Turkey after Atatürk
Ataturk died in Istanbul on 10 November 1938 caused an outpouring of grief throughout the Turkish nation. With much ceremony, the president of the body transported to Ankara and in a temporary grave, from which it was in 1953 moved to a new mausoleum built on a hill overlooking Ankara. The building has since become a national shrine.
The stability of the new republic was obvious by the smoothness of the presidential succession.The day after Atatürk’s death, the Grand National Assembly elected his chief lieutenant, Inönü, president. Celal Bayar was, his successor as Prime Minister Inönü continued in 1937 in this office.
World War II
As tensions in Europe increased, Inönü determined to Turkey neutral in the event of a war unless the country’s vital interests were clearly at stake. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 prompted Turkey to sign a mutual assistance pact with Britain and France in October. Secure, the Government concluded a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany on 18 June 1941, just four days before the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. The military successes of the Axis powers contributed increased pro-German sentiment, even in some official circles. It appears, however, Inönü never wavered from its position that the Axis powers could not win the war have. Despite German pressure, Turkey at no time allowed the passage of Axis troops, ships or aircraft, has been conscientiously by or about Turkey and its waters and the Convention of Montreux enforced in the street. Turkey broke diplomatic relations with the government of Adolf Hitler in August 1944 and in February 1945 declared war on Germany, a necessary condition for participation in the Conference on International Organization in San Francisco in April 1945 instead of which the United Nations (UN ) emerged. Turkey was thus one of the original members of the fifty-first world organization.
Multi-party system, 1946-1960
The UN Charter was approved by the Grand National Assembly in August 1945, but brought the debate on the measure during the summer through Turkey’s first major post-war domestic political conflict. A proposal by former Prime Minister Bayar, Adnan Menderes and two additional CHP deputies calling for changes in Turkish law be entered to the domestic application of the freedoms and rights for which the government had allegedly by the adoption of the principles of the Charter of the United Nations subscribed insurance. If the proposal was rejected, leaving his four supporters of the CHP and resigned her seat in the Assembly.
Despite the rejection of Menderes’s proposal, the government relaxed controls many wars and agreed to the further democratization of the political process. In January 1946 the Democratic Party (DP), is registered under the guidance of Bayar and Menderes; subsequently became the focus of opposition to the CHP. The general elections in July 1946 gave the DP sixty-two seats of 465 in the assembly, demonstrating the attractiveness of the new party. Although the DP represented the interests of private business and industry, it also received strong support in rural areas.
In May 1950 general elections, about 88 percent of the electorate of about 8.5 million went to the polls again a large majority of DP. In the Assembly was 408 seats, the DP and only sixty-nine the CHP, whose unbroken dominance since the founding of the republic was thus ended.Bayar was elected president of the new assembly hall, in place of Inönü, and named Menderes prime minister. As expected, reduced the Menderes government economic reliance on state funding of direction, while private companies and foreign investment in industrial development.
In May 1954 election, the DP increased its parliamentary majority. In making its election victory as a mandate for radical changes, including the reform of the civil service and state enterprises, the Menderes government obtained the passage of a legislative package means that the opposition characterized as “undemocratic and authoritarian.” The CHP concentrated his attacks on the government-backed law that limits the freedom of the press. Tension increased when was the press law and other restrictions imposed on public meeting several months before the planned elections in October 1957 attracted. The Government argued that the necessary legislation to prevent “irresponsible journalists” from inciting disorder. The inability of the two major political parties in the Assembly brought together, passed the parliamentary process to a standstill as months. was during a tour of central Anatolia by CHP leader Inönü in early 1960 gave rise to outbreaks of violence along its route, the Menderes government reacted by suspending all political activity and declare martial law. 28 April 1960, were students who were demonstrating in Istanbul against the government policies in defiance of martial law fired from the police and some were killed. The following week, staged by cadets of the Military Academy for a protest march in solidarity with the student movement, it brings an element of the armed confrontation with the civilian authorities.
