The Kemalist Legacy
In a thirty-six-hour oration to his party spread out over five days in October 1927, Ataturk
barely mentioned his political ideas. Instead, he presented an extended justification of the
actions he had taken since the war of independence in 1919–1920. At the end of the
speech, Ataturk appealed to subsequent generations of Turks to defend the “national inde-
pendence” that he and his colleagues had won. In the future, he warned, “there will be
ill-will, both in the country itself and abroad, which will try to tear this treasure from you.”
The six principles of Kemalism remain at the core of Turkish public life although
most of them have been diluted to one degree or another over the years. Some aspects
of secularism, for example, were modified during the 1950s after the defeat of Ataturk’s
Republican People’s Party, and the election of 2007 was widely viewed, in part, as a
referendum on how strictly Turkey should adhere to Ataturk’s secularist philosophy.
State intervention in the economy was curtailed under mandates from the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund, which extended a major loan to Turkey in 1999 after the econ-
omy went into a deep recession. Economic reforms to reduce the government’s role
in the economy also were key to the governing philosophy of the Justice and Devel-
opment Party when it first came to office in 2002.
Democracy was notably not among Ataturk’s six principles. Under his autocratic
rule, Turkey had just one political party—his Republican People’s Party—and the
Grand National Assembly essentially acted as a rubber stamp for the president.
Ataturk’s party continued to govern for a dozen years after his death, but lost its soli-
tary on power in 1950, when the Democratic Party won the country’s first multiparty
elections. The Democratic Party would govern until its ouster by Turkey’s first mili-
tary coup in 1960 (Military Intervention in Politics, p. 639).
Following is an excerpt from a speech delivered over five days, from October 15 to
October 20, 1927, by Ataturk to the ruling Republican People’s Party, meeting in
Angora, Turkey. In this excerpt, Ataturk calls on his colleagues to defend Turkish
independence against domestic and foreign challenges.DOCUMENT
Ataturk’s 1927 Speech to the
Republican People’s Party
OCTOBER 1927The result we have attained [today] is the fruit of teachings which arose from cen-
turies of suffering, and the price of streams of blood which have drenched every foot
of the ground of our beloved Fatherland.
This holy treasure I lay in the hands of the youth of Turkey.
Turkish Youth! Your primary duty is ever to preserve and defend the National
independence, the Turkish Republic.
638 TURKEY