The Empire And The Republic

Murat Metinsoy

In 1922, ‘the sick man of Europe’ was finally pronounced dead. Six centuries old, with a body slumped across three continents, the Ottoman Empire had fallen behind the West and nationalism was biting at its extremities. In its place would rise a secular republic, in which the sultan’s subjects would become modern citizens, the age-old privileges and discriminations based on religion and sex would be abolished, and wealth would belong to the people. But none of this would be possible without radical reforms. It would require a revolution. Coming into being in October 1923, the Republic of Turkey stood at a crossroads; as it enters its second century it stands at another. How to reconcile the cultural heritage of the Ottomans with the political values of the Republic?

Death throes

The Republic that was formally announced on 29 October 1923 was the manifestation of ideas and hazy imaginings that had been conjured during the 19th century. The reforming sultan Mahmut II, ruling between 1808 and 1839, had begun to dismantle some of the Empire’s cultural codes, big and small. In 1826 he abolished the Janissaries and established a European-style army. In 1829 he passed a hat reform, stipulating that officials and civilians alike should wear a plain fez. Mahmut’s educational reforms produced a new generation of Ottomans with a secular outlook, where the ideals of the French Revolution – hürriyet, müsavat, uhuvvet – found takers among the middle classes. The era following Mahmut’s reign – encompassing those of his sons Abdülmecid and Abdülaziz – became known as the Tanzimat, or ‘reorganisation’.

In 1876 a new sultan, Murad V, was brought to the throne in a coup led by a group of reformers known as the Young Ottomans. Dissatisfied with the limited scope of the Tanzimat, this opaque group was supposedly founded at a picnic in Istanbul’s Belgrad Forest in 1865. Its six original members soon grew to encompass army officers, bureaucrats, journalists and intellectuals. United by Ottoman patriotism and Islamism, they did not seek to overthrow the sultan, but to save the Ottoman Empire via the introduction of a constitution. Murad, the Young Ottomans’ sultan of choice, had agreed to introduce a constitution but, suffering from what appeared to be a nervous breakdown, he was declared unfit to rule and replaced by his younger brother, Abdülhamid II, who proclaimed the Empire’s first constitution (Kanuni Esasi) and the first parliament (Meclisi Mebusan) in 1876. But once in power, Abdülhamid exiled the leaders of the Young Ottomans, dissolved parliament and suspended the constitution under the pretext of the 1877 Russian-Ottoman War, in which the Empire lost much of its Balkan territory. Choosing Islam as his weapon against the dissolution of his Empire, Abdülhamid resorted to a pan-Islamist policy.

Young Turks celebrate the revolution which forced the re-establishment of constitutional government, 1908. GRANGER – Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

Abdülhamid’s despotic rule lasted around 30 years and created the strongest opposition movement in Turkish history because of his exclusionary, authoritarian and Islamist policies, as well as the enormous loss of land. Formed in 1889, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) was the most effective opposition group. Comprising Turkish, Albanian, Greek and Armenian intellectuals who sought to reinstate the constitutional regime and overthrow Abdülhamid, the CUP was part of a broader reforming movement known as the Young Turks. In 1908, the Young Turk Revolution – led by the CUP – forced Abdülhamid to restore the constitution he had abolished and then forced him from power the following year. The new sultan, Mehmed V, was completely subordinate to the CUP government and its military leaders.

The Ottomans picked the losing side in the First World War. The conflict both hastened the Empire’s demise and altered the composition of Anatolian society. Ethnic cleansing and deportations resulted in a savage loss of the Armenian population; a population exchange between Greece and Turkey following the peace increased the proportion of Muslims. The war – and the defeat – galvanised nationalist sentiment. In its wake, Mehmed VI (Vahdettin), who came to the throne in July 1919, hoped to secure his power by forging an alliance with Britain. Like his elder brother, Abdülhamid II, he tried to curtail the forces of parliament and secular bureaucracy.

Mehmed VI (Vahdettin), the final Ottoman sultan, 1918. Library of Congress. Public Domain.

