The Power of the People: Everyday Resistance and Dissent in the Making of Modern Turkey, 1923–38 by Murat Metinsoy

Abstract

After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the founders of the Turkish Republic undertook an ambitious modernization and nation-building project under an authoritarian single-party rule. The literature about the first two decades of Turkey is vast. Scholars from various disciplines have examined in detail the various coercive policies and goals of the Kemalist leaders, their ideological mindset, and the power struggles among them. In The Power of the People, Metinsoy shifts the attention from state-centered analyses to society. He shows how ordinary people, particularly those who were the most vulnerable, coped with the ambitious demands of an authoritarian state. He illustrates how people could exercise agency by resisting, manipulating, and at times effectively obstructing policies that disadvantaged them.The book is divided into three broad sections. The first section focuses on the peasantry that constituted the bulk of the population at the time and suffered the economic and demographic miseries during the long-lasting wars that ended the Ottoman Empire. The Republican regime did not bring relief to the peasants. High agricultural taxes, the Great Depression, state monopolies, commercialization of agriculture, exploitation by large landowners, and repression at the hands of the gendarmerie caused massive discontent within the peasantry. Although the peasantry’s grievances were not sufficient to create mass rebellions or organized social movements, they were manifested in petitioning, spreading rumors about state agents, avoiding tax payments, smuggling, theft, and banditry. Such forms of resistance were consequential. At times the state had to forgive tax debt, loosen restrictions on the trade of monopoly goods, restructure credit debt, and initiate land-distribution programs. A longer-term effect was the persistence of the peasantry and its agriculture-based economy despite the state’s push for industrialization.The second section turns to the working class. Heavy taxes, long working hours, unsanitary and dangerous conditions, low wages, and weak social-security provisions caused broad labor discontent. Artisans engaged in traditional crafts were hurt by industrialization and imports of cheap goods. Low-income state employees, such as teachers, preachers, and local bureaucrats, were disgruntled by late salary payments, a lack of social benefits, and high tax deductions from their low wages. Like workers in rural areas, urban wage earners during the early Republican period had their struggles. Even though authoritarian rule did not allow the emergence of strong labor activism, workers devised a broad repertoire of resistance strategies. They wrote to the press, petitioned the government, and engaged in small acts of noncompliance, such as prolonging breaks, producing defective goods, and stealing from their workplace. Absenteeism, low productivity, high labor turnover, spontaneous protests, and embezzlement indicated wage earners’ discontent, compelling the government to improve the life of the working class by initiating legal and social measures.In the final section, Metinsoy states that people expressed their disapproval of the secularization reforms by spreading rumors, criticizing the government in coffee houses, refusing to send their children to secular schools, and placing seditious placards in public spaces. Religious brotherhoods and educational groups persisted in secret. Many people shunned the Western-style hats imposed by the Hat Law, and the unveiling campaigns failed significantly to change women’s dress. People found ways to continue their old habits, sometimes by feigning ignorance or by pretending to be mentally ill. In short, the reforms could not displace long-standing local cultures, practices, and norms. Metinsoy underlines that the state “responded in a flexible and tolerant manner to nonviolent and individual resistance and nonconformity on many occasions unless it evolved into organized political challenge” (284). The high level of social discontent and the state’s infrastructural weakness forced it to be more accommodating.This book is not only a valuable addition to Turkish-studies literature but also to the literature about transformative states and modernization. It offers a balanced perspective on top-down reforms, focusing on state–society interactions and social responses without taking for granted that the implementation of state policy always results in intended consequences.Metinsoy’s research is impressive and meticulous, drawing from a vast variety of sources including different state archives, memoirs, newspapers, novels, and poems. But the book also has some shortcomings. It does not do justice to the literature that emerged in Turkish studies examining state–society relations and everyday politics during the single-party period. The literature is no longer as state-centered as Metinsoy portrays. The analysis also has a conceptual problem. The notion of “everyday forms of resistance” loses its analytical strength when applied indiscriminately and broadly. Do acts not explicitly directed against the state qualify as resistance to the state—for example, a poor wage earner’s theft from a state factory? If so, a tax collector’s or high-level bureaucrat’s acceptance of bribes would also constitute resistance to the state. Why would a poor citizen’s petition asking for financial aid from the state be an example of resistance? The sheer number of such examples make the book repetitive and sometimes hard to read, but they also raise questions about the conceptual foundation on which the book rests. The examples fail to distinguish between acts of resistance, limits to state authority, and survival strategies.