Turkish Parliament Research Articles

The Alliance in the Storm: Geopolitical Representation of the United States in the Turkish Parliament during Détente

This article analyzes how the geopolitical representation of the United States in Turkish political discourse changed during the 1960s and 1970s in the context of deep crises between the two countries, such as the Cyprus question, the opium issue, and the US arms embargo on Türkiye. Within the framework of critical geopolitical theory, it uses the concept of “geopolitical representation.” It examines the changes in the geopolitical representation of the United States in Turkish political life through practical geopolitics. To this end, it evaluates the debates, speeches, and correspondence made by the representatives of the ruling and opposition parties and members of the government in the Turkish Grand National Assembly between 1964 and 1979, within the context of the crises in Turkish-American relations, particularly within the foreign policy framework. It is argued that while the alliance between Türkiye and the United States and Türkiye’s membership in NATO were seen as important symbols of Türkiye’s sovereignty and enjoyed unwavering support in the 1950s, tensions with the US, Türkiye’s “strategic partner,” in the 1960s and 1970s led to notable shifts in the Turkish parliament’s narrative. As a pioneer of anti-NATO and anti-US rhetoric, the Workers’ Party of Türkiye (TİP) played a prominent role in shaping parliamentary discussions.

The Limits of the EU's Power in the Context of Sanctions Imposed to Türkiye in the Eastern Mediterranean

Since the beginning of the 2010s, Türkiye has been subjected to efforts of exclusion from the deepening energy collaborations in the Eastern Mediterranean. In 2020, Turkish Parliament approved a bill authorizing the deployment of troops to support Libya in countering various threats to its stability and integrity. These threats included terrorist organizations, irregular migration that had an impact on the entire region, illegal armed groups, and human trafficking. Additionally, Türkiye took steps to disrupt the anti-Türkiye axis in the region by signing a maritime delimitation agreement with Libya to establish clear boundaries for maritime jurisdictional areas. With this move, Türkiye positioned itself as a game changer in the Eastern Mediterranean. Greece and the Greek Cypriot Administration of Southern Cyprus (GCASC), who are uncomfortable with Türkiye's steps in line with its rightful interests, have made concerted efforts to involve the EU in the issues related to the Eastern Mediterranean region, acting in favor of their own unilateral interests. The EU, eventually, has decided to impose sanctions on Türkiye, particularly as a result of discussions in the European Parliament. The biased and unfair attitude of the EU, coupled with its implementation of sanctions, will have significant political costs on Türkiye-EU relations. In this context, an evaluation is being made regarding the effectiveness of the EU's stance and applied sanctions, considering the EU’s perspective and its claim to be an actor in the region within the context of the current balance of power.

The Long Speech: Rhetorical Abundance in Circulation

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes excessively long speeches in order to argue that circulation naturalizes rhetorical processes that govern meaning within texts. In our view, abundant acts of address unsettle dominant models of speech and circulation, presenting an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between rhetorical forms and circulatory transfigurations. We focus on Strom Thurmond’s twenty-four-hour filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights Act and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s 1927 speech to the Turkish Parliament, which lasted thirty-six hours over six days. We bring together these otherwise unrelated long speeches to outline three fictions of text and circulation: textual unity, speaker persona, and implied audience. We argue that these fictions stand in for the excessive address in circulation and, in turn, forms of circulatory abbreviation naturalize rhetorical constructions internal to the speech. In this way, we offer a rhetorical account of circulation that connects textual processes to circulatory forms.

Penalizing women MPs: the approval of women-initiated bills in the Turkish parliament

ABSTRACT This article examines the effect of female bill authorship on bill approval. The analysis focuses on the Turkish Parliament between 2002 and 2015. During this time, the Islamic Justice and Development Party controlled the country’s government and a parliamentary majority, and gender issues became central to political discourse. Using a novel data set of content-coded private members’ bills, we evaluate whether gender affected bill approval. The analysis sheds light on gender discrimination, and the impact women MPs have on the corpus of laws that govern the country. The results reveal that bills initiated by women did not receive a similar treatment to those initiated by men. All else equal, these bills were less likely to become law.

