, Ecevit argued for a return to Ataturk’s ¨ he claimed had displayed a profound ambivalence toward the west. This required, above all, resurrecting Ataturk’s anti-imperialist impulses, which had ¨ been abandoned by the Civilizational logic after World War II. To do this, Ecevit had recourse to the Nationalist logic. However, his nationalism was not grounded in an essential or unsurpassable antagonism between Turkey and the Europe. Rather, Turkish nationalism involved the self-formation of the nationpeople to guard against an exploitive relationship with the west. The Turkish 39 40 41

Ecevit, Batının Bunalımı (Ankara: CHP Yayınevi, 1975), 29. Bulent ¨ Ibid., 33. Ibid., 31.

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people’s suspicion and wariness toward the west was a healthy and proper attitude, predicated not on Turkish conservatism, but rather on the contradictions within the European project of modernity itself. In this way, Ecevit’s conceptualization of Turkey’s relationship with Europe espoused the essences of both the Civilizational and Nationalist logics. By championing the European example as a beacon of democracy and social justice and calling for closer ties with the west, while simultaneously urging the nation to stand up against European imperialism, Ecevit underscored both the “invitational” and “antagonistic” self/other relations structuring Turkish understandings of Europe and Turkey. Taken together, all of the theoretical innovations resulting from the crosspolitical questioning of the Turkish project brought a new dimension to Turkish critiques of the EEC. The radical right had been ideologically split, the secular right mired in interwar European racial ideologies, and the interwar Islamists forced, by their opposition to Kemalism, into the straightjacket of traditionalism. The Turkish-Islamic Synthesis modernized both. It allowed political Islam to express itself within the developmental paradigm of the national project and permitted an outmoded fascist nationalism to employ Islam in its critique against the EEC. On the left, Ecevit reintroduced a complex and dialectical vision of Turkey and Europe, complicating the pristine hostility directed by the numerous Marxist groups against the Common Market.

resituating party politics The ideas generated during the great westernization debate made their way into politics and were adopted, oftentimes in a simplified or distilled manner, into the discourse of Turkey’s political parties. As they entered the garrulous and hyperbolic arena of national party politics, they were polarized by political actors seeking to differentiate themselves from one another, particularly among the right. More significantly, once encased in party platforms, these new reformulations of the national project were placed before, and assessed on their resonance with, the Turkish electorate. Most studies of this period focus on the polarization of party politics into a right-left conflict that turned increasingly radical and violent as the decade progressed.42 The importation of the Cold War dichotomy into party politics, at least regarding domestic issues and spillover into urban violence, is undeniable. Yet this interpretation breaks down when analyzing Turkish political postures toward the EEC. The EEC cut through the National Front against communism, exposing fault lines between the JP and the smaller right-wing parties whose position on the Common Market was near-identical to the left or left-leaning groups they clashed with in universities and on the street. In this sense, the 42

Turkey. See Ahmad, The Turkish Experiment in Democracy: 1950–1975 and Erik Jan Zurcher, ¨ A Modern History (London: I.B.Tauris, 2004).

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EEC divided Turkey through an alternate political geography, creating uneasy alliances that complicated both Turkey’s internal and external dynamics. The Radical Right One of the most significant developments following the coup was the entrance of the radical right into mainstream Turkish politics. The newly formed Islamic National Salvation Party (NSP) and the neofascist National Action Party (NAP) did not perform well at the ballot box, fetching a combined 14 percent of the vote in both the 1973 and 1977 general elections. But this was enough to prohibit both of Turkey’s two major parties, the RPP and JP, from forming a majority in the assembly, thus ushering in the era of coalition governments, not one of which the radical right was excluded from. Exploiting the threat of their withdrawal, the NSP and NAP extracted numerous concessions on policy and portfolios from their coalition partners. By effectively paralyzing executive and legislative action, they relocated the site of real political power from the government and assembly to the state bureaucracy and the streets. By these means, the NSP and NAP wielded an influence totally out of proportion to their electoral support. In their opposition to communism and the RPP, which they tried to cast as its domestic manifestation, both the NSP and NAP fostered an imported Cold War dichotomization of the social space. Yet in many other areas they positioned themselves outside the left-right conflict, as organic movements whose ideology was indigenous to Turkey herself. The NSP was the successor to Necmettin Erbakan’s first Islamic party, the National Order Party, which had been closed down by the military government for threatening the “secular nature of the Turkish Republic” and violating Article 19 of the constitution, which stated: No one shall be allowed to exploit or abuse religion or religious feelings, or things held sacred by religion, in any manner whatsoever, for the purpose of personal or political influence, or for even partially basing the fundamental, social, economic, political, and legal order of the state on religious tenets.43

The 12 March coup pushed Erbakan and the NSP to subsume Islam under a nationalist lexicon. Already blacklisted by the TAF, Erbakan was forced to tread carefully, making sure not to swerve too far from the national path. In addition to these structural pressures, the nationalization of Islam, as it turned out, was also politically expedient. The struggling craftsmen, shopkeepers, and small entrepreneurs of Anatolia that made up the NSP’s potential electorate were the worst hit by the dislocations of an accelerated and uneven modernization.44 The Islamic fundamentalism of the NOP had failed to attract the votes of a people who had been forced to deal with more practical 43 44

http://www.anayasa.gen.tr/1961constitution-text.pdf (last accessed 30 May 2013). Ahmad, The Turkish Experiment in Democracy, 318.

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socioeconomic concerns. Erbakan was quick to adjust to these developments. The newly formed NSP emphasized religion in a much less vulgar way than its predecessor, combining Islamic and national imaginaries to a critique of capitalism in both its domestic and imperialistic forms.45 For the NSP, the only feasible unit capable of resisting and overturning the capitalist threat was the nation. Erbakan’s new emphasis was evident in the 1973 election campaign, when he spoke of a “national capitalism” that was true to the nation’s history, traditions, and values, while also “rooted in a scientific and technically inclined Islamic civilization.”46 Appealing to the uprooted of Anatolia, Erbakan proposed “interest-free banking” and the expropriation of profits from, if not outright nationalization of, big business and its foreign investors. In Turkey’s relations with the external world, the NSP positioned itself (and Turkey) outside and above the Cold War conflict. Erbakan made no distinction between the Soviet Union and the west, which he equated as two manifestations of the same corrupt civilization, both being, “imperialistic states rooted in a ravenous materialism out to enslave other nations via the importation of their cultural systems.”47 Throughout the 1970s, he advocated immediate withdrawal from NATO and the EEC, the severance of all ties and relations with the west, and a new orientation toward the Arab countries to the east, “where Turkey could ascend to its role as the rightful leader of Muslim states.”48 The other major radical party of the right was the National Action Party ¸ that championed the racial (NAP), a neofascist group led by Alparslan Turkes ¨ and cultural superiority of the Turks. Despite a self-avowed idealism, the NAP was a pragmatic party that dressed according to the weather. It was founded in 1969 as a radical nationalist party with a racial epistemology derived from the fascist parties of interwar Europe. Yet its particular brand of Turkish nationalism was influenced by the bipolar postwar world and the perceived threat of Turkish cultural eradication. Throughout the 1970s it sought out a third way between capitalism and socialism, espousing a variant of autarkic corporatism. The NAP’s shifting attitude toward the Common Market exemplified this pragmatism. Interpreting the EEC as an economic and cultural encroachment on Turkish autarky, the NAP was initially vehemently opposed to the Common Market. The party program adopted in June 1973 stated: The NAP is not against regional economic organizations. On the other hand, we consider a national duty, all resistance to organizations that reach beyond the economic domain toward social, cultural, and political integration. The Common Market, which 45 46 47 48

˘ ¨ Ali Gevgilili, “Sanayi Toplumun Es¸iginde Laiklik,” in Turkiye’de 1971 Regimi (Istanbul: Milliyet Yayınları, 1973), 245–47. Milli Selamet Partisi, 1973 Parti Programı (Ankara: MSP, 1973). Binnaz Toprak, Islam and Political Development in Turkey (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981). ¨ us ¨ ¸ (Istanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 1975). Necmettin Erbakan, Milli Gor

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is nothing more than the belated and indirect application of the Sevres treaty, will lead to the social and cultural deformation of our nation. For this reason the NAP is openly and firmly opposed to the EEC.49

In its stead the NAP program offered several alternatives, most notably economic integration with African and Middle Eastern states, whereby Turkey would preserve its cultural autonomy. Domestically, the NAP was firmly rooted within the Cold War dichotomy, engaged in constant discursive and physical warfare with the left. In 1979, with the Cold War reheating both globally and at home, the NAP suddenly switched its position on the EEC, the struggle against communism now taking strategic precedence over its previous reservations against western imperialism. A decade later, with the European Community/Union siding with Kurdish claims for cultural autonomy, the NAP would once again switch over to an anti-EU stance. The Emergence of Ecevit Though a noted poet, intellectual, and politician, Bulent Ecevit’s chief legacy ¨ remains his role in the historic transformation of Ataturk’s party, the RPP. ¨ Between 1969 and 1973, Ecevit oversaw arguably the most important development within Turkish political culture since the transition to a multiparty system: the leftward shift of the RPP from its top-down Kemalist roots as the party of the Turkish state to an organic center-left party championing the Turkish people. A half-century after its inception, the RPP maintained a unique hold on Turkey’s social-imaginary. Founded by Ataturk ¨ as the first political party of modern Turkey, until 1950 the RPP embodied, in theory and practice, the Ataturkist project. With the transition to free elections and multiparty politics ¨ in 1950, however, Menderes’s Democrat Party succeeding in casting it as an elitist statist party that had alienated itself from the people. The 1960 military coup carried out against the DP for its “deviations from Ataturk’s revolution¨ ary agenda” and the subsequent reinstallation of the RPP to government, while affirming the party’s privileged position within the Turkish project, also rein˙ forced its statist and elitist image among the electorate. As long as Ismet Pas¸a, the aging war hero who, following Ataturk, had embodied the interwar RPP, ¨ remained its chairman, the party found it impossible to shake this image and continued to suffer at the polls. The left-of-center platform was introduced in the mid-1960s as a way to remedy the party’s electoral woes by positioning it between Demirel’s JP and ˙ the Workers’ Party of Turkey. Though embraced as a slogan by Ismet Pas¸a, it

49

Milliyetc¸i Hareket Partisi, 1973 Parti Programı (Ankara: MHP, 1973), 31.

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had little practical effect on the party’s policies or image until its avid spokesmen, Ecevit, was elected as secretary-general at the Eighteenth Party Conference in 1966.50 Under Ecevit’s leadership, the left-of-center slogan came to signify a populist politics, taking the side of the worker and peasant against the landowner and state. This radical departure from the established policies of ˙ on the RPP came to a head when In ¨ u¨ decided to support the Erim government in 1971. Having staked his position on breaking its ties to the armed forces and bureaucracy in favor of the people, Ecevit found himself in a difficult sit˙ on uation. On 21 March 1971, the day of In ¨ u’s ¨ decision, Ecevit resigned as secretary-general of the RPP, one of the first moves that would put him into ˙ on ˙ on open confrontation with In ¨ u. ¨ By 1972, following In ¨ u’s ¨ continuing support of the military reforms, this confrontation had become open and increasingly ˙ on vocal.51 In ¨ u’s ¨ decision to call an Extraordinary Party Conference in May 1972 to stem the pro-Ecevit sentiment proved to be the final battleground between the old and new faces of the RPP. The delegates’ vote of confidence for the pro-Ecevit Party Council signaled his clear victory over the conser˙ ˙ on In vative guard.52 A day later, Ismet ¨ u¨ resigned as party chairman, a post he had held continuously for more than thirty-three years. When the Conference met again a few days later, it elected Ecevit as the new chairman of the RPP.53 Ecevit’s complex perspective on the west was informed by and in turn informed his posture toward the EEC. Wary as he was of the malicious economic motivations of the west, the EEC, as the institutional realization of multinational liberal capitalism, was for Ecevit particularly suspect. He made clear that the EEC could not be viewed as an alternative to U.S. hegemony, stating that the, “Common Market must be understood as yet another vehicle in the service of the liberal-capitalist agenda.”54 Yet despite these views, Ecevit never contemplated nullifying Turkey’s association agreement with the EEC; moreover, he envisioned membership in the Common Market in Turkey’s future. Ecevit felt that Turkey needed to maintain its historic relations with Europe, and that the EEC was the only real means of doing so. Turkey’s political, social, and cultural integration with the Common Market was critical to actualizing a free, democratic, and socially just Turkey.55 Ecevit’s use of the Nationalist logic was limited to ensuring that 50

51 52 53 54 55

For concise analysis of the struggles within the party during this period, see Frank Tachau, “The Republican People’s Party” in Political Parties and Democracy in Turkey, eds. Metin Heper and Jacob Landau (London: I.B. Tauris, 1991). For Ecevit’s own writings on the subject, see ˙ ¸ Bankası Yayınları, 1966). Bulent Ecevit, Ortanın Solu (Ankara: Is ¨ ˙ on On In ¨ u’s ¨ support of the amendments to the constitution and the escalation of the conflict ˙ ˙ on within the RPP, see Ismail Cem, “In ¨ u¨ ve Ecevit,” Milliyet, 30 July 1971. Milliyet, 6 May 1972, Toplum, 8, 9, 12 May 1972. Milliyet, 15 May 1972, Toplum, 15 May 1972. ˙ ¸ Bankası Yayınları, 1975), 175. Ecevit, Dıs¸ Politika (Ankara: Is Bulent ¨ See Aks¸am, 31 January 1970 and Ulus, 13 March 1970.

