In addition to the emergence of a new Anatolian middle class that is capitalistic, conservative, pious and pragmatic, the most obvious change is in civilian-military relations. For almost 150 years the Turkish military was the vanguard of modernization, secularization and nationalism in the country. Its place was secure. As an institution above the realm of politics, the generals represented a deus ex machina that protected the system in order to safeguard the official ideology of the republic: Kemalism.Today’s Turkey has entered a post-Kemalist stage. The political role and relevance of the military is in retreat. Not surprisingly, Kemalism is also no longer able to define the future of this rapidly changing country. The vision of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, based on establishing a secular nation-state, has become the victim of its own success. In other words, Kemalism has succeeded in creating a successful secular nation-state but failed to establish a liberal democracy. This is why the transition from a national security mindset to a liberal democracy mindset required a transition from Kemalism to post-Kemalism. Kemalism was about modernist certainties of the 19th century. Post-Kemalism is about the postmodern relativism of the 21st century.
It is only to be expected that such change is unsettling. Change is always risky. But resisting change is equally perilous. Why are Turkish Kemalists so afraid of change? The short answer is because they are on the losing side. As fate would have it, change to Turkey is coming from the conservative periphery rather than the progressive elites. It was first Turgut Özal, a political figure that combined a unique set of attributes -- conservatism, piousness, pro-Western capitalism, mixed ethnicity and a secularist family -- that shook Turkey’s entrenched economic and political structure with pro-market, anti-bureaucratic reforms. After his untimely death and the lost decade of the 1990s, the 21st century in Turkey witnessed the rise of another political movement with unique attributes: a post-Islamic party that represented the conservative periphery with a pro-democracy and pro-market agenda. The fact that change kept coming from conservatives like Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was too hard to digest for Kemalist progressives. Alas, this is what happens when progressives can no longer progress. They become defenders of the status quo.
When the Turkish military made a last attempt to control the situation with the e-memorandum of April 2007, the democratic backlash was so powerful that the generals are still at a loss in terms of finding their new place in the system. Such a backlash asserting the civilian control of the military was a foreign concept for Turkish generals. They have been suffering setback after setback ever since. The latest salvo came this week, as both the prime minister and the president rejected some of the military’s top choices to fill top military posts. After four days of tense discussions at the Supreme Military Council (YAŞ), it once again became abundantly clear that the balance of power in Turkey is shifting towards the civilians. Basically, the generals had to give up their plans for the promotion of 11 officers that have been charged with taking part in a coup plan code-named Sledgehammer. According to prosecutors, the plot was hatched in 2003, shortly after the Erdoğan government came to power.
In short, in post-Kemalist Turkey, civilian supremacy now regularly prevails. This may be routine for Western democracies, but it is nothing less than a giant step forward for Turkish political standards. The Erdoğan government wants the country to take a further step towards democratization on Sept. 12, when a referendum will decide the fate of a package of constitutional amendments that strengthen the power of the civilian judiciary. Once again, conservatives are pushing the agenda of change against the Kemalist elites. It doesn’t take much to predict that the morning of Sept. 13 will be another victory for post-Kemalism.
