This paper addresses why the common challenges of late development have generated starkly different responses in the global south. More specifically, I analyze what I term the national developmentalist regimes in Mexico, Turkey, Argentina, and Egypt during the middle half of the 20th century. The larger purpose of this paper is to situate Kemalism as part of a broader category of reformist regimes in the developing world and to facilitate its systematic investigation. Whereas nationalist regimes in Mexico and Egypt displayed astonishing durability even during times of economic downturn, Kemalist and Peronist elites failed to establish a stable political order in Turkey and Argentina, respectively. In particular, what accounts for the rapid demise of the Kemalist single-party regime? I attribute this outcome to Mustafa Kemal’s reluctance, given the low-level of intra-elite conflict and limited popular mobilization, to invest in the building of state infrastructural power and ruling party strength at the onset of his regime. Due to the relative weakness of ruling-party and state corporatist institutions, in sharp contract with Mexico and Egypt, the Kemalist elites could only establish a limited political base and thus remained vulnerable to the defection of elites, who could mobilize popular classes against the governing party.

The political career of Mustafa Sarigul, the main opposition candidate for Istanbul’s 2014 mayoral election, illustrates the factionalized nature of Turkish politics—and particularly of its second largest party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP). This paper uses Sarigul’s biography, drawing on and contextualizing his recent memoirs to demonstrate what are, too often, generalizations about Turkish politics. Like many Turks, Sarigul was born in rural Turkey, migrating to Istanbul in the mid-1960s. By becomming an activist in the CHP, which ran Istanbul in the 1970s, Sarigul found employment and connections. During the years following the 1980 coup, Sarigul embraced the capitalist spirt of the neo-liberal Ozal era, focusing his energies on developing a business empire. His election to the Turkish parliament in 1987 drew him into both important debates (such as constitutional reform) and political battles (as various factions on the Turkish left struggled for influence). Once again out of office during the 1990s, Sarigul become increasingly rich and influential in the politics of Istanbul’s Sisli municipality. His election as Sisli mayor in 1999 was due to his excellent skill at retail politics and the shocking corruption of his competitors. During his first term as mayor, a financial crisis discredited many of the country’s most powerful politiains and helped usher in Turkey’s current ruling-party, the Justice and Development Party. Sarigul weathered the stormy political currents of the early 2000s and was reelected in 2004 with an even greater portion of the vote—the greatest, in fact, of any CHP mayor in the country. His impressive showing convinced him to challenge the CHP leader, Deniz Baykal. The ensuing leadership struggle (and the violently climactic party congress that resulted) illustrate the ways in which party leaders can fend off challenges and discpline their intra-party opponents, thereby making clear what are often abstract statements about Turkey’s “leader-dominated” parties. By focusing on the experience of a single politian, this paper seeks to both bring to attention a fascinating individual and also highlight broader themes in Turkish politics.

Despite a very broad societal consensus in Turkey on the need for a new constitution, the parliamentary process supported by an energetic political-public sphere failed. This failure in drafting a new and democratic constitution, on the other hand, has not been a surprise, because even if all major political actors in the process seem to have agreed on the need to achieve a new constitution, the languages preferred therein have been quite diverse and contradictory. This diversity and contradiction, I argue, can be understood best by a reference to three different theoretical approaches to the concept of the political with corresponding notions of the constitution. First is Carl Schmitt’s perspective that subjects the validity of the constitution (and the legal order in general) to a prior political decision on the identity of the community and its friends and foes (“politics as us vs. them”). David Easton’s understanding of politics as “authoritative allocation of values”, on the other hand, corresponds to a constitutional model based on “the market model of democracy” with a notion of “politics as business”. Jürgen Habermas’s perspective on law and democracy, as the third alternative, puts the emphasis on the need for a procedural legitimation of collectively binding rules and thus provides for a critical understanding of the relationship between politics and the constitution. It has to be added that the Habermasian perspective differs crucially from the Schmittian and Eastonian approaches in its normative stance on the need for transcending the nation-state framework of constitutional politics. As for the Turkish context, this paper wants to show that the failure of the new constitution-making process can be explained as a consequence of a deadlock between “Turkish Schmittians” (i.e. political actors subjecting the constitution and the law to antagonistic self-imaginations of the political community, that is “the nation”). By way of conclusion, the paper would argue that, Turkey, both as a member of Council of Europe and a candidate for EU membership, must adopt a Habermasian approach to politics and the constitution.

The main focus of this paper is to address the conditions of internally driven regime-change. In particular, I explore the role of the military and the labor unions as sources of regime-change via their impact on socio-political mobilization in Turkey between 1960 and 1980. Therefore, I will trace the necessary conditions for political mobility of the military and the labor unions, and how this creates avenues for social mobility. Hence, this paper will attempt to answer two key questions: What is the relationship between sources of social mobilization and regime-change? And, how has the level of politicization in the military and the labor unions affected regime-change in Turkey during the three coups between 1960 and 1980? The framework presented here unpacks the levels of politicization across the following five factors to reach more compelling explanations for the impact of politicization of the military and labor on regime-change: (1) The sociology of the military/labor organization (2) mission and the role of the military/labor unions in politics, (3) the status of the military/labor unions within society, (4) the role of military/labor unions as a source of political and social mobilization, and 5) foreign influence. This paper argues that when the military is the main source of social mobilization, regimes will have a higher likelihood of experiencing military intervention into politics during periods of internal unrest, such as experienced in Turkey in three different coups between 1960 and 1980. This case study offers a better understanding of the nexus between civil-military relations and the labor movement, and their effect on regime-change and political stability. The findings are applicable beyond the Turkish case, as we look at contemporary civil-military and labor relations elsewhere in the Middle East.

Throughout the twentieth century literary representations of bureaucracy that range from the satirical to the tragic came to constitute a category of novels that developed irrespective of the conventional boundaries of national literature or historical period and to include diverse works, such as Franz Kafka's classic The Trial (1925), the Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim's The Committee (1981), and the Albanian author Ismail Kadare's The Palace of Dreams (1981) set in a fictional Ottoman dream archive. These novels, which typically chronicle an ill-fated individual's struggles within a mysterious, burgeoning bureaucracy, provide pointed commentary and critiques not only of the government institutions that form their subject matter but also related topics, which include institutional networks of information and power, censorship, national narrative, and subversion. Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü [The Time Regulation Institute], the final novel by the renowned Turkish author Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962), which was serialized in 1954 and published in 1961, falls firmly within this bureaucratic literary tradition with its depiction of a seemingly naive narrator who becomes embroiled in an institution whose mission is the regulation of time. Current scholarship analyzes this novel primarily in relation to Tanpınar's implicit commentary on the Ottoman past and the sweeping modernization reforms implemented by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk after the formation of the Turkish Republic; however, when contextualized with Tanpınar's oeuvre and Turkish literature of the 1950s and 60s, this work proves an anomaly stylistically and thematically in its focus on bureaucracy. Why did Tanpınar buck the literary trend to social realism in Turkey and his own stylistic inclinations in order to experiment in the literature of bureaucracy during this period? What does the novel reveal about the intersection of Turkish politics and literature and the role of the author vis-à-vis the state? Through an examination the shifting politics of the Turkish literary landscape in the 1950s and 60s as well as the comparative canon of the literature of bureaucracy, this paper investigates the timeliness of Tanpınar's Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü and Turkish bureaucracy from a literary perspective.