La validez en el lenguaje formal

Globalizing Civil-Military Relations

If as Huntington infamously predicted, future ideological clashes will spring from civilizational conflict—effectively summed up by the expression ‘west versus the rest’—then his equally succinct description of university students as the enduring “universal opposition” also fails to find much empirical currency.294 _{In Turkish society, the majority perennial political opposition}

has typically originated from the Islamist right, hardly a bastion of radical university leftism. While the 1960s and 1970s were fraught with severe ideological conflicts and were the most violent period contentious politics produced in the modern history of the Turkish republic, if nothing else, the existence of the Soviet Union served as a paradigmatic model that legitimized the Turkish left’s flirtation with communism during this period of political turmoil.

It is commonly recognized that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union precipitated an ideological crisis in many leftist movements across the world. In the absence of strong Soviet support to buttress and legitimize its ideological adoption by leftist political parties, the appeal of communism was unsurprisingly discredited by the loss of its most tangible political embodiment. In Turkey, ideological debates were nevertheless far from being settled since the Islamist opposition had yet to forcefully mobilize their movement into a following that had the necessary political and bureaucratic power within the state to challenge the military. Moreover, processes of globalization that have by now become a mainstay of society had begun to

294_{Huntington, Samuel P. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Twentieth Century. Norman, OK:} University of Oklahoma Press. 


gradually change the dynamics of contentious politics in Turkey in ways that would both help and hinder the country’s democratization prospects.

At its root, globalization refers to the rapid spread of capital, labor and goods across the world, with the transmission of ideas and knowledge production being equally important aspects of the same basic phenomenon. 295 However, when scholars have peered more closely into the contingent and discrete processes at both national and supranational levels that shape

globalization as a political construction, they have increasingly pointed to several critical factors that speak to the economy of globalization. For instance, Steger has keenly observed that

definitions of globalization often entail a set of competing interpretations as to what globalization precisely constitutes. Different types of globalization, or what he calls

“globalisms,” represent a “hegemonic system of ideas that make normative claims about a set of social processes called globalization.” 296

The spread of some of these political norms has been particularly relevant to some of the secularist discourses that have been so endemic to Turkish politics since its founding. As Nevzat Soguk has so adroitly observed, the headscarf ban enforced by the secularist military elites in Turkey has, paradoxically enough, been increasingly championed by conservative elements within European parliaments, such as in Belgium and France, where legal prohibitions on

Islamic dress such as the burqa have been debated and by state and society and ultimately ratified into law. 297 Perhaps even more paradoxically, the globalization of other anti-Islam laws, such as bans on the construction of Islamic architecture vis-à-vis popular European referendums, speak to how the production of local and national globalisms are shaped by historical contingency:

295 _{Held, David. 2003. The Global Transformations Reader (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Polity.} 296 _{Steger, Manfred. 2009. Globalisms (1st ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, p. 7.}

297 _{Soguk, Nevzat. 2011. Globalization and Islamism: Beyond Fundamentalism. Lanham, MD: Rowman &} Littlefield.

Whereas in Turkey the state has long sought to institutionalize prohibitions on the wearing of headscarves in public spaces, in European cities society has increasingly been the political fulcrum to achieve such social objectives. If we therefore accept globalism as a set of ideas and ideological claims, then as political ideas and norms expand beyond national borders, novel types of globalisms are generated by the new historical and political contexts they inhabit. Steger underlines this very point by noting that among various subtypes, market globalism as a political ideology became the most dominant ideational force in the 21st century, and it tended to typify the central tenets of neoliberalism, which Steger outlines:

primacy of economic growth, the importance of free trade to stimulate growth, the unrestricted free market, individual choice, the reduction of government regulation, and the advocacy of an evolutionary model of social development anchored in the Western experience and applicable to the entire world.298

In a similar vein, civilian authority over the state has figured as perhaps the consummate example of market globalism’s spread and adoption since the 1974 Portuguese Carnation