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the Turkish government would be constantly on guard, in the interests of its people, against the imperial and exploitative elements found in the EEC. For Ecevit, Turkey’s relationship with the EEC perfectly symbolized the contradictory impulses of the west toward the developing world. Regarding ideals such as freedom and democracy, he often stressed the importance of the Common Market in keeping Turkey close, both physically and spiritually, to Europe. For example, in a speech criticizing the budget before the TGNA in 1976, he argued: The European Economic Community attaches great importance to modes of government. It is known that free democratic regimes are a clear necessity within the EEC. There is no place in the EEC for those that do not obey this condition.56

Ecevit was reiterating the idea, first formulated in the wake of 1960 coup and soon to become popularized by the Iberian applications, that the lure of membership could be used as a carrot to ensure domestic political and social practices in keeping with the western European norms.57 Yet it was this same EEC that had to be guarded against in the realm of economics, for Europe’s economic interests were at odds with Turkey’s national interests. The government program Ecevit read before the TGNA on 12 January 1978 highlighted the necessity of a confrontational stance in dealing with the Common Market: We shall take the immediate and necessary steps to ensure that our troubled relations with the EEC shall be resolved in a manner beneficial to our nation, industry, and economy. As it stands, our present relationship with the European Economic Community, especially with regards to the Additional Protocol, is a severe impediment to our national development and industrialization. These present relations make it extremely difficult for Turkey to pursue a foreign trade policy with the developed world in keeping with its economic and social interests. For this reason, the government is committed to renegotiating our relationship with the Common Market in line with our national and economic interests. Furthermore, the government will attempt to reorient Turkish-EEC relations to ensure that the Turkish economy is not destroyed or her independence threatened by the Common Market.58

Given Turkey’s present economic difficulties, this new footing implied first negotiating a temporary freeze on Turkish tariff reductions, and second, realizing the free movement of labor between Turkey and the EEC that member states had agreed to in 1972 but were presently reluctant to enforce because 56 57

58

TMBB D:4 T:3 C:16 22.2.1976, 253. The EEC had long entertained this idea in abstracted form; the first concrete embrace of this idea occurred within the context of the Mediterranean enlargement in the early 1980s as a means to consolidate the democratic regimes of Portugal, Spain, and Greece. TMBB D:5 T:1 C:2 12.1.1978, 278.

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of the economic downturn. As it presently stood, the EEC was an impediment to Turkey’s national development and had to be confronted within this antagonistic light.

impasse, icing over, interpellation To this point, we have examined how the Nationalist logic became the dominant framework through which Turkey was reimagined in various arenas of Turkish political culture, paying particular attention to the role of the EEC in this process. This final part examines specific events and controversies in Turkish-EEC relations between 1974 and 1980. In this period, a great many closed-door conversations took place both within Turkish ministries and between Turkish and European officials. Rather than trace the history of animosities and mistrust that helped unravel Turkish-EEC relations, I have chosen to describe a series of episodes and controversies that erupted and were widely debated within Turkish political culture. These episodes, often brought before the public by political actors themselves, involved a large degree of grandstanding and theatre, and were by their nature hyperbolic. While reasoned and calculated debate had never been a defining feature of Turkish approaches to the Common Market, Turkish-EEC relations after 1974 evinced a dramaturgical quality, becoming a public and elevated backdrop against which the national was staged and performed. A Left-Islamic Platform: The RPP-NSP Coalition of 1974 The first elections after two years of military governance produced surprising but ultimately inconclusive results. The RPP came out as the top party, its first victory in an openly contested election, with 185 seats in the TGNA (41 short of being able to govern on its own). The right was fragmented, with the JP securing 149 seats, the NSP 48 and the NAP 3 seats. After some deliberation, Ecevit reached an agreement with Erbakan, which resulted in a coalition between the center-left RPP and the Islamic NSP. This pairing, forced into union by a fragmented electorate, constituted a significant departure, at least rhetorically, from previous postwar Turkish governments. Within the sphere of foreign policy, this equated to a series of dramatic overtures toward a multidimensional policy. Both party leaders of the coalition had different conceptions of what a broader foreign policy would entail, as evidenced by their respective international visits during their first year of rule. Ecevit’s initial forays were modest but in keeping with the new left-of-center politics of his party. In March, he traveled to Germany, then led by the SPD’s Brandt, and from there to London, where he met with the Labour Party Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Ecevit soon began to branch out, however, with a visit to Romania in December before embarking on a long Scandinavian tour of Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway. These initially modest departures

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from Turkey’s traditional postwar contacts were followed by more daring state visits to Yugoslavia in May, the USSR in June, and Libya in August. Erbakan, in turn, had his eyes turned firmly toward the Muslim states of the Middle East. Aside from official trips to a number of these countries including Iraq and later Iran, he was especially occupied with the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).59 The end result of these visits, in material terms, amounted to very little. Most often they concluded with a treaty of friendship and/or agreements of vague promises for economic cooperation. S¸aban C ¸ alıs¸, Feroz Ahmad, and Aryeh Shmuelevitz have all remarked on this fact and stressed that Turkey was in no way unique, but rather just one of many countries taking advantage of the more lenient atmosphere provided by detente to pursue their individual ´ foreign policy agendas by broadening and deepening international contacts that previously had been deemed inappropriate.60 Yet in the Turkish case, what these overtures lacked in terms of their material effect they more than made up for in symbolic significance. Ecevit and Erbakan’s true intentions lay on a different plane. Through these visits, each heavily covered by the press, Ecevit and Erbakan were introducing their countrymen to paths different from the liberal western model. Each new relationship allowed Turkey to imagine itself within a different constellation of global alignments. Structured around different modes of identification and with differing agendas, Turkey’s foreign policy forays into the non-EEC world broadened its horizons and opened up new ways of imagining the Turkish project. This was evident from the simple and widely recognized fact, both within Turkey and in Europe, that Turkey’s flirtations with the Middle East, Africa, and the Eastern bloc were more significant than the similar forays of, say, Greece. For Greece, freshly emerged from a military dictatorship and seeking the good graces of the west, there was no possibility of falling outside of western orbit, a possibility that Turkey routinely exploited in its dealings with Europe.61 The net 59

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61

The OIC was set up in Rabat, Morocco, on September 25, 1969, in reaction to an arson attack against the Al-Aqsa Mosque on August 21, 1969. The primary goal of the OIC is, according to its Status, “to consult together with a view to promoting close cooperation and mutual assistance in the economic, scientific, cultural and spiritual fields, inspired by teachings of Islam.” While Turkey was present at the initial meeting and has participated in every OIC gathering since its inception, it has never ratified any of the provisions of these meetings citing that these would contravene Turkey’s constitutional requirement of secularism. For more information on Turkey ˘ “Islam Konferansları ve Turkiye,” ˘ Dıs¸is¸leri and the OIC, see I. Divanlıoglu, Dıs¸is¸leri Bakanlıgı ¨ ˙ Akademisi Dergisi (April 1972): 97–105 and Gokc Cumhuriyeti, Islam ¨ ¸ en Alpkaya, “Turkiye ¨ ¨ ut ¨ Konferanslı Org Dergisi, 46/1–2 (1999): 55–68. ¨ u¨ ve Laiklik,” Siyasal Bilgiler Fakultesi See Ahmad, The Turkish Experiment in Democracy: 1950–1975, 421–23; C¸alıs¸, Turkey-EU Relations, 173, Shmuelevitz, Republican Turkey: Aspects of Internal and External Affairs, 68–71. The Economist also seemed to support this view; see, “In Search of Friends,” The Economist, 5 June 1978. A point explicitly made by Ecevit’s during his address to the International Press Association in Brussels on 25 May 1978.

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effect of these overtures was to de-center the United States and EEC states in the Turkish imagination. It allowed Turks to conceive of multiple paths to the Turkish project, giving them a sense of choice, stake, and responsibility regarding Turkey’s future. With these international overtures, Erbakan and Ecevit were claiming that present-day Turks were no longer the passive objects of the Turkish revolution, but active agents in fashioning the Turkish project. The new initiatives in foreign policy had an immediate impact on TurkishEEC relations. In the coalition government program, the Common Market lost its singular position as the only economic association concerning Turkey, and was mentioned as just one among many economic and political engagements pursued by the government. The section in the program that concerned the EEC began with the following comments: Based on the need to orient our exports to different markets, the government will give high priority to cultivating trade and economic relations with the countries of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; countries with which we have cultural, historical, and religious ties.62

Moving on to Turkish-EEC relations, the program called for, “a revision of the recently enacted Additional Protocol in line with the new tariff systems the EEC has conducted with third countries so as to assure a fair and equitable situation for Turkey.”63 At least as far as Turkish-EEC relations were concerned, the government’s stance, at least initially, seemed more than rhetorical pandering. One of the first acts of the coalition government was to establish a “Special Commission” on the EEC, to be headed by the SPO, in order to formulate the Turkish demands for the renegotiation of the AP.64 This was a calculated move to reassert the precoup position of the SPO, now restacked with Erbakan and Ecevit’s men, as an institutional core of the Nationalist logic. The Special Commission wasted no time in declaring that, “given Turkey’s present economic situation and developmental plans, it is inconceivable to continue down the outlined path toward a customs union with the EEC,” and called for a fundamental renegotiation of Turkey’s relationship with the Common Market.65 Erbakan’s virulent anti-EEC stance and a growing anti-imperialist sentiment within the left wing of Ecevit’s RPP ensured that most other ministries, especially the all-important trade and finance ministries, sympathized with the SPO in its inter-bureaucratic battle with the MFA. Ecevit had even taken the unprecedented step of appointing a foreign minister from outside the diplomatic corps and its increasingly isolated worldview. In a little-veiled retort to Aydın Yalc¸ın’s Temporary Committee on Turkish-EEC relations, which had consulted pro-western business and trade groups, the Special Commission, 62 63 64 65

¨ ¨ umetleri ¨ Yılmaz, Turkiye Cumhuriyeti Huk Programlarında Dıs¸ Politika: 1920–1980 Gokhan ¨ ¨ (Denizli: Pamukkale Universitesi, 1974), 82. Ibid., 82. ¨ ˘ Ozel Ihtisas Komisyonu Raporu (Ankara: DPT, 1976). DPT, Avrupa Ekonomik Toplulugu Ibid., 33.

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charged with gathering the opinions of interest groups within Turkish society, invited comment from radical revolutionary organizations and unions includ˙ and the TMMOB (Chamber of Architects and Mechanical Engineers). ing DISK ˙ The DISK representative, a one-time the WPT MP, Sadun Aren, declared that ˙ “DISK is opposed to accepting as an option the continuation of the Ankara ¨ urk Agreement, even in modified form,” while Teoman Ozt ¨ of TMMOB called for an immediate and unilateral Turkish withdrawal from the association agreement with the EEC.66 These views were duly published in the official report prepared by the SPO and stand as a testament to the degree to which radical national thinking had penetrated the Turkish state. The RPP-NSP coalition marked a turning point in the hegemonic struggle between the Nationalist and Civilizational logics. Before 1974, the Nationalist logic had been confined to the opposition, functioning as a negative discourse with which to bait and discredit official policy. The Ecevit-Erbakan government promoted a confrontational posture toward the Common Market as the official ideology of the Turkish government. This pushed the struggle past the tipping point, creating a multiplier effect, whereby proponents of the Civilizational logic were marginalized all the more for being in the opposition, and greater legitimacy was lent to arguments structured by the Nationalist logic. The reversal of fortunes was verified and endorsed by the Turkish media. It was most clearly exhibited in the isolation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as an institution as well as a mentality, by the mainstream press. An editorial in Cumhuriyet in May 1974 had this to say about Turkish-EEC relations: A famous French Minister once remarked: “War is too important to be left in the hands of soldiers.” In Turkey’s relations with the EEC, we can say, “The Common Market is too important a problem to be left as a monopoly of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” Yet this is precisely what is happening today as our new Foreign Minister is being eclipsed by the institution he is supposed to direct. I’m not suggesting that Ecevit wants to withdraw from the European integration project . . . his hope is to establish a non-abusive relationship. Today it seems like a shadow hangs over this hope – the source of which is very close indeed.67

Ali Sermen, in another article in the same daily, echoed these sentiments, commenting on how directives issued by the diplomatic corps to MFA personnel in charge of EEC-Turkish relations were at odds with both Foreign Minister Gunes¸ and the RPP. As Sermen posed rhetorically: If these directives are made without consulting the SPO, Trade and Finance Ministers, and stand in contradiction to Prime Minister’s [Ecevit’s] own comments, who is running our foreign policy? Not a democratically elected government but the outdated mentality of a minority of career diplomats within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.68 66 67 68

¨ ˘ Ozel DPT, Ikinci Avrupa Ekonomik Toplulugu Ihtisas Komisyonu Raporu: 1976, DPT ¨ Archives: 1393-OIK-195. Cumhuriyet, 3 May 1974. Cumhuriyet, 3 May 1974.

