The big picture behind September 12

The September 12, 1980 coup, which took place 46 years ago, was not merely a military intervention that ended the fratricidal conflict and terror on the streets. It was a historical earthquake that changed Turkey's economic, social, and geopolitical course.

The big picture behind the coup must be read along two axes.

The first was the January 24, 1980 decisions. Turkey was being transitioned from an import-substitution, statist, and protectionist economic model to an outward-oriented liberal model supported by the IMF and the World Bank. The state was to shrink, foreign trade was to be liberalized, the path for privatization and foreign capital was to be cleared, and labor and trade union structures were to be weakened. The liquidation of political and union resistance after September 12 greatly facilitated the implementation of this program.

The second axis was geopolitical.

With the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the US had lost one of its most important pillars in the region within its rimland geopolitics, and its doctrine of containing the Soviets had suffered a heavy blow with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that same year. Moscow's approach to the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean was an unacceptable geopolitical threat to Washington. Turkey could not be allowed to fall further into the sphere of influence of a growing anti-NATO left-wing politics.

In this environment, Turkey's drift away from the Western system on NATO's southeastern flank was not a risk Washington could afford to take.

September 12 ended the terror at a tactical level. However, it tied Turkey more tightly to the hegemony. Leftist and Kemalist segments received a heavy blow. Nationalism was reshaped with American Turanism. The codes of religion-state relations changed, and in the following years, the field for the expansion of political Islam was opened with Brzezinski's famous green belt doctrine.

Moreover, the information that has emerged over the years regarding the counter-guerrilla, irregular warfare organizations, provocations, and political murders that remained in the dark has shown that the fratricidal conflict before September 12 cannot be read merely as a spontaneous right-left clash.

The 1967 Greek Junta of the Colonels, the March 12, 1971, and September 12, 1980 coups should be evaluated within the same links of Cold War geopolitics.