william.armstrong@hdn.com.tr
Hurriyet Daily News - Friday,July 25 2014
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
is never happier than when he is slamming the main opposition
Republican People’s Party (CHP) as solely responsible for all the
authoritarian ills of Turkey’s modern history. The point is hammered so
effectively and relentlessly that it has become an uncontestable truth
for many Turks, but like most tub-thumping political rhetoric from the
bully pulpit it’s a gross oversimplification. In fact, the CHP
has spent far more time out of power than in it throughout republican
history, and the its traditional principles have had a far less
tenacious hold on the Turkish state than many want to believe. Indeed,
those principles have been robustly contested within the party itself.This detailed study by Turkish academic Yunus Emre focuses on the emergence of the CHP’s social democratic wing in the 1950s and 1960s, examining the peculiar trajectory of a center-left outside of social democracy’s “native” Western Europe. To frame this emergence, Emre spends a long time sketching the party’s origins in the early years of the republic, when it was in charge as a single party government for 27 years. In many senses, this early CHP defined itself against the left: The existence of classes and class interests was flatly rejected by the Kemalist nation-builders, who emphasized the principle of a single corporatist nation undifferentiated by class struggle or division and suppressed the organized labor movement. The establishment of a national economy and a national bourgeoisie was prioritized; no class-based organizations were allowed until 1947 and socialism and socialist organizations were illegal until the 1960s (long after the single-party era had ended).
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