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In a rare move, the opposition NAP also joined in the official and media chorus against the MFA. In its party program it called for an immediate Turkish withdrawal from the EEC, pointing out, however, that any change in Turkish foreign policy first “required a wholesale reform of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs” in personnel and mentality, which the NAP felt were compromised by western ideology.69 As a sign of how much the tables had turned, Hasan Cemal of Cumhuriyet noted in 1974 that in many circles in Ankara, the pro-EEC Foreign Minister ˘ was being referred to as the “radical Common Marketer.”70 Tevfik Sarac¸oglu Another telling article in early May summed up this prevailing attitude. Drawing parallels between Ecevit and Ataturk in their responsible ambivalence ¨ toward the west, the editorial contrasted this to the irresponsible and outof-touch mentality of the MFA: For the past 150 years, Turkey has chosen the West. Apart from the brief interlude during Turkey’s war of independence this has meant pursuing a foreign policy ‘of integration with the West no matter what the cost.’ Turkey’s independence can only be maintained by going back to the mentality of the national struggle. While the 1960s showed sign of a renaissance towards this mentality, this had little effect on a foreign policy dictated by a diplomatic core dedicated to Europeanization at any price. Despite strong opposition from the SPO and the press, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs continues its policy of willful resignation towards the West. Under these circumstances, Ecevit’s Ataturkist foreign policy will have no chance of success.71 ¨

The reader will recall how strikingly similar these words were to articles published in the ultranationalist journal Devlet in 1969. The passage of the same argument in the same style from a right-wing to a left-wing response, and perhaps more importantly from the margins of Turkish political culture to its established core, attests to the versatility of the Nationalist logic. It demonstrates how the Nationalist logic was able to traverse the political spectrum as well as structure official and oppositional discourse with equal cogency. Hegemonic Consolidation: The Nationalist Logic and the Wheels of the State Politicization of the Turkish bureaucracy, begun a decade earlier, only intensified with coalition governments of the 1970s. As the nationalization of political rhetoric filtered through the ranks of various state ministries, it began to have a marked effect on technical negotiations between Turkey and the EEC. Because of the king-maker position of the NSP, Erbakan’s influence in the government prevented any real progress in even the generally agreed-on wish to revise aspects of the Additional Protocol. Erbakan tried to transfer, with 69 70 71

Milliyetc¸i Hareket Partisi, 1973 Parti Programı. Cumhuriyet, 24 March 1974. Cumhuriyet, 1 May 1974.

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some success, the primarily responsibility for Turkish-EEC relations from the MFA to the SPO, and tried, with much less success, to make good on plans to form an Islamic Common Market. He also began submitting wholly unrealistic demands to the EEC, asking for an immediate lifting of EEC restrictions on ´ Turkish exports and drastic readjustments in Turkey’s obligations. Upon Emile No¨el’s visit to Ankara in 1976 in a bid to revive the negotiations, Erbakan set up a meeting (which he chaired) attended by all relevant ministries. He presented a long list of Turkish demands and offered nothing in return. When No¨el calmly told him that this would be unacceptable, Erbakan became quite angry and threatened to withdraw all Turkish workers from Europe.72 Of course, he had no intention of negotiating with the EEC and realized full well that his offers would be ignored. This was perfectly acceptable to him. After the prospect of severing relations with the Common Market completely, effectively sidelining them seemed to be the next best thing. The RPP also became increasingly frustrated by the state of Turkish-EEC relations.73 The ambivalent and complex perspective toward Europe of its leader, Ecevit, was not shared by many in the rank and file. Ziya Gokalp ¨ Mulayim of the RPP, who served as the chair of the Senate Foreign Affairs ¨ Commission, was, by contrast, much starker in his comments. In a published brief, An Independent Foreign Policy, he urged “the need to reassess all our relationships with the West including NATO and the EEC,” and that Turkey should counter the imbalance in these relations by opening itself socially and economically to the Soviet and Third World blocs.74 The RPP-NSP government’s rhetoric was beginning to have an effect on the mid-and low-level technocrats within the bureaucracy as well. Following the politicians, many RPP bureaucrats began to see Turkish-EEC relations in an antagonistic light, expressing themselves through the Nationalist logic. The marked shift in the RPP’s nationalist rhetoric toward the EEC prompted one critic to remark: Most of the RPP leaders paraded around as social democrats without having an inkling of what social democracy really was. When looked at closely, a radical nationalism was visible beneath. It was not by accident that the European press had labeled Ecevit the “nationalist leader.”75

Even when Demirel’s JP government was in power, it had to cater to coalition members, offering important portfolios like Education, Customs, and Culture to its NAP partner. The political appointments made by the ministers began 72 73

74 75

¨ uk ¨ Avrupa Kavgası 1959–2004, 246–48. ¨ Buy Birand, Turkiye’nin The anti-EEC group within the RPP was a product of some elements of the old guard that had developed an allergy to foreign capital during their struggles against Menderes in the 1950s and the younger, more leftist, elements, who wished to see in Turkey a “National Capitalism” led by a socially minded national bourgeoisie. ˘ Ziya Gokalp Mulayim, Bagımsız Dıs¸ Politika (Ankara: 1978), 11–19. ¨ ¨ ¨ Keskin, Avrupa Yollarında Turkiye, 193.

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to trickle down and effectively politicized the bureaucracy. The net effect of this politicization was to give a decidedly negative slant to the technocratic knowledge on Turkish-EEC relations being produced by the Turkish state. The reports coming out of the SPO, Trade, Customs, and Finance Ministries became tailored toward validating the preconceived political positions of their superiors and one begins to see, during these years, a large variance between similar reports by these ministries and the MFA or pro-EEC Economic Development Fund.76 Anti-EEC elements had also begun to work their way into the last bastion of pro-EEC sentiment, the MFA. Yıldırım Keskin, a diplomat involved in TurkishEEC relations during these years, pointed out: Once it was realized that the RPP would form the next government certain people within the MFA thought it best to proclaim their anti-EEC views. They stated that Turkey had no place in Europe and should join the non-aligned group led by Tito. They wrote and distributed a report on this called the “New Economic Order,” held meetings, all in an attempt to gain the favor of the new government.77

By 1978, only a handful of men remained within the MFA who still supported Turkish-EEC integration. Dwindling in number, these men continued to be attacked by their peers and the media as traitors to the nation. In a 1978 article published in the mainstream daily Milliyet, Oral Sander offered a scathing critique of the MFA, accusing it of hijacking Turkey’s foreign policy. Sander argued that the MFA had two principle duties: to represent the democratically elected Turkish government and to protect the national interest of Turkey in diplomatic negotiations. It had failed in both. In its dealings with the Common Market, Sander accused the MFA, “of representing Turkey not as it is but in their own image of Turkey as a ‘Western’ country where our national culture is reduced to ‘S¸is¸ Kebabs’ and ‘Carpets.’”78 This was not only a critique of the MFA but a veiled attack on the project of westernization that had relegated Turkish culture to a set of exportable commodities recognizable by Europeans. Sander did not stop there, but went on to admonish the diplomatic corps for neglecting Turkey’s national interests in their negotiations with the EEC: They [the diplomats] feel that how they talk, how they dress, and what “Western” music they listen to, is more important than what they know and what they say. In an age when diplomacy is conducted by technocrats too busy to tuck their shirts in, our diplomats look more as if they belonged at the 1815 Conference of Vienna.79 76

77 78 79

˘ See, for example, the differing conclusion by the SPO report Avrupa Ekonomik Toplulugu ¨ ¨ us ¨ ¸ ler ve Yaklas¸ımlar (Ankara: DPT, 1977) and one prepared by Professor Vural Uzerine Gor Savas¸ for the Economic Development Fund of the same year, Vural Savas¸, Sanayiles¸me ve Entegrasyon (Istanbul: IKV, 1977). ¨ 183. Keskin, Avrupa Yollarında Turkiye, Milliyet, 5 March 1978. Ibid.

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The language in this last article was typical of the criticisms leveled against the MFA during these years. The general image was of a group of fanciful and fantastic men clinging tight to the ideology of a bygone era, increasingly out of touch with the Turkish nation and the EEC negotiators; the latter, by contrast, were imagined as sober, realistic, and hardworking. These developments in Turkey, coupled with the EEC’s own increasing reservations about Turkish membership, had effectively stalled any real progress on Turkish-EEC integration.80 Ecevit’s minority government, formed in 1978 without interference from Erbakan, brought new hope to these relations both in Turkey and in Europe. In fact, soon after forming the government, Ecevit traveled to Brussels for a meeting with the British Commission President Roy Jenkins. With an aim to revitalizing the languishing relationship, the two agreed to meet in the coming September after the Turkish side had put together a new way forward, including the possible renegotiation of the Additional Protocol.81 In October 1978, Ecevit sent the Turkish delegation back to Brussels with proposals on how to solve the impasse. The delegation headed by Nazıf C ¸ uhruk, the economic chief in the MFA, put forward four demands. First, it asked for a five-year hiatus on Turkish tariff reductions to the EEC so that the fourth Five Year Plan could have room to operate. This sent a clear message to the EEC Commission that state planning within Turkey remained at odds with a liberalized trade regime. Second, it asked that the EEC put no restrictions on Turkish industrial exports, especially concerning the few sectors where Turkey could hold comparative advantage, such as textiles. The demand was essentially asking the EEC to accept not only Turkey’s desire to industrialize its national economy, but also to offer help in the process. While this had been the original idea behind the Ankara Agreement signed fourteen years before, the EEC had outgrown these initial commitments and was prepared to accept and engage with countries with much lower levels of economic development – as evidenced by the accession negotiations of Greece, Portugal, and Spain, which had begun or were shortly to begin. Third, the Turkish delegation asked for full and free movement of labor, also an original stipulation of the Ankara Agreement, but one that the EEC had been reluctant to implement after the economic downturn. Fourth, it requested from the EEC a $4.4 billion aid package, a staggering sum more than ten times what the EEC had envisioned providing. The EEC Commission was shocked by these proposals and bought time by saying that it would consider them in due course. Ecevit, calling its 80

81

What made matters even worse for the Turkish side was that amid all the talk of revision and imbalance, the original schedule of the Additional Protocol was conformed to, with Turkey ¨ reducing tariffs for European imports in 1975 and 1976. See DPT, Turkiye AET Ilis¸kileri (Ankara: DPT, 1989), 7. ¨ uk ¨ Avrupa Kavgası 1959–2004, 265. ¨ Buy Birand, Turkiye’nin

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bluff, made a unilateral decision to “freeze” all Turkish relations with the EEC, “until a new formula for these relations had been negotiated.” Mehmet Ali Birand and others have argued that these moves were a clear indication that Ecevit had no, or at best a confused, EEC policy.82 By contrast, it is possible to discern in Ecevit’s actions a deliberate attempt to put into action his idea of a just and balanced relationship between Turkey and the EEC wherein the two sides would approach each other as equals. The four proposals were Ecevit’s way of leveling the playing field. Unlike Erbakan, who had put forth unreasonable demands knowing they would stall relations, Ecevit truly believed that the positive side of the contradictory impulses of the west must and would accept these proposals. As he made clear by freezing TurkishEEC relations, it was only under such conditions that Turkey could continue its relationship with Europe. Whatever the rationale, it is impossible to overstate the symbolic significance of Ecevit’s gesture. It was, after all, the first time Turkey was putting integration on hold, and unilaterally at that. The decision, while consistent with the RPP platform, was incredibly alarming to pro-EEC groups. To be sure, Turkish opposition to the Common Market was rampant, but for all their shouting, these groups had had a minimal impact on the actual process of integration itself. Those committed to Turkey’s place in the European project approached this domestic opposition, much as they did the interruptions caused by the military coups or the popular European resentment over Cyprus, as storms to be weathered while ensuring integration continued apace. Ecevit’s unilateral freezing of relations, as the official position of the Turkish government, brought an abrupt end to such interpretations. Coupled with the increasing overtures and connections Turkey was forming with the non-western world, Ecevit’s gesture seemed to indicate that Turkey would look elsewhere for allies and assistance, officially calling into question Turkey’s commitment to a future place in Europe. For a long time afterward, there was a lot of speculation within Turkey that Ecevit had passed up the chance to apply for full membership at a time when the EEC could not help but begin negotiations. As recently as 2006, Cumhuriyet ran an article claiming that the Commission General Secretary ´ Emile No¨el had personally told Ecevit during a visit to Ankara in 1978 to apply for full membership and that the prime minister had turned this down.83 Soysal and Erol Manisalı have repeatedly argued that Even though Muntaz ¨ No¨el did not and could not offer the promise of membership, and, moreover, that Ecevit would never have willfully rejected this offer, this interpretation still persists today.84 Its persistence is evidence of the popular Turkish belief 82 83 84

Ibid., 262. Cumhuriyet, 8 May 2006. See Mumtaz Soysal, “Bir Adam ve Bir Sorun,” and Erol Manisalı, Hayatım Avrupa (Istanbul: ¨ Truva Yayınları, 2006).

