Metin Heper

• Professor of Political Sociology
• Ihsan Doğramacı International Advanced Studies Center at Bilkent University

In the absence of politically influential aristocracy and the entrepreneurial middle classes, the political and economic transformations in the Republican Turkey have been the handiwork of the political elites. Thus, late Dankwart A. Rustow, prominent political scientist with a special interest on Turkish affairs, talked of the "cultural revolution...

In two interviews conducted in May 2007, prominent Turkish social scientist şerif Mardin suggested that if the conditions one day become conducive for it, the bigots in his country may exert an effective communal pressure on the secularly oriented to adopt certain Islamic life styles and the secularly oriented may find it difficult not to act in co...

In Republican Turkey, the military has always had respect for democracy. However, from 1960 onwards, the military intervened in politics on four occasions. This was because it felt responsible for dealing with internal as well external threats to the country. From 2002 onwards, however, the military began to openly question the very wisdom of inter...

In studies on civil society, there is a tendency to perceive it as an instrument for the transition from an authoritarian system of government to a democratic one. It is not taken as a societal entity in an already consolidated democracy that contributes to the making of public policies. This is also the case when it comes to studies on civil socie...

Since 2002, the year the Justice and Development Party (JDP) formed a majority government in Turkey, the bulk of secularists in that country have felt that Turkey would soon drift toward a state based on Islam. The secularists in question are of the opinion that the JDP government has been engaged in dissimulation (takiyye) and that, in the first o...

The Justice and Development PartyPolicies and PraxisConclusion

Uniquely, Metin Heper suggests a theory of acculturation (rather than assimilation) captures the nature of State-Kurd interaction in Turkey, by not leaving any part of that interaction unaccounted for.

IN TERMS OF THE HISTORICAL CATEGORIES FORMULATED BY S. N. Eisentadt, the origins of the Ottoman-Turkish polity were imperial-bureaucratic rather than imperial-feudal or patrimonial. The regime was not patrimonial because the centre had its own distinctive normative system; the values of the centre were just a pale reflection of those of the periphe...

The public policies towards the Kurds, and for that matter towards any sub-group of the population, have been shaped primarily by the state’s approach to matters of nationalism. In the Turkish case, one observed a state creating its own nation, and not vice versa. Within the context of this particular nation-building process, the kind of nationalis...

Not unlike the Ottoman state, the Republican state in Turkey, too, has regarded the Kurds as an integral part of the population and, in normal times, both of those states adopted friendly policies towards them. These states never expected the Kurds to revolt. On the eve of the Shaikh Said rebellion in 1925, initially Ankara did not pay much attenti...

During the course of the nineteenth century, the harmonious relations between the Turks and some of the non-Muslims1 in the Ottoman Empire came to an end when the latter attempted to obtain their independence and, one by one, except for the Armenians, they succeeded in realizing this goal of theirs. Then, during the first two decades of the twentie...

Was the Ottoman Empire an appropriate milieu for pursuing the forced assimilation of marginal groups? Did one encounter in that realm a dom­inant majority that was not comfortable with the existence of minorities? Did the Ottoman state’s pattern of dealing with its different subjects include ethnic engineering? Did the Ottoman state aim at unity wi...

The Young Turks did not attempt to mold a new identity for the people.1 Consequently, the society that the Republic inherited had hardly a notion of Turkish identity.2 Until the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, there was no name for Turkey in Turkish. The National Pact drawn up in February 1920 by the last Ottoman Chamber...

Views differ concerning the origins of the Kurds. The alternative accounts are that (1) they had been the people of Gutium in ancient Sumeria, more or less direct descendants of the Medes, a branch of Turkic or Iranian peoples, (2) they are the same ethnic group as the Partians with an Indo-Persian origin, or (3) they are an ethnically distinct and...

It is now in order to present a summary of the primary findings of the present essay, make a brief evaluation of the present paradigm in the light of the findings of our essay, and offer some additional observations, which may be useful for studying the Kurdish issue in Turkey from a comparative perspective.

This manuscript investigates to what extent civil-military relations in Israel and Turkey, two countries in the Middle East which have democratic systems of governments, evinces characteristics that one comes across in advanced democracies. It shows that in both countries the military plays a relatively influential role, that being more so in Turke...

The military in Turkey has been both the subject and the object of modernization as Westernization. In the process it came to occupy a prominent place in the Turkish polity, acting as the guardian of the premises upon which the Turkish Republic was based. In the post-1960 period it took power into own hands several times. Yet, the military interven...

