The Military And Politics

BY TAHA AKYOL
MILLIYET- Columnist Taha Akyol comments on creating a balance between Turkey’s military and civilian spheres. A summary of his column is as follows:
With the National Security Council (NSC), the military’s influence on our nation’s politics will finally be in the spotlight. The focus of the seventh harmonization package will be this. The government is staying mum about the contents of the package in order not to start a discussion between the military and civilian powers. However, for example, the media is hinting that the Secretariat-General of the NSC will become a civilian post. This issue should be solved calmly and reasonably without turning it into a contest between the military and civilian powers. For this purpose, the civilian leadership, which favors reform, and the military, which favors Turkey’s European Union membership, should avoid polemics.
The seventh harmonization package is getting public support. There are three reasons for this:
* Decreased terrorist threat: The lessening of the terrorist threat means a decrease in the need for the military to provide domestic security. For this reason, the term of compulsory military service is being shortened.
* Our EU accession process: With our EU membership, most of our security problems will recede, and we will gain economic and political power. For this reason, the military is supporting the EU. The NSC’s becoming subject to civilian authority will accelerate our EU membership.
* Periphery’s power: The Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) peripheral nature is strengthening the NSC’s will to harmonize with democratic standards.
With these three factors, the NSC will be reorganized through the seventh harmonization package.
Modernization requires becoming civilian as well because the narrowing of the political field by the military bureaucracy hampers social development. For this reason, as nations become modernized, the scope of the military is limited to only matters of defense and the fight against terrorism. Today politics should reconcile society’s competing opinions and interests. However, the logic of the military is completely different. The military considers reactionaryism the ‘domestic enemy,’ but politicians knows that these kinds of social issues can be solved not by excluding them, but by opening up means of participation in the modernization process. At least the difference in logic makes a civilian NSC Secretariat-General indispensable. These are the EU standards for both our civilian and military powers.

SOURCE: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF PRESS AND INFORMATION