In 1920 he signed the Treaty of Sèvres with the victorious Allies. The treaty partitioned the Ottoman lands, creating Armenian, Kurdish and Greek states, while putting other parts of Anatolia under Allied occupation. The sultan kept his throne and palace. Few things stirred nationalist sentiment as much as the treaty (its signatories would later be stripped of their citizenship). Largely forgotten in the West, its memory lingers in Turkey even today, manifested in a fear of conniving external enemies sometimes called ‘Sèvres Syndrome’. For Turkey’s nationalists, it became clear that as long as a sultanate existed, arbitrary rule for personal interests would continue.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

With parts of Anatolia under Allied occupation nationalist militia forces began to appear, especially in the east (where fears of an imminent Armenian invasion were prevalent) and in the west (where there were similar fears of a Greek one). Among the commanders of these new ‘National Forces’ (Kuvayı Milliye) was Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later Atatürk, ‘father Turk’), a soldier who had won a reputation as a war hero during the Ottomans’ successful defence of the Dardanelles.

There is a common misconception that Atatürk came from the Ottoman elite. He was born into a middle-class family in Salonica which in 1881, the year of his birth, was an important Ottoman port city with a large non-Muslim mercantile elite, where European goods, ideas and other modern novelties first appeared. Passing through the Military Academy, he became a member of the CUP in 1907, though would later be critical of the organisation, especially its wartime alliance with Germany. Because of this, following the fall of the CUP government in October 1918, the sultan was not suspicious of him. Atatürk had been among the Young Turks who sought to save the Empire, but after the war the sultan’s co-operation with the Allies changed his mind.

A meeting of the reformist Committee of Union and Progress, c.1909. © Pictures from History/Bridgeman Images.

In May 1919 Atatürk was sent in an official role to the Black Sea city of Samsun, tasked with prosecuting those who were resisting the sultan. But he had no intention of doing so: his arrival on 19 May is now considered the beginning of the War of Independence. As the Kuvayı Milliye faced reprisals from both the occupying forces and the sultan’s own Kuvayı İnzibatiye (‘Forces of Order’, created in 1920 to deal with the nationalist movement) Atatürk resigned from the army to undertake leadership of the independence struggle. For his actions, he was sentenced by the state to be hanged; the war was not only fought against the Allies – it was fought against the sultan, too.

Seeking to form a national parliament in defiance of the Allies and Istanbul, in April 1920 nationalist representatives from across Anatolia met in Ankara for the inaugural meeting of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. There, the ‘1st cabinet of the Executive Ministers of Turkey’ was formed with Atatürk as its chairman.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk wearing a top hat and white tie, 1925. GL Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

The War of Independence lasted until the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923. Battles were waged with Armenians in the east, Italy and France in the south, Greece in the west and France and Britain in Istanbul. Espousing anti-imperialist rhetoric, Atatürk secured financial aid from the Soviet Union. France (in conflict with Britain over remnants of the Ottoman Empire in Mosul and Kirkuk) and Italy (jealous of Greek occupation of Smyrna) passively supported the nationalists. After Turkish victory over the Greeks in the Battle of Sakarya in October 1921, France became the first Western power to recognise the Turkish nationalist movement with the Treaty of Ankara on 20 October 1921.

In late August 1922, nationalist forces launched the Great Offensive, pushing west across Anatolia and capturing Smyrna on 9 September. It was a decisive victory. Atatürk rode through the city in a carriage, dressed in civilian clothes – not on a white horse, as is sometimes claimed. On 11 October 1922 the Mudanya Armistice between Britain, France, Italy and Turkey recognised Turkey’s claims in western Anatolia and eastern Thrace. Then, in July 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne recognised the sovereignty of the new Republic of Turkey and agreed the state’s borders.

Making the Republic

Atatürk’s war was not over. After the military victory, he had to fight on a domestic front for the modernisation of state, society and culture. Today, he remains a national hero for a huge majority of Turks, but not all: in the past two decades or so, aspects of his lifestyle, his secular reforms and his peaceful foreign policy have come under increasingly harsh criticism from Islamist and ultra-nationalist circles within the Republic. This in turn has led those left-leaning intellectuals who previously criticised him as an authoritarian figure to reconsider his role, recasting him as an enlightened, progressive leader in comparison to Turkey’s current crop of neopopulist leaders. To understand why, we need to understand the reforms that forged the Turkish Republic.

