Elementos de un presupuesto de potencia de enlace

The end of World War I sealed the fate of the 600-year-old empire. Having been an experienced and successful commander in the Ottoman ranks, Mustafa Kemal capitalized on the power vacuum created by the implosion of the empire. Having won the Turkish independence war against the British, French, Italians, Greeks and Armenians, the Kemalist clique deposed the Sultan and established the new Turkish republic in 1923.

50 _{Yucel Bozdaglioglu, Turkish Foreign Policy and Turkish Identity: A Constructive Approach, pp. 43,44.} 51 _{M. Sukru Hanioglu (2011) Ataturk: An Intellectual Bibliography, Princeton University Press. pp. 49-50} 52 _{M. Sukru Hanioglu. The Young Turks in Opposition. p. 3.}

53 _{Stephen Vertigans (2003) Islamic Roots and Resurgence in Turkey: Understanding and Explaining the} Muslim Resurgence ,Westport, CT: Praeger, p. 46, http://www.questia.com/read/102053475.

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The Kemalist triumph of Westernism marked the end of a power struggle among the ideologies that competed to save the empire. Given his experiences in the battlefronts and the CUP ranks, M. Kemal was convinced that it was impossible to continue with the legacy of the Ottoman Empire hence the need for a clean slate. That is to say, to Ataturk, this newly emerging nation-state, of which he was the architect, ought to be completely detached from its past. Therefore, first and foremost, the Kemalists launched a comprehensive de-Ottomanisation campaign to eradicate the Islamic/Ottoman state institutions. The complete overhaul of state alone would not have been meaningful if the society remained Ottoman. Thus, the extensive restructuring of the society was set to be one of the major endeavors of the Kemalists. M. Kemal was adamant about creating a society and a state identity based on western values. To him, the two had to go in hand in hand because the divergence between state and social identity would create a legitimacy problem.54

Above all, the catastrophic experiences of the past century that lead to the impending collapse of the empire prompted the Kemalist elite55 of the newly established republic to concede that in order to be able to hold onto the hard earned territory, a strongly centralized state and ethnically homogenized nation was paramount. Therefore, the Turkification efforts in the new republic went as far as changing the Kurdish or

54 _{Yücel Bozdaglioglu (2003) Turkish Foreign Policy and Turkish Identity: A Constructivist Approach,}

New York: Routledge p. 45, http://www.questia.com/read/106192540.

55 _{According to Bozdaglioglu, the Western oriented Kemalist reforms contributed greatly to the creation of}

the Kemalist elite. He further states that the Kemalist elite in Turkey vowed to protect unconditionally the Kemalist doctrine, which basically chaped the domestic and foreign policy of the republic’s entirety. The emergence of the Kemalist elite in modern Turkey is the result of the transformation of the state from a theocratic empire into a modern, secular nation-state through Kemalist reforms. The Kemalist elite was responsible for preventing any deviations from the Kemalist principles, carried important implications for both Turkey's foreign and domestic politics, which will be evaluated in the later chapters of this work. Yücel Bozdaglioglu (2003) Turkish Foreign Policy and Turkish Identity: A Constructivist Approach (New York: Routledge, p, 51.

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Armenian names of settlements in the text books. By law, every citizen of the republic was considered to be “Turkish”.

Another prerequisite for consolidation of power was the establishment of elitism. The justification for elitism arises out of the conviction that the majority of citizens of the new republic were “ignorant and illiterate”, which at the same time was the elitist view of anything Ottoman. This contemptuous view from the elite, not to mention the survival instinct, called for a stringent implementation of the reforms, which naturally were top to bottom.56 _{The disparity between the ruling elite (the core), who predominantly lived in} urban areas and the ruled, who resided in rural Anatolia (the periphery), began to constitute a contentious matter with the latter’s gradual movement into the former’s habitat in early 1970s.57 _{The gradual rise of the periphery eventually would result in the} advent of the AKP government. This situation will be extensively discussed, in the following chapter.

The effective permeation of reforms into society as well as the eradication of the entrenched Ottoman beliefs and state system depended greatly on the degree of their radical character. Therefore, M. Kemal believed that the envisaged cultural, social and economic reforms had to be radical in character. 58

Finally, Michael A. Raynolds depicts the essence of Kemalism. He says; "[t]he conceptual matrix that provided the ideational basis of the Turkish Republic is known as Kemalism, after Mustafa Kemal, the general who led the military campaign that culminated in the creation of the republic and then ruled it until his death in 1938.

56 _{Bozdaglioglu, p. 7} 57 _ibid

58_{Osman Okyar(1984)“Ataturk's Quest for Modernism,” in Ataturk and Modernization of} Turkey, ed. Jacob M. Landau (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, p. 51.

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Kemalism functioned as a comprehensive worldview that supplied both a historical diagnosis of the challenges facing Turkish society as well as a vision of how to overcome those challenges." 59