ABSTRACT
The radicalism of the ideological stance of the Kemalist republican regime after 1923 never ceased to amaze its contemporaries. To those who observed Turkey from afar or who visited its towns (but not its villages) in the 1920s and 1930s, a spectacular transformation seemed to be taking place that affected not only Turkey’s institutions and its legal system, but also the very way of life of the Turks. As most observers were not intimately familiar with Turkey’s recent history and the achievements of the late Ottoman Empire in the field of modernization, developments in the Kemalist republic were all seen as part of a brave and entirely new experiment. In popular writing on Turkey this image persists, but in academic writing it has long been superseded by analyses that see the Kemalist policies as the last phase of reform policies initiated by the Ottoman Empire. For those who try to gauge on a scholarly level the origins of the Kemalist ‘revolution’ and the way it was influenced by the Ottoman intellectual heritage, it is important first of all to establish precisely where the Kemalists were radical innovators and where they were not. In doing so, we can do no better than take as our point of departure the definition of the essential elements in its ideology given by the Kemalist party itself: the ‘six Arrows’ (Altı Ok), adopted at the Party Congress of 1931 and inserted into the Turkish Constitution in 1937. These were republicanism, secularism, nationalism, reformism, populism and etatism. 1 Of these, two may be described as dealing with instruments rather than objects of policy, republicanism and etatism. The other four together therefore form the quintessence of Kemalist ideology. To what extent were these new and radical? Let us look briefly at the four elements in turn and compare Kemalist policies with those of the preceding era and with the ideas formulated by a number of leading thinkers and writers of the Second Constitutional Period.
