Modern Turkey’s Founding Principles
DOCUMENT IN CONTEXT
No country is the creation of a single person, but one man left an extraordinary
imprint, still very much visible, on Turkey. During a two-decade period, Mustafa
Kemal—named Ataturk, or “father of the Turks” by his compatriots in 1934—dragged
Turkey from a collapsed empire into nationhood, drafted a set of principles that con-
tinue to guide Turkey, shifted the country’s fundamental outlook from the East to the
West, and altered the daily lives of Turks by implementing changes in areas as diverse
as the alphabet and clothing.
Ataturk used dictatorial means to reach the ends he sought. Only a dozen years
after his death in 1938 did Turkey have its first change of government through open
elections. Even so, Turkey’s advance toward democracy, which remains turbulent early
in the twenty-first century, might have been even more uncertain had not Ataturk
imposed his will on his country at a crucial time in its history.
After leading the 1919–1920 revolt against Greece and the Western powers—a
revolt considered by Turks to be their war of independence—Ataturk emerged as the
dominant figure in the Turkish world following the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. He
then set out to transform Turkey from a backward society into a modern, Western-
oriented secular country along the lines of Britain, France, or even the defeated Ger-
many. Ataturk led Turkey from 1923 until his death, but his formal position as pres-
ident fails to adequately acknowledge his role as the initiator and promoter of Turkey’s
march toward modernity.
Many of the changes that Ataturk implemented in Turkey represent the rapid
acceleration of a reform process that began in the late nineteenth century, during the
final decades of Ottoman rule. Ataturk was one of the so-called Young Turks, who
seized effective control of the Ottoman Empire in 1908 and sought to modernize it,
only to push it into collapse by aligning with Germany at the outset of World War
I. Among the Young Turks’ contributions was their advocacy of the concept of eth-
nic Turks as a nation, rather than mere residents of an empire ruled over by the
Ottoman dynasty. Ataturk incorporated Turkish nationalism into a series of ideas that
came to be known as Kemalism, or the Six Arrows.
Six Principles of Kemalism
The six principles of Kemalism usually are listed in the following order: reformism,
republicanism, secularism, nationalism, populism, and etatism (stateism). These ideas,
even when taken together, do not constitute a formal political theory. In fact, Ataturk
never fully explained Kemalism. Rather, it evolved through the various decrees and
laws that he used to implement the policies that flowed from his ideas. In 1931, these
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