hands of an elected national assembly that had appointed Ataturk as president, but only
the Republican People’s Party, founded by Ataturk, was allowed to contest elections;
Ataturk himself held nearly all real political power. In addition, Ataturk developed a series
of ideas for the Turkish nation-state that guided the development of Turkey. To one
degree or another, his ideas remain the core concepts of the Turkish state. Referred to as
Kemalism, or the Six Arrows, the ideas are reformism, republicanism, secularism, nation-
alism, populism, and etatism (or stateism, a guiding role for the state in the economy).
Democracy, absent from Ataturk’s ideas, did not make an appearance in Turkey
in any genuine form until 1950—a dozen years after Ataturk’s death and the year an
opposition party swept the Republican People’s Party from power. Since that time,
multiparty elections have been the norm in Turkey, often with so many parties
involved that no single party managed to win a majority of parliamentary seats. The
result has been a series of unstable coalition governments that failed to deal with the
challenges facing Turkey, especially modernizing the economy to meet the needs of
global competition.
Four times—in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997—Turkey’s military has intervened
to remove governments that the generals determined to be ineffective or heading in
the wrong direction. The last of these interventions, in 1997, was what Turks call a
“soft coup” to force the resignation of the country’s first prime minister from an openly
Islamist political party, the Welfare Party. The military long had considered itself the
guardian of Ataturk’s legacy, so its actions in 1997 were widely seen as upholding the
principle of secularism. Five years later, however, Turkey’s voters gave a much stronger
mandate to another Islamist party, the AKP, while at the same time ousting from office
nearly all the traditional politicians who had governed in preceding decades. The AKP,
led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul, established one of the most
competent governments in years. In 2007, however, the generals again intervened in
politics, trying this time to block Erdogan’s preferred candidate for president. This
action prompted Erdogan to call the early elections that his party won, a victory widely
viewed as a public rebuke to the generals.
Nationalism has also been a driving force in modern Turkish history, besmirch-
ing the international reputation of Turks for nearly a century. During the last decades
of the Ottoman Empire, a new generation of leaders who called themselves the Young
Turks emerged to proclaim the virtues of the Turkish nation. The Young Turks seized
power in 1908 and six years later dragged the empire into World War I on what would
prove to be the losing side. A consequence of the Ottomans’ entry into the war was
a movement by ethnic Armenians in eastern Turkey to align themselves with czarist
Russia on the opposing side in the war. The Young Turks reacted in 1915 by forcing
the Armenians out of Turkey and into what is present-day Syria. Hundreds of thou-
sands of Armenians died of starvation, disease, and maltreatment during the forced
deportations. The exact number of deaths remains in dispute, with Armenians insist-
ing that approximately 1.5 million people died, and most Turkish sources putting the
figure at 200,000 or less. These deaths—which Armenians call the first genocide of
the twenty-first century—trigger such emotion that successive Turkish governments
have threatened to suspend diplomatic relations with countries that endorse the
Armenian version of what occurred.
Turkish nationalists also have failed to come to terms with ethnic Kurds, partic-
ularly those who insist on a national right to an independent Kurdistan. For eight
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