Turkey: A Modern History by Erik Jan Zurcher

Author:Erik Jan Zurcher [Zurcher, Erik Jan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780857730541
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2004-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

12 · The Transition to Democracy, 1945–50

Within a few years of the end of the Second World War, Turkey’s political system, economic policies and foreign relations all underwent a fundamental change. In this chapter I will examine the factors behind the change and the way in which it came about.

Socio-economic pressure for change

By the end of the Second World War, İsmet Pasha İnönü’s government had become deeply unpopular, even hated, by the large majority of the Turkish population for a variety of reasons. In analysing this discontent, one should make a distinction between the mass of the population (the peasants and industrial workers) and the segments of the coalition on which the Kemalist regime had been built (the officers and bureaucrats, the Muslim traders in the towns and the landowners in the countryside).

The regime had never been popular with the masses. The small farmers in the countryside, who at the time still made up about 80 per cent of the total population had not seen any great improvement in their standard of living, in health, education or communications. If we take something like electrification as a measure of modernization, we note that as late as 1953 the total number of villages that had been linked up to the electric grid was ten, or 0.025 per cent of Turkey’s 40,000 villages!1 While total production of electricity had grown tenfold between 1923 and 1943, it was still a phenomenon of city life, since Turkey had a grand total of nine miles of power lines in the latter year. Of the total energy capacity of 107,000 kilowatts available in 1945, 83,000 kilowatts went to Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir. And even so, the trolleybuses in Ankara had to stop when the lights went on.2

On the other hand, the one characteristic of the modern state with which the villagers had become familiar during the 25 years of Kemalist rule was the central state’s effective control over the countryside. The gendarme and tax collector became more hated and feared than ever. Resentment against the state, in itself a traditional feature of country life, became more acute because the state became more effective and visible. It was also exacerbated because the state’s secularist policies, especially the suppression of expressions of popular faith, severed the most important ideological bond between state and subject.

Industrial workers were still a very small minority in Turkish society, some 330,000 in a population of around 20 million, but the exact number depends on what is understood by ‘industrial’; the number mentioned includes many who were really employed in artisanal production.3 Their socio-economic position was weak. Until June 1945, organizations based on class, and trade unions were regarded as such, were still prohibited in Turkey, as were strikes. The workers, like the other wage and salary earners, had been badly hit in their purchasing power by the rising cost of living during the war.

Discontent among the mass of the population was not new and in itself would probably not have led to political change.

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