The proclamation of the Turkish Republic

On the evening of 29 October 1923 the Grand National Assembly in Ankara passed an amendment to the fundamental law, whose first article now read: “The form of government of the Turkish state is a republic.” Immediately afterwards the deputies unanimously elected as president Mustafa Kemal, leader of the national movement and victor of the war against the Greeks. The next day a government was formed by his closest associate, İsmet Pasha, who three months earlier had negotiated the Treaty of Lausanne. So was born the Republic of Turkey, the state that replaced the six-hundred-year-old Ottoman Empire. The proclamation crowned four years of struggle against the occupiers and the Sultan, and at the same time began a revolution from above which within little more than a decade transformed the country’s political system, its law, its public religion and its alphabet. Kemal’s Turkey – authoritarian, secular and nationalist – became for some a model of modernisation and for others, Germans among them, the example of a nation that had rejected the victors’ peace and been reborn under a strong leader.

A state without a name for its system

Formally, the new Turkey came into being before the republic. On 23 April 1920, after the Allies had occupied Constantinople and dispersed the Ottoman parliament, the Grand National Assembly met in Ankara and declared itself the sole legitimate representative of the nation. Mustafa Kemal became its president. The fundamental law of 20 January 1921 declared that sovereignty belonged unconditionally to the nation and that executive and legislative power was exercised by the Assembly. It called the state simply “the State of Turkey”. It said nothing, however, about the form of government or the capital. While the war lasted, Kemal avoided the subject, because many of his supporters, including deputies and officers, still regarded themselves as subjects of the Sultan and Caliph, who, it was said, was being held captive by the occupiers.

After the victory over the Greeks and the Armistice of Mudanya, Kemal took action. When the powers invited the Sultan’s government to the peace conference at Lausanne as well, the Assembly abolished the sultanate on 1 November 1922. Mehmed VI fled aboard a British warship, and the Assembly elected his cousin Abdülmecid II as caliph, now merely as a religious leader without temporal power. The result was a system nobody could name. The state was headed by the president of the parliament, while in Constantinople resided the Caliph, whom some politicians and clerics saw as the natural head of state. Ministers, known as commissioners (vekil), were elected by the Assembly one by one, which led to endless disputes and to governments made up of people who did not work together.

Preparations

Kemal devoted 1923 to preparing the ground. At the turn of 1922 and 1923 he had already announced the creation of a people’s party. On 1 April the Assembly, hitherto dominated by various factions, decided to call new elections. They were won almost everywhere by candidates of the Defence of Rights Associations backed by Kemal, which in September were transformed into the People’s Party (Halk Fırkası), later the Republican People’s Party. On 24 July the peace that recognised the sovereignty of the Ankara government was signed at Lausanne; on 23 August the Assembly ratified it; and on 6 October Turkish troops entered Constantinople, which the Allied forces had evacuated.

Kemal did not utter the word “republic” in public until September. In an interview with the Viennese Neue Freie Presse on 22 September 1923 he said that Turkey was in essence already a republic, and his answer, reprinted in the Istanbul press, caused a storm. The second step concerned the capital. Kemal did not want to return to Constantinople, the city of the sultans, the Caliph and the embassies, exposed to attack from the sea. On 13 October 1923, on the motion of İsmet and a group of deputies, the Assembly passed a one-article law making Ankara the capital – an Anatolian town that then had a few tens of thousands of inhabitants, no sewerage and only a handful of decent buildings. For years diplomats were reluctant to move there from Istanbul.

The crisis and 29 October

The proclamation was brought about by a government crisis that Kemal had largely engineered himself. On 23 October the Assembly rejected the candidate whom Prime Minister Ali Fethi, later Okyar, had proposed as interior minister, and elected another deputy instead. That same day, instead of the candidate nominated by the outgoing deputy speaker of the Assembly, the deputies elected to that post Rauf, later Orbay, a former prime minister who was drifting ever further away from Kemal. On the evening of 25 October Kemal gathered the ministers at his residence in Çankaya, outside Ankara. It was decided that the government would resign and that its members would not join a new one. The resignation was announced in the Assembly on 27 October. For two days the deputies tried in vain to put together a new cabinet, and none of Kemal’s people was willing to sit in it.

On the evening of 28 October Kemal invited İsmet, Fethi and a few trusted generals and deputies to dinner at Çankaya. According to those present, he told them: “Gentlemen, tomorrow we shall proclaim the republic.” After dinner he and İsmet drafted the constitutional amendment. On the morning of 29 October the parliamentary group of the People’s Party met. When the discussion on the composition of the government reached deadlock, the group entrusted Kemal with resolving the crisis. He asked for an hour and then presented his draft: government crises arose from an ill-defined system, so it had to be called by its proper name. The group adopted the draft, and in the afternoon it went before a plenary session of the Assembly.

