Abstract
The 1929 crisis and the consequent economic policies wreaked havoc on the agricultural sector and cultivators’ living standards in Turkey, and the following dispossession process brought about discontent that became apparent with the emergence of the Free Republican Party (FRP) in 1930. The brutal repression of the widespread support for the FRP in the public meetings and the elections and, lastly, the closure of the FRP was the reflexes of the ruling cadre leading to a return to the Republican People’s Party (RPP) ’s authoritarian single-party regime. In addition, the RPP officially adopted statism as the economic policy in the 1931 Party Congress.
While the establishment of the authoritarian single-party regime has been analyzed as the imposition of a rule in a top-down manner, the development of statism has been discussed as an example of good decision-making of the ruling cadre. Besides, the literature has focused mainly on either policy-making at the top of the state or the economic conditions and discontent at the societal level. Even though the close relationship between widespread discontent following the economic crisis in 1930 and upcoming policy formation has been mentioned, it has yet to be studied in depth. To fully understand the development of these policies, it is necessary to reckon the state formation, policy making, and social conditions as the forms of the same underlying social relations and analyze them in their unity. Therefore, this paper aims to answer how the authoritarian single-party rule and statism converged in 1930s Turkey in and through contradictory and conflicting social relations. The answer requires archival research that would enable the identification of the demands raised by the cultivators and expose the formation of statist economic policies and authoritarian single-party regime through process tracing.
Based on the archival documents, namely the RPP’s provincial congresses’ wish lists, the records of Mustafa Kemal’s journey in the country after the closure of the FRP, parliamentary minutes, and newspapers, I argue that statism and authoritarian single-party rule developed as confluent tendencies in tandem in response to the popular discontent that became apparent in the FRP experience. That is to say; the ruling cadre reframed the contradictory and conflicting relations in its interaction with the dissidents, specifically the cultivators, which ranged from oppression with violence, collecting demands, and developing policy that promised to integrate the demands of different social classes in the regime.
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