Revolution, which resulted from a military coup organized by a faction of progressively oriented officers in the Portuguese military.299 The Carnation Revolution set off a prolonged period of democratization in the global South that more or less continues until the present. The Carnation Revolution was also the starting point for the greatest period of global democratization in world history, popularly termed the “third-wave” of democracy. The revolution in Portugal

foreshadowed the types of authoritarian regimes that presented the greatest challenge to

democracy’s global march: tutelary military regimes. Spreading to Latin America from Southern Europe, the third-wave saw a whole host of military regimes collapse to elite settlements made between civil authorities and the military. Portugal therefore was not only the spatial and

298_{Steger (2009), 10.}

temporal epicenter for the spread of democracy’s largest ever wave, but it served to highlight the types of authoritarian regimes that seemed to be most vulnerable to authoritarian collapse: dominant military dictatorships. Scholars such as O’Donnell and Schmitter later theorized this pattern of military vulnerability in their seminal study of authoritarian collapse during the third- wave300, and later scholarship by comparativists such as Barbara Geddes further fortified this robust finding.301 The primary reason scholars see military-led regimes as being so susceptible to collapse is due to their inherent resistance to maintaining the cohesion of the ruling elite and thus preventing elite defection. This is primarily because in countries dominated by the military, the kinds of state institutions that are typically considered to prevent elite-defection in authoritarian regimes—such as political parties—are often poorly positioned and equipped to maintain the state’s civilian control over the armed forces. In cases where already strong political parties are backed by a strong base of social support and a large middle-class membership—not to mention a demonstrated history of civilian capacity to check the military—party controls can effectively contribute to constraining the military’s ability to act with impunity.

During the Carnation Revolution, the coup plotters were officers who had fought in former Portuguese colonies in Africa, referring to themselves as the Armed Forces Movement (MFA). The goal of the coup was to seize power from the Estado Novo dictatorship, which had ruled Portugal since the 1930s, in order to lead the country towards a transition to democracy. The initial political program that the putschists designed rested on three fundamental ideals: “decolonization, democratization, and development.”302

300 _{O’Donnell, Guillermo and Philippe Schmitter C. 1986. Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative} Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 


301 _{Geddes, Barbara. 1999. “What do we know about democratization after twenty years?” Annual Review of} Political Science 2: 115-144. 


302 _{Rezola, Maria I. 2008. “The Military, 25 April and the Portuguese Transition to Democracy.” Portugese Journal} of Social Sciences, 7 (1): 6.

The Carnation Revolution caught the United States and its NATO allies by surprise. Henry Kissinger, the infamous U.S. Secretary of State who had a penchant for “involving” the U.S. in the domestic politics of many democratizing countries, later acknowledged that “Washington knew next to nothing about any of the personalities involved” in the MFA’s organized coup. 303 Fifteen months after the revolution, the political trajectory of the regime was unclear, and the risk of a communist takeover was more plausible than ever before. The participation of the Portuguese Communist Party in the government had deeply troubled Portugal’s political allies. Kissinger was in particular concerned about the plausibility of a Communist takeover being replicated elsewhere in Europe, especially in Italy. “If the Communists gained a hold over the government in either country,” Kissinger maintained, “it would create a sense of inevitability, facilitating the inclusion of Communists in other NATO countries.”304

Portugal’s transition to democracy, its commitment to strengthening market globalism, and its status as one of the founding members of NATO, pushed the U.S. to prioritize it as a major foreign policy issue. It was at this point that its NATO allies, specifically Germany and the U.S., commenced a response to actively encourage Portugal’s transition to a functioning liberal democracy by providing economic aid and technical assistance through international organizations. German assistance was facilitated via its party foundations, known as

Stiftungen.305 By the mid-1970s, these foundations began assisting democracies that were in transition on the Iberian Peninsula. Democracy promotion via civilian control over the state and armed forces was increasingly becoming a foundational element in international programs dedicated to democratic transition.

303 _{Pero, Mario D. 2011. “‘Which Chile, Allende?’ Henry Kissinger and the Portuguese Revolution.” Cold War} History 11(4): 627.

304 _{Pero (2011), 628.} 305 _{Bruneau (2015), 53.}