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that all matters of import are decided via backdoor deals – ironically, a belief that Ecevit himself, with his calls to democratic and transparent diplomacy, was most intent on eradicating. Erkmen’s Application and Subsequent Felling Ecevit’s freezing of relations, after a brief flare-up of media activity surrounding the decision, effectively removed the Common Market from the national spotlight as Turkey turned its collective attention to domestic troubles. Were it not for the insistence and perseverance of the Justice Party foreign minister Hayrettin Erkmen, Turkish-EEC relations may have taken a back seat to the domestic crisis that gripped Turkey beginning in 1978. Amid the daily terror, political assassinations, strikes, rampant inflation, martial law, fears of another impending coup, European reluctance, revolution in Iran, and the invasion of Afghanistan, Turkey’s relations with the Common Market could easily have been left to rot where Ecevit had abandoned them. Controversial as it was, Erkmen’s announcement in February 1980 that Turkey intended to apply for full membership to the EEC before the year was through ensured that Turkish-EEC relations remained at the center of Turkey’s logarithmically radicalizing political atmosphere. It was a decision arrived at, as far as is known, in consultation with no one within the government, and came as a complete surprise even to his staff, the career diplomats within the MFA.85 With hindsight, one could argue that Hayrettin Erkmen was a man both ahead and behind his time, though certainly not of it. In one respect, he was a seasoned politician of the old guard, who had served as minister in several Democrat Party governments under Menderes in the 1950s. He was perhaps one of the last unadulterated subscribers to Turkey’s place within European civilization, believing that Turkish-EEC relations were the material means to this realization.86 Erkmen was present at the initial meeting of DP ministers in 1959 at which the Turkish decision to apply for membership to the EEC was decided, and according to S¸aban C ¸ alıs¸, who interviewed Erkmen some years later, “felt the same way about the EEC in 1980 as he had in back in 1959.”87 In other respects, however, he was also an astute observer of Turkey’s new economic direction and the geostrategic realities facing the country in 1980. Erkmen’s decision to apply was based on the urgency of the Turkish situation brought on by a series of internal and external developments. Externally, the prospect of Greek membership, and with it the threat of the Greek veto, weighed heavily on his mind. Greece had concluded negotiations and was set to become a 85 86 87

Yıldırım Keskin, on the MFA staff in charge of Turkish-EEC relations, recalls how taken aback ¨ he was by Erkmen’s decision. Keskin, Avrupa Yollarında Turkiye, 195. Birand, Turkiye’nin Ortak Pazar Macerası, 410–11. ¨ C¸alıs¸, Turkiye – Avrupa Birligi I˙lis¸kileri, 188.

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full member beginning 1 January 1981. Erkmen wanted to submit the Turkish application before Greece had an opportunity to veto it.88 Second, he was fully aware of how recent developments in Iran and Afghanistan had greatly increased Turkey’s geostrategic importance to Europe. He knew he could play off of European fears that a Turkey explicitly rebuffed by the West could turn easily toward either the Iranian or the Soviet model. Now was the time to force the issue with an application that, in Erkmen’s mind, the EEC would not dare refuse. Domestically, Erkmen was urged on by the economic reforms of 24 January 1980, which had been enacted by the JP government. These reforms had essentially turned Turkey into a free-market export-oriented economy, a fundamental reversal from the principle of import-substitution development that had guided all aspects of Turkish economic planning and policy since 1960.89 These new reforms removed many, if not all, of the EEC’s economic objections to the Turkish position. Erkmen also suspected the Turkish Armed Forces of plotting another coup and felt that Turkey’s application would demonstrate the government’s resolve in carrying out the Ataturkist project, thus restoring ¨ the military’s confidence in the JP and warding off intervention. Similarly, he was also banking on the fact that the Turkish application would tie Turkey’s political system to Europe, making it more difficult for the TAF to suspend democratic practices.90 The decision caught everyone by surprise and created a storm that began in Brussels but quickly spread to a pan-European debate on the possible effects and significance of Turkish membership.91 Within Turkey, once it appeared that Erkmen was serious and not bluffing his way into concessions from Europe, the opposition sprang into action. Erbakan filed another motion for a vote of confidence, which was scheduled to be taken up after the Assembly’s summer recess. The deliberations over this interpellation were the occasion for the final struggle between the two logics, and form the final episode in our story. On 5 September 1980, seven days before the military takeover, Necmettin Erbakan exercised his third interpellation against the JP government. Unlike his previous attempts, which had indicted the executive branch as a whole, Erbakan specifically targeted Erkmen. The interpellation accused Erkmen of “betraying 88

89

90 91

Here, as Yıldırım Keskin points out, is where Erkmen was either misled or ignorant of the fact that even if Turkey had applied that summer, by the time of it reached the Council of Ministers ¨ for a vote, Greece would have become a member. Keskin, Avrupa Yollarında Turkiye, 185. In this respect, 24 January 1980 stands as perhaps one of the most significant days in recent Turkish history, especially after the military junta’s decision to not only preserve these reforms ¨ but to promote the man responsible for them, Turgut Ozal, to run the economic policies of the military regime. Arcayurek, Demokrasi Dur (Istanbul: For a detailed discussion on these latter points, see Cuneyt ¨ ¨ Bilgi Yayınevi, 1986). See for example, The Times, 6 February 1980, The Guardian 6, 7 February 1980, and David Barchard, Turkey and the West (London: Routledge, 1985).

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the national interest in his beliefs and actions as Foreign Minister.”92 The first charge read as follows: The respected minister has, from his first day, attempted to thrust Turkey into union with the Common Market; a union that would invariably turn us into a satellite of Europe, estrange us from the Muslim world, and force us into political integration with the West.93

The remaining charges faulted the foreign minister with giving concessions to the Greeks, ignoring Western Thrace, siding with the west against Iran, refusing to condemn Israel for its aggression against the Palestinians, and for making light of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. To be sure, this was a politically motivated gesture aimed at the Achilles’ heel of the Justice Party, an act of predatory power politics meant to destabilize an already shaky government. With the RPP supporting Erbakan, the interpellation was able to amass enough votes to remove Erkmen from his post.94 Among the general assault on the foreign minister, one of the more interesting speeches came from the NSP MP from Malatya, Recai Kutan: Our representative abroad [Hayrettin Erkmen] goes on and on about a “Western club” that he thinks we are a member of. Let us for a moment reflect on the meaning and mentality behind this phrase. Our representative extols the benefits of being part of this club. Does he mean the acquisition of technical and technological knowledge? Of course not. He says, I have no interest in science, technology, real development, or industrialization. He is simply interested in acquiring his music from New York, his hairstyle from London, and his clothes from Paris, comfortably and with the least possible labor or effort. What is heavy industry to him? He begs for foreign investment in assembly industries to satisfy his pathetic dreams of making beer and bottling soda. This, my friends, is the mentality of the ‘Western club’ in its essence. This mentality replaces an honorable and national foreign politics with the insipid politics befitting of a satellite country.95

In many ways Recai Kutan’s talk was reminiscent of Erbakan’s speeches against the EEC a decade earlier. There is no question that the underlying philosophy and overall tenor were informed by the same source. What stands out in Kutan’s speech is the identification of the exact threat posed by Western imperialism. Whereas Erbakan had spoken of the dangers of Western science, of Western ideals, Kutan referred to the superficiality of Western consumerism, with its fashionable music, hairstyles, and clothes. Given the rabid consumerist credo that swallowed Turkey in the mid-1980s, that brought with it numerous foreign-financed light industries (among them bottling plants) to feed this new 92 93 94 95

TBMM D:5 t:1 C:16 29.7/1980, 717–18. Ibid., 718. Demirel, rather than rally to Erkmen’s defense, decided to sacrifice his foreign minister in order to hold together his own government. TBMM D:5 t:1 C:16 3.9.1980, 810–11.

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demand, Kutan’s comments on the eve of the military coup proved prescient indeed. Erkmen was prepared for many of these attacks. His defense, to his credit, was remarkable for its insight and bipartisan appeal. From his opening remarks, it was clear that he had thought beyond the immediate accusations and tried, as best he could, to discern their underlying rationale. Erkmen’s initial salvo was to question the polemic of the “national interest” which he was accused of transgressing. He rhetorically asked whether the groups supporting the interpellation would actually carry out the foreign policy they claimed the foreign minister had betrayed. He argued, “that the term ‘national interest’ was more than a slogan to be harnessed for political gain but one of rational, educated calculation.”96 In these opening comments, Erkmen also tried to divide his opposition by isolating the NSP as an un-contemporary and thus antiAtaturkist faction and called on the RPP to drop political posturing and unite ¨ behind an Ataturkist policy against Erbakan.97 ¨ Erkmen then proceeded to address the specific charges leveled against him. He spent the vast majority of his time and energy on the first charge faulting his decision to apply for full membership to the EEC. In justifying his decision, Erkmen addressed what he felt to be the three most vociferous objections to Turkish membership. To the belief that the European Parliament was a supranational organization exercising sovereignty over individual nations, Erkmen calmly explained the role allotted to the EP under the institutional structure of the EEC, which, in 1980, amounted to very little. However, Erkmen claimed, the EP was making important decisions about the future state of Europe, and Turkey, as an associate member, was being left out of these decisions.98 To the widespread belief that by joining the EEC Turkey would become a colony of powerful European states, Erkmen had the following rejoinder: Forget seriousness, there is not even a trace of poetry in this belief. There is apprehension, anxiety, or intentional misdirection but no ounce of truth. If the Common Market is the great colonizing country, than are England, France, its colonies? Each one of the member states has a functioning parliament and unconditionally exercises its right to sovereignty. If they do so, what is to stop us from doing the same? Every country has the right to speak in their official tongue and widely makes use of this right. Nor is there the slightest risk, as our friends charge, of our culture being erased or lost in Europe. The member states all protect their own cultures with particular zeal. When we join the EEC, we will no doubt do the same.99

In answering both of these objections, Erkmen took issue with the “us” versus “them” mentality of the Nationalist logic employed by the opposition discourse, a mentality that opposed a negatively described Europe to Turkey. 96 97 98 99

Arcayurek, Demokraci Dur, 331. ¨ TBMM D:5 t:1 C:16 3.9.1980, 828–34. Ibid. Ibid.

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His retorts aimed to erase this inclusion/exclusion dichotomy by relocating the Turkish subject from an external position (from which European culture seemed monolithic and homogenizing) to a position within the inner workings of the EEC (where European civilization was seen as a pluralist conglomeration of many cultures). This relocation of the imaginary Turkish subject from an antagonistic to an inclusive position was Erkmen’s ingenious attempt to re-accredit the Civilizational logic as a viable discourse. He did not dispute the particular nationalist objections of the opposition, but much more fundamentally disputed their expression through the antagonistic ontology of the Nationalist logic. The Nationalist logic had structured imaginations of the Turkish nation in opposition to the EEC. What Erkmen was offering in its stead was a vision of Turkish culture incorporated into the tapestry of cultures that comprised Western civilization. In hindsight, hung in the balance of these two scenarios was the Turkish social-imaginary, caught between immersion into a global civilization that increasingly commodified the differentiation of culture (s¸is¸ kebabs and carpets) and the preservation of the nation through continued confrontation with the west. While it would be full twenty years before Erkmen’s vision became crystallized into the official motto of the European Union, “United in Diversity,” Turks of the late 1970s were debating its meaning and significance as an existential possibility. The interpellation served as the final battle site between the Nationalist and Civilizational logics. It was the culmination of nearly two decades of struggle between two ways of talking about Turkish-EEC relations, each with its own way of imagining Turkey. The battle that had begun in 1963 when Niyazi ˙ first introduced the Nationalist logic in his criticism of the ˘ Agırnaslı of TIP Ankara Agreement had now come to its conclusion inside the same building. As a testament to how far the tables had turned, the boos and fist-banging that ˘ had accompanied Agirnaslı’s TGNA speech seventeen years ago were, in 1980, now directed toward the last true proponent of the Civilizational logic. Seven days later, on 12 September 1980, the Turkish Armed Forces would carry out the third and bloodiest of its military interventions.

Conclusion

Nations, unlike dreams, die when they cannot successfully interpret themselves. – Stathis Gourgouris1 From now on, change in Turkey will be mandated by foreign pressure. However you choose to look at it, a new period has dawned on Turkey and from now on, nothing will ever be the same. (Reaction to the official EU recognition of Turkey as a candidate for full membership, 1999) – S¸. Kanber2

and synthesis by castration: ataturkism ¨ the 1980 military coup For more than three years, the generals of the 12 September coup d’etat ´ ruled Turkey through the National Security Council (NSC).3 During this time, 650,000 people were detained and questioned, 250,000 were arrested, and countless others tortured, executed, or disappeared.4 The mass political persecution of the Turkish population was the most visible dimension of a broader project to eradicate the sociopolitical structure of the second republic (1961– 80). The NSC ensured that there would be no possibility of returning to the past. It criminalized all existing political parties, banished their leaders from 1 2 3 4

Gourgouris, Dream Nation, 1. S¸. Kanber, “10 Aralık Miladı: Hic¸bir S¸ey Eskisi Gibi Olmayacak,” Milli Gazete, 14 December 1999. With the election of 6 November 1983, Turkish society began a gradual task of civilianization. This process would last approximately another six years. Amnesty International, Turkey: Human Rights Denied (London: 1988), AI Index: EUR/ 44/65/88.

