Post-1917 Turkey
Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War and the partition of the Ottoman lands between Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, and Arabs, Turkey was prostrated. The horror of the Allies upon the discovery of the killing fields of the Armenian genocide kept the League of Nations from showing the Ottomans even the attenuated mercy meted out towards Germany. The Treaty of Sèvres, reluctantly signed in 1919 by Sultan Mehmed VI, was particularly harsh. Under its terms, Turkey was forced to:
Moreover, following the transfer of the once-Turkish territories to Greece and Armenia, their Muslim populations -- more than two million people -- were promptly expelled to the Turkish state, now including only most of Anatolia. The signing of the Treaty of Sèvres might the Sultan discredited whatever legitimacy remained to the Ottoman Turkish state, now with its capital in Izmit. In 1920, the charismatic Turkish general Mustara Kemal declared, in the interior city of Ankara, the existence of the First Turkish Republic. This republic drew upon the masses of expelled Muslims and suffering city-dwellers who wanted to mount a counteroffensive against the European colonial powers and their local allies. By the end of 1921, the Sultanate's remaining military forces combined with the Franco-British to destroy this republic, with Kemal himself dying in the siege of Ankara.
Although the republicans were crushed, the Sultanate -- from 1922, under Abdül-Mejîd -- remained fundamentally unstable. The Muslims expelled to Turkey evolved into an impoverished landless proletariat hostile to Turkey's neighbours, while the educated classes refused to accept the loss of Constantinople and a dysfunctional sultanate. Much as the Sultanate tried, it was never able to emulate the Egyptian model of constitutional monarchy; indeed, it became little more than a puppet of Franco-British economic interests. Surviving republicans spread to the countryside where they waged an insurgency against the Sultanate. Gradually, as the insurgency spread throughout Turkey, the Sultanate's generals began to increase their power, drawing upon Franco-British military credits to expand their power. In August of 1928, the generals staged a coup, taking power "temporarily" so as to crush the insurrection, reducing the office of the Sultanate to a mere figurehead. In early 1929, the Sultanate was abolished altogether, and the Second Republic was declared under the presidency of General Azar Ogulü.
The Turkish Second Republic came to adopt authoritarian nationalist policies enforced by a secret police force responsible only to Ogulü himself. It adopted revanchist policies towards its Anatolian neighbours, in particular isolated Christian Armenia and Trebizond. The Ogulü dictatorship claimed that Turkey's demographic supremacy -- 13 million Turks in 1936, as opposed to 2.7 million Armenians and 1.4 million Trebizonders -- and its military tradition would allow the Second Republic to triumph over its enemies. Both countries necessarily panicked, but apart from Greece the attention of the the League of Nations and its member-states was concentrated upon the worrying affairs in central and eastern Europe.
The Armenian War of 1939-41 began with a massive Turkish offensive into Armenia. The Armenian government had amply forewarning of this event, and met the Turkish offensive towards Ardahan with a successful counteroffensive into Turkish territory of its own. In the twenty years that intervened between the Turkish genocide of Armenians and the invasion of 1939, Armenia had evolved into a sturdy state, with the help of diasporic Armenians from across the world -- Anatolia, Iran, the Soviet Union, and beyond -- who eagerly joined the native Armenians in building a modern state. Though it was a small country, the Armenian government certainly did not neglect the military with its aggressive Turkish neighbour; it possessed a superb French-trained officer corps and an efficient conscript army. As the Ogulü dictatorship found to its shock, Armenia was quite capable of resisting Turkish attacks. In the spring of 1940 Trebizond joined Armenia and placed its small but powerful navy and merchant marine at Armenia's disposal, while the summer 1940 mobilization of the Greek army in Ionia faced Turkey with a two-front war. Following a successful Armenian counteroffensive into northeastern Turkey, in January of 1941 General Ogulü agreed to peace with Armenia in exchange for the demilitarization of the Turkish northeast. The outraged Turkish parliament turned against Ogulü and led a revolution against the Second Republic with the help of disaffected elements of the military. Following Ogulü's execution by firing squad, the Third Republic was declared.
