Anat Goldman. Journal of the Middle East & Africa. Volume 9, Issue 2. April-June 2018.

This article explores the current ambiguous position of the cult of Atatürk in Turkish society and politics, as both a state cult that is not entirely desired by the ruling party and a fragmented and contested people’s cult. The article argues that the commodification and personal appropriation of the cult of Atatürk in the 1990s and 2000s blurred the lines between state and society and between political ideologies, eventually turning the cult into a much more inclusive realm than before, which enables debating national identity in Turkey despite the contentious political environment.

Introduction

Just before sunset on June 17, 2013, three weeks into the Gezi Protests and after the second time the police banned gathering in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, a lone man, performance artist Erdem Gündüz, walked across the square, making other people believe that he was just a tourist. He began to stand silently while facing the Atatürk Cultural Center. He stood there, hands in his pockets, without any announcements, signs, or explanations, and without responding to police attempts to interact with him. Soon after, people began to join him; by midnight, there were several hundred people silently standing in the square, and dozens of police officers who ended up unwillingly becoming part of the spectacle simply by standing there motionless, undecided about how they should respond. This lasted until 2 AM, when the police dispersed the crowd. As word spread across the Internet, Turks adopted the hashtag $duranadam (“standing man” in Turkish), and before long, people in Istanbul, in other parts of Turkey, and even abroad began replicating Gündüz’s act with their own standing protests.

Interpretations about and explanations for Gündüz’s action, for which he later received several international awards, occurred almost immediately. Unlike explicit acts of dissent that replicate oppression as a means to resist it, such as people who chain themselves to buildings or put duct tape on their mouths to denote silencing, the act of standing motionless is both easy for spectators to understand and join as well as obscure enough to inhibit the state authorities’ ability to detect or act against it. Unlike explicit acts of resistance, the intentions embodied in the act of standing still are much more covert. People stand still in the streets all the time when they wait for a bus or a friend, when they are lost or confused, or when they look at a shop window or a street scene. How can the police distinguish between such actions and silently standing in dissidence? Gündüz said that his action was an almost spontaneous reaction against police violence and mainstream media censorship: “I didn’t think about it as a form of silent protest, a form of activism or anything. I just did it, because I was there as a citizen who lives in that country.”

In addition to the international recognition that Gündüz’s standing received, it also relied heavily on Turkish national symbolism. Gündüz stood in Taksim Square, a well-known Republican site, in front of the Atatürk Cultural Center, which had been closed since 2008, initially for renovation, and then according to the new plans for Gezi Park, which was one of the causes of the 2013 protests, to be demolished. While standing, Gündüz stared at the two national flags that were hanging on both sides of the building and the giant image of Atatürk hanging in the middle, which the police had restored just days before, replacing the signs that the Gezi protesters had hung on the building when they had taken it over. In addition, the act of silent standing relied heavily on a national repertoire of public engagement that all Turks know very well—the November 10, 9:05, standing in honor of Atatürk—which added another layer of meaning to Gündüz’s act. It could be understood as an act of mourning over the loss of Atatürk, the leader; grief over the loss of old principles of the Republic under the current government; or an act of honoring and declaring loyalty to Atatürk and the values that his image had come to represent. Gündüz’s choice to reference Atatürk in his act was intentional. He said: “I wanted to demonstrate my respect to the principles and ideas of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic….”

Replicating the act of silent standing in honor of Atatürk in the context of a protest against the Turkish government turned the meaning of this act on its head. While the symbolic origins of the minute of silence are rooted in the idea of individual compliance and the merging of an individual’s will, time, and freedom with the state’s will, the Standing Man protest was a moment of dedication to the separation of its participants from their state and its will. The Duran Adam protest marks the current stage of the cult of Atatürk. While it is still a state cult that is reluctantly and, sometimes, ambivalently pushed by the state, for many it has become an act of resistance to the current government or an act of loyalty to principles that they think the Justice and Development Party, or Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisı (AKP) government, had moved away from.