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political life, dismantled civil institutions including the unions, student groups, and the press, and cleansed the universities and bureaucracy of “radicals,” paying particular attention to the left. Amid this brutality the military government, as in 1960 and 1971, remained mindful of European responses. One of the first acts of the NSC was to reassure Europe of its commitment to put Turkey back on the course sketched out by Foreign Minister Erkmen before his removal by interpellation.5 Such assurances, it turned out, were completely unnecessary. The initial reaction of the west to the military coup was strategic and reprehensible. The United States, NATO, and the IMF were “thrilled” with the developments, while the EEC reaffirmed its continued commitment to the Association Agreement, saying that it “understood the situation.”6 Within Turkey, the military government faced a more daunting problem. Overcoming the radicalization of the second Turkish Republic required more than the temporary suffocation of its political and civil organs. Erkmen’s downfall, though politically induced, had made one thing crystal clear: the Civilizational logic that had structured the official ideology of the post–World War II Turkish Republic was no longer capable of absorbing, explaining, or orienting the society it claimed to represent. The invitational gesture, one that pegged the Turkish project to validation by an external authority, had shown itself to be politically impotent against a discourse that antagonized this same authority as a threat to the nation. That oppositional and increasingly radical voices were able to attack the government and even the state through a nationalist discourse was unacceptable to the military establishment. As long as the official ideology of the Republic (its re-articulation now incumbent on the NSC) remained open to charges of treason (this is, in the end, what the Nationalist logic implied), the legitimacy of the Turkish state would continue to be undermined. To address this ideological shortcoming, the NSC complimented the corporatist restructuring of Turkey’s sociopolitical institutions with its own inter¨ pretation of the Turkish social-imaginary, one it referred to as Ataturkism. As in 1960, albeit in a drastically different political climate, the generals once again turned to Turkish intellectuals and academics in their reformulation of the Turkish project. The newly promoted professors, who owed their positions to the military purge of the university system, were only too happy to assist. Their efforts culminated in a conference organized by Professor Halil Cin, titled ¨ Unity with Ataturkism, held in 1981. A right-wing thinker, Cin had, following the coup, been offered the post of Rector at Selc¸uk University in Konya, the

5 6

Rustow, “The Roses and the Thorns,” 37. For Carter’s message to the Turkish NSC leader Kennan Evren, see Kenan Evren, Anılar – Vol 2 (Istanbul: 1991), 94. For the EEC’s reaction, see Bulletin of the European Community, September 1980, 52. By acknowledging the failure of democracy in Turkey, the reaction of the west legitimized the military coup in the eyes of the generals, especially given the contrast with 1967 Greece when the EEC came down hard on the junta, immediately severing relations.

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conservative heartland of Turkey. Together with a few associates, Cin became the semiofficial ideologue of the military dictatorship, supplying the theoretical basis and justification for the restructuring of Turkish society. Cin and his associates’ reformulations of the Turkish project were subsequently enshrined in the new Turkish constitution of 1982 and reprinted in simplified form in school and military textbooks throughout the 1980s. In effect, they express the forced synthesis of the Civilizational and Nationalist ¨ logics. Ataturkism was founded on two concepts said to form the core of the Turkish people, nation, and state: contemporary civilization on the one hand and the independence, unity, and togetherness of the nation on the other. As such, Ataturkism was seen as a “pragmatic, rational, scientific, democratic, ¨ realistic, and consequently, dynamic ideology” – the Enlightenment writ large by a brutal military dictatorship. The dynamic aspect of Ataturkism was par¨ ticularly stressed and often contrasted with the static “dogmatic-totalitarian” ideologies of Marxism-Leninism and National Socialism. In its adoption of a modern western discourse and its stress on dynamism, Ataturkism presented itself as an ideology willing and capable of adapting to ¨ the changing requirements of contemporary civilization: a clear revival of the Civilizational logic, albeit in modified form. In its stress on national independence, unity, and wholeness in the face of antagonized external threats we see the continuation of the Nationalist logic, particularly the third essentialist appeal, whose two political-ideological wings had been brought together in the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis and subsequently adopted by the NSC. As Hilal Cin ¨ stated in his 1983 work, Ataturkism: A Dynamic Doctrine, “Ataturk realized that a nation can adapt to novelty and change only if they are not at odds with the nation’s own history, traditions, and soul.”7 This seemingly contradictory, if not nonsensical, claim is expressive of the military dictatorship’s attempt to synthesize the invitational and antagonistic strains of the Turkish project. Yet to speak of Ataturkism as a true synthesis in the Hegelian sense is ¨ somewhat misleading. In Ataturkism, the Turkish project was recast as the ¨ conjunction of two impulses; impulses not to be subsumed and elevated into a new thesis, but instead maintained in a reinforcing tension. This tension was evident in Cin’s redefinition of Ataturk’s legacy. Cin claimed that while Ataturk ¨ ¨ had set reaching the level of civilized nations as the fundamental aim of the Turkish people, he also understood that every nation had a particular existing tradition and inclination all its own. “To simply mimic the accomplishments of others without regard to this basic fact would,” according to Cin, “end in both a failure to match the nations copied and the loss of one’s own nationality.” “Yet,” he concluded, “Civilization cannot be neglected, for peoples that are not civilized are thrust beneath the feet of those who are.” As these remarks suggest, the essentialist solution to the Nationalist logic (that Turkey was comprised 7

¨ ¸ ul ¨ uk: ¨ Dinamik Bir Doktrin (Istanbul: 1984), 14. Halil Cin, Ataturkc

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of a racially Turkish and culturally Islamic people with essential attributes not existent in the west) was adjoined to the Civilizational logic to form the new official discourse of the modern Turkish state. Several remarks can be made about this thesis. In one sense the tension in Ataturkism shared similarities with late Ottoman and early Republican think¨ ing, where the governing elite had also grappled with the coexistence of invitational and antagonistic impulses toward the west. Those beautifully telling lines in Enver Pas¸a’s letter, “Your civilization, it is poison, but a poison which awakens, and one cannot, one does not want to sleep anymore. One feels that if one were to close one’s eyes, it would be for the dying,” quoted in the introduction to this book, vividly attest to this coexistence. Yet for these men of the early twentieth century, as well as the few personalities like Bulent Ecevit who had ¨ been likewise torn by contradiction in our period of study, this tension constituted an existential question, in fact the existential question of the Turkish project. By contrast, the tension between the invitational and antagonistic impulses, while maintained in Ataturkism, was utterly devoid of ambivalence ¨ or even presented as a problem. Ataturkism was, in fact, offered as the solu¨ tion to the political and social strife within the second Republic caused by the polarization of this very contradiction. Such a solution required the castration of the essential structure of both the Civilizational and Nationalist logics. The much discussed appropriation of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis by the TAF has to be seen in this context. To be sure, the explicit incorporation of Islam into the official ideology of the Turkish state was a departure from previous positions. Yet a closer look at how this synthesis was incorporated into Ataturkism reveals a fundamental caveat in ¨ its translation. The original formulation of the TIS, interweaving Islamic and Nationalist currents in Turkish political thought, was a profoundly antagonistic ideology. Structured by the Nationalist logic, it identified the Turkish self as that which had been prohibited from realization because of the presence (within itself) of an alien other. This antagonistic structure predicated the identification of a whole host of domestic traitors and foreign enemies that were inhibiting the actualization of the true Turkish self. Yet it was precisely this bifurcation of Turkish society that the military junta, in its corporatist reunification of Turkey, was bent on overcoming. Accordingly, while Islam and an essentialized Turkishness were promoted within the new official social-imaginary, they were also stripped of the antagonistic impulse that had structured their original articulations. As Yıldız Atasoy has remarked regarding the appropriation of Islam by the TAF, “To the extent that Islam was promoted by the state, it was done so entirely for the interests of the state and to create a homogeneous bond that would cause society to cohere and foster moral and obedient citizens.”8

8

Yıldız Atasoy, Islam’s Marriage with Neoliberalism: State Transformation in Turkey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 94.

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For its part, the Civilizational logic was domesticated in a similar way. While Ataturkism asserted its dynamic openness to contemporary civilization, this ¨ openness was strictly bounded, allowed to the extent that it did not impinge, politically or socially, on the unity, oneness, and integrity of the Turkish state. As such, the radical gesture welcoming the European other to preside over the Turkish project was explicitly cordoned, barred from intruding on the core of the Turkish nation. In both instances, Ataturkism appropriated the ¨ “content” of the Nationalist and Civilizational logics while castrating them of their antagonistic or invitational form. The repercussions of this ideological reformulation of the Turkish state between 1980 and 1983 were immediate and long-lasting. The forced and truncated synthesis of the two logics animated (and continues to structure) the approach that the military establishment has taken toward Turkish-European relations since. In fact, the fundamental contradiction in the TAF’s post-1980 attitude to Turkey’s membership bid is a direct product of this synthesis. In the thirty-plus years since the military coup, the TAF has in principle supported Turkey’s accession to the European Union, viewing EU membership as the culmination of Ataturk’s project to elevate Turkey to its rightful place within ¨ contemporary civilization. Yet, to the extent that this contemporary civilization (through the EU accession process) has demanded a restructuring of Turkish society, especially as regards Kurdish rights or the TAF’s own influence on Turkish politics (i.e., when the EU has impinged on the “independence, unity, and togetherness of the nation”), the military establishment has stonewalled “Europeanization.” Speaking only of the Turkish side, the “thorny issues” that have dogged Turkish-EU relations since Turkey’s application for full membership can all be traced to the contradictions unresolved by the forced synthesis of the Civilizational and Nationalist logics within Ataturkism. ¨

the stipulatory logic and the erasure of history This book has presented a history of how Turks understood and gave meaning to their integration into the European Economic Community between 1959 and 1980. My purpose in writing it was twofold. First, I sought to situate this encounter as a continuation of a much broader historical debate over the foundations and orientation of the Turkish project. Second, by doing so, I have tried to show how and why the prospect of joining a rather minor economic organization came to have an existential grip on the nation and became the site where Turks reformulated ideas of where they came from, who they were, and where they were going. That Turks between 1959 and 1980 equated the EEC with “Europe” has been a key assumption of this book. While it would take the end of the Cold War and the formation of the EU in 1992 to have the wider European public slowly come around to this conflation, Turks, I argued, had conceptually married the EEC to Europe from its inception. This is a somewhat contentious point that

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challenges the accepted scholarly narrative of Turkish-EEC/EU relations in particular and Turkish postwar history more generally. Given this, it is helpful to revisit some of the arguments for why Turkish supporters and detractors of the EEC were united in viewing it as the hypostatization of the idea of Europe. The book has approached this issue from four interrelated angles, offering historical, positional, processional, and source-based arguments as to why this was so. Historically, the book revisited two developments in Turkish-European relations in the late Ottoman period. The first traced how nineteenth-century Turkey was simultaneously included into the European system of states while being excluded from the European “club” or “community.” This liminal geography of the Turk in Europe animated Ataturk’s aim to raise Turkey to the level ¨ of contemporary civilization and informed how Turks approached the possible alliances and organizations of Europe following World War II. In this light, the book argued that Turks saw membership in NATO as simply a reaffirmation of Turkey’s strategic value for Europe in warding off the new Russian threat. By contrast, in the minds of Turks, membership in the European Community was equated with joining the civilized nations of the world from which Turkey had been historically denied. This was the main reason why Turks, well before their European counterparts, understood the infant EEC as a long project leading to the eventual economic, political, and social union of Europe. Second, and more important for the many Turkish detractors of the EEC, was the historical resonance between the liberalization of Turkey’s trade regime as it integrated into the Common Market and the bitter memories of Ottoman capitulations to the European powers throughout the nineteenth century. This rewriting and re-remembering of Turkish history through the lens of contemporary TurkishEEC relations formed a constant and unique feature of Turkish debates, one not replicated in discussions concerning any other European association. Perhaps more than any other factor, the constant referencing of these historical resonances imparted to the EEC an unrivaled gravity and significance. Second, the book put forward a positional argument related to the timing of Turkey’s application to the EEC vis-`a-vis other European organizations. By the time Turks began to discuss openly their foreign policy (1964), Turkey’s membership in NATO, OECD, and the Council of Europe were faits accomplis. Detractors were faced with the much more difficult maneuver of withdrawing Turkey from these organizations. NATO posed particular difficulties in this regard, where a gesture similar to that made by the French President Charles de Gaulle was strategically infeasible. By contrast, when Turks began to openly discuss the direction of their foreign relations, Turkish integration into the EEC was an ongoing and incomplete process, the very framework of which was negotiated in the midst of a charged domestic debate. The open-ended nature of the EEC-Turkish associations created a grey zone where Turks were able to debate an ongoing process rather than retroactively comment on past engagements. This was another reason for why the EEC played such a momentous role within Turkish political culture.