The Armed Forces Coup and Interim Rule, 1960-61
Atatürk had always insisted that the armed forces should, as a national institution of partisanship and wrangling, to stay out of politics. The military leadership had traditionally subscribed to this viewpoint, with the proviso that a major role of the army as guardian of the constitution and Kemalism act was. By 1960, with the military already deeply in political affairs because the government involved the use of martial law to enforce its policy, joined the senior command that the government had left Kemalist principles and that the Republic was in danger of disintegration. On 27 May 1960, Turkish army units under the direction of the Chief of Staff, Cemal Gürsel, seized the main government buildings and communications centers and arrested President Bayar, Prime Minister Menderes, and most of the DP representatives in the Grand National Assembly, and a large number of other public servants. Those arrested were charged with the abolition of the constitution and establishing a dictatorship.
The coup was little violence, and so could easily acceptable in the country. The government, the Committee of National Unity (CNU), the thirty-eight officers who had organized the coup replaced composed. The Committee has acted as the supreme authority to carry out the appointment of a cabinet, initially consisting of five officers and thirteen civilians executive functions. The number of civilians in the Cabinet, but was later reduced to three. General Gürsel, who had fought at Gallipoli under Atatürk, took over temporarily the positions of President, Prime Minister and Minister of Defense. In the beginning was Gürsel that the Committee would normally be of a temporary nature and that the government would be returned to civilian hands at an early date.
The most pressing problems of the CNU in the first months faced after the coup were economic.The regime had been toppled responsible for inflation and heavy debt, poverty and austerity measures had taken to stabilize the economy. An Economic Planning Agency, State Planning Organization was established to study social and economic conditions and to develop the country’s five-year development plans.
In January 1961, a Constituent Assembly was formed, which participated in the CNU. This interim legislature a new constitution, ratified after a long debate, in May and submitted to a referendum in July. This Constitution, the so-called Second Republic of Turkey was founded, contained a number of significant deviations from 1924 constitution but continued to embody the principles of Kemalism. The new constitution was approved by 60 percent of the voters. The large opposition vote was a disappointment to the CNU and showed that sympathy for the DP persisted, particularly in socially conservative small towns and rural constituencies.
Meanwhile the trial of some 600 former government officials and DP officials in October 1960 had begun on the island in the Bosporus Yassiada. All but about 100 of those tried were convicted, and fifteen death sentences were pronounced. Partly in response to public appeals for leniency, the death sentences of former President Bayar and eleven others were commuted to life imprisonment, but Menderes and two former ministers were hanged.
Fourteen political parties offered candidates in the October 1961 elections, but made only four won seats in the bicameral Grand National Assembly under the new Constitution. The results gave the CHP 173 seats in the House – the 450-member National Assembly – and only thirty-six in the 150-member Senate. The Justice Party (Adalet Partisi – AP), the generally recognized as the heir of the DP received 158 seats in the House and seventy in the top. The remaining seats were between the New Party of Turkey and the Republican Peasant Party Nation Party, later renamed divided Nationalist Action Party (milliyetçi Haraket Partisi – MHP). The New Party was supported by the DP Turkey onetime dissident who led with Menderes in the mid-1950s, broken, and the MHP attracted militant had rights. Because neither of the two major parties offer a majority to form a broad coalition either between the two major parties, or between one of them would be necessary, and the two smaller parties.
