The Anatomy of the Turkish Military's Political Autonomy

The most profound contradiction marking Turkish democracy in the 1990s is the demonstrated inability of civilian politicians to control the military.The Turkish military enjoys a strong degree of military autonomy.Three times it has intervened in Turkish politics.The patterned nature of military-civilian relations has created a legacy that reinforces and maintains the independence of the armed forces.Since 1980, however, fresh developments make studying military-civilian relations even more significant.First, the democratic thrust of the radically altered political economy since 1980, both domestically and internationally, must be considered.The growing political role of the armed forces is at best anachronistic and at worse incongruent with the regime's commitment to the norms associated with liberal democracy and free market capitalism.The existence of parallel state structures, one civilian and the other military, undermines the authority and the democratic accountability of elected civilian governments.Furthermore, despite the deep breach in Turkish politics between rhetoric and action, the structural distortions and contradictions generated by the march toward a more "liberal" economic and political order, and the Kurdish insurgency, one should not assume that the past necessarily predicts the future.Finally, there are internal and global conditions antagonistic to the military's ethics and political credentials.Nevertheless, the harmony of the series of civilian governments with the military since the transition to civilian democracy testifies to the civilians' tenuous hegemony.This essay addresses the current difficulty in reasserting civilian supremacy in the Turkish political system.The problem will be identified and analyzed by focusing on several theoretical points, from a historical perspective, relating to the substance and sources of the Turkish military's autonomy.The autonomy of the military will then be examined using index variables measuring the military's political effectiveness vis-A-vis civilian institutions over the last two decades.It is important to note that this essay neither analyzes the causes of coups in Turkey nor studies the nature and consequences of the transition from military to civilian rule.Rather, it focuses on the expanded role of the Turkish military under civilian governments since the 1980 coup.