• The Hinge of Europe-1
Turkey
,By ROBERT CONQUEST IN Ankara the other day I stood near the front of an unemployed demonstration outside the National Assembly and listened to a union official, standing on a car, urge them to break through the cordon. Later an opposition jour- nalist told me the rather strong things he was saying about the government in connection with the incident. Both exhibitions of freedom are portents, and rather extraordinary ones.
For they were both to be found under a regime which has admittedly overthrown a government fairly elected by a majority of the people, and which has no intention of letting it come to power again.
A majority has no right to rule if it does so at the expense of the natural rights of minorities. So far, anyone can go along with Turkey's 1960 revolution. And this is an important crux to Which progressive opinion in England has not given enough, or at any rate the right kind of, thought (perhaps because it is usually Leftist regimes which claim to speak for majorities).
The army had a constitutional argument for its seizure of power, since its regulations made it responsible for the protection of the Turkish Republic established by the Constitution of 1924. Moreover, one can sympathise with the difficulty of its present position. For revolutionaries who have overthrown a corrupt and arbitrary regime are hardly like to want to let it be restored just because such is the popular will.
The execution of Menderes, and holding the elections so soon afterwards, were two political errors on the part of the army. Much bitterness Was caused by the executions, though it seems agreed that a certain brutal-mindedness in the Turk, combined with his acceptance of the in- evitable, may prevent this from having the last- ing poisonous effects it might have had in some countries.
Fortunately, the leader of the coup, Presi- dent Giirsel himself, with the perhaps reluctant asset of his senior supporters, has lately shown notable good sense. Even more so, has the leader of the new Justice Party, General GOmtispala. And, above all, [norm, faced with a situation of real political com- plexity for the first time at the age of seventy- three, has handled everything with patience and skill. They are, indeed, assisted in their dealings With the soldiers by Atattirk's own view that the Assembly comes before the Army. The prestige of the .political organs, their careful maintenance even during all the years of dicta- torship, has paid off in blunting military pre= tensions, so uninhibited in some other countries. The twenty-eight million Turks are the major block to Soviet expansionism southwards. This, of course, has always been their role in inter- national politics and has led many people to condonb unpleasant regimes in Turkey—as when, for instance, Karl Marx heartily supported the frightful Ottoman rulers against Russia in the war of 1876-77. Of course,. one cannot be too Pernickety about immediate democratic purity in one's allies when faced with a major aggres- ior, and those who complain that the Western Alliance contains regimes we would all like to be rid of are invariably people who were happy tc have Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek on our side in the Second World War. Nevertheless, a stable democracy is a better bet than any other regime. And Turkey is at present in an extremely interesting political situation, where 'democracy' and 'progress' and such general concepts take flesh in ways which the cosmopolitan intellec- tual, unused to real situations, might find a little baffling.
Revolutions are usually made by officers or intellectuals. Both classes share a common mili- tary and academic delusion. Roughly speaking, we may say that solutions arrived at by force are only permanent when the force is employed to liberate the polity from distortion, and to create a situation in accord with, or only a little in advance of, the feelings of the masses of the population. (Marx saw this, as Lenin did not.) Imposed solutions—that is, settlements made by force contrary to the deepest set senti- ments of the population—can only be maintained in the long run tr, the erection of force into a system of government, by the permanent main- tenance of the unnatural pressures.
For it is, of course, possible to freeze an un- natural situation by the creation of an immensely powerful and self-perpetuating military bureau- cracy, as in the Soviet Union. But there is no reason to suppose that the decay inherent in such rigidities will not eventually lead either to relaxation or to eruption. It must be rarely that the anomalies can be maintained for more than a generation. The impressive victories peter out. The tausendjahrige regimes are forgotten.
In Turkey this flaw in revolutionary methods had, after forty years, come home to roost. Atattirk's revolution came at a time of disrup- tion and despair and re-created Turkey—creat- ing it, indeed, for the first time as a national State. Much that he did was necessary. But when, with his immense prestige, which still persists unchallenged, he created a secular, 'pro- gressive' Turkey, he was going far beyond what the majority wanted. Nor did a generation of Kemalist rule make them want it. As soon as a free vote was permitted, the Democratic Party, representing the religious, 'backward' masses, in alliance with a rather undisciplined merchant class, were swept to power in election after election. The overthrow of the Democrats by the army, the execution of Menderes and the other Ministers, still did not affect the existence of a 'Turkish majority supporting the Democratic idea. In the elections of October, 1961, the parties in effect representing the banned Demo- crats still got a majority of the popular vote and of the seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives.
A revolutionary State which submits to uni- versal suffrage may be overwhelmed by the votes of the peasantry, and many ideological formula exist to prove that 'true' democracy involves the rule of the towns. But this point has little rele- vance in Turkey. The Justice Party triumphed in the better-developed west and Istanbul itself, while the People's Republican Party had its popular, as against its elite, strength in the north and east In any case, it was evident that the army would not allow the Right-wing parties to form a government. It was also evident that a govern- ment could not be formed without them. In the circumstances, the present People's Republi- can Party/Justice Party coalition was the only tolerable solution. But, given the bitter- ness of the previous year, it says a great deal for Iniinu and Gilmtispala, and for General Giirsel too, that agreement could be reached. The main principle of the coalition is simple: detente. Its policies are based on the acceptance by each side of special limitations. The Justice Party will not question what the army and the People's Party regard as basic Kemalism, embodied in the new Constitution. The Republicans will maintain democratic stan- dards and cajole or persuade the army to accept further democratisation. Meanwhile, there is, in fact, more freedom of speech and general politi- cal freedom in Turkey now than there was under the Democrats. And it is being extended. The 147 university teachers dismissed in October, 1960, one of the worst blemishes on the new regime, have just been allowed to return to their posts.
There is naturally a continual background of complicated manoeuvre and peripheral intrigue. Elements of the old Democrats want revenge. The students, whose April, 1960, demonstrations in Istanbul and Ankara, bloodily put down by the police, were the first stirrings against Men- deres's regime, hotly oppose a political amnesty, or at least their organised spokesmen do. The 'Life Senators' intruded from the army at the time of the coup (even though they have since been reduced in number by the elimination of some extremists) recently issued a violent and threatening defence of their status.
Yet the attempt by a group of the more ex- treme young army officers to seize power in February was frustrated without any trouble. The main problem it presented, in the intricate political balance, was that less extreme military elements yet pressed for an amnesty for the offending soldiers. Giirsel felt it necessary to grant this, and it was overwhelmingly voted in the National Assembly. But it naturally roused considerable and public agitation from the Justice and other parties. If men are to be amnestied for attempting to seize power ille- gally, then what of the imprisoned Democratic Ministers? There were a few votes cast against the military amnesty, and the bulk of the Justice Party seems to have gone along with it on the understanding, which yet had to be tacit for fear of offending some army elements, that Intinu would manoeuvre an amnesty for the Democrats in the near future. This is, so far, a demonstra- tion both of the difficulties of the political situation and of the political skill with which they are being handled. Nothing is final yet, and Turkey is still steering between a cyclic and bloody future and a further evolution of demo- cracy. But the signs are promising—if one con- skiers what things were like, astonishingly promising.
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