Policy and external relations in the 1960s
The new bicameral elected General Gürsel president of the republic. On taking office, he asked seventy-eight-year-old former President Inönü to form a government. Inönü, who was only appointed tries Prime Minister of Atatürk in 1923, an agreement with the AP for a coalition to achieve in that party an equal number of cabinet posts with the CHP share would, but party leaders failed to resolve their differences amnesty for the condemned in the studies Yassiada.Gürsel Cevdet Sunay and President General, Chief of Staff, warned that the irresponsibility of some lawmakers could be a military intervention in politics to provoke again. In February 1962 a group of officers staged a revolt in Ankara in protest against the role of AP in the Government proposed amnesty plans. The uprising was quickly suppressed, and suspected sympathizers in the officer corps were purged. Inönü subsequently introduced legislation to grant amnesty, the officers involved in the revolt. In October, 283 of those who had been convicted in Yassiada, executive clemency has been given freely, on the recommendation of the Assembly. Two years before the former President Bayar and the other captives were freed last.
The AP has such significant gains in municipal elections in 1964 that came as Prime Minister Inönü. After unsuccessful attempts by the AP and the CHP a government, an interim administration form has been mandated to serve until the October 1965 general elections. The voters in this election gave the AP a clear majority in the Grand National Assembly. The vote allowed the new prime minister, forty-four-year-old Suleyman Demirel to form a one-party government and claim a mandate for his legislative program. An engineer and former head of the National Water Authority, Demirel was a one-time protege of Menderes. Although Demirel cultivated a pragmatic and technocratic image of the young party, inherited the AP to the DP’s identification with right-wing populism and supplies the same constituency on a broad basis.The party withdrew support from the industry and by craftsmen and shopkeepers, but his real strength lay in the peasantry and the large number of workers who had recently come into the cities from the countryside. Although it never denied the principle of secularism enshrined in Kemalism, promoted tolerance of the AP open expression of the traditional Islam that many in these latter groups filed appeals. Although a large part accepted for state enterprises in a mixed economy, the AP also encourages the development of a stronger private sector than before, and was receptive to allowing foreign investment in Turkey.
Although Demirel increase in defense spending and took a hard line on law-and-order issues military leaders remained suspicious of his party because of its roots in the DP. Demirel seemed his position among them improved by supporting the successful presidential candidacy of General Gürsel, if Sunay, died in office in 1966, but opposition would have the military later withdraw the Prime Minister on legislation, the full political rights back to the surviving former leaders Government forced DP. Enactment of legislation was also hampered by other growing factional divisions in the AP. The representation of the business-oriented Liberal Party wing Demirel urged more to the market economy. He was with some issues forward and pushed others by a traditionalist wing that was socially conservative, more agrarian question in their orientation and had links with the Islamist movement.
to participate after the CHP in the 1965 general election defeat, the party in an internal debate to determine their position in the left-right continuum. At forty-year-old Bulent Ecevit succeeded Inönü as party leader the following year he tried to identify the CHP with the Social Democratic parties of Western Europe. The party platform favored state-directed investment to private investment and recommended limits on foreign participation in the Turkish economy. In addition, a rapid expansion of public services financed by taxes calls, which would limit the growth of personal income. Ecevit said the CHP’s commitment to the maintenance of political secularism in contrast to the AP leniency in the face of a revival of religious influence. Although promised to respect Turkey’s defense, he insists on an independent foreign policy to enhance efforts to bilateral relations with the Soviet Union included.
As party leader Ecevit, the CHP tried by a party elite to transform the nation from above into a mass movement with a broad constituency in the political process guidance. Ecevit socialist rhetoric was compatible with the Kemalist principles of state management of the economy, but the shift to the left he opened causing discord in the party. In 1967 forty-five CHP deputies broke up a centrist party to form won almost 7 percent of the votes in the October 1969 elections.Both major parties lost votes, but right of center parties, the AP-LED, outpolled the CHP and the small leftist parties of almost two minutes before one of the AP and the Grand National Assembly was able to increase the majority of sixteen. Some observers indicated that the election results a polarization of Turkish politics that would be the AP and CHP pull in opposite directions and tighten political extremism.
