The intellectual history of Kemalism

“The man who seeks water.” This is how Şevket Süreyya Aydemir defined himself. Indeed, he lived an extraordinary life.

“I am flying in a dream world again…” wrote Ahmet Hamdi Başar in his memoirs; he, too, was one of the most interesting characters in the history of the Republic.

Both were born in 1897. They remember Abdulhamid and the Young Turk Revolution. They know the Ittihadists and the Balkan Wars. They know the First World War and the War of Independence very well. Both chose the new capital, Ankara, rather than the old imperial capital, Istanbul.

Aydemir concluded that the “water” he sought across various geographies—Anatolia, the Caucasus, Russia—and which he clearly thought he had found from time to time, was finally in Ankara. Başar, who studied geography at the Darülfünun in Istanbul, accompanied him in a narrower field between Istanbul and Ankara, taking frequent and rapid steps. Both tried to give direction to the ideology of the “Turkish revolution” in the 1930s. Both clung especially to the principle of statism, which was included in the Republican People's Party program in 1931.

Aydemir argued that Turkey had not industrialized like the West and, moreover, that it was a time when the conflict between imperialists and colonial countries was fundamental; ultimately, he proposed an authoritarian development model that aimed to reach a classless society and placed statism at the center. For Başar, however, statism was a tool for the development of the bourgeoisie in Turkey.

The Kadro magazine, which Aydemir addressed, received attention from certain segments of the government. But Atatürk, with the addition of suggestions from other quarters, put an end to the publication of Kadro—which he found too rigid in its views—by appointing the magazine's owner, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, as ambassador to Tirana.

Başar had the opportunity to accompany Atatürk as an advisor on his famous domestic tour in 1930. He was removed from the train before it reached its final station. He did not give up. He appeared against Kadro with the Kooperatif magazine and wrote books. A few years later, he tried his luck once more. However, almost the only thing he heard from Atatürk, whose thoughts on his work he wanted to hear, was that he was a “dreamer.”

The views in Başar’s Davalarımız (Our Cases), published in 1943, deserve further examination. Here, Başar spoke of the necessity of resorting to a socialist view to give a universal dimension to Atatürk’s principles. A socialism that means preventing injustices through the state and statism; creating a happy and advanced nation by utilizing all natural and human power. A socialism where the abolition of private property could be considered when it is seen to be beneficial to society and increases production. Not one established by the proletariat, but by idealistic, conscious, and highly cultured people.

Before long, Başar appeared around the founding cadre of the Democrat Party. After the first Government Program of the Democrat Party was read, he also made the first speech on behalf of the party. He defined the change that had taken place not as a transfer of power between parties, but as a transition from “the rule of the palace servants to the rule of the nation,” amidst applause.

Başar, who saw hope in the Democrat Party for the realization of his ideas, soon experienced disappointment and resigned. Aydemir, with the same hope, unlike many others, attached himself to Menderes in the late 50s, during his most authoritarian period.

Interestingly, both viewed May 27 positively. In the early 1960s, Aydemir tried to formulate “Turkish socialism” in the Yön magazine, while Başar, in the Barış Dünyası magazine—again in opposition to Aydemir and, in the meantime, Yön—tried to formulate a “social-capitalist” order in very close relationship with businessmen.

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Emin Türk Eliçin was born in 1906 in Avanos, Nevşehir. The son of a teacher. A peasant boy. A hafiz at seven. A young teacher committed to the ideals of the Republic at 21.

But it did not take long for him to experience his first disappointment. He saw the Ministry not on the side of a Republican teacher, but on the side of the landlord (ağa). What followed was Resim Ay with Nazım Hikmet, working as a civil servant at the Turkish Language Association, education in Germany for a while, a kind of translation work with Sabahattin Ali at the Ankara State Conservatory, chasing jobs from city to city… dismissals, trials…

At the time Eliçin started a series of articles in 1964, there was a tendency toward the left in the world. The 1961 Constitution had also created a relatively free political atmosphere. Socialism was now being discussed in Turkey. The widely influential Yön magazine was advocating for socialism. A socialism that drew its strength from Kemalism, and which argued that in Turkey, where a working class capable of making a revolution had not yet formed, a second War of Independence against imperialists should be fought under the leadership of civilian-military intellectuals before the socialist stage, and that every anti-imperialist segment should come together for this.