This article argues that the current ambiguous position of the cult of Atatürk in Turkish society and politics, as both a state cult that is not entirely desired by the ruling party and a fragmented and personalized people’s cult, is a source of its surprising strength, persistence, and inclusivity. Even though the ruling party, AKP, and the Turkish president, Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan, worked to undermine and eliminate the state-cult of Atatürk, the Turkish government does not have a unified and coherent position against it. This became apparent when the party used Atatürk references and imagery in the aftermath of the 2016 failed coup, an act that received much criticism both from secularists, who saw it as hypocrisy, and Islamists, who saw it as betrayal.

At the heart of this changing position of the cult of Atatürk, and what enabled its persistence into the 1990s and 2000s, lies the social, political, and economic transformation that Turkey has undergone since 1980 and, even more so, after 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet Block. The post-1980 coup political system and the neoliberal reforms that were initially pushed by the military junta, and later by Prime Minister Turgut Özal, reconfigured the country’s political system and economy, as well as the people’s relationship to the state and the way in which they engage in politics. In the case of the cult of Atatürk, the Turkish government’s political pull back from Kemalism in the public sphere at the beginning of 1983 enabled other actors to influence and participate in national expressions, particularly as a new consumerist culture was emerging, through market activity in what was then defined as “consumer citizenship” where individuals express their sense of belonging to the national community or their identification with a political stance through market activity instead of political engagement.

In many countries, the focus on consumer citizenship has shifted during the last few decades. Consumer citizenship once implied an inward-looking process of nation making. The aim of this process was coherently to delimit and consolidate both national markets and national identities. Yet, in an era of globalization, when flows of capital, people, and ideas exert increasing cultural and financial pressure on the nation-state and its ways of maintaining territorial integrity, states and corporations have revised their representations of consumer citizenship.

In the context of the cult of Atatürk, expressions of consumerist citizenship can be seen in people who decorate their homes, businesses, and even bodies with Atatürk memorabilia, buying photos, calendars, clocks, phone covers, T-shirts, and even tattoos, as well as the industry created to supply these demands. In addition to an emerging market for such memorabilia, some businesses, particularly large corporations and banks, went beyond this type of market activity to take over roles that were formerly filled by the state. Corporations publish November 10 ads in memory of Atatürk in the national newspapers and on TV and radio, and shopping malls organize special Atatürk exhibitions and public ceremonies, all as a means to enhance Atatürk’s presence in the public sphere, while the government has given up on this role, and has even begun to encourage a parallel cult of Erdoğan that currently exists side by side with the cult of Atatürk.

This article will review these changes and how they affect the new types of commemoration. It will show how, despite political polarization and contestation in the country, the image of Atatürk became a realm in which even those who oppose Atatürk and his legacy can debate their Turkish identity. Currently, the dual position of the cult of Atatürk as both a state-led cult and an independent people’s cult that is often directed against the state only helps strengthen its role in Turkish public life.

Theoretical Framework

The literature on state cults and cults of personality distinguishes between public expressions of nationalism under authoritarian regimes and in democracies. Nevertheless, in both cases, it tends to tell a top-down story that attributes a central role for the state in initiating and implementing these cults. This is true for the majority of studies on cults of personality that look at authoritarian and totalitarian cases, such as China, North Korea, Soviet Russia, and even Syria, but quite a few of the seminal works on nation building have also considered its practices as instrumental for governments, elites, and other social groups in achieving their political goals. These works, as well as others that look at identity-shaping practices or educational practices, and those that examine everyday (or banal) expressions of nationalism, often see the process of nation building as being top-down and intentional; that is, dependent on state planning and its efficacy. Yet this top-down approach falls short in explaining the complex dynamics of the dissemination of a national ideology to the population and the homogenization process, as well as the emergence of a people’s cult that exists side by side with a state cult, as in the case of Atatürk. This failure is mainly due to the linear understanding of the relationship between state and society, which often portrays the state as all-powerful and coercive, and the binary understanding of social response, which either depicts society as passive and submissive or as reactionary and openly or tacitly rebellious. This conceptualization of the state-society relationship in the context of nation building has undergone a transformation in the last decade when scholars began to look at mid-level stakeholders and bureaucrats and the bottom-up formation of commemoration and state cults, as well as their reproduction, providing much less of a state-centered narrative than before. These new studies also undermine the traditional understanding of citizenship, which defines the relationship between an individual and the state as being contractual, where the state provides security to its citizens, ensuring their rights, and citizens provide the state with the resources to do so. With identity-shaping practices, states go beyond the initial contractual conditions to mold individual identities into a new model of their desired citizens. Nonetheless, understanding these simply as a means for the state to exert further control over the population misses the transformative nature of these practices and, more significantly, the public’s role in this transformative nature, as demonstrated in the case of Atatürk.

