Content area
Full Text
Introduction
This piece was written in the mid-1970s and to the best of my knowledge was not published anywhere. I found it along with other unpublished writings while moving out of the office that I occupied for over forty years. It is the story of the rule of the Democratic Party (DP), which came to power in Turkey 1950 and was ousted by a military coup in 1960 but not before it has set in motion a chain of reactions that produced the Turkey of the twenty-first century. Reading the original hand-written version, I discovered that it reflected rather accurately the spirit and atmosphere of Turkish politics in the crucial period of 1950-1960 as well as the background, education and careers of the main personalities involved in the politics of the time. The period 1950-60 actually spelled out the key issues in Turkish political life that were later broadened, reshaped and given new names but did not deviate from the basic orientation they had developed between 1950 and 1960, despite four military interventions that ousted elected governments in 1960, 1971, 1978 and 1997. Democracy in Turkey survived and thrived thanks to strong popular support as indicated by the participation in elections, usually in the upper 70 to 80 percent range.
Religion, that is, Islam, played a key role in the process of democratization. While it served as a means for the leaders' mobilization of and identification with the masses, it also became the beneficiary of the freedoms brought by democracy and economic development. In other words, both the development of democracy and democracy itself facilitated the acceptance of Islam as the basic cultural right of the individual Turk, a secular right rather than a divine ordainment. The combination of economic development with Islam had a variety of roots which cannot be studied at length here. Suffice it to say that Sufipopular Islam in Turkey always had a worldly dimension, despite its mysticism, as did the official institutionalized religion that actually became much stronger under the Republic's secularist policies.
DP rule between 1950 and 1960 accelerated the rise of an Anatolian middle class that demanded the freedom to practice its religion along with practical measures, such as financial credits, tax cuts, export subsidies and the like....