ABSTRACT
After the autumn of 1983, Turkish politics passed through the down phase of the cycle of military intervention, withdrawal, emergent political crisis and re-intervention which had been repeated three times since 1960. The question which remained was whether this was indeed just another phase of the cycle, or whether the cycle itself had been broken, so that Turkey might be moving on a steady path towards firmly established democracy. By the early 1990s, domestic politics were still far from stable, since the party system was fluid, parts of the constitutional structure in a state of potential flux, and ideological and economic problems still unresolved. In the south-eastern provinces the bitter conflict between the security forces and Kurdish militants was resumed. On the other hand, there seemed to be no a priori reason to assume that the liberal parliamentary system would be incapable of resolving these problems, as it had in other countries – even if solutions would take time to achieve. At the very least, it seemed likely that, barring unpredictable external shocks, another swing towards the interventionist phase of the cycle would be some time in coming, if it came at all.
