Today there are 45 countries in the geography where Ottoman despotism ruled for many centuries. The provinces of Kurdistan and Dersim were independent in their internal affairs and dependent in their external relations. Mesopotamia's multilingual, multifaith and multicultural fabric, together with Anatolia's local autonomies, had created a political order in which central authority was limited. However, in the last quarter of the 19th century, this order began to be shaken by ideological waves coming from both inside and outside.
The revolutionary wave created by the Paris Commune affected not only Europe but also the young generation of intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire. This generation embraced the idea of “NATION” in order to stop the collapse of the empire, but this nation was not the common will of the peoples of Anatolia, it was shaped within the narrow molds of a Turanist ideology. Thus, the Young-Turk movement became the ideological carrier of a Turkist centralization that dominated geography, not of an emancipatory transformation.
The second mechanism that accelerated Ottoman despotism was Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa and the Islam-Teali Society working in parallel with it. These structures, while ostensibly advocating Islamic unity, were in reality expanding the organizational grounds for Turanist cadres and carrying out internal operations that accelerated the dissolution of the empire. In the same period, the fall of Tsarist Russia, the birth of the Soviets and the rise of the Socialist struggle opened a new horizon for all the peoples in the region. For the first time, the world witnessed the birth, albeit premature, of a Socialist power.
This historical break pushed the peoples of Anatolia to seek an alliance around their own national problems. The Kurdish Teali Society was the most important organized expression of this search. However, the Turkish Teali Society, founded in the same period, managed to keep the Kurdish movement away from the alliance table. Nevertheless, the opposing popular forces united around the 1921 Constitution, creating a framework that recognized the multi-identity structure of Anatolia and Mesopotamia. This Constitution also laid the foundation for the Republican People's Party.
But this unity did not last long. In 1922, the Koçgiri tribes, one of the most active social pillars of the Kurdish Teali Society, were targeted by an alliance of local bandits led by Topal Osman, with very few armed forces of the Republican People's Party. The Koçgiri Massacre was not only a suppression operation, but a clear message of intimidation to all the autonomies in Anatolia. ’The new State will not recognize the old autonomies and will use every means to create a monist nation.“
And so it was.
1923 İzmir Economic Congress decides to establish the CHP and the new Republic of Turkey. With the 1924 Constitution, all Ottoman-era autonomies were abolished. The subsequent Eastern Reform Plan aimed to silence the peoples of the region politically and culturally by redesigning the state's bureaucracy and technocratic mechanisms. The new Latin alphabet rendered the literate population of the period dysfunctional overnight. The Presidency of Religious Affairs and the imam hatip schools were turned into institutional carriers of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, the official ideology of the state.
After all legal and cadre units of the state were shaped in line with the monist ideology, a new political engineering was put into action, this time under the guise of a “Pluralist Parliamentary System”. The ideological continuity of the State was reproduced with a different face by activating the then Deputy Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and Celal Bayar, one of the leading figures of the Turanist cadres, within the Democrat Party.
This continuity repeated itself in the 1960 coup under Cemal Gürsel, in the 1971 memorandum under the Naim Talu government, in 1980 under the Kenan Evren junta, then under the ANAP, Ana-Yol, Ana-Sol governments and finally in the new political blocs established in the 2000s. As the Erdoğan-Gülen coalition weakened its grassroots support, it failed to secure a sufficient majority in the 2018 elections. The coalition was formed by the electoral alliance of AKP and MHP, and then the parties forming the People's Alliance were arranged in a rosary. The power structure established with the beads of this rosary was nothing but the current version of this historical line.
Today, the CHP's political projections have not gone beyond this historical continuity. The only things that have changed are the actors and the frictions between internal cliques. The ideological backbone of the state mind has been following the same line for a hundred years. All parties have their own processes, they have come and gone. But CHP=State. After the 1960 Cemal Güresel Coup, Alparslan Türkeş's CKMP and MHP represent the Intelligence wing of the State. Therefore, governments in this country, more than elections and parties, are a form of power that fulfills the needs of the State and this power is shaped by the SBE. In this sense, it does not go beyond a row within the parties.