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Third, the book put forward a processional argument that examined a temporal affinity between Turkey’s long membership bid to the EEC and the openended nature of the Turkish project itself. Exploring this affinity, it tried to give an explanation to the puzzling question of why the EEC, among all the postwar western organizations Turkey solicited, became the focal point of the Civilizational logic. Turkey’s memberships in NATO, OECD, and the Council of Europe were all marked by relatively short, if not instantaneous, periods of integration. As bounded events, however momentous, they were at odds with the Civilizational logic’s predication of the Turkish project as a process. When the Civilizational logic was used to describe them, Turkish membership in NATO, OECD, and the Council of Europe were noted as individual milestones within a larger project. By contrast, both the Treaty of Rome, which had established the EEC, and the Ankara Agreement, which had associated Turkey to it, were essentially the formal blueprints for elongated processes of integration. As such, they shared a deep resonance with the processional logic underlying the Turkish project.9 Finally, it must be mentioned that all of these arguments are ultimately reflected in, and have been constructed to explain, the sources themselves. Membership in the EEC, as page after page of this book illustrates, occasioned a prolific, constant, and vital debate within Turkey. Politicians, technocrats, playwrights, lawyers, intellectuals, columnists, think tanks, street thugs, and business and union leaders took a stand on Turkish-EEC relations and defined themselves through this stand. After having perused thousands of journals, newspapers, party programs, memoirs, trade magazines, and other sources published between 1959 and 1980, I can say with confidence that other organizations such as NATO, OECD, or the Council of Europe were marginal if not insignificant sites of reference and debate by comparison. In the final pages of this conclusion, I would like to situate Turkey’s initial encounter with the EEC in relation to the subsequent developments in TurkishEU relations. No easy task, it is one made even more difficult by the dramatic shifts that have occurred both within the EU and Turkey, not to mention the wider world around them. Since 1980, Turkish-EU relations, and how Turks have approached them, have been profoundly impacted by geostrategic earthquakes, most notably the dissolution of the USSR (1991) and 9/11 (2001), or for that matter actual earthquakes (1999) or economic ones (2001), closer to home. This same period has witnessed a renaissance of the European project from the Single European Act (1985) to the Treaty of European Union (1993), marked a threefold increase in its membership (from nine to twenty-seven), and watched its descent into political (2005) and monetary (2011) crises. At the cost of eschewing these external or circumstantial developments, one possible option would be to address the political and economic changes that informed Turkish attitudes toward European integration since 1980. On the political level, one could speak to the profound shift in the sites of Turkish 9

Pages 48–49 provide a more detailed discussion of this rather complex argument.

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support and opposition toward the EU, one conditioned by the active presence of the military within Turkish politics. There is a clear history to be traced here, one where post-coup popularly elected governments have advocated Turkish integration into the EU as a means to ensure and consolidate civilian power against a military establishment that has become increasingly wary of European-style “democratization.” Though taking many turns, this ¨ dynamic was manifest in Turgut Ozal’s initial application for full membership to the EC in 1987, informed the abrupt shift from a radically anti- to pro-EU stance of the Refah (Welfare) Party upon entering government in 1996, and has animated the pro-EU platform of the AKP government since 2003. The analysis of Turkey’s pre- and post-1980 political economy unearths an equally seismic shift, one that has its roots in the economic policies enacted eight months before the coup. The 24 January 1980 reforms, in a single stroke, reversed the economic principle that had oriented Turkey since 1960, bringing the era of import substitution industrialization (ISI) to an end by opening Turkey up as an export economy. In doing so, they effectively removed the economic rationale for Turkish opposition to the EEC. These reforms were wholeheartedly embraced by the NSC government and the liberal economic policies of its civilian successors. Tracing the repercussions of this shift, one could examine the peculiar circumstances that led Turkey from the 24 January reforms to membership in the European Customs Union some fifteen years later, placing Turkey in the unique category of being the only non-city-state country to have joined the European customs union without the benefits of full EU membership. Yet another option would be to bypass these histories altogether and speak of twenty-first-century developments. This vector would focus on how the meteoric rise in Turkey’s economic and regional geopolitical influence, coupled with an existential fatigue over a seemingly interminable accession process, has, for the first time in centuries, dampened the import of the “European question” within the Turkish imaginary. But all of these approaches, precisely because they address major themes and milestones in the history of Turkish-EU relations, have been covered extensively. Instead, I want to focus on a structural change in the epistemological framing of Turkish-EU relations, one that has gone largely unnoticed by the interlocutors and scholars of these relations alike. Gone unnoticed, I argue, because this epistemic shift has, quite purposefully, erased the history of prior Turkish attitudes by deeming them obsolescent. The explication of this claim, made possible by contrasting prevalent approaches to Turkish accession with the history detailed in this book, will, on a political level, justify its writing. But let us start at the beginning. The Hegemony of Stipulation Looked at from a fifty-year perspective, the most striking aspect of TurkishEEC/EU relations is the exponential increase in the number of conditions an

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applicant must meet to become a member. In 1959, when Turkey (and Greece) first applied to the EEC, there were two criteria for joining the Common Market: the applicant had to have a market economy and be a European state. By contrast, today, there are more than 30,000 legally binding verdicts, directives, regulations, or acts with which Turkey must comply, totaling 100,000plus pages in the official journal. The accession process has categorized these criteria into thirty-five “chapters,” each with numerous subheadings. The criteria themselves range from the heights of state policies like capital punishment and minority rights to regulations dictating the placement of windows in barber shops. There are a number of historical explanations for the logarithmic rise in membership criteria. One can see it as the natural outgrowth of the deepening integration between member states, a product of the increasing bureaucratic regulation of social life in postindustrial societies, or as a response to a historical contingency – the fall of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent enlargement of the EU into the Eastern bloc. All these explanations are to some extent undeniable. Yet, what is of concern to us is not naturalizing this expansion, but assessing the effects of these criteria on Turkish attitudes to the EU. Here, in their reception, is where the numerical increase in EU conditionality was translated into a qualitative shift in the framework of Turkish-EU relations itself. To explain this shift, it is necessary to introduce a new logic. Like the Civilizational and Nationalist logics, this new logic is also based on a self/other relation, although its origin and subjectivity is European, not Turkish. The logic itself is not particular to Turkish-EEC/EU relations but rather forms the framework of post-1993 EU Enlargement. Its aim is, quite simply, to bring the other into the same. It does this through a twofold process. First, it nominates the “otherness” of the other, identifying those elements within a candidate country that are lacking or insufficient with respect to EU norms and regulations. Second, it creates a process by which these lacks or deficiencies can be overcome to merge the other with the self. This process of identification and erasure of the “otherness” of the other I call the Stipulatory logic. The Hungarian foreign minister Laszl ´ o´ Kovacs ´ perfectly encapsulated the structure of this logic when asked what would change in his country on 1 May 2004, the day Hungary officially joined the European Union. His reply: “Nothing at all. It is for this nothing that we have been working since [our application in] 1998.”10 Even though the stipulatory logic is, in principle, as old as enlargement itself, it only came to dominate the framework of enlargement following the ratification of the Copenhagen Criteria. Named after the 1993 European Union in the Danish capital, the Copenhagen Criteria laid down the universal requirements necessary for an applicant country to join the EU. The criteria were divided into three areas: political, economic, and legislative, prescribing specific and 10

Taken from a talk given by Laszl ´ at Columbia University in 2004. ´ o´ Kovacs

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detailed conditions for accession. Broadly, these stipulated that a candidate country achieve stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, respect for and protection of minorities, the existence of a functioning market economy, as well as the capacity to cope with competitive pressure and market forces within the Union. These conditions were further refined by the Madrid Council (1995) and the Agenda 2000 report issued in 1997. Turkey’s first encounter with the new framework of Enlargement came one year later, in the form of a Regular Report prepared by the European Commission. This report, to be reissued on a yearly basis, gave the Commission’s assessment of Turkey’s progress in fulfilling the criteria for membership. From this moment on, Turkish debates on joining the EU would be structured by the logic of stipulation. The Regular Report, in contrast to previous assessments on Turkey issued by various branches of the EU, is striking in its invasiveness. It is a surgical document reaching into and assessing the very fabric of Turkish society, covering everything from Turkey’s tax structure to the hygiene and safety regulations in its fisheries. In its very detail, it constructs a blueprint for the reconfiguration of Turkey’s social, economic, cultural, and political practices in line with existing EU ones. The net effect of its stipulations has been the violent recalibration of Turkish society into elements and sectors that are commensurate with EU criteria and “problem areas” that are found lacking.11 Its violence lies precisely in its universality. The stipulations are indifferent to, and through indifference erase, the historical specificity of Turkey (or, for that matter, any applicant country). More precisely, they interpret this specificity as an anachronistic vestige that must now be overcome (lingering authoritarian impulses of the Ottoman and Kemalist eras or their relations with minorities come to mind). In an illuminating study of the Hungarian Enlargement, Jozeph Borocz offers a discursive analysis of the Regular Reports, highlighting how the they “deny subjectivity” to the applicant, “through a veritable grammar of exclusion, creating an imaginary world where the partner is distant, inferior, and disposable.”12 Once introduced, the Stipulatory logic, in its sheer volume and capillary detail, quickly permeated Turkish debates on the EU. It did not eclipse the Civilizational and Nationalist logics that had structured Turkish perceptions of the EEC, but rather circumscribed them, determining what these logics could 11

12

In this they share a close affinity with the westernizing impulse of the interwar period, where the Kemalist elite similarly delineated every facet of Turkish life into a European “a la franga” (French) way, deemed appropriate and possessing value, and its “a la turka” (Turkish) counterpart, considered negative and condescended to – with the important caveat that the full acquis, as the end-product of a long process of technocratic harmonization, was something that could never be dreamt up by a revolutionary regime. The former operated at the level of the social-symbolic, the destruction of traditions and habits of the Ottoman old regime, whereas the latter was totally bereft of symbolic gestures. Jozeph Borocz, “The Fox and the Raven,” in Empire’s New Clothes: Unveiling EU Enlargement, ed. Jozeph Borocz. http://aei.pitt.edu/144/1/Empire.pdf (last accessed 10 October 2011).

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address. Since 1998, whether objecting to the abolition of capital punishment or the right of Kurds to broadcast in their own language, the Nationalist logic has almost exclusively focused on, and thus been bounded by, the stipulations set by the EU.13 Turkish understandings of national sovereignty and culture have suffered greatly as a result of this, forced into defensive, chauvinistic, and statist postures. More inconspicuous and elusive has been the effect of the Stipulatory logic on the very attributes and characteristics of Turkishness itself. To give an example, one of the countless regulations of the Acquis is a ban on the sale of food cooked in open areas. Among other things, its adoption in Turkey meant the temporary dismantling of the boats that sold balık ekmek (fish and bread), lining the banks of the Bosphorus: a popular image of Istanbul no doubt, but by no means a historical symbol of Turkey. Almost overnight, however, these boats became a national tradition, recognized as such at – and through – the moment of their disappearance. In theoretical terms, the “otherness” of the other, nominated by the Stipulatory logic, was adopted as a unique and essential Turkish custom because of its externally mandated erasure. This development is not peculiar to Turkey, but it underscores the totalizing hegemony of the Stipulatory logic, one that not only reconfigures the practices of a society but also dictates the content (fishing boats) and form (nostalgia) of its possible resistance. The logic of stipulation has had a similarly alienating impact on the Civilizational logic. By mandating certain, especially political, reforms, the EU has effectively annulled the active agency of those Turks who strove to elevate their country to the level of contemporary civilization. An integral part of European civilization, as understood by Turks, was the sense of empowerment it imparted to transform their own society. The invitational gesture at the heart of the Civilizational logic welcomed the European other as the beacon and judge of the Turkish project, but crucially maintained Turks as the historical subjects of that project. Those committed to this ideal have had a difficult time reconciling it with civilization by diktat. Several Turkish prime ministers have been forced to navigate that delicate boundary separating doing something “for oneself” and doing it “because of and for another.” The repeated and pathetic plea of Turkish leaders that “We are not carrying out these reforms because the EU has asked us to, but because they are ones that we as Turks have desired for a long time” captures this difficulty vividly. Ironically enough, PM Recip ˘ Erdogan’s recent remark that Turkey would continue its transformation process by renaming the Copenhagen and Maastrict Criterias as the Ankara and Istanbul Criterias is just the latest in long list of comments by Turkish leaders trying to circumvent this paradox.14 13

14

Outside of a few intellectuals and, by 1960s standards, extremely small radical leftist groups, the only major exception to this trend has been the Welfare Party before their abrupt pro-EU shift upon assuming power. ˘ “Turkey and the European Union: Europeanization without Membership,” H. Tarik Oguzlu, Turkish Studies, 13/2 (2012): 229–43.

