Atatürk and the Uncomfortable Case for the Interim Autocrat

How does a country move from tyranny to liberalism? The comfortable answer is: gradually, by persuasion, through institutions that grow more open over time. The uncomfortable answer, which the historical record keeps offering, is that it has often been done by one man with an army who decided that it should happen and made it happen. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is the cleanest case, and I want to look at what he shows and what he does not.

What He Did

Atatürk inherited the rump of the Ottoman Empire in 1923: a defeated theocratic monarchy, a population that was overwhelmingly rural and illiterate, and a religious establishment that controlled law, education and the calendar.

Within fifteen years he had abolished the sultanate and the caliphate, replaced religious law with codes borrowed from Switzerland and Italy, closed the religious schools and courts, replaced the Arabic script with a Latin alphabet, given women the vote, and pushed the country by decree toward a European model of a secular nation state.

None of this was done democratically. It was done by a war hero who commanded the army, ran a single party, and did not tolerate serious opposition. The population was not asked. Much of it did not want the changes and would have voted against them.

Why It Counts as a Step Forward Anyway

Here is the argument that makes liberals uncomfortable. If you rank Turkey in 1922 and Turkey in 1938 on any axis a liberal cares about, women's status, literacy, the reach of religious law over private life, the independence of the state from the clergy, the second is far ahead of the first. And the first would not have become the second by itself. The institutions that would have carried a gradual reform did not exist. They were what the reform created.

A society that has never had liberal institutions cannot vote them into being, because voting is one of the institutions. Someone has to build the school before the graduates can run it. In Turkey that someone was an autocrat, and the school he built produced, two generations later, a country that held real elections, changed governments at the ballot box, and argued in public about its own founder.

I do not think this can be waved away. The route from theocracy to a functioning secular state ran, in this case, through a dictatorship, and it is not obvious that any other route was available.

The Limits, Which Are Severe

Now the other half, because the case is regularly overstated by people who like the conclusion.

First, the interim autocrat is a gamble on the autocrat. Atatürk genuinely wanted the outcome he imposed, and he died before he could be tempted to reverse it. Most people who seize power to modernise a country turn out to want power more than modernity, and the "interim" phase becomes permanent. For every Atatürk there is a long list of strongmen who promised the same transition and delivered only the strongman. You cannot tell them apart in advance, which makes the bet a bad one to recommend.

Second, what was imposed from above stayed dependent on the above. Turkish secularism was guarded for most of a century not by the population but by the army and the courts, which intervened repeatedly against elected governments they considered too religious. That is not a liberal arrangement. It is a tutelary one, in which the guardians of the reform overrule the people the reform was supposedly for. It kept the reform alive; it also kept the country from ever fully owning it.

Third, and this is the part that closes the argument: the later course. Once the guardians weakened, the population elected, and re-elected, a government that has spent two decades reversing much of what Atatürk built, restoring religion to public life, and concentrating power in one office. Whatever else that shows, it shows that the interim step did not finish the job. Eighty years of secular institutions had not produced a population that wanted them enough to keep them. The reform had been administered to the country, not adopted by it.

What I Take From It

Two things, in tension, and I think both are true.

An autocrat can move a society forward, and pretending otherwise is a kind of piety. The institutions that make liberalism possible have, more than once in history, been installed by people who were not liberals, and the installed institutions were real.

But a reform that the population did not choose is a reform the population can later reject, and eventually will, unless in the meantime it has been persuaded rather than merely governed. The interim autocrat buys time. What the time is for is the part that Turkey shows was never completed: turning a decree into a decision that the people would have made themselves. The measure of the interim step is whether it makes itself unnecessary. Atatürk's, in the end, did not.