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The Trajectory of Democracy: the Social Roots of Regime Change in Turkey

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The Trajectory of Democracy: the Social Roots of Regime Change in Turkey THE TRAJECTORY OF DEMOCRACY: THE SOCIAL ROOTS OF REGIME CHANGE IN TURKEY by Barış Çetin Can Eren A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland August 2014 ©2014 Barış Çetin Can Eren All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT This dissertation is an analysis of the long-term trajectory of democracy in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic with a focus on class relations, revolutionary struggles and coups d’etat over the last century. I argue that two factors have intertwined to determine the trajectory of the political regime: social movements and competition within the power bloc. I make four main arguments, which diverge from the existing literature on democratization. First, by using a two-dimensional conceptualization of democracy, I argue that during the last century, the Turkish political regime, far from being ‘trapped’ in the ‘unconsolidated’ domain, experienced four different modalities of democracy. I conceptualize coups, not as symptoms of democratic immaturity, but as means of regime transition. Second, I challenge the argument that a weak civil society and the absence of social dynamics explain the fragility of Turkish democracy. I identify two waves of revolutionary movements -- from 1912 to 1930 and from 1974 to 1998 -- that have impacted the regime and vice-versa. Third, in contrast to the widely used Weberian “center-periphery” analysis, I trace three cycles of capital accumulation in the last century, with a different group assuming the hegemonic role in each: (1) the palace-centered bureaucracy, (2) the party-centered bureaucracy, and (3) a coalition between the capitalist army and Istanbul capital. Each cycle gave rise to a competitive period within the power bloc (a crisis of hegemony) that politicized society and paved the way for coups. ii Finally, I explain the interaction between social movements and competition within the power bloc. The nature of the resolution of each crisis within the power bloc depended on the nature of social struggles. Right now, Turkey is in the middle of a new regime crisis, the resolution of which will again depend on the nature of social struggles. The empirical foundations of the dissertation are built on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including official statistics as well as two major databases compiled by the author from Turkish newspaper reports and other published sources on the instances and intensities of various forms of social unrest between 1876 and 2014. First Readers: Professor Beverly J. Silver Professor Giovanni Arrighi (1937-2009) Second Reader: Professor Joel Andreas iii To Mehmet Amca, with love and disagreement… iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I came to Hopkins in 2000, one year after Abdullah Öcalan’s imprisonment and trial. As I stated in my letter of application, I had a specific question for the dissertation. I argued that extensive proletarianization of Kurds will shape the future of the Kurdish question as we knew it: on the territory of the national struggle, the guerilla warfare will cede its place to an Intifada style uprising; and in the west, Kurds, the major component of the new proletariat employed mainly in the informal sector, will be the engine of the struggle for democratization. Indeed, in 2003, I had already completed the field work in Yenibosna for the dissertation, wrote a chapter and presented it at the Institute of Global Studies at Johns Hopkins. But then... Then, as a result of a “vortex of combined circumstances”, I shelved that project and started this historical study. Although the agents and conspirators responsible for this change weren’t pleasantly remembered during the last decade, now I think it was a correct decision to change my dissertation topic. I thank all of them. Although having a life span of a decade, ironically, this study has been written in one year as the sum of five separate intense periods of writing. The reason for this was my priorities and preferences that can be inferred from the conclusion of this study. I wrote the proposal that can be considered the dormant form of the first chapter, in May-June 2004. The first draft of the second chapter was written in March 2008, the draft of the fourth chapter in September 2012. Right after the heydays of the Gezi uprising, I came back to Baltimore, between June 2013 and January 2014. I reformulated the whole argument, that implied the rewriting of all drafts from scratch, and wrote a v detailed synopsis. Finally, between July and August 2014, I wrote all the chapters at hand. I regret the fact that I did not have the necessary time to work on Chapter 3 as much as I did on other chapters. Although the chapter provides a minimally plausible argument, I implore the reader to consider the argument of that chapter as a set of