The initial Atatürk cult in the 1920s was state-manufactured, and similar to other cults of personality that began appearing at that time. Yet, when it was created, Atatürk’s move towards secularism and fast-track Westernization was unpopular with a large part of the population. Interestingly, and despite Atatürk’s efforts, his cult took off much more forcefully after his death, and it was standardized only after his second burial, which took place under the rule of the Democratic Party, or Demokrat Parti (DP), after the regime transitioned from a one-party state to a multi-party system in the late 1940s. Additionally, in the years before the cult had been standardized and consolidated, Ismet İnönü, Atatürk’s successor at the Republican People’s Party, Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi or (CHP), and in government failed in his attempt to establish his own cult of personality by following the already existing state law during his term in power between 1938 and 1950. He encountered resistance inside his party and from the emerging political opposition. While in the early years after Atatürk’s death the political leadership intended to commemorate him, the cult that effectively formed went beyond this initial planning to become one of Turkey’s most important founding myths and national symbols. The current popularity of Atatürk in public and private life in Turkey seems disconnected from the state apparatus; therefore, a study of this case and the historic circumstances and complex social dynamics leading to it can contribute to our understanding, not just of cults of personality, but of national cults in general and voluntary public expressions of nationalism.

Economic and Social Change in the Aftermath of the 1980 Coup

Within three decades, the people living within the borders of the Republic of Turkey had experienced their country’s transition from an inward-looking agrarian economy to a major regional power, so that, by 2013, Turkey had become the sixteenth largest economy in the world.

Turkey was one of first major test cases for what later became known as the Washington Consensus, the World Bank’s new structural adjustment to lending in cooperation with the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) stabilization program. Plans to restructure the country’s economy preceded the 1980 Turkish coup d’état. In the January 24 Decisions earlier that year, Süleyman Demirel’s center-right Justice Party, or Adalet Partisi (AP), government signaled Turkey’s transition to a free market economy, and accepted a bundle of IMF-supported reforms that envisioned a new regime based on exports, which would end the country’s traditional import-substitution policy. In March 1980, Ankara signed an agreement with the World Bank to grant Turkey structural adjustment loans, while a three-year standby agreement with the IMF three months later provided the largest amount of credit ever granted by that organization at that time.

The military intervention of September 12, 1980, led to the imprisonment and torture by the armed forces and police of more than half a million citizens, the proscription of trade unions, and the nearly complete elimination of the country’s associational life. The coup, together with the neoliberal restructuring announced on January 24, 1980, unleashed forces of market liberalization. It also opened the gateways for the generation of new social classes, increasing levels of wealth, and a more liberal political culture, as well as the emergence of new social and identity-based politics. Turgut Özal successfully deepened the structural adjustment reforms after becoming prime minister in 1983. In 1989, when the Turkish Grand National Assembly elected Özal as president of the republic, taking it over from General Kenan Evren, the commander of the 1980 coup, Özal became the symbol of the return of civilian government.

As part of these reforms that marked the weakening of state centralization, Turkey applied for membership in the European Community on April 14, 1987, and the Turkish Grand National Assembly ratified the right of individuals to apply to the European Court of Human Rights. The first private broadcasting channel began operating in 1989 via satellite and, in 1993, an amendment to the constitution (i.e., article 133) enabled private radio broadcasting. The first shopping mall opened in 1988 in a suburb of Istanbul. The Black Sea Economic Corporation Council came into being on June 25, 1992. Turkish authorities established new regulations and institutions to implement government policies, and the state reinforced and expanded its coercive powers to dismantle institutions and regulations associated with the old import-substitution and industrialization-led regime. New legislation enabled the state to invoke its authority over organized labor, and unions were closed. Meanwhile, the government took control of and subordinated independent social institutions.