British troops marching by Nusretiye Mosque, Istanbul, 1920. Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo.

In November 1922, the centuries-old sultanate had been abolished. Vahdettin had attempted to meddle in the negotiations in Lausanne, which angered Atatürk’s Ankara government. The Grand National Assembly was made the sole political authority; Vahdettin fled on a British ship. The following year saw discussions as to how the new nation would be governed and the Republic was proclaimed on the evening of 29 October 1923.

What followed was a secularising and modernising revolution, carried out under the auspices of the newly founded Republican People’s Party (RPP) and its principles of republicanism, nationalism, secularism and populism. At the dawn of the Republic, Turkey’s population was largely rural and illiterate. The majority of the sultan’s former subjects lived in poverty. The war years had depleted the country’s economic and human resources. Large development projects were essential. But before they could be embarked upon the secular nation needed to accept itself as such.

Atatürk saw that a cultural, or psychological, transformation was a prerequisite of social and economic development. He and his generation had grown up under Abdülhamid’s oppressive religious dictatorship. A keen admirer of science (‘the truest guide on earth’), Atatürk had seen how women and secular intellectuals had suffered under the conservative ideology of the old empire. He loathed the hypocrisy of those who had run it, living in luxury while preaching piety and modesty. He made a deliberate show of never hiding his passion for modern, worldly pleasures: drinking rakı, dancing, cinema, opera, fine dining – he defended them publicly. All of this was to be reflected in the new Turkey, and projected to the rest of the world. Western Europe had reinforced its superiority over the Ottomans by wielding Orientalist representations of the old empire as backwardly religious, unenlightened, uncivilised and irrational. Atatürk spent hours with foreign politicians and journalists attempting to impress upon them how civilised, rational, hardworking and open minded the Turkish people were. The Swiss anthropologist Eugène Pittard was among those who visited Turkey and met with Atatürk to discuss Anatolian civilisation. Pittard later wrote a refutation that the Turks were an ‘inferior Asian yellow race’ which would have pleased Atatürk. He was adamant that Turks should be seen as ‘white’ to erase the Orientalist image of Turkish ‘barbarians’ that had been used to validate the Treaty of Sèvres.

Atatürk introducing the new Turkish alphabet, Kayseri, 20 September 1928. © Tallandier/Bridgeman Images.

How to implement this psychological change across Turkey? The answer, in part, was education. The Ottoman Caliphate – the last of its kind – was officially abolished on 3 March 1924. On the same day, religious foundations (vakıfs), the religious office of Sheikh ül-Islam (a title given to eminent Islamic scientists) and religious schools (madrassahs) were closed. Mixed education was introduced. Tariqas – Sufi schools – and shrines were shut.

Such reforms could not pass without unrest. Opposition to the Republic and Atatürk was wrapped in religious rhetoric from the start, and mostly organised and spread by the institutions he had abolished. In 1925, the Sheik Said Rebellion broke out in the south-eastern Kurdish areas of the new nation. Sheik Said was a Kurdish tribal leader, with Sunni religious authority over his tribe. Secular reforms, as well as the new regime’s Turkish nationalism (Atatürk had identified the ‘problem of Kurdishness’ in a speech in 1923) alienated many conservative Sunni Kurds and caused a local rebellion fought on Islamic and Kurdish grounds.

The rebellion was quickly quelled; Alevite Kurds refused to join it, siding with the Ankara government. But it was the first religious and ethnic backlash against the Republic, and inspired other religious and (especially) Kurdish uprisings. In the wake of the revolt, Atatürk and the RPP tightened their grip, passing the Takrir-i Sükun Kanunu (Maintenance of Order Law) in March 1925. The order outlawed all opposition, including the new conservative opposition party, the Progressive Republican Party, which had only been founded in November the previous year. The Sheik Said Rebellion laid the ground for the RPP’s single-party rule.

