The Culture of the Turkish Military: From Intervention to Accommodation

19 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXVII, No.2, Winter 2014 The Culture of the Turkish Military: From Intervention to Accommodation Yücel Bozdağlıoğlu* Introduction Even though the problematic nature of civil-military relations has a long history in Turkey, it has taken on significant importance when the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) came to power in the 2002 general elections. The AKP’s accession to power marked a turning point in civil-military relations in because the Islamic background of the AKP leaders posed a direct challenge to the official Kemalist ideology of the Turkish state and that of the military as the self-appointed guardian of the Kemalist principles. The military’s unease with politicians that have an Islamic background was also aggravated by the AKP’s parliamentary majority, which enabled it to elect the president. The AKP nominated the minister of foreign affairs, Abdullah Gül, for presidency in April 2007. Mr. Gül’s political past within the Islamist Welfare Party and his wife wearing headscarf (hijab) put the westernized elite and the military on alert. Over the last two decades, the hijab in Turkey acquired a symbolic importance and came to represent an opposition to Kemalism, which is the official ideology of the Republic. The AKP leaders’ statements that the party is firmly committed to the Kemalist principles were not found convincing. Many westernized elite believed that the AKP leaders were doing takiyye (hiding their real intentions of turning Turkey into an Islamic state). The Chief of Staff, General Yaşar Büyükanıt commented on the official website of the Department of Chief Staff that the president must be devoted to the principles of Kemalism not only in words but also in essence.1 Büyükanıt’s *Yucel Bozdaglioglu is a faculty member at Adnan Menderes University, Nazilli I.I.B.F. Department of International Relations. He got his Ph.D. at the University of Kentucky in 2001 in Transnational Relations. He publishes Turkish articles on Foreign Policy and Turkish Politics. 1 Radikal, 12 April 2007. 20 2 Nilüfer Narlı, ‘Civil-Military Relations in Turkey’, Turkish Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 107127 (2000), p. 107. 3 Ümit Cizre, (2004) ‘Problems of democratic governance of civil-military relations in Turkey and the European Union enlargement zone’, European Journal of Political Research, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 107-125 (2004), p. 107. 4 Radikal, 25 August 2005. comments were later labeled as a failed “e-coup” and became the subject of an intensive criticism and later a parliamentary investigation. These comments together with nation-wide demonstrations organized by the Atatürkist Thought Associations (Atatürkçü Düşünce Dernekleri) against the AKP government brought to the political agenda the possibility of another military coup. What was interesting at the time was that some of the most westernized elite called the military to directly intervene and topple the AKP government. The situation clearly demonstrated that at least some part of the westernized elite still relied on the military as a solution to perceived political problems. For them, the military is the guardian of the Republic and democratic principles in Turkey, which constitutes an apparent contradiction with western/European ideals. Fortunately, the crisis was resolved with the Parliament’s decision to hold early elections in July 2007, which resulted in clear victory of the AKP winning 47 per cent of the national vote and majority of the seats in the Parliament, which eventually elected Abdullah Gül as the President. The AKP’s accession to power came in a time when Turkey was identified as the candidate country by the European Union (EU) and its pressure for further democratization started to increase. Many EU officials have consistently stressed that the military’s prominent role in Turkish politics casts doubts on Turkey’s democratic credentials and “demanded a host of legal and political reforms from Turkey to bring it in line with western Europe’s democratic standards, which includes an empirical separation between civil and military authorities.”2 Some scholars in Turkey also argued that the military’s increasing assertiveness in Turkey’s domestic...