The Turkish Nation as a Bridge: Imagining a Nation in Turkish Parliamentary Discourse

This article analyses Turkish parliamentary discourse about Turkish communities living outside of Turkey from 1988 to 2016. It focuses particularly on the usage of the bridge metaphor in discursive strategies towards these communities; concentrated mainly in former Ottoman territories and parts of Eurasia. The article argues that Turkish parliamentarians used the bridge metaphor to frame Turkish communities as part of both the Turkish nation and the nation where they lived, thereby constituting their liminal and in-between identity. Parliamentarians continuously (re-)imagine, (re-)construct, and (re-)produce the Turkish nation by using different discursive strategies that included uniqueness, sameness or difference. They used identity markers as ethnicity, language, geography, history, and religion to address these strategies. Metaphorically framing Turkish communities as a bridge provided them a dominant bridge role, namely that of friendship and peace. By transforming Turkish communities into a bridge of friendship and peace, through different dimensions, they believed that they would have a positive and crucial role for the country where they live and for Turkey. This bridge role provided opportunities as well as limits, illustrating the interplay between discourse and foreign policy developments.

Navigating underrepresentation and gendered barriers to women's political power: Narratives and experiences of women parliamentarians in Turkey

As women increasingly participate in political decision-making around the world, the research emphasizes the need to further understand how informal barriers shape women's political participation. At the same time, the persistent stability of hybrid political regimes calls for additional inquiry into the impact of hybrid regimes on gender politics and its actors. Based on the case of Turkey, a hybrid regime, this study explores how women MPs navigate gendered, informal obstacles in parliament and to what extent their navigation strategies reflect the broader implications posed by the hybrid regime context. This exploratory study draws on qualitative, in-depth semi-structured interviews with eight women MPs in the Turkish parliament from government and opposition parties. The findings illustrate that navigating the informal barriers women MPs experience in the Turkish parliament happens both individually and in collective ways. Individually, women MPs choose to navigate the informal barriers of gender norms by either assimilating or contrasting the masculine way of doing politics. Collective navigation strategies of women MPs in the Turkish parliament illustrate their approaches to representing women's interests, seeking women's solidarity across the parliament, and linkages with civil society to empower women, which also reflect the different positionings of government and opposition within the Turkish hybrid regime dynamics. The findings reveal the need to further research the complex, dynamic interplay of how informal practices and hybrid regime tactics target gender politics and its actors, while also giving more attention to women's agency in tackling and countering obstacles to their political power within and beyond political institutions.

Ewolucja pozycji ustrojowej Wielkiego Zgromadzenia Narodowego Turcji

The aim of article is to show the evolution of parliament’s role in Turkey and the changes taking place within the tripartite division of power from the time of the establishment of the Republic of Turkey (1920’s) to 2018. The article attempts to answer the following questions: how have the scope of competences and the position of the Turkish parliament changed? What are the competences of the parliament following the last reform of the Basic Law (1982)? The research hypothesis assumes that in the case of Turkey, we are dealing with a process of gradual deparliamentarization and replacement of parliament’s supremacy in the tripartite division of powers with a strong monocratic executive power. The changes taking place, characterized in successive basic laws and their amendments, can be described as a gradual weakening of the legislative power and the reduction of its powers in the structure of governmental bodies.