Among those Yön wanted to bring together on the same front were CHP members who had not lost their independent spirit. Within the CHP, there was a left-wing wave. About a year later, a few months before the 1965 elections, the CHP declared itself a center-left party. On the other hand, the TİP already existed as a party on the far left. Yön’s interest in the CHP created discomfort in the Workers' Party of Turkey (TİP). Even though they cooperated, their relationship was always tense.

Eliçin published his articles at such a time. In the Eylem magazine, which was close to the TİP. On the “ideological stages of the Turkish revolution” and the “nature of the Turkish revolution.” Moreover, while names like Aydemir and Başar, who had written on these subjects in the 1930s, had moved the ideology debates to the plane of the 1960s.

According to Eliçin, the Turkish Revolution was the War of Independence, the republic, secularism, and the transition of sovereignty to the nation. However, it was not a class revolution. The interests of the landlord, the bourgeois, and the bureaucrat had blocked the path of the revolution; therefore, the revolution could not create its own ideology. The attempts at ideology subsequently constructed under the name of Kemalism consisted only of superstructural reforms. Şevket Süreyya Aydemir and the Kadroists, Doğan Avcıoğlu and the Yönists, as well as official Kemalist circles, assumed the existence of a cadre that could change society from above with a “palace servant” (kapıkulu) mentality detached from the people. Ahmet Hamdi Başar, on the other hand, had first shared the same elitist cadre mentality, but upon the rejection of his proposals, he defined all Kemalist cadres as “palace servants” and finally turned his direction directly to the bourgeoisie. Although this diagnosis of Başar was important, the real solution lay in the class struggle that would end the rule of the bourgeoisie.

While writing his articles, Eliçin was intervening in the politics of that day, developing a critique against the movements within the left that leaned on Kemalism. It is not really possible to say that his articles found a direct response at that time. But the term “palace servant,” which he borrowed from Başar partially and with more cautious usage, was carried into left-wing literature in a way that indicated a bureaucratic tradition beyond expressing a military segment within the Ottoman administrative system. The sympathy Eliçin showed for the concept of the Asiatic mode of production, which had just come to the agenda in those days, in terms of interpreting Turkey’s historical development, was also blended with the use of “palace servant.” A few months after Eliçin passed away on March 21, 1966, the findings of Sencer Divitçioğlu, and later Mehmet Ali Aybar and İdris Küçükömer, on the political tradition in Turkey showed significant parallels with his theses.

Academic studies that would now be included in the field of Turkish political life were accompanying the history of revolution books. Even if they were not following the line above, they were focusing on similar topics and debates: Taner Timur’s The Turkish Revolution and Its Aftermath, Cem Eroğul’s The Democrat Party: Its History and Ideology…

Mete Tunçay published the first volume of Leftist Movements in Turkey in 1966. In order to establish the information infrastructure he needed to prepare the second volume of this book, he published The Establishment of Single-Party Rule in the Republic of Turkey in 1981, which is seen as one of the important sources of the “post-Kemalist” narrative.

A discussion area had begun to form on the nature of the Turkish Revolution. Eliçin’s articles were published in 1970 by Ant Publications, which was close to the TİP, under the title Kemalist Revolution Ideology: Its Nature and Place in History, after his death and his acquittal in the case he was tried in. Yet, in the title of his articles, Eliçin was emphasizing the Turkish Revolution. His wife, Asiye Hanım, who wrote the introduction to the book, was interpreting Eliçin’s last articles (the last of which was published in 1965) as if they were voicing the TİP’s internal agenda of the year the book was printed, 1970, or even 1968. Asiye Hanım was using the term “palace servant” to name a concrete exploiting class beyond Eliçin’s emphasis on mentality. In short, what Eliçin wrote was being packaged within the framework of the agenda of the Ant Publications circle in early 1970. What Ant manager Doğan Özgüden wrote years later took this even further: “How true and appropriate what Eliçin […] wrote was would be understood with the Kemalist terror applied after the March 12, 1971, and September 12, 1980, coups.”