working hypotheses. Contrary to misunderstandings that label him as a theorist of the world-system, longue durée, and hegemonic competition or worse still the rise of China, and blur the very originality of his thought distinguishing him from Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank, Giovanni Arrighi was a great dialectician. He was able to identify the specificity of each cycle of capitalist accumulation, and show how each cycle contained, negated and at the same time superseded, the previous one, and demonstrate that the dissolution of each cycle was the very result of its strength and achievement. What made me come to Hopkins was the epilogue of The Long Twentieth Century. I consider myself extremely lucky to have taken his classes and joined his conversations during my presence in Baltimore between 2000 and 2003. If this dissertation has any academic strength, it is no doubt because of Giovanni, who was at the same time my joint advisor. Not because of his approval but because of his disagreements. From day one, he, as my joint advisor, found the argument of this study very banal, my conceptualization boggy and my arguments unconvincing. In this sense he transformed me into a person who started to draw circles and arrows on all kinds of blank paper, followed by marching into Giovanni’s room and forcing him to a discussion. The source of the disagreement, as can be traced in Chapters 1 and 5, was my distinction between revolutionary and reformist movements. While writing and thinking vi about the dissertation, his comment that “A more dialectical conception of historical processes is not necessarily more accurate than a less dialectical one”, haunted my mind. Not only his intellectual harshness but also his “good heart”, and our shared memories will accompany me till the end of my life. And I am sure I am not the only person to have these imprints and feelings. Anybody would notice the impact of my other joint advisor, Beverly Silver’s Forces of Labor on the data collection process of this book. Without Beverly’s meticulous contribution to my proposal, I wouldn’t have received the grant from the National Science Foundation, so crucial to begin the research. She read and commented on the synopsis and did not complain about my bombardment of final versions of chapters. Beverly was my protective shield against all kinds of administrative problems. Thanks to her solutions and interventions, I was able to survive all kinds of administrative crises. In the summer of 2012, when I was technically homeless, she shared her library carrel, her office, and even her desk with me. Joel Andreas read my proposal super-carefully, and gave me confidence in the academic value of my two axes. He also read and commented on the synopsis. I’m afraid I did not incorporate his final suggestions concerning the axes of inclusion. During the time when I was outside the US, Linda Burkhardt, Jessie Albee and Terrie Lovern solved all my departmental problems. And I am grateful to them. Amy Holmes read and corrected the proposal several times. Aslıhan Tüdeş, Sinan Çelik, Gökhan Karaman, Nihal Uzan and Engin Gürbüz worked for the data collection project. Emre Altan helped supervise the data collection. After the depletion of NSF vii money, Aslıhan worked voluntarily and completed the digitization of missing newspapers. Doğuş Çakan collected the images for the 2005-2010 period, and Nurcan Dağ coded the 2005 articles. In February, Erdem Yörük and İlhan Can Özen visited my office in MacCaulay at midnight and renamed the file names of the digitized newspaper articles. The early data for Armenian uprisings came from Şefika Kumral’s review of the relevant literature in February 2009. Daniel Pascuiti answered patiently my questions about Excel. Without Sezen Bayhan, access to the library of Boğaziçi University would have been too complicated. Finally, Murat Özgün drew the cube in Chapter 5. After moving to Turkey in 2003, my address in Baltimore for my occasional visits was the house in Oakenshawe. Thanks to Rolande Glicenstein’s generosity, friendliness and humor, this address became not only an oasis but also a true home. I will not only miss our “kibbutz” but also our heated discussions concerning American politics. During my self-imposed prison term in Baltimore, Stephanie Koziej and Amritha Lal brought me news from the outside world. Without Stephanie’s questions, invitations, songs, and invitations, my life in Baltimore would be a lot less tolerable. Throughout this process, regardless of where I was, I was always together with Kıtan Eren, Vacide, Necla, Tülin and Yaşar Tunca, Nejla Torun, Firdevs and Emin Eyüboğlu, Sevinç Özer, Songül and Rafet Yılmaz, Sengül and Adnan Yurtsever, Nazmiye and Muzaffer Akyüz, Nimet Yazıcı, Ali and Gazel Özdemir. I am grateful to them and their memories. As regards “friends”… Without their informed, patient, and courageous struggle, without their candidacy to truly revolutionary human practice, everything in this viii dissertation would be meaningless.
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