Cover Page The handle http://hdl.handle.net/1887/31879 holds various files of this Leiden University dissertation. Author: Adak Turan, Sevgi Title: Kemalism in the periphery: anti-veiling campaigns and state-society relations in 1930s Turkey Issue Date: 2015-02-12 Chapter 4 Negotiating Kemalism: The Local Elite in the Anti-Veiling Campaigns of the 1930s “The reports of the inspectors who examined the local party branches were reviewed by the General Administrative Committee. The most striking point in the inspecting reports is the negligence and indifference shown by the local party administrators in fulfilling some of the duties that they are obliged to do according to the party regulations; duties that could be achieved simply with a little effort.”338 I. Defining the Local Elite in the Turkish Context Despite the fact that Turkish modernization under the Kemalist regime has attracted an enormous attention in social sciences and is frequently used to analyze modernization, social development and authoritarian regimes since the 1950s, the question of how this regime was working in practice, not only through the visible high politics of Ankara but in the provinces, has been left largely unanswered. In classical analyses of the early republican era, Turkey is classified as an “exclusionary single-party regime,” which builds its power on the already existing divisions in the society and uses the party organization to mobilize its political base.339 In the Turkish case, this division was the division between the Westernized and educated urban classes, on the one hand, and traditional peasant masses, on the other. The RPP had built its power base mainly on the former while trying to “educate” the latter rather than mobilizing them for political participation. Atatürk’s own speeches, 338 A party circular to the local branches, 1936. See Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi Genel Sekreterliğinin Parti Örgütüne Genelgesi, 1 İkincikanun 1936’dan 10 Haziran 1936 Tarihine Kadar, vol.8, Ankara: Ulus Matbaası, 1936, p. 13; see also PMRA 490.1 / 3.12.30, quoted in Murat Turan, CHP’nin Doğu’da Teşkilatlanması, Istanbul: Libra, 2011, p. 188. 339 For example, see relevant chapters in Authoritarian Politics in Modern Society: The Dynamics of Established One-Party Systems, Samuel P. Huntington and Clement H. Moore (eds.), New York: Basic Books, 1970. See also Frederick W. Frey, “Political Development, Power and Communications in Turkey,” in Communications and Political Development, Lucian W. Pye (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967, pp. 298-316. 100 characterizing the party as “a school for the education of the common people” were seen as a basis of this.340 The fact that the RPP was dependent on the dominant classes, despite its populist rhetoric, has frequently been mentioned to point to the anti-democratic and elitist nature of the early republican regime.341 Some scholars have characterized early Kemalist Turkey as a “tutelary” system, which built itself on the main cleavage in the society. Initially, it had limited political participation, but did not aim to exclude the subordinated groups forever; as the country modernizes, the system would supposedly move into a more democratic one.342 One of the main shortcomings of such analyses was the neglect of the local as an important dimension of social and political change in the early republican period. In other words, the local, which has been usually referred as the “periphery,” was associated with the masses, with the peasantry, with the “traditional” sectors of the society, and thus as passive and comparatively less significant part of the analysis. In this line of thinking, the local had become a significant factor in Turkish politics, mainly with the transition to multi-party system in 1946. Although there is a point in this argument since elections did make the participation of the citizens in politics possible through direct voting, and thus the beginning of competitive politics was a major breakthrough, it would be misleading to argue that the local was ineffective and insignificant before the introduction of the multi-party system. In addition, as it was discussed in the introduction, the idea that authoritarian single-party regimes should be analyzed first and foremost by looking at the central politics has been rightly criticized based on new theoretical and empirical research on state and state-society relations. The neglect of the local is particularly visible in the lack of analyses in the literature on the local elites. Where the political elite in Turkey are concerned, the emphasis is almost exclusively on the elite in the “center,” on 340 See Sabri Sayarı, “Some Notes on the Beginning of Mass Political Participation in Turkey,” in Political Participation in Turkey, Engin D. Akarlı (ed.), Istanbul: Boğaziçi University Publications, 1975, pp. 121-133. 341 See, for example, Tunçay, 1992. 