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This line of debate opened in the 1960s did not close; it was reproduced in different forms and has extended to the present day. Against Eliçin’s objection of 60 years ago that “none of the versions of Kemalism are valid,” it is said these days that “there are various Kemalisms.” The book titled The Intellectual History of Kemalism from the Single-Party Era to Nationalism, edited by İhsan Ömer Atagenç and published by Telos Publications in 2025, attempts to place these Kemalisms in a historical framework.

The work is a book that has emerged from the pen of a certain generation: researchers who remember the September 12 coup and the assassination of Muammer Aksoy vaguely, Erdal İnönü a little, and February 28 better; who welcomed the AKP’s rise to power as high school or university students; and who know the Republic Rallies, the Taraf newspaper, Ergenekon and Balyoz, and Gezi.

These researchers received their university education during a period when criticisms of Kemalism, which grew stronger after the September 12 Coup, gained a certain space in academia. In the meantime, they saw and experienced very different Kemalisms. The book is a product of the pursuit of these Kemalisms.

In the preface of the book, Atagenç opposes reductionist and ahistorical interpretations of Kemalism, emphasizing that the narrative cannot be limited to the 1930s and 2000s. He argues that a huge Cold War period has been skipped, and moreover, that there were Kemalist approaches with different contents even in the 1930s. He reminds us that even within the book, different approaches that could fit the diversity of Kemalism can be seen together.

The article dealing with the diversity of Kemalism in the 1930s explains the existence of these different interpretations by the fact that Kemalism did not define itself in a rigid way, avoiding the danger of turning into a dogma. These interpretations, which were made known to Atatürk and some of which were accepted by him from time to time, are classified into five groups as republican, liberal, democratic, authoritarian, and left-Kemalism.

İnönü’s role, both during his presidency and afterward, is drawn as a figure who, despite having some human weaknesses, tried to do the right thing in the name of Kemalism under the existing conditions. Various criticisms directed at İnönü’s “unacceptable” Kemalism are answered meticulously, sometimes openly and subtly, and sometimes just by making them felt. When the fifties are reached, the reading of Kemalism made through Bayar with a pleasant narrative language does not surround the field because it has to settle for limited material, but it shows that Bayar had no doubt about seeing himself as a Kemalist.

The reading of Kemalism made through the Forum magazine is a valuable contribution. However, the author’s presentation of Forum as the first representative of left-Kemalism and his view of Forum’s Kemalism as valid for today deserve to be discussed. The article dealing with the CHP between 1965-73 presents four different revisions of Kemalism: Turhan Feyzioğlu represents a right-wing conservative revision, the İnönü-Satır-Erim line represents a heterodoxy in the center, the Center-Left represents a reformist left revision, and Yön-Devrim represents a revolutionary left revision.

In the right-wing Kemalism brought by the Cold War, Atatürk becomes a hollowed-out figure integrated into the West on the axis of anti-communism. While left-wing Kemalism lost power after March 12, right-wing Kemalism gained power on the Feyzioğlu and Trust Party line; with September 12, it further consolidated its position within the state. Nationalism in the 2000s, on the other hand, emerges as a defense mechanism where the instinct to protect Atatürk’s legacy against the AKP government turns into a national security problem.

Kemalism, of which Eliçin saw no version as valid sixty years ago, stands before us today as a diversity that includes Aydemir’s Kadro, Başar’s economic statism, and dozens of different interpretations extending to the present day. In the Turkey of today and tomorrow, knowing and discussing Kemalism in all this diversity seems inevitable for anyone who wants to touch one of the country’s most fundamental political thought veins.