Nakena wrote:Vistulange wrote:Turkey was a multi-party democracy when it joined in February 1952, Therm. Get your facts straight. I'd point more to Portugal as an example of non-democracies being admitted to NATO.
Under Menderes who was not a dictator but is nonetheless in many way a spiritual predecessor to Erdogan.
Rubbish. Just because you can put Adnan Menderes into a broad category alongside Tayyip Erdoğan does not mean that they are in any way similar.
The Democrat Party of 1952, at the elite and decision-making level, which Adnan Menderes himself certainly was a member of, had very, very, very, very little difference from the Republican People's Party. If you put a random villager from Manisa who had voted for DP in the DP headquarters upon the night the DP won the 1950 elections, he could have very well thought that he was in the CHP headquarters with İsmet İnönü, as opposed to being with Celal Bayar. These people were practically the same in ideology and worldview, with the slightest difference being that the CHP was a bit more statist in regards to the economy - owing to the legacy of the Great Depression, before which the CHP was quite liberal - and that the DP was more towards free enterprise. Otherwise, in regards to religion, the role of the state, language, etc. the two parties were extremely similar. They came from the exact same tradition, and the DP was formed out of people who were, themselves, Unionists just like the CHP folks. Hell, Celal Bayar - the head man of the DP up until the late 1950's - has a very notable quote: "When I speak of 'the party', I do not mean the Democrat Party. I mean the Committee of Union and Progress." Bayar was a Unionist to the core and bone - it's difficult to overstate just how much of a committed Unionist he was, even on the night of 27 May 1960, when he recalls having contemplating firing four bullets at the men who had arrived to arrest him, then using the last one to commit suicide, then later changing his mind to only committing suicide, and nearly carrying it through when he was prevented from doing so. It was only in the late 1950's that the Democrat Party began to slide towards authoritarianism, with the real excesses starting after 1957; it has absolutely no pertinence to the admittance of Turkey into NATO whatsoever. Moreover, even when these excesses started, the Democrat Party held no real ideological conflict with the foundational values of the Republic itself.
On the other hand, Tayyip Erdoğan comes from a distinctly anti-establishment root, that of the National Outlook movement of Necmettin Erbakan. From the outset, with the National Order Party in the early 1960's, Erbakan made it crystal clear that he was against the secular republic, at least, to the "secular" bit, more than the "republic" bit. I should make it clear here that Erbakan was by no means a "monarchist": there was no monarchist-restorationist movement in Turkey, ever. It was not even the result of a mass purge. Of course, there were some folks in the early nationalist movement who were somewhat pro-monarchy, such as Refet Bele, but they were never powerful political forces. Anyway, Erbakan's parties repeatedly got shuttered, but Tayyip Erdoğan was in one way or another involved in politics with this movement from the 1970's onwards, with youth wings and so on. He was a notable member of the MTTB - the right-wing, nationalist-religious union of students - and was once head of the Istanbul chapter during the 1970's, if I recall correctly. Looking through the MTTB yearbooks of the times, you see many a familiar name there, alongside Erdoğan's: Cemil Çiçek, former Speaker of the Parliament; Bülent Arınç, former Deputy Prime Minister and current presidential adviser; Abdullah Gül, former President, etc. All of these figures were distinctly separate from the "Menderes tradition": that mantle had been assumed by Süleyman Demirel's Justice Party, a secular, centre-right party. Erbakan's "National Outlook" openly rejected that ideology in favour of a distinctly Islamist and semi-nationalist outlook.
Even in the 1990's, when Tayyip Erdoğan rose to prominence as the Mayor of Istanbul under the Welfare Party, the party (and Erdoğan himself) was rejecting the tenets of the secular republic, hence the 1997 memorandum that brought down Erbakan's government and put Erdoğan behind bars under charges that would be considered bullshit these days, not just in Turkey but also elsewhere in the world. It was only when Erdoğan very publicly split off from his former movement in the 2000's, decrying them as fundamentalists and famously stating that "he had taken off the National Outlook jacket", that Erdoğan fabricated this story of assuming Menderes' mantle, as the leader of a reformed, centre-right political party. Even then, it was not only Menderes that was idolised, but also Turgut Özal as well. This is an indication that it was one thing in particular that Erdoğan assumed, and that was the commitment to a free market economy, as opposed to the heavily state-controlled economic model advocated for by the National Outlook movement.