The extreme left was in the Grand National Assembly in the 1960s, represented by the Turkish Workers’ Party (TWP). His platform for the redistribution of land, nationalization of industry and financial institutions named, and the exclusion of foreign capital, and called for closer cooperation with the Soviet Union. The party attracted the support of only a small number of trade unionists and leftist intellectuals. Though it had won fifteen seats in 1961 elections, averaged its share of the vote in 1965 and 1969, fewer than 3 percent. Of greater consequence in the 1960s – and for the future – the party of the extreme rights of Alparslan Turkes, one of the architects of the coup was led from 1960. Turkes was among the officers of the CNU for opposing the restoration of democratic institutions has been displaced. He later joined the army and in 1965 took control of the Republican Peasant Party Nation Party, later the MHP. Turkes came to the ultranationalistic and authoritarian character of his party to embody. Labeled by some as fascist and requested that the MHP strong government measures to maintain order and management of the economy. Although sympathetic private ownership, the party was hostile to capitalism and foreign investment. In essence, secular, which considers MHP Yet Islam as one of the pillars of the Turkish state and Turkes links included on religion in his nationalist platform.
Turkes party had won 14 percent of the vote and fifty-four seats in 1961 elections, but electoral support dropped to below 3 percent in 1965, when many marginal right-wing voters, the AP switched on. In 1969, the MHP was reduced to a single seat in the Grand National Assembly, but gave it Tuerkes hate speech and confrontational, the party more important than the strength in the elections alone would have been justified. He organized the party on military lines and indoctrinated party activists, strict discipline on them. The party youth movement included a paramilitary arm, the “Grey Wolves”, whose members left disturbed student activities, initiated physical attacks on political opponents and to avenge attacks on MHP members. MHP-incited violence escalated in the late 1960s and set the tone for the volatile political atmosphere of the 1970s.
Turkey’s relations with the United States grew rapidly in the aftermath of the Second World War.Turkey has developed a decidedly pro-Western stance of the Cold War in the late 1940s and in 1950, an infantry brigade sent to the Korean peninsula under UN command are serving. The pattern of close bilateral relations with the United States after the war that Turkish Foreign Relations labeled form began with an agreement signed in Ankara in September 1947 in implementing the policies of President Harry S. Truman the previous March are formulated.Known as the Truman Doctrine, the president’s policy statement clarifies United States intentions for the security of Turkey and Greece guaranteed. Truman won the approval of the Congress of the United States for an initial appropriation of U.S. $ 400,000,000, both countries support. Congress also authorized United States civilian and military personnel to assist in economic reconstruction and development and military training. Subsequently, Turkey took in the United States sponsored European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan). Turkey also was a member of the Council of Europe was added in 1959 and applied for association with the European Community (EC), later the European Union (EU – see Glossary). Aside after the coup of 1960, Turkey’s application was finally approved in 1964.
Turkey into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO included – was, see Glossary) joined in 1952 and 1955 with Great Britain, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan in the Baghdad Pact, a multilateral agreement that the defense of Central Treaty Organization (CENTO was ) according to overthrow the Iraqi monarchy in 1958. Turkey played an important diplomatic and strategic role as a bridge between NATO and CENTO alliance systems. The headquarters of NATO’s Allied Land Forces Southeastern Europe (LAND SOUTH EAST) was established in Izmir. In addition, developed in the near Adana operational bases for NATO purposes. A 1954 military facilities agreement with the United States allowed the inclusion of other NATO installations, and the stationing of U.S. troops in Turkey. The headquarters of CENTO were transferred to Ankara, when Iraq withdrew from the alliance.
Turkish participation in NATO was a regional conflict between Turkey and Greece with the complicated status of the island of Cyprus until 1960 a British crown colony. The Greek-speaking Cypriots sought an end to British rule and many disadvantaged Enosis (union) with Greece. For fear of discrimination and loss of identity, the Turkish minority countered by proposals for the division of the island between the two communities. Conflict between the two communities led to major crises in 1964 and again in 1967, while Turkey and Greece – both NATO members reached – just before the war.
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