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The Stipulatory Logic and the Academic Study of Turkish-EU Relations In addition to permeating Turkish political debates, the Stipulatory logic has exercised an equally profound influence over academic inquiry. Much as the Civilizational and Nationalist logics before it, the logic of stipulation has birthed its own epistemology, its own way of understanding and analyzing Turkish-EU relations. The final pages of this book describe the emergence of this new site of knowledge production, detail how it has transformed the terrain on which recent academic analyses of Turkish accession are conducted, and finally situate the initial history of Turkish approaches toward the EEC (1959–80) within this new field. The Copenhagen Criteria and the Emergence of an Objective Social-Scientific Literature The Copenhagen Criteria established a uniform set of guidelines regulating the process by which an applicant state would join the EU. Before these criteria, EU Enlargements, though occurring in waves, had largely been conducted on a case-by-case basis. To understand the epistemological shift in academic studies of Turkish-EU relations, it is important to situate it within a wider historiographical turn from the national to the universal in the study of European Enlargement. This universalization, made possible by the common blueprint outlined in the Copenhagen Criteria, is marked by the growing tendency to view each specific national encounter between the EU and an applicant state as a case study of an abstract and model accession process. In fact, the interdisciplinary field of Enlargement Studies and the meteoric rise of the conceptual category of “Europeanization” owe their existence to the establishment of these universal criteria.15 The universalization of membership criteria has likewise given birth to a shared international lexicon, utilizing terms such as convergence, adaptation, harmonization, and norm diffusion by which discrete accession processes can be evaluated and discussed. Over the past fifteen years this new international framework has come to govern the academic study of Turkish-EU relations. The great majority of analyses of Turkey’s membership bid have become comparative – whether explicitly, wherein the Turkish case is measured against the accession processes of other applicant states, or implicitly, where Turkey is approached and assessed by its deviations from a mythologized, perfectly compliant, and seamless harmonization.16 This comparative framework, I argue, underlies and 15

16

The Google Books Ngram viewer for keywords “Europeanization” and “EU Enlargement” offer a rough statistical record of the meteoric rise in the use of these terms following the establishment of the Copehagen Criteria. http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Europeanization&year_start=1900&year_end=2012&corpus=0&smoothing=3 and http://books.google .com/ngrams/graph?content=EU+Enlargement&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus= 0&smoothing=3. The list of works taking an implicit comparative approach is nearly as long as the complete bibliography of Turkish-EU relations since 1993. Among the significant works that have drawn

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has made possible two interrelated approaches to understanding Turkish-EU relations that have dominated the scholarly literature over the past two decades. The first and most prominent branch of inquiry born of this comparativism are those studies that question Turkey’s relatively slower progress in joining the EU. After all, the question of when and how Turkey will join the EU, or why it is still at the gates, is informed by the successful accession of the CEEC states. Academic work has been conducted on almost every possible aspect of this issue, from detailed studies on areas where Turkey has failed to adapt to EU norms to more analytical interpretations exploring Turkish institutional inertia, Turkish populism, or Turkey’s strong state tradition as explanations for Turkish shortcomings.17 Whatever their particular issue, all such inquiries are animated by the need to explicate Turkey’s relatively tortuous progress toward accession. The second branch of academic inquiry into Turkish-EU relations is comprised of studies that examine the effects of EU conditionality on Turkish modernization, again with an implicit comparison to similar processes of “Europeanization” in eastern and central European states. These studies have detailed how the stipulatory logic has aided (or failed to benefit) Turkey’s democratization, legal structure, civil society and business organizations, and market or minority reforms.18 These studies focus not so much on why Turkey has still to

17

18

explicit attention to this comparativist stance, especially with regard to the CEEC states, are: Harun Arıkan, Turkey and the EU: An Awkward Candidate for EU Membership (Burlington: ¨ ¸ , “An Awkward Partnership: Turkey’s Relations with the EU in Ashgate, 2003); Ziya Onis Comparative-Historical Perspective,” Journal of European Integration History, 7/1 (2001): 105–19; S. Togan and T. S. Balasubramanyan, Turkey and Central and Eastern European ˘ Countries in Transition (New York: St. Martin’s Press: 2001); and the introduction by M. Ugur and N. Canefe in Turkey and the European Union: Accession Prospects and Issues (London: Routledge, 2004), 1–15. Ziya Onis¸, “Contesting for Turkey’s Political Centre: Domestic Politics, Identity Conflicts, and the Controversy over EU Membership,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 18/3 (2010): 361–76; Ziya Onis¸, “Luxembourg, Helsinki, and Beyond: Towards an Interpretation of Recent Turkey-EU Relations,” Government and Opposition, 35/4 (2000): 463–83; Mine Erder, “Populism as a Barrier to EU integration: Rethinking the Copenhagen Criteria,” in ˘ M. Ugur and N. Canefe (eds.) Turkey and the European Union: Accession Prospects and Issues (London: Routledge, 2004), 49–75; K. Yıldız and M Muller, The European Union and Turkish Accession: Human Rights and the Kurds (London: Pluto Press, 2009). It is also worth mentioning the handful of works that have taken a multidimensional approach to the same question, pinpointing, alongside Turkish shortcomings, internal divisions within the EU for its ˘ inability to provide a credible anchor for Turkish reforms. See, Mehmet Ugur, The European Union and Turkey: An Anchor/Credibility Dilemma (Brookfield: Ashgate, 1999) and Bahar Rumelili, “Turkey: Identity, Foreign Policy and Socialization in a Post-Enlargement Europe,” Journal of European Integration, 33/2 (2011): 235–49. Significant studies within this genre include: Meltem Muft ¨ uler ¨ Bac¸, “Turkey’s Political Reforms and the Impact of the European Union,” South European Society and Politics, 10/1 (2005): 17–31; S. Aydın and F. Keyman, “European Integration and the Transformation of Turkish Democracy,” Centre for European Policy Studies EU-Turkey Working Papers No 2 (August 2004); Serap Atan, “Europeanization of Turkish Peak Business Organizations and Turkish-EU

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gain admittance to the EU, but rather how the accession process has impacted the transformation of Turkish society. Regardless of their emphasis, both branches of the new social-scientific literature on Turkish-EU relations take their starting point from the “problem areas” identified by the Stipulatory logic as outlined in the yearly EU Reports regarding Turkish accession. Collectively, their aim has been to shed light on these problem areas – namely, the issues of constitutional reform, Turkey’s democratic deficit and economic preparedness, as well as the rights of minorities, journalists, and humans – inquiring either into the reasons behind Turkey’s failure to harmonize with EU standards or how EU conditionality has affected the modernization of Turkey. In doing so, these studies implicitly take a normative approach to Turkish shortcomings, judging them through the economically liberal, politically multiculturalist modernity of the EU (even in the glaring absence of this modernity among many of its member-states). By and large they assume the putative validity of EU norms and assess Turkish society as to its compliance or resistance to an EU prescribed modernization. Rarely are these norms questioned, or seen as having a contingent and specific history of their own.19 More often, they are placed outside of history as timeless and universal. This dehistoricization of EU norms and standards shares much in common with the modernization theories of the 1950s. Much like the works of Bernard Lewis and Daniel Lerner written at the birth of Turkish-EEC relations fifty years ago, recent analyses of Turkey’s membership bid exhibit a similar, if inadvertent, teleology – one that fosters the hierarchical relations of an advanced European core directing/dictating the modernization of its developing Turkish periphery. The implicit normative character of the new social-scientific literature is most evident in the semantic conflation of the terms modernity, modernization, Europeanization, and liberalization (whether political or economic), used interchangeably in recent analyses of Turkish-EU relations. Through this conflation, these studies seamlessly equate positive transformations of Turkish society with Turkey’s harmonization to EU standards and negatively label all protractions or acts away from this convergence as stasis or regression.

19

¨ ¸ , “Contesting for Turkey’s Political Centre: Domestic Politics, Relations,” 100–122; Ziya Onis Idenity Conflicts, and the Controversy over EU Membership,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 18/3 (2010): 361–76; and Jonathan Sugden, “Leverage in Theory and Practice: ˘ and N. Canefe (eds.) Turkey and the Human Rights and Turkey’s EU Candidacy,” in M. Ugur European Union, 265–76. ¨ ¸ , “Luxembourg, Helsinki, and Beyond: Towards Exceptions to this trend include Ziya Onis an Interpretation of Recent Turkey-EU Relations,” Government and Opposition, 35/4 (2000): 463–83 and Paul Levin, Turkey and the European Union. Both works make explicit mention of the historical contingency of contemporary EU norms, Levin’s study going so far as to argue, in brilliant dialectical fashion, that these norms are in fact produced through the EU’s own assessments of their lack within applicant states such as Turkey.

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The binding of Turkish modernization with Europeanization (understood as EU convergence) has persisted even after the waning of mutual enthusiasm and commitment to Turkish membership that marked the opening accession negotiations in 2005. Fuat Keyman’s argument that, despite reservations by many Europeans toward Turkey’s Islamicist government, Turkish modernity has become essentially “locked” to European liberal democracy by the “certainty” of its EU candidacy is a case in point.20 Going even further, ˘ 2012 article, “Europeanization without Membership,” H. Tarik Oguzlu’s argues that “Turkey’s European transformation” will continue in spite of the enervation of EU conditionality – in other words, that Turkey will continue to converge with EU standards even in the absence of the Stipulatory logic.21 The rise of this new “objective” social-scientific literature is particularly noteworthy given its concurrence with the growing worldwide popularity of South Asian postcolonial theory and critiques of developmentalism originating in Latin American and African studies.22 While these fields have developed critical methodologies challenging the unquestioned universality of western/ northern social forms, norms, and practices, academic inquiry into TurkishEU relations seems to have moved in the opposite direction. A telling example of this trend can be found in two articles, written almost a decade apart by a leading scholar of Turkish-EU relations, Fuat Keyman. The first is a theoretical piece written in 1995 (three years before the first Regular Report) titled “Articulating Difference: The Problem of the Other in International Political Economy.” The article criticizes the western rationalistic premises of the field for reducing “the ethical space for the Other(s) to represent themselves independent of western universalism, in their own cultural specificity and with ownership of their history.” The second article, written in 2004 and titled, “European Integration and the Transformation of Turkish Democracy,” inquires into the leveraging effects of the Copenhagen Criteria on Turkish democracy and explores four “problem areas” (the role of the military, the judicial system, and human and minority rights) where further EU conditionality is needed. Here Keyman acknowledges the EU stipulations as a universally valid register by which to approach Turkish society and modernization, despite his earlier claims that 20 21 22

Fuat Keyman, “Turkey between Europe and Asia,” in Gerard Delanty (ed.), Europe and Asia Beyond East and West (London: Routledge, 2007), 203–15. ˘ H. Tarik Oguzlu, “Turkey and the European Union: Europeanization without Membership,” Turkish Studies, 13/2 (2012): 229–43. For example, see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). For critiques of Developmentalism, see Wolfgang Sachs (ed.), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand Press, 1991) and Gustavo Esteva, “Beyond Development, What?” Development in Practice, 8/3 (1998): 280–96.

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this western universalism denies the other a space to present itself, reducing its otherness to exogenously defined problem areas that must be overcome.23 Toward a Depoliticized Anthropology: Purging Past and Present Voices Of course there are many recent studies that continue to be highly critical of the EU, the accession process, and Turkey’s involvement in it. In fact Turkey’s inclusion into the European Customs Union (1995) became the target of a broad range of critical works on Turkish-EU relations. These studies consistently centered on Turkey’s unique status as the first and only major country to enter into a customs union without the rights and privileges of full EU membership, underscoring how the regulation of Turkey’s external trade regime had been handed over to a supranational body over which Turkey had no voice or control. Leading the attack was Erol Manisalı’s 2002 work, The Silent Coup in Turkish-EU Relations, arguing that the “1995 Customs Union amounted to nothing less than the colonization of the country.”24 Manisalı’s revival of an anti-imperialist discourse was soon taken up by number of prominent intellectuals including the politician Mumtaz Soysal, ¨ the poet/journalist Attila Ilhan, Ali Ulvi Ozdemir, and Yılmaz Dikbas¸, among others.25 The re-emergence of an anti-imperial critique, on both the Turkish left and nationalist right, during the first decade of the twenty-first century was, to a certain extent, a reaction to the ruling AK party’s embrace of the EU. Yet more significant than the reemergence of these critical studies after a twenty-year hiatus has been the total denial of their existence by the new socialscientific literature being produced contemporaneously. An English-speaking reader perusing the international journals publishing the IR and political science studies detailed above would be hard-pressed to find even a footnote referencing these critical interpretations. The reasons behind this ostracization stem from an epistemological divide pervading interpretations of Turkish-EU relations. From the perspective of the new internationalized field of knowl¨ edge production, intellectuals such as Manisalı, Soysal, Ozdemir, and Dikbas¸ are not regarded as legitimate interlocutors within the social scientific debate. Their methodologies are rejected as ideologically motivated and their subject positions dismissed for being too (existentially) immersed in their subject of inquiry. The arguments of these critical scholars are seen as being incommensurate with a de-politicized and de-historicized anthropology that 23

24 25

See Fuat Keyman, “Articulating Difference: The Problem of the Other in International Political Economy,” Review of International Political Economy, 2/1 (1995): 70–95 and S. Aydın and F. Keyman, “European Intergration and the Transformation of Turkish Democracy.” ¨ Erol Manisalı, TurkiyeAvrupa I˙lis¸kilerinde Sessiz Darbe (Istanbul: Der Yayınları, 2002). ¨ ¨ ˘ Kars¸itligının ˘ Ali Ulvi Ozdemir, Turkiye’de Avrupa Birligi Tarihi (Ankara: Alter Yayıncılık, ˙ ˘ C 2008); Attila Ilhan, Bir Millet Uyanıyor: Avrupa Birligi ¸ ıkmaz Sokak! (Istanbul: Bilgi Yayınevi, ˘ Tabuta C¸akılan Son C¸ivi (Istanbul: Asya S¸afak Yayınları, 2005); Yılmaz Dikbas¸, Avrupa Birligi: 2006).