THE SOURCES AND DYNAMICS OF TURKEY’S ANTAGONISM TOWARDS THE EURO-ATLANTIC ASPIRATIONS OF SWEDEN AND FINLAND

Since 1949, NATO’s membership has increased from 12 to 31 countries through nine rounds of enlargement. Allegedly, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization door remains open to any European country in a position to undertake the commitments and obligations of membership, and contribute to security in the Euro-Atlantic area. Yet, any decision to invite a country to join the bloc is taken by the North Atlantic Council on the basis of consensus among all Allies. This dichotomy has attracted particular attention following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which ‘encouraged’ historically non-aligned Finland and Sweden to apply for NATO membership. Apparently, the Euro-Atlantic aspirations of both Nordic countries have immediately encountered strong Turkey’s antagonism. While Finland is now a NATO Ally as of 4 April 2023, Sweden has got merely an official Invitee status. Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has highlighted that NATO’s priority is for Sweden’s accession to be completed as soon as possible as well. Although President Erdogan submitted Sweden’s accession protocol to the Turkish parliament for ratification in October 2023, there is an ongoing discussion on the reasons why the process has been held up by official Ankara. This article aims at exploring the genuine motives behind Turkey’s reluctance to clear the way for the country to become part of the Western military-political bloc. It argues that self-positioning of Turkey as a non-conventional NATO Ally pursuing an autonomous policy, trying to have its own national security concerns better accommodated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, has been a critical factor.

The National Pact project predicting the security of Anatolia from a Turkish perspective and the intensifying Turkish-British rivalry in Northern Iraq (1920–1926)

The National Pact Project, which was approved by the Turkish parliament and became official on 28 January 1920, was approved by the Ottoman Assembly. It envisaged the security of the Turkish presence in the region, which considered Anatolia as the axis, and was based on the thesis that this security started in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria. There was a Turkish-British rivalry with the central theme of oil in Northern Iraq. Ultimately, the winner was England, which had military and political power. According to the Turkish side, the separatist movements that emerged in the last period after the Cold War and concentrated in the south of Turkey, especially in Northern Iraq, revealed the realistic aspect of the National Pact project, which was developed against possible security gaps. However, Turkey has never put the project into practice, and limited operations in areas close to the borderlines have been sufficient.

Understanding Turkey’s Long Debate on Extending Voting Rights to External Residents through Parliamentary Minutes

Abstract Extending voting rights to citizens living abroad has been one of the longest debated subjects in the Turkish Parliament, even more persistent than is generally assumed in academic and political circles. In this study, we aim to understand how Turkish political decision-makers conceived Turkey’s external residents’ right to vote from abroad and the rationalisations and conjectures put forward by parliamentarians during different political times. For this purpose, we traced parliamentary minutes back from the beginning of Turkey’s two party-system to the present. We found that two channels of demand for change existed: pressure from citizens living overseas and individual parliamentarians who had connections with residents abroad. We also noticed that opposition parties’ agenda towards the Turkish diaspora’s right to vote differed when they took control of the government. Additionally, we found that coups d’état and the established bureaucracy in Turkey resisted the diaspora’s right to participate in national elections.

Tweeting apart: Democratic backsliding, new party cleavage and changing media ownership in Turkey

Turkey plunges headlong into democratic backsliding under Erdoğan’s presidency. The country was a forerunner in the decline of democratic standards in a decade from 2010 to 2020. In the first part of the article, we investigate how this democratic erosion suspends Turkey’s long-standing traditional party cleavage between religious conservatism and secularism. By tracing individuals who follow the members of the Turkish parliament on Twitter, we attach the deputies to their followers with the help of correspondence analysis. We illustrate that, as the ethnic identity divide remains significant, democracy-authoritarianism cleavage becomes the main party split that brings the supporters of an ideologically diverse group of opposition parties closer. In the second part, we conceptualize the democracy-authoritarianism divide as the main cleavage in Turkish party politics after 2017 to shed light on how the AKP’s different tactics of capturing traditional media generated a partisan media landscape.

Was There a Civil War in Anatolia between the Ottoman Collapse in World War I and the Establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923?

For most Turks the emergence of the Republic of Turkey out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire involved a four-year period of national struggle/milli mücadele. In the version of events canonised by Ataturk's October 1927 Nutuk speech to the Turkish parliament the expression civil war is not used. Yet the range of adversaries he depicts, including the Ottoman Palace suggests that there were many types of wars being fought in Anatolia in those years. This article suggests that the term civil war can be applied to those years and discusses historical research that says so. Not only was the war with the Palace an inchoate civil war over the Ottoman Succession, there are strong European parallels with the Turkish experience of imperial collapse, ethnic conflict, partition and state formation between 1918 and 1923. To draw the connections we need to think of civil war in a ‘layered’ way and the latter part of the article justifies such an approach.

