This panel explores several ways in which the legal arena has witnessed ideological contestation in the history of the Turkish Republic. As a group, the papers track the consolidation and transformation of the Kemalist regime from its early days through to the politically fraught years that preceded the 1980 coup d’etat. In turn, each paper will demonstrate how legal processes such as amnesty provisions, resettlement policies, political trials, and legal thought acted as venues for the negotiation of many central questions of the Turkish republican project. Questions surrounding the nature of Turkish national identity, the character of the Turkish state, and Turkey’s relationships with its neighbors and geopolitical powers are threaded through each investigation. While each of these papers builds off of scholarship on the political history of Turkey, their emphasis on processes of lawmaking, law enforcement, and litigation offer seldom applied methods of analysis, and bring to light some critically overlooked sources.
A deeper study of the way concepts of legal “rationality” have been deployed to undergird the ideological project of Kemalism, as offered across these papers, is crucial to advancing our understanding of how thoroughly ideological policies are made legible for the public by making claims to practicality and widespread normative ideas about how peoples and nations ought naturally be organized. In the contexts of resettlement policies that relied on a widely held assumption that ethnic homogeneity was rational, and in the faith that “apolitical” and “technocratic” state apparatuses could bridge deep social and political divides, two of these papers investigate a kind of positivist rationality couched in legalistic language that represents an intellectual and political through line across Turkey’s various governments from the 1920s to the 1970s.
Two other papers share new vantages onto the ways political crimes were named, prosecuted, and ultimately forgiven in Turkey’s single party era (1923-1950). By using the legal forum to carry out acts of political repression, and political mercy, the government of the Republican People’s Party knew well how to use legal reasoning to punish, coopt, or silence their ideological foes while maintaining the legitimacy of the state during its formative, and precarious, first decades. These two papers demonstrate how the Kemalist state managed the intense ideological entanglements of this period through the court system, and through the selective pardoning and application of amnesty laws. Together, they suggest new ways in which Kemalist ideology was legitimized under the single-party state.
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Alexander E. Balistreri
The “unmixing of peoples” in the Ottoman-Russian borderlands was a century-long and traumatic process, both violent and voluntary, state-led and local. Most historical literature has naturally focused on the genocidal deportations in these borderlands during the First and Second World Wars. The logic of ethnic unmixing, however, was inherent to the idea of the modern state and extended into the peacetime laws and practices of the early Turkish Republic and Soviet Union. This paper examines the formation and implementation of a new, putatively “rational” population policy in the Turkish-Soviet border region in the mid-twentieth century. The paper covers three interrelated topics: resettlement policies, new controls over trans-border movement, and the use of internal exile as a means of social engineering. In addition to being inspired by “legal-rational” ideologies of domestic ethnic homogenization and population control, such ideologies, this paper demonstrates, transcended state boundaries, and population policies were actually coordinated by the Turkish Republic and the Soviet Union. Archival materials from Turkey and the Caucasus, alongside published memoirs, the contemporary press, and family histories constitute this paper’s source material.
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Dr. Senem Aslan
When are states more likely to pardon political prisoners? What tangible and symbolic functions do political amnesties serve? What do political amnesties imply for state-society relations and state ideology? This paper seeks to answer these questions through an examination of political amnesties and the relationship between the state and political prisoners in the early Republican period in Turkey. While amnesties have been generally granted for political crimes in other countries, in Turkey amnesties rarely applied to political prisoners. This is despite the fact that Turkey is one of the top countries in the world for its very high frequency of amnesty laws and successive governments have been quite willing to enact amnesties for criminal prisoners to deal with an overburdened justice system. Nevertheless the single party period (1923-1946) stands as an exception. In the first decades of the Turkish Republic the state pardoned many of its opponents, including Kurdish and reactionary rebels, political exiles (150’ers), opposition journalists, and those accused of planning the assassination of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. This is surprising because the single party era is considered to be one of Turkey’s most repressive periods when the Kemalist state did not tolerate any challenges to its rigid ideology. Focusing on the single-party period, this paper explores why intense political repression went hand in hand with political amnesties. I argue that the Turkish state used political amnesties as a tool to quell and coopt political opposition. Amnesties were symbolic displays of power that helped construct an image of the Kemalist regime as omnipotent and merciful. By compelling political prisoners to publicly acknowledge their past crime, amnesties were meant to weaken the legitimacy of the opposition’s political claims and assure their withdrawal from political contention. The research of this paper is mainly based on primary sources, such as parliamentary records, memoirs, and archival documents.