Privatization and the decline of state services, especially on the edge of major cities, which were growing as a result of the 1980s-accelerated urbanization, created an institutional void, and Islamist networks used this opportunity to fill the vacuum. They provided a range of health, housing, and education services, especially in the urban periphery, and consequently formed relationships at the neighborhood level that would provide the backbone of political Islam’s electoral support from the 1990s onward. Although living conditions became increasingly more difficult for the lower classes after the 1980s, only the Welfare Party, or Refah Partisi (RP) emphasized the importance of economic justice. Thus, the RP organized a very effective political campaign in the early 1990s that mobilized local women and built upon an already existing relationship of trust in the neighborhoods. In its political campaign, the Welfare Party promised a “just order” (adil düzen) to redistribute wealth morally and support small business owners. In the local elections of 1994 and the national elections of 1995, the RP won the largest number of the votes, became the leading party in the Parliament, and its party leader, Necmettin Erbakan, became the prime minister. The Welfare Party’s electoral success came as an alarming surprise to many Kemalist citizens and army officials. It is noteworthy that the Turkish Islamist movement also benefited from the suppression of the 1970s leftist movements, which occurred during the 1980 coup. Islamists promoted a Turkish-Islamic synthesis as a social glue to hold together a nation that was divided along political lines.

The state had also moved away from some of the ways it legitimized itself. For instance, the History Foundation organized the celebrations concerning the seventy-fifth year of the Turkish Republic, in 1998, so that, for the first time in the history of the nation, this was accomplished outside the state structure by a non-governmental organization. Moreover, the exhibitions, books, and other products associated with the festivities unusually featured aspects of “everyday life” and “popular culture,” rather than reflecting official discourses or emphasizing the authority and the institutions of the state.

Meanwhile, concomitant to the Welfare Party’s rise to power, a new cult of Atatürk began to emerge. Özyürek argues that the movement started among secular Kemalists, and that an important factor that led to the commercialization and privatization of Atatürk imagery in the 1990s was the appearance of Islamic symbols in the public political market. Veiled female university students crowding the secular institutions of the modern republic were the first signs of the increased public visibility of Islam. The public appearance of Islam was possible partly through the commodification of Islamic symbols. The consumer culture of the 1980s and the 1990s and the emerging Islamist middle class created a commodity-based identity politics and lifestyle. Islamists began to enjoy five-star hotels where they could swim in sex-segregated pools, frequent restaurants that did not serve alcohol, listen to Islamic radio stations, and attend fashion shows featuring new designs of head scarves and overcoats.

The Current Cult of Atatürk

Sixty-four years after his second interment in 1953, and seventy-nine years after his death in 1938, Atatürk remains omnipresent in daily life in Turkey. By law, his portraits and busts must appear in every school and all public buildings. Every town has at least one main street named after him, and there are squares with Atatürk’s statues across the country. Nonetheless, the cult also has a very strong personal and voluntary aspect. Atatürk’s portraits regularly decorate cafés and restaurants and appear on T-shirts, phone cases, key chains, clocks, posters, lighters, children’s coloring books, and even tattoos and baklava packets.

In the days between Republic Day (October 29) and the anniversary of Atatürk’s death on November 10, and even more so in the week following the latter (i.e., Atatürk Week), individuals, businesses, and state institutions perform various commemorative acts, which include decorating one’s home, car, or workplace with the national flag and images of the first Turkish president; holding small memorial ceremonies; and even exhibitions. On November 10, many people dress in national colors or wear T-shirts with Atatürk’s image for the 9:05 silence in his honor. In Ankara, many people visit Anıtkabir, the Atatürk Mausoleum, on that day; while in Istanbul, many go to the Dolmabahçe Palace, where Atatürk spent his last months and where he died.