Civil–military relations in Turkey have always been problematic. On several occasions the military has intervened in politics. With the coming to power of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in November 2002, those relations could have taken a new twist, for the military in Turkey has always been a robust guardian of secularism and there has be...

Metin Heper discusses the formation of Turkey’s identity, which came to encompass both an "Eastern" and a "Western" (or European) dimension. Against this background, Heper discusses three main issues within the politics of Turkey that have remained problematic from the perspective of the EU: Islam in politics, nationalism and the consideration of...

In parallel to the strong state tradition in the Turco-Ottoman context, the modernization process had two basic characteristics. First, modernization meant westernization and all the reforms implied the adaptation of western culture, science, technology, bureaucratic rationality, education, law and etc. Second, the modernization process was pursued...

Until recently, although they did not subscribe to political Islam, religiously‐oriented political parties in Turkey were closed down because their leaders could not prevent some militant members from making statements provocative to the secular and democratic regime in that country. Turkey has had a cultural‐cum‐civic nationalism; consequently, ev...

The task of studying Turkish politics has traditionally been split among an “internationalized set” of researchers, who have produced first‐rate scholarship both at Turkish universities and abroad, and local Turkish political scientists, who have been influenced by Ottoman‐Turkish society and culture. This latter group was often divided along stric...

Turkey's recent success in dealing with the threat of political Islam without the military taking power into its own hands cannot be explained by either of the two contending theories about the military's role in the consolidation of democracy, that of the "mode-of-transition" or that of "electoral dynamics." Following the transition to democracy,...

The particular pattern the bureaucratic development in Turkey has evinced suggests that legal rationality is a prerequisite for the successful institutionalization of rational productivity. Whereas there is a zero-sum type of relationship between patrimonialism on one hand and legal rationality and rational productivity on the other, there is a pos...

Turkey's democracy has been consolidated by the inclusion of the religiously-oriented into mainstream politics. This was facilitated by the increasing secularization of the Turks that made support for a radical religious revival less likely, and the increasing moderation of the worldviews of the religious groups themselves.

In the mid-1990s, civil-military relations in Turkey came close to the liberal-democratic model. The military was essentially interested in contributing to public policy in matters it deemed important-matters that pertained to the internal and external defense of the country. Officers thought that they should make such a contribution not because th...

Consolidation of a democracy requires the establishment of a balance between the horizontal and vertical dimensions of democracy, that is, between participation and responsible leadership. The balance in question necessitates a harmonious relationship between the state and civil society. A too strong state as well as a too weak one poses difficulti...

Interest group politics constitutes a critical link between the State and civil society. The primary function of interest groups is no longer perceived solely as that of articulating and transmitting demands of society into the political process; in its stead, the interest groups are accorded a variety of roles, including socializing citizens, orga...

Preface Part Theoretical Backdrop Introduction by Metin Heper The State and Public Bureaucracies: A Comparative and Historical Perspective by Metin Heper Part II. Anglo-American Context The United States: The Anti-Statist Society by Ronald Glassman Development of an Unpretentious Bureaucracy: The Case of England by Henry Parris Part III. Continenta...

In its conventional Weberian version, “the state” is used to refer to human associations that successfully claim the monopoly of legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. In this conception, the state is presumed to have final authority, i.e., sovereignty as first formulated by Jean Bodin. As elaborated by David Easton, such a stat...

“The Death of the Bureaucrat.” Not long ago this was the headline of a daily column in a Turkish newspaper.1 The author, a student of Turkish politics, had read into the passing away of a high civil servant the demise in Turkey of a whole tradition, what I have called elsewhere “the historical bureaucratic ruling tradition.” (Heper, 1976a). I quote...

The objective is to assess the validity of one general proposition that has been central to much of the thinking and theorizing among students of comparative public administration. It is that the political roles ofpublic bureaucracies vary systematically with the regime types. This proposition is examined in the context of two disparate political s...

The article takes issue with two hypotheses often claimed in the literature-that the Ottoman centuries extending from the sixteenth to the nineteenth evince a progressive development from a centralized to a quasi-feudal polity, and that during the course of the nineteenth century progress had been made toward a constitutional government. It is note...

Illustrates objectives and methods of public administration education programs in Turkey. Information is presented on general perspectives of administrative study programs, modernization in Turkish society, social sciences, administrative reform strategies, and the Turkish bureaucracy. (DB)