Breaking ties

For centuries, dress had been a distinguishing mark of rank, gender and religion in Ottoman society. Atatürk’s clothing reforms sought to eradicate this, forging equality between men and women, but also blurring the differences between Europeans and Turks. In 1925, he went a step further than Mahmut II had in 1829 and banned the fez, promoting Western brimmed hats. Many fez wearers found a workaround – wearing berets or peaked caps and turning their peaks back during prayer. Atatürk was cautious when it came to women’s clothing and never legislated a full ban on veiling; only state officials and students were legally required to uncover their heads. Anti-veiling campaigns were delegated to municipal authorities; most Muslim women continued to cover their heads despite abandoning heavy face veils. Women were encouraged to appear in public life freely.

Two Turkish women in modern dress, c.1935. World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

It is arguable that Turkish women were the biggest winners of the Republic. In 1926, the first civil code, based on Swiss law, outlawed polygamous marriage, restricted religious marriages outside official processes and gave women equality in marriage, divorce and inheritance rights. A co-education system opened doors to jobs previously only available to men. Women were gradually given the right to vote from 1930 to 1934. In the 1935 national elections, 18 women entered the Grand National Assembly – this at a time when France did not yet officially recognise women’s political rights. Whether this drive for equality reached into rural Turkey is another question.

In 1928 Turkey’s ‘Alphabet Revolution’ saw the Republic adopt the Roman alphabet and Western Arabic (European) numerals in a reform devised to break ties with both the Ottoman past and Middle Eastern countries. During Atatürk’s lifetime the literacy rate more than doubled. The Education Ministry translated huge quantities of world literature, from Greek philosophy to classics of the Western, Chinese, Arabic and Persian canons, such as Hugo, Zola, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, al-Farabi, Rumi and many others. The Arabic call-to-prayer was translated into Turkish, as was the Koran; the first translation by a respected religious scholar was completed by Elmalılı Muhammed Hamdi Yazır, at Atatürk’s request, between 1935 and 1939.

An equine statue of Atatürk in the Turkish Republic’s capital, Ankara, c. 1935. Library of Congress. Public Domain.

Many pious Turks continued to use Arabic in their private prayers, including the families of the Republican elite (the first prime minister and second president, İsmet İnönü, for example). In 1934 a law abolished traditional titles such as Pasha (‘General’), Bey (‘Lord’), Efendi (‘Sir’), Hanım (‘Lady’) and Hoca (an Islamic teacher). All citizens were now Bay (Mr) or Bayan (Mrs/Miss). Mustafa Kemal Pasha officially became ‘Atatürk’ in 1934, following the introduction of the Surname Law, by which all citizens were to have an official last name.

The reforms did not stop at language. Atatürk was a patron of the arts. The Islamic ban on the representation of the human form was overturned and the arts were subsidised. Artists from Europe were invited to Turkey to erect monuments; Heinrich Krippel, a German sculptor, lived in Turkey for 13 years and created monumental statues, including the Sarayburnu Monument in Istanbul in 1925, the first Turkish monument to represent the human body and a Turkish statesman (Atatürk, naturally). From Italy, Pietro Canonica designed the Monument of the Republic (Cumhuriyet Anıtı) in Istanbul. Ankara’s Trust Monument (Güven Anıtı) was the work of three Austrian sculptors. The Republic sent students to Europe and welcomed academics fleeing Nazi Germany; law professor Ernst Hirsch fled Germany for Istanbul in 1933 and would become known as the ‘father of Turkish commercial law’; he was followed by economists such as Alexander Rüstow, Fritz Neumark and Wilhelm Röpke, the historian Andreas Tietze and more than 80 German scientists.

Following the Great Depression of 1929, the state’s role in the economy increased. In 1931 the RPP added two new principles to its founding four: ‘statism’ and ‘reformism’. The Turkish Central Bank was founded on 11 June 1930 to implement strict monetary policies against inflation, followed by Sümerbank and Etibank, all supported by the state. At the end of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey had 4,000 kilometres of railway; within a decade that was doubled. Industries that the Ottomans had badly lacked, such as sugar, paper, cotton, canning, rubber, cement, steel, glass and bottle factories, were all opened. This state capitalism required raising taxes and resulted in monopolies that alienated the low-income masses from the RPP. They would look elsewhere for representation: the result can been seen in Turkish politics today.