342 See, for example, Ergun Özbudun, “The nature of the Kemalist Political Regime,” in Atatürk: Founder of a Modern State, Ali Kazancıgil and Ergun Özbudun (eds.), London: Hurst&Company, 1997[1981], pp. 79-102. Duverger’s classical analysis of single-party systems and particularly his discussion on the difference of the Turkish case from the fascist and communist single-party regimes have been quite influential in the literature on Turkey and used as a reference point in characterizing the Kemalist regime as a tutelary regime, ultimately aiming to establish a democratic system. See Maurice Duverger, Political Parties, London: Methuen, 1951. 101 the members of the high politics and bureaucracy in Ankara. In his classical work, The Turkish Political Elite, Frederick W. Frey, for example, focuses on the profile of the members of the parliament between 1920 and 1957.343 Frey explains this focus by referring to the focal position of the parliament; because there was a high degree of governmental integration in Turkey, “when one examines the social backgrounds of the deputies to the Grand National Assembly, one obtains, ipso facto, information on the backgrounds of all the cabinets and ministers, on the formal leadership of the Assembly, and on the top political party leaders as well.”344 In other words, these elite were the key to understanding Turkish politics; the impact of the local could be felt through its influence upon the deputies, conceptualized as “localism” by Frey.345 He acknowledges that these local pressures upon the deputies were present even during the single-party era, but he does not discuss in any detail how these pressures were working or what were the role of the local actors in this period. His analysis of localism is content with touching the increase in the impact of the local actors with the transition to multi-party era: “the opening up of the tutelary developmental system and the inauguration of a Western, multi-party parliamentary structure emphatically increased the representation of local forces, that is, of local elites.”346 In a recent study, Ahmet Demirel revives Frey’s analyses and provides a more detailed profile of the members of the parliament during the single-party era based on new sources.347 Since Demirel’s focus is also on the central elite and the elections, the local is included to the degree that it could have an influence on the parliament, which is again measured by localism. He indicates that localism decreases from the second parliament (1923-1927) to the third (1927-1931), from 61.6 % to 47.4%, which signifies a weaker link 343 Frederick W. Frey, The Turkish Political Elite, Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1965. 344 Ibid., p. 6. For Frey, one fundamental distinction through which the elite were defined was education. Among the educated class, the Western-educated modernists defeated the medrese- trained faction; Kemalist reforms had aimed at ensuring this. See ibid., p. 38-41. Second to education was occupation. 345 Localism was measured by looking at the ties of the deputies with the province they represented. In fact, for the period Frey studies (1920-1957), the overall degree of localism seems to be limited, since only 58% of the deputies were born in a province they represented. This percentage was higher for those members of the parliament who were involved with occupations like agriculture and trade. See ibid., p. 93-94. 346 Ibid., p. 397. 347 Ahmet Demirel, Tek Partinin İktidarı: Türkiye’de Seçimler ve Siyaset (1923-1946), Istanbul: İletişim, 2013. 102 between the parliament and the local.348 As a very minor incorporation of the local, Demirel also mentions an attempt by the regime leadership to symbolically include the sectors of the society who were not part of the political elite, and by doing so, to limit the increasing tendency in the parliament towards bureaucratization. For instance, in the 1931 elections, the RPP decided to nominate “ordinary” workers and peasants for membership in the parliament and 13 peasants and 10 workers were elected.349 Although Frey’s work provided a significant first contribution and has been frequently cited, this tendency of focusing exclusively on the political elite in the capital has become dominant in the literature at the expense of overlooking the role of local actors and dynamics in the implementation and interpretation of the policies formulated by the “central elite” in Ankara. The reason behind this special focus on the central elite has been the state-centric framework shared by the main approaches to Turkish history and politics, as briefly touched in the introduction. Since the 1950s, the emphasis of the modernization theory on the bureaucracy and elite as the agents of social change has shaped the major studies on Turkey and left an important footprint for the subsequent analyses despite the critiques the theory received.350 In works that followed the strong state approach, the central elites are characterized as an undifferentiated group who perceive the state as vital for holding the community together, while being intolerant and suspicious towards the periphery.351 According to this approach, the dichotomy of “strong state vs.