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stands at a disinterested and objective distance from its subject. As a consequence, their interpretations are removed from the realm of legitimate scholarly work and marginalized to the realm of primary documents that – much like the statements of political parties or civil society organizations – may one day serve as archival objects of social-scientific research. This lack of engagement with approaches, methodologies, and questions deemed invalid by the new field of knowledge production has radically altered the terrain of the scholarly Turkish debate on the EU. Above all, it has bifurcated this terrain, drawing a rigid line between what are now seen as ideologically charged arguments for or against Turkish membership and interpretations of Turkish-EU relations that bear the internationally recognized stamp of “objectivity.” My aim in drawing attention to this bifurcation is not to bring attention to more critical interpretations ignored by the English-language literature. I wish, rather, to underscore how a certain way of thinking about and assessing Turkish-EU relations has become hegemonic, thereby epistemically marginalizing other ways of imagining and understanding these relations. This marginalization has also beset past interpretations of Turkey’s membership bid. To give but one example, consider Bulent Ecevit’s claim that ¨ Turkish-EEC relations are the product of an inherent contradiction between the ideological and material relationships the west has fostered with the rest of the world. The nuanced argument that democratic and socially just European societies are forced, from an economic standpoint, to deny these privileges to the developing world, is totally at odds with the questions asked by and methods that govern the new social-scientific literature. This incommensurability accounts for why our same English speaking reader perusing internationally recognized journals over the past two decades will find only passing mention of the countless interlocutors that have filled the pages of this study. In fact, s/he would be left with the impression that the rich debates over Turkey’s membership bid between 1959 and 1980 detailed herein had simply not occurred.26 Recovering a Past Modernity I have tried to show that things were not always this way. In marked difference to the amnesia of the present, Turkish commentators, politicians, and scholars in the initial decades of Turkey’s membership bid incessantly invoked the past. By connecting the Common Market with the longer histories of Turkey, Europe, and their relations, Turks were able to interpret and understand them on their own terms. Exogenous, ahistorical and depoliticized concepts such as economic restructuring or norm diffusion so en vogue today were described in a completely different register, one blasted through with historical and political resonance. The former likened to Ottoman capitulations and understood 26

It could well be argued that this history is irrelevant to the questions they are concerned with. True enough, but this same history also, by virtue of its irrelevance, forces the issue as to why they are asking these particular questions in the first place.

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through a discourse of neocolonialism, the latter either praised as the propagacivilizational mission or critiqued as yet another instance of tion of Ataturk’s ¨ European cultural imperialism. This book has detailed the initial history of the intense and shifting Turkish debate over the material and symbolic significance of its inclusion into the European project. Looking back on this period, the existential arguments rested in history, culture, and political economy seem abstract and ideological when compared to the dominant way of understanding and assessing Turkish-EU relations that reigns today. Yet it was precisely this existential interrogation of Turkey and Europe’s past, coupled with the protracted and incomplete question of the Turkish and European projects, that allowed Turks to ask and answer a set of fundamental questions about themselves, questions that modernization theory has denied them from asking before and since. What kind of society have we formed? Where did this society come from? In what direction is this society headed? Is this something that we, as society, want? In so asking, Turks were, however briefly, able to take stock of their own history and set out to imagine, if not determine, their own future. More than a half century after Turkey applied to join the then-nascent EEC, the debate over Turkey’s place in Europe continues. This book has sought the answer to this question not through geographic or cultural arguments or analyses of Turkey’s political structure, but by looking into how Turks understood themselves through their existential engagement with the European project. It has underscored how Turkish debates over joining the EEC between 1959 and 1980 became a critical site where Turks inquired into who they were and where they were going. To the extent that this active, self-reflexive and self-defining experience of modernity is historically of European origin – and, to this author, its most profound legacy – Turkey had, during these years, become fully European.

Index

Additional Protocol (AP), viii, 2, 12, 86–87, 98, 100, 105–08, 118–22, 131, 137, 140–43, 146–48, 156, 158–63, 166, 168, 170, 195, 198, 200, 203 ˘ Agırnaslı, Niyazi, 56–58, 209 Ankara Agreement, 2–3, 8, 12, 16, 26, 41, 49, 53, 56–57, 75, 77, 86, 118, 120–21, 129, 133, 147, 156, 162–65, 170, 199, 203, 209, 216 preparatory stage, 2 signing of, 55 transitional stage, 2, 90, 112 anti-western, 3, 11, 112, 173, 181, 184, 189 Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal, vii, 3, 12, 20, 25, 28, ¨ 34, 39, 42, 46, 54, 56, 62–63, 72, 89, 93, 95, 100–01, 117, 120, 122, 135, 137, 149, 152–54, 158, 162, 165, 182–83, 186–89, 193, 200, 212, 214–15, 227 Bursa Speech, 102–04 on contemporary civilization, 28–32 significance for Ankara Agreement, 48–52 postwar bureaucrats, 34–35 Workers Party of Turkey, 75–76 Atlantic Alliance. See NATO Aybar, Mehmet Ali, 70, 75–76, 116, 128 Boran, Behice, 75, 99, 100, 141–42 colonialism, 14, 60, 75, 114, 138, 143, 227 decolonization, 8, 41 neo-colonialism, 14, 99, 112, 131

postcolonial thought, 14, 23, 32, 59, 61, 64, 75, 155, 188, 224 Council of Europe, 10, 36–37, 50, 51, 54, 215, 216 Cuban Missile Crisis, 27, 40, 41, 72, 78, 85 customs union, 2, 37, 57, 138, 160, 198, 217, 225 Cyprus, 8, 10, 16, 27, 54, 78, 83–85, 89, 118, 169, 171, 173, 204 invasion of, 170–72 de Gaulle, Charles, 41, 45, 84, 163, 166, 169 Demirel, Suleyman, 79, 102, 120, 133, 136, ¨ 142, 144, 147, 150, 152, 156, 189, 193, 201 Democrat Party, xi, 7, 18, 25–26, 27, 38, 40, 43, 46, 49, 93, 96–97, 102, 104, 129, 134, 135, 149, 193, 205 ˘ Dogan, Mehmet, 181, 184–88 Ecevit, Bulent, 8, 119, 141, 146, 171, 193, ¨ 194, 197, 201, 213, 226 EEC Policy, 196–200, 203–05 on populism, 104–06 views of EEC, 194–96 views of west, 188–90 Economic Development Fund, 88, 162, 164–65, 202 EEC Institutions Council of Ministers, 37, 44–45 European Commission (EC), 36, 43–44, 47–48, 53, 135, 144, 147–48, 161, 166, 198, 201, 203–04, 219

229

Index

230 EEC Institutions (cont.) European Parliament (EP), xi, 36, 44–45, 144, 208 Erbakan, Necmettin, 99, 142, 150, 156, 161, 180–81, 191, 192, 196–99, 200–01, 203, 204 interpellation of JP, 142–46, 206–08 Eren, Nuri, 34 Ergin, Feridun, 38 Erim, Nihat, 159–63, 194 Erkin, Feridun Cemal, 27, 47, 51 ´ Etatism, 13, 95–97, 138 European Free Trade Area (EFTA), 40–41, 163, 165, 170 Europeanization, 20, 31, 39, 59, 67–68, 73, 76, 109–11, 116, 126, 129, 155, 200, 214, 221–24 ˘ Feyzioglu, Turhan, 49, 51 France, 5, 9, 22–23, 31, 33–34, 45, 57, 60, 84, 103, 133, 155, 159, 169, 199, 208, 215 Germany, 9, 13, 23, 34, 44, 54, 57–58, 66, 78, 103, 134, 159, 196 Gevgilili, Ali, 106–08, 146 Gokalp, Ziya, 13, 20, 24, 178, 201 ¨ ˘ Gokmen, Oguz, 36 ¨ Greece, 3, 9, 10, 26, 27, 37, 41, 44, 52–54, 67–68, 83, 111, 158, 165, 171, 195, 197, 203, 205–06, 218 Gunes ¨ ¸ , Turan, 63, 88 Hallstein, Walter, 47, 48 Hearth of Intellectuals, 81, 182 Idealist Hearths Union, 123, 127 imperialism, 4, 14, 71–74, 76, 100, 101, 109, 112–13, 116, 124, 127, 128, 132, 183, 186–87, 190, 193, 207, 227 industrialization, 42–43, 55, 74, 94–97, 121, 123, 126–27, 135, 137–40, 146–47, 163, 172, 181, 184, 195, 207, 217 ˙ on ˙ In 25, 26, 41, 44, 46–47, 77, 83, ¨ u, ¨ Ismet, 97, 106, 120, 129, 146, 194 ˙ Iren, Cihat, 38, 43 Japan, 13, 30, 135 Justice Party (JP), xi, 41, 73–74, 78, 81, 102, 108, 122, 126, 129, 133, 136, 141–47, 150–53, 155–56, 163, 184, 189, 190–91, 193, 196, 201, 205–07

Kadro, 18, 95, 138 ˘ Kafesoglu, Ibrahim, 179, 183–84 Keskin, Yıldırım, 148, 202, 206 Menderes, Adnan, 5, 11, 18, 25–26, 40, 45, 70, 82, 93, 96, 102, 120, 149–50, 154, 165, 184, 193, 205 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), xi, 35, 38, 41, 43, 84–85, 88, 107, 131, 133, 137, 140, 152, 156, 167, 176, 198–05 modernization theory, 75, 89, 227 Nadi, Nadir, 45, 46 National Action Party (NAP), xi, 81, 123–24, 132, 173, 184, 191–93, 196, 200–01 national interest, 3, 5, 49, 57–58, 74, 84–85, 106–07, 111–12, 130, 132, 140–43, 149–51, 153, 186, 195, 202, 207–08 National Order Party (NOP), xi, 101, 124, 143, 161, 191 National Salvation Party (NSP), xi, 81, 184, 191–92, 196, 199, 200–01, 207–08 National Struggle. See War of Independence National Unity Committee (NUC), xi, 26, 39, 40–44, 54, 134–35, 149 NATO, xi, 9–12, 27, 50–51, 54, 74, 84–85, 99, 167, 192, 201, 211, 215–16 Noel, Emile, 158 Occidentalism, 14, 92, 110–12, 114, 180 OECD, xi, 10, 50–51, 54, 74, 134, 215–16 Olcay, Osman, 162, 163 Ottoman Empire, 19, 20, 29–30, 95, 101, 143, 185 capitulations, 12–14, 61, 101, 108, 127, 152, 215, 226 Young Turks, 13, 80, 95, 178 ¨ Ozal, Turgut, 139, 206, 217 populist, 5, 19, 25, 40, 72, 102–05, 107–09, 115, 117, 128, 135, 140, 149, 154, 184, 187, 194 recolonization 1. See colonialism: neo-colonialism Republican People’s Party (RPP), xi, 25, 41, 46, 49, 63, 73, 82, 97, 104–05, 107–08, 129, 131, 141–42, 144–46, 149, 161, 163, 173, 188, 191, 193–99, 201–02, 204, 208

Index Soviet Union, 3, 10, 70, 74–75, 84, 95–96, 99, 126, 133, 179, 192, 201, 206 State Planning Organization (SPO), vii, xi, 41, 49, 54, 87, 97, 107, 119–21, 127, 143, 150, 152, 154–55, 160–62, 165–66, 176, 181, 187, 198–202 tariffs, 2, 12, 13, 43, 86–87, 116, 118, 121, 137 Topc¸u, Nurettin, 81, 94, 110, 180–82 Treaty of Lausanne, 105–08, 129, 148, 152–53 Treaty of Rome, 1, 2, 9, 26, 45, 50–53, 99, 216 Treaty of Sevres, 74, 101, 106–08, 152–53, 193 Turkes ¸ , Alparslan, 100, 179, 192 ¨ Turkish Armed Forces, 3, 5, 26, 33, 40, 85, 97, 135, 159, 160–63, 166, 171, 175, 191, 206, 209, 213–14 Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA), vii, xi, 36–37, 40, 47, 56–58, 69, 105, 119, 132, 145, 148–52, 156, 161, 195–96, 209

231 Turkish Union of Chambers (TOB), 49, 147 Turkler, Kemal, 98, 107, 109 ¨ United Kingdom, iv, 10, 13, 31, 41, 57, 133, 153, 169, 170, 203 United States, iv, 8–12, 35, 41, 63, 78, 83–84, 98, 169, 171–72, 185, 194, 198, 211 ¨ unel, Ust Besim, 108, 120, 121, 141, 146 ¨ War of Independence, 14, 31, 59, 72, 74–76, 93–94, 107, 109, 114, 131, 138, 148, 152–53, 200 ˙ vii, xi, 56–58, Workers Party of Turkey (TIP), 69, 77–78, 79, 82–83, 99, 104, 109, 120, 126, 142–43, 161, 188, 193, 199, 209 emergence of, 69–71 foreign policy of, 75–76 on War of Independence, 71–72 Yalc¸ın, Aydın, 39, 120–22, 144–45, 161, 167–69, 184, 198 Zorlu, Fatin Rus ¨ ¸ tu, ¨ 27, 37–38, 40, 45