Ottoman past, Republican future

Atatürk did not live to see Turkey become a true democracy. In 1939, a year after his death, the RPP was still the only political party in the country, under the leadership of Atatürk’s closest friend (and war hero) İsmet İnönü, who became Turkey’s second president. İnönü kept Turkey out of the Second World War and in the postwar era his desire for Turkey to be part of the Western world (motivated, in part, by the expansionism of the Soviet Union) saw him implement another great reform in 1946: multi-party democracy. In 1950 the main opposition, the Democrat Party, won with a landslide. İnönü accepted the outcome: ‘This defeat was my greatest victory.’ The change brought Turkey closer to the West, culminating in the country’s admission to NATO in 1952.

Mustafa İsmet İnönü, 1938. World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

In the years before his death, Atatürk had been visited, on separate occasions, by global leaders such as the Greek prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos, Faisal I of Iraq, Alexander I of Yugoslavia, Edward VIII, Amanullah Khan of Afghanistan and the shah of Iran. The last two, especially, were fascinated by Turkey’s secular reforms, but faced domestic crises when they tried to implement similar changes at home. That Turkey has not fallen victim to the revolutionary fundamentalism seen in other Islamic countries such as Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt or Malaysia – despite being under the rule of an Islamist party – is testament to the success of Atatürk’s project.

In its first century, the Republic of Turkey survived despite a series of coups, the Kurdish rebellion, economic crises, the flow of the rural masses to urban areas and the growth of religious and ethnically oriented identity politics in the 1990s. In the 2000s, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) reaped the harvest of these divisions, winning its first election in 2002 and retaining power ever since. In the year in which Turkey enters its second century, the AKP under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has won a fraught election that was seen, globally, as pivotal to Turkey’s future.

School children in Diyarbakir carry a portrait of Atatürk at the beginning of a parade to mark Republic Day, 29 October 1990. Richard Wayman/Alamy Stock Photo.

Today, the biggest challenge Turkey faces is not Islamism but neo-populism and authoritarian nationalism, neither of which are peculiar to Turkey. The old problem of crony capitalism – in part a legacy of the Republic’s monopolies – impedes the sort of innovations that are vital for economic development. It seems that economic problems, alongside the unresolved issue of Turkey’s Kurds and the millions of refugees escaping Syria at its southern border, will shape Turkish politics during the first decades of its second century.

As for Atatürk’s place in Turkey’s future, Erdoğan and the AKP have long been critical of his foreign policy, which was based on forging close relations with the West and staying away from Middle Eastern affairs, as espoused in his personal motto: ‘Peace in the country, peace in the world’. For years, Turkey’s Islamists and extreme nationalists have argued that Atatürk’s decision to abolish the Empire, sultanate and caliphate limited the greatness of Muslim Turks and effectively gave up Turkey’s leading role in the Muslim world and Central Asia. But from Atatürk’s viewpoint in 1923, the Ottoman Empire was a corrupt and old-fashioned multinational state which did not benefit the Turkish people and, furthermore, was not even respected by Muslim Arabs. For Atatürk, racist (and race-based) pan-Turkism was a non-starter because his conception of Turkish nationalism was based on patriotism and citizenship.

During the revolutionary zeal of the Republic’s first decades, his outright rejection of the Ottoman past was natural. A century on, it is exploited by Turkey’s current rulers, who argue that they are the true heirs to the rich heritage of the Ottoman Empire that Atatürk rejected. But it is the Republic’s core political values of secularism and democracy that will prove vital for Turkey’s success over the next 100 years.

Murat Metinsoy is Professor of Political Science and History at Istanbul University and the author of The Power of the People: Everyday Resistance and Dissent in the Making of Modern Turkey, 1923-38 (Cambridge University Press, 2021