The amendment covered six articles of the 1921 fundamental law. The first article now read: “Sovereignty belongs unconditionally to the nation. The system of government rests on the principle that the people direct their own destiny themselves and directly. The form of government of the Turkish state is a republic.” Other articles declared Islam the state religion and Turkish the official language, created the office of president, elected by the Assembly from among the deputies, and replaced the individually elected commissioners with a cabinet headed by a prime minister appointed by the president. The law was passed to cries of “Long live the republic!” In the evening the Assembly voted to elect the president. Mustafa Kemal received the votes of all 158 deputies present. The Assembly had considerably more members at the time, but many of them, including some of Kemal’s critics, were away from Ankara. The proclamation was celebrated with artillery salutes in Ankara and, over the following days, throughout the country. On 30 October İsmet formed the republic’s first government.

The documents of that day bear the date 29 October 1339. Turkey was then using the Ottoman Rumi calendar, whose days and months had coincided with the Gregorian ones since 1917, although its years were counted differently. The Gregorian calendar and the Christian era have been in force in Turkey since 1 January 1926.

Reactions and the first months of the republic

The proclamation took even some of Kemal’s comrades-in-arms by surprise. In Istanbul, Rauf, General Kâzım Karabekir and other heroes of the War of Independence complained that so important a decision had been taken in haste, behind the nation’s back and without discussion. The Istanbul press asked what the Caliph’s role would now be. The question became pressing in December 1923, when the newspapers published a letter from two influential leaders of Indian Muslims, the Aga Khan and Ameer Ali, appealing to the government to respect the dignity of the caliphate. Kemal presented it as proof of a British intrigue, and the newspaper publishers were brought before an independence tribunal.

On 3 March 1924 the Assembly abolished the caliphate, the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Pious Foundations, and religious schooling, and all members of the Ottoman dynasty were banished from the country. Abdülmecid II left the next day. On 20 April 1924 the Assembly adopted a new constitution, which remained in force until the military coup of 1960. Islam remained the state religion under it until 1928. In the autumn of 1924 Rauf, Karabekir and their supporters founded the opposition Progressive Republican Party. It survived less than a year: after the outbreak of Sheikh Said’s Kurdish rebellion in February 1925 the government passed the Law on the Maintenance of Order, and the party was dissolved. For more than two decades the republic became a one-party state. Kemal combined the office of president with the leadership of the party, which drew up the electoral lists, and with authority over the army, whose officers owed their victory to him. The Assembly re-elected him in 1927, 1931 and 1935, each time unanimously. Formally Turkey was a parliamentary republic with a government answerable to the Assembly; in practice every important matter was decided by the president at Çankaya, and Prime Minister İsmet carried out his will. This model – one leader, one party and one programme for remaking the nation – lasted in Turkey until 1946, when İnönü agreed to the creation of a legal opposition.

Significance

The proclamation of 29 October 1923 closed the history of the Ottoman Empire, whose sultanate had been abolished a year earlier and whose last remnant, the caliphate, was abolished a few months later. In international law the republic was the successor of the empire and took over its debts and obligations, but it saw itself as an entirely new state – national rather than dynastic and multi-confessional. On this foundation Kemal carried out a series of reforms over the following years: he introduced a secular civil code, banned the fez, closed the dervish orders, replaced the Arabic alphabet with the Latin one and gave women the vote. At the same time his republic was a one-party dictatorship that suppressed opposition, denied the Kurds the right to their own identity and completed the removal of Christians from Anatolia.

For the history of the road to the Second World War, the Turkish Republic mattered in two ways. First, as a model. In the Europe of the 1920s democracies were collapsing one after another. A year earlier Benito Mussolini had taken power in Italy, and ten days after the proclamation in Ankara Adolf Hitler tried to overthrow the government in Munich. The German right, as the historian Stefan Ihrig has shown, portrayed Kemal’s Turkey as a state that had rejected an imposed peace, rebuilt its army from scratch, “cleansed itself” of minorities and been reborn under the leadership of one man. Even in the 1930s Hitler spoke of Kemal with admiration, and the propaganda of the Third Reich made the “new Turkey” one of its examples of “national rebirth”.

Second, as a state that, unlike its German admirers, was content with what it had won. The republic sought neither revenge nor new territory beyond Hatay, which it obtained through negotiations with France. It made peace with Greece, joined the League of Nations in 1932, concluded the Balkan Entente in 1934 and in 1936, again through negotiation, regained at Montreux the right to fortify the Straits. When war broke out in September 1939, Turkey, by then governed by President İsmet İnönü, signed a treaty of mutual assistance with Britain and France in October, but for almost the entire war it kept out of the fighting, manoeuvring between Berlin, Moscow and London. It declared war on Germany and Japan only on 23 February 1945.