In its 23 years of existence, the Third Republic -- dominated by the interchangeable National and Conservative political parties -- proved itself incapable of any significant achievements. Though the Turkish military refrained from further interventions in politics, this new neutrality came not from the Turkish military's pacifism but rather from the Republic's construction of a civilian-manned National Guard to place countervailing pressure on the army. Under the Third Republic, Turkey failed to deal effectively with its population problems -- mass illiteracy, the poor status of women, the ever-growing ranks of the urban poor, high death rates, and the very high Turkish birth rate: over the Third Republic's lifespan, the Turkish population doubled from 14 million in 1941 to 29 million in 1964. Even more worryingly for Turkish nationalists, the Third Republic's ineffective and corrupt politicians failed to foster any substantial economic growth, and Turkey evolved into an economic colony of Europe and Egypt.
In the end, it was the rapid growth of the Socialist Party among Turkey's poor that brought the Third Republic to an end, after the Socialist Party received a majority of the popular vote in the 1964 national elections, the National and Conservative parties combined to oppose these radicals only to be driven from power by the National Guard. The Turkish Fourth Republic evolved by the end of the 1960's into an ostensibly socialist regime, occasionally democratic, that tried to enact sweeping social and economic reforms. For instance, the Turkish state borrowed from the professed policies of Mustafa Kemal -- under the Fourth Republic elevated to the status of a national hero -- in replacing the shari'a legal codes with more modern ones based on the French models, giving full political and civil rights to Turkish women and religious minorities. This policy achieved some success, but managed to alienate the mass of religious Muslims in Turkey, who resented these changes. More costly still were the Fourth Republic's economic policies, which included the expropriation of farmlands without compensating the landlords and distributing it to the Turkish peasantry and the nationalization of many foreign-owned firms. A landowning peasantry was created, but at the cost of destroying the limited infrastructure maintained by the landlords, while the nationalized firms became a heavy burden on the government's budget and scared away foreign investors. By the early 1980's, the Fourth Republic was visibly teetering. For the first time, Turkey became a source of immigrants, as members of Turkey's underclass and its frustrated bourgeoisie both began leaving the country in large numbers for prosperous Egypt and Europe.
The Revolution of 1983 was provoked by the failure of the Fourth Republic to adequately feed the Turkish masses in the famines associated with the Third World War. After a bloody coup by the National Guards, the Fifth Republic was established by a coalition of Sunni Muslim clerics who proclaimed Turkey to be an officially Islamic state on the model of Iran. For all of the Fifth Republic's revolutionary rhetoric, though, in the end the Sunni government of Turkey refused to associate with Shi'ite Iran and came by the mid-1980's to follow Egypt's lead in the region. To compensate for the Fifth Republic's external irrelevance, the government began a series of purges against supposedly "heretical" intellectuals and members of the Alevî sect. These purges drove a new wave of emigration into the European Confederation and Egypt -- in particular, to League-administered Constantinople, where in 1995, exiled Turks formed a "government-in-exile." Worse, some National Guard units revolted against the Fifth Republic and began to wage an urban insurgency.
The Fifth Republic might have collapsed on its own. In July of 1998, though, Turkey was invaded by the Holy Alliance, which managed to destroy the flower of the Fifth Republic's military in a series of battles just east of Izmit. Although the Holy Alliance withdrew after less than a week, the sheer shock of the Holy Alliance invasion brought down the Fifth Republic. The "government-in-exile" returned from Constantinople, and proclaimed the establishment of the Sixth Republic with the support of the military. Slowly, Turkey is beginning to democratize, although the growth of tensions between the various factions included in the Sixth Republic's government of national unity -- including Socialists, Communalists, Islamists, and Muslim Democrats -- threatens to overwhelm the country.
The Turkish Sixth Republic is faced with a variety of daunting problems, including Turkey's economic backwardness, growing overpopulation, the presence of politicized and active paramilitary forces, and a wounded national identity. Observers are still uncertain as to whether the Sixth Republic will be able to deal any more effectively than its predecessors with these problems.