BY H. BULENT KAHRAMAN
RADIKAL- Columnist H. Bulent Kahraman writes about a rift between the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government and the country’s bureaucratic establishment. A summary of his column is as follows:
Close watchers of the AKP government should have noticed that it recently launched a new campaign for our country’s EU membership bid. Following Justice Minister Cemil Cicek’s call for judges to implement EU reforms in their rulings, the government is now urging all non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to promote and speed up Turkey’s integration into the Union. Surprisingly enough, this campaign came in the wake of controversial remarks by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan charging that a bureaucratic ‘oligarchy’ was trying to lord over Turkey’s elected politicians. That is, the prime minister was admitting that the AKP holds the government yet lacks the real reins of political power. These three developments in fact briefly summarize the basic contours of Turkey’s political life and structure over the last century.
True, the AKP is the government, but it lacks political power. And the bureaucracy really is one of the reasons for this. The definition of Turkey’s bureaucracy should be flexible in that it constitutes an alliance, which I call a ‘historical bloc.’ By bureaucracy, I mean a specific quarter in Turkish political history, an alliance which was initially made up of ‘the military, bureaucracy and intellectuals’ back in the early years of the republic. This bloc is in a sense the established order, and its raison d’etre is to protect the overwhelming dominance of the regime’s founding ideology. And apparently, the government is now in a conflict with this alliance.
However, in fact all our governments since 1950 have had tense relations with this bloc, notably Adnan Menderes’s Democrat Party (DP), Suleyman Demirel’s Justice Party (AP), and Turgut Ozal’s Motherland Party (ANAP). Each of these three prominent figures had their own sociological reasons for conflict with the bureaucracy, and more importantly they were aware of them and used them against the bureaucracy. This is what the AKP now lacks. It fails to understand the meaning and function of its mass support, and instead is merely blaming the bureaucratic establishment. In so doing, it cannot overcome the dilemma of being the government while lacking real power.
SOURCE: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF PRESS AND INFORMATION