Esra Özyürek argues that as Kemalist consumers moved the official state imagery into the market and their homes, they privatized state symbolism, which used to define the public sphere. More importantly, for the first time in the history of the Turkish Republic, citizens perceived the official state ideology as in need of their personal protection, and they took personal responsibility to promote it. Thus, the commodification of the cult of Atatürk increased the engagement of its participants. Consumerist acts became much more engaging than political acts. Yet Özyürek’s argument draws a clear line between Kemalists and Islamists on this issue, marking Islamist appropriations and participation in the cult of Atatürk as subversions of the national narrative that are often disingenuous. She also does not point out the inner generational clashes between secularists among the citizen-consumers who take part in this movement.

The debate over appropriations of Atatürk’s image was not just between Islamists and Kemalists. Not all private secularist actions have been received well by others in their ideological milieu, and some trends, such as getting tattoos, taking wedding photos in Anıtkabir, or posting YouTube videos of very young children crying over the death of Atatürk, which have become a trend since 2008, created much controversy among secularists. Some of them consider these acts to be disrespectful and inappropriate or, in the case of the crying children, even as forms of child abuse.

In addition, in the last decade, as the state has moved away from the cult of Atatürk, large corporations began to take its place by funding newspaper and TV ads that commemorate November 10 and promote Atatürk’s presence in the public sphere. This interest in the image of Atatürk has gone beyond the creation of a market for memorabilia associated with him. Since the mid-2000s, Turkish corporations have been taking over the formerly state-led acts that worked to preserve Atatürk’s presence in the public sphere. Since that time, Turkish and international corporations have begun assuming the state role on November 10 by buying ad space in newspapers and on TV that they use to commemorate Atatürk. This trend is part of a broader transition that Ozkan and Foster describe where the construction of citizens as consumers has undergone a major transformation in contemporary Turkey. Yet while Ozkan and Foster focus on campaigns for products such as Cola Turka or Mavi Jeans that use Turkish nationalism in contrast or in response to global trends, and turn the act of consumption of these products into one where individuals assert their identity and belonging to the national community by buying certain products, the November 10 advertisements are not trying to sell a product; rather, they are used to brand these corporations as national assets, as inviolable parts of Turkish nationalism. Hence, they are now taking responsibility for actions formerly performed by the state, and thus proclaiming themselves to be new agents of commemoration.

The earliest signs of this trend began in 2004 when Lösev (The Health and Education Foundation for Children with Leukemia) and Aras Kargo (a large cargo company) bought space in Hürriyet to publish ads that commemorated Atatürk. Between 2005 and 2006, the appearance of November 10 newspaper issues changed significantly, when corporations, such as Koç Holdings, Iş Bankası, Ağlaoğlu Grup, Turkish Airlines, Deniz Bank, and many others began to purchase large November 10 ad space, taking up entire pages year after year. For example, Koç Holdings have become famous for the tradition the company created of taking up the full back page of Hürriyet every November 10 since 2008. In 2014, however, the company gave the back page space to Iş Bankası, which requested it in order to mark its ninetieth anniversary by publishing a back page November 10 ad in honor of Atatürk. Currently, Turkish companies and local branches of international companies, such as Cannon, post on Facebook and Twitter on November 10 to commemorate Atatürk.

The Gezi Park protest included many groups that were historically critical of Atatürk and his reforms, and many other participants, such as Standing-Man Gündüz, did not have a political affiliation or identification with any political party. Yet many of the actions taken during the Gezi protests appropriated the image of Atatürk as a means to resist state oppression. It was common to see people carrying and waving flags containing Atatürk’s portrait or excerpts of Atatürk’s speech to the youth, and other quotes began appearing in graffiti and on signs across Taksim and Istiklal Avenue. One of the actions that remained for months was that of an old man who painted Atatürk’s profile at several locations on Istiklal Avenue.

Five months after the Gezi protest, on November 10, 2013, the seventy-fifth anniversary of Atatürk’s death, a record 1,089,615 people visited Atatürk’s mausoleum, Anıtkabir, in Ankara, on a single day. It was more than twice the number of people that had visited a year earlier. When Radikal, a liberal newspaper that was published until the winter of 2016, asked its readers to write and explain why they visited Anıtkabir that day, quite a few responded by indicating that “it was not for the love of Atatürk”; in contrast, others wrote that “people are only now recognizing the significance of his values,” or that he “has become the symbol of freedom and resistance against oppression.” The popular cult of Atatürk had moved beyond admiration of the man and his Kemalist values; it had come to represent an opposition to the oppressive state and a way for Turkish citizens to separate themselves from the current Justice and Development Party, or Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisı (AKP) state by infusing new content into a national symbol that opposes it.

