The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Turkey

Turkey is a transcontinental state located mostly (291,773 sq. mi.) in Southwest Asia and partly (9,174 sq. mi.) in Europe. Bordered by three seas—the Black Sea to the north, the Aegean Sea to the west, and the Mediterranean to the south—Turkey serves as a geographic and cultural bridge between Asia and Europe. Its estimated population in 2007 was 73 million, of which 99.8 percent were Muslim. Although the Ottoman Empire ruled from Istanbul after 1453, Ankara became the capital of the Republic of Turkey in 1923.

The Ottoman state had been a multifaith, polyethnic empire up until World War I, but the mass deportation of Armenians in 1915 and the forcible population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923–26 produced a nation-state overwhelmingly inhabited by Muslims, most of whom consider themselves ethnically Turkish. Sunnis constitute a strong majority of the population, but there is also a sizable ‘Alawi minority as well as pockets of Shi‘is and Nusayris. Small Greek Orthodox, Armenian (Lusavorchakan and Catholic), and Jewish communities remain mainly in the big cities, while significant Kurdish populations inhabit the eastern and southeastern parts of Anatolia. Due to intensified internal migration after 1950, large numbers of Kurds now live in the major cities of western Turkey as well. The partition of the Ottoman Empire also turned small concentrations of Arabs and Turks into minorities on either side of Turkey’s borders with Iraq and Syria.

Although Turkey is but one of the many successor states of the Ottoman Empire, it is commonly considered to be the heir of that historic polity. With one brief exception in the 1920s and 1930s, the Turkish establishment embraced this perception and viewed the republic as the legitimate successor to the empire and its former glory. In the aftermath of the Balkan wars of 1912–13, the empire that once straddled three continents and included such far-flung regions as Hungary, Yemen, Egypt, and Eritrea lost substantial territory to a number of breakaway nation-states and shrank to become a principally Asiatic country. The Ottoman defeat along with the Central Powers in 1918 brought about the final partition of the empire. The threat of further partition, embedded in the Sèvres Treaty of 1920, forced Turkish nationalists to fight for their independence in Anatolia between 1919 and 1922. The war, fought mainly against Greece, ended in a Turkish victory that yielded recognition of the boundaries of the new nation-state in the Lausanne Treaty of 1923. This treaty left the decision on the fate of the former Ottoman province of Mosul to the League of Nations, which awarded Mosul to Iraq in 1925. Since then, the single major change in Turkey’s borders took place in 1939 when Turkey annexed the former Sanjak of Alexandretta (Hatay), which had been ceded to Syria under the French Mandate.

For centuries, the Ottoman Empire was the main Sunni power of the Muslim world. Following the conquest of the Arab provinces in the early 16th century, the Ottoman sultans formalized this position by assuming the title of caliph, which they used increasingly from the 19th century onward. Although Turkey inherited the caliphate, the republican leadership abolished the institution in March 1924, thereby bringing to an end a 1,300-year-old Muslim tradition. The abolition of the caliphate constituted a landmark event in the history of the Turkish Westernization movement. In contrast to the more cautious Ottoman tradition of reform, in which the ruling elite sought to Westernize the empire while keeping Islamic institutions intact, the republican leadership, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, adopted a radical program aimed at sidelining Islam completely in the new Turkish society, which was to be governed by lay institutions guided by an intensely secular ideology. As part of their project, the republican elite strove to fashion a new Turkish identity based on ethnicity in place of religion. Turkey became the first officially secular Muslim country in 1937, although it had already been so in practice since at least 1928.

A central part of the republican agenda was the creation of new political institutions. In 1921, the Turkish Grand National Assembly adopted a new constitution. In November 1922, it abolished the sultanate. On October 29, 1923, the leaders of the nationalist movement proclaimed the Turkish Republic. In 1922, Mustafa Kemal had established the People’s Party (later called the Republican People’s Party, or RPP), which dominated the political scene until the end of World War II. No genuinely free elections were held until 1950. Since then, however, regularly contested elections precipitated the fall of the RPP from its erstwhile position of dominance, and Turkey enjoyed a pluralistic multiparty regime. The advent of electoral politics notwithstanding, the army and the civilian bureaucracy maintained a form of tutelage over the state. The military, which viewed itself as the guardian of Kemalist ideology, launched two major coups in 1960 and 1980, intervened directly in politics in 1971, and intervened less directly (the so-called postmodern coup) in 1997. More recently, the Turkish military threatened to intervene in the presidential elections in 2007. Although secular centrist parties traditionally have dominated Turkish politics, the elections of 2002 produced the first pro-Islamist government in modern Turkish history. The Justice and Development Party, a moderate Islamist party, won a second and more decisive election victory in 2007 and gained a majority in the Turkish Grand National Assembly, the legislative body, and full control over the executive branch of government.

Turkey is the 17th largest economy in the world, with a gross domestic product (GDP) of $361.1 billion (at official exchange rates), GDP per capita of $8,900, and a real growth rate in GDP of 6.1 percent for 2006. Despite measures toward economic liberalization following the switch to a multiparty system, the Turkish economy of the 1960s and 1970s remained protectionist, etatist, and still heavily dependent on agriculture. Extensive reforms carried out in the 1980s, however, brought about major structural change. In the early 21st century, the agricultural sector produced less than 10 percent of Turkish GDP, and Turkey had one of the world’s freest market economies.

To date, Turkey is the only Muslim country to have joined major Western institutions and alliances. Turkey joined the European Council in 1949, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in 1961, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1973, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1952. It became an associate member of the European Economic Community in 1963 and received full membership candidate status from the European Union in 1999. Negotiations on accession to the European Union began in 2005.