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Dr. James Ryan
In the years just before and after the end of World War II, as Turkey tentatively backed away from its commitments to Nazi Germany, and lurched towards a new alliance with the emergent Anglo-American victors in hopes of securing protection against Soviet demands on its territory, two high-profile political trials resulted in the silencing of prominent proponents of fascism and socialism in Turkey. This article compares the 1944-45 trial of a group of twenty-eight writers, college students, and former military officials known as the “Pan-Turanists” – Turkish ultranationalists who envisaged a “Greater Turkestan Union” and were supported by the German embassy – with the 1946 trial of three leftists who wrote for Tan – a popular daily newspaper in Istanbul that was destroyed in a riot the year before. In the case of the Pan-Turanists, the closed-door proceedings ultimately sent a dozen of the group’s members – including the eventual founder of the Nationalist Action Party, Alparslan Türke? – to prison, where some would experience torture. The editors of Tan would escape prison terms but were financially ruined in their defense and robbed of their livelihood, resulting in their self-imposed exile to the Soviet Union in 1950. Utilizing American and Turkish archival material, as well as periodicals, and memoirs of the trials participants, this paper elaborates on the ideological effects of Turkey’s putatively pragmatic diplomatic policy during the war, and argues that the suppression of radical viewpoints during and after the war hindered the early development of Turkey’s first successful opposition party, the Democrat Party, which ran in its first parliamentary election in July 1946. Understanding the effect of these trials is crucial, as they laid significant groundwork in the domestic arena for Turkey’s Cold War era partnership with the United States, established strict, legally enforced ideological boundaries for the early multiparty period, and would fuel the political narrative of leftist and nationalist opposition politics in Turkey in the decades following their conclusion. More broadly, the paper asks key questions about the role of political trials in democratizing governments, and the role of legal ideology in defining ethnicity and citizenship.
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Mr. Joakim Parslow
From the early to mid-1970s, Turkish lawyers, judges, criminologists, and information scientists participated in a series of conferences on “cybernetics in law.” The initiative came from Toygar Akman, a philosopher, lawyer, and member of a circle of theorists consisting also of Ayhan Songar, a neurologist, Sedat Akal?n, an economics and business scholar, and Ali ?rtem, a management consultant. Although cybernetics had by then become the centerpiece of government-funded research programs as far apart as Chile and the USSR, in Turkey it had remained limited to this small group of thinkers at the margins of intellectual life. Yet from 1971 onward, their futuristic explorations took center stage with promises of computerized identification of criminals and automated judging machines that would prevent case backlogs and conflicting appellate rulings.
What explains this sudden interest in cybernetics among Turkey’s top legal thinkers and practitioners? What implications did it have for Turkish political-legal thought during the turbulent decade before the 1980 military coup? In this paper, I examine the extant conference proceedings and surrounding discourse on technological approaches to governing and judging to argue that Turkey’s short-lived cybernetics craze must be seen in the context of a wider turn toward technocratic governance, a turn which came in reaction to the violent politicization of state institutions such as the judiciary and police during the 1960s. After the March 1971 coup, when the Armed Forces installed an “apolitical” cabinet while allowing ultranationalists in the security forces to torture thousands of leftist detainees, statesmen from the center left to the far right sought a new scientific-administrative paradigm on which to build a more stable form of governance than the democratic Rechtsstaat embodied in the 1961 Constitution. Cybernetics appeared to offer an approach unblemished by association with the major schools of thought, whether Marxist, conservative, or Kemalist. Drawing on the history of second-generation systems theory, I argue that while much of this theorization manifested a creative, optimistic approach to technology and life that might now be labeled transhumanist, the brief but significant introduction of cybernetic thinking into Turkish state circles also signaled the longing for a disembodied and therefore morally and politically unassailable position of governing beyond the distinction between power and law, friend and enemy, rights-bearing legal subject and torturable bare life.