Even anarchists began adopting Atatürk symbols in their repertoire. On November 15, 2013, the journalist Ismail Saymaz tweeted a photo he had taken in front of a boutique in Izmir, showing a mannequin dressed in urban-guerilla fashion with a bandana bearing the signature of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk that covered its face and that was wearing a white T-shirt with a portrait of a smiling Atatürk. In another case, the Beşiktaş Çarsı, a die-hard fan group of the Beşiktaş football club, which is often linked to anarchism and is known for its motto “Çarsı is against everything,” had a new addendum during the Gezi days: “Çarsı is against everything except Atatürk.”

To complicate matters further, since the failed July 15 coup in 2016, it has been hard to draw a clear line between religious and secularist appropriations and the intentions of those who participate in the Atatürk cult, as was possible in the 1990s. At the time of writing, especially after the failed July 15, 2016, coup, it would be difficult to distinguish clearly between state and society involvement in the cult, or between “genuine” Kemalists and “hypocritical” AKP participation in the cult of the Republic’s founder. The current cult of Atatürk, in its ambiguous presence in Turkish public life, engages more people than ever before, despite Turkish president Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan’s attempts to establish his own competing cult of personality.

In addition, one cannot ignore the fact that many conservatives, and even AKP supporters, participate in the cult of Atatürk. Days after the failed July 15, 2016, coup, a huge Atatürk portrait was hung on the AKP office building, a decision that has been criticized by conservatives, who see the use of his image as contributing to the idea that the respected leader is the only foundation for legitimacy in politics in Turkey and that other movements are illegitimate. Liberals also criticize the practice, seeing it as hypocrisy. Even Erdoğan himself, at a rally of more than one million people in Istanbul on August 7, 2016, drew a parallel between the spirit of Atatürk as a young officer who founded modern Turkey in 1923 and the civilians who took to the streets on July 15 to try to stop rogue soldiers in tanks and helicopters from seizing power. Erdoğan addressed attendees at the Istanbul rally, with portraits of himself and Atatürk blowing in the breeze on either side of the huge stage, saying, “The belief that helped war veteran Mustafa Kemal start and win the war of independence was running through all Turkey’s cities on July 15.” Erdoğan’s praise of Atatürk in his November 10 speech in 2017 should not come as a surprise.

Conclusion

Interestingly, the privatization of state institutions and the fragmentation and personalization of the cult of Atatürk ended up broadening and enhancing participation in the cult, despite the contentious nature of politics in Turkey. Thus, the cult of Atatürk has become a platform through which even the most marginalized groups get to show and debate their “Turkishness.”

Removing state control from certain aspects of public life, particularly in the case of national cults, has enabled the formation of new practices, as well as the participation of multiple voices in commemorative acts, which consequentially has broadened circles of engagement. Privatization has turned commemoration from an act of political engagement into a consumerist undertaking, and has brought commemoration from the public sphere into people’s homes. Such is reflected on their bodies (e.g., clothing, tattoos, etc.), and in their virtual identities (e.g., social media, such as Facebook and Twitter). On the one hand, this has made participation in these cults easier. On the other hand and in the case of the Turkish contentious political environment, it has made political identification and engagement through consumerism more intense.

The transformation that the cult of Atatürk has undergone in recent years also reflects the contemporary scholarship on Turkish nationalism, which transcends the old dichotomy between religious and secularists in Turkey, which once considered only the latter as nationalists. Moreover, the practice of celebrating the Republic’s founder shows how nationalist discourse is significant to both groups and is appropriated by each of them. The ambiguous role and presence that the cult of Atatürk has had in public life in contemporary Turkey have strengthened nationalism, even as its substance has been appropriated and changed by various groups. The relative freedom that religious or secular people have in appropriating this cult and debating its meaning and significance—both inside their communities and with others who oppose or have misgivings about their views—leaves one with the impression that the cult of Atatürk will not disappear anytime soon.