Bitlis Deputies and Their Activities in the The Republican Period According to the Archival Records of The Grand National Assembly of Turkey (1923–1950)

Bitlis, tarihi geçmişi ve kültürel değerleriyle Anadolu’nun önemli medeniyet merkezlerinden biridir. Bu nedenle şehrin tarihinin her dönemini araştırmak ve aydınlatmak hem Bitlis iline hem de “Tarih bilimine” önemli katkılar sunacaktır. Yerel tarih çalışmaları, bölgesel ve ulusal tarih çalışmalarına önemli kaynaklar ve faydalar sağlamaktadır. Tarih boyunca önemli bir yerleşim yeri olan Bitlis’in Cumhuriyet’in ilk yıllarından itibaren sahip olduğu siyasi yaşam alanının ve bu alanda siyaset yapan kadroların gayretleri toplumsal dönüşüm açısından büyük önem arz etmektedir. Bu çalışmayla Bitlis’in Cumhuriyet Dönemi siyasi, sosyal, ekonomik ve kültürel gelişim süreci, şehri temsil eden milletvekilleri ve yaptıkları faaliyetler çerçevesinde değerlendirmeyi amaçladık. Cumhuriyet döneminde ülke yönetimine egemen olan siyasi kadroların hem yerel hem de ulusal düzeyde hangi siyasal, sosyal, ekonomik ve kültürel tabana dayandıklarının ortaya konulması önemlidir. Genel olarak ülkenin, yerel olarak temsil ettiği şehrin, planlanmış hedefler istikametinde ilerlemesi ve gelişmesi milletvekillerinin becerileriyle yakından alakalıdır. Bu çalışmada Bitlis ilini Cumhuriyet Döneminde (1923-1950) TBMM’de temsil eden milletvekillerinin özgeçmişi ve Meclis faaliyetleri araştırılarak, Bitlis’in bu dönemde TBMM’deki temsil durumu, seçilen kişiler, yapılan çalışmalar ve yaşanan olaylar incelenmiş olup şehrin siyasi ve toplumsal tarihi açıklanmaya çalışılmıştır. Ayrıca milletvekillerinin bölgesel ve ulusal sorunları çözme konusundaki yaklaşımları ve faaliyetleri ortaya konmaya çalışılmıştır. Arşiv kaynakları ışığında hazırlanan bu çalışmada, betimleyici yöntemsel yaklaşım benimsenmiş olup Cumhuriyet Döneminde Bitlis milletvekillerinin biyografileri ve meclis faaliyetleri kronolojik sıraya göre ayrıntılı bir şekilde ele alınmıştır. Milletvekillerinin özgeçmişlerine ait bilgilere TBMM Arşivinde yer alan sicil dosyaları, Tercümanı Hal Varakaları ve TBMM yayınları olan Türk Parlamento Tarihi (ilk 8 cilt) isimli kitaplardan ulaşılmıştır. Vekillerin seçim mazbataları yine TBMM arşivinden, Genel Kuruldaki çalışmalarına ise Zabıt Cerideleri taranarak elde edilmiştir. Milletvekillerinin diğer siyasi çalışmalarına ulaşmak için Cumhurbaşkanlığı Cumhuriyet Arşivi’ndeki Bitlis ile ilgili elde edilen belgelerden yararlanılmıştır. Bu çalışmada arşiv kayıtlarından elde edilen belgeler ışığında milletvekillerinin biyografileri ve yaptıkları çalışmalar ortaya konulmuştur. Ayrıca literatür taraması yapılarak konumuza katkı sağlayacak diğer araştırma eserleri de incelenip makale oluşturulmuştur. Çalışma sonucunda Cumhuriyet Döneminde TBMM’de (TBMM 2-3-6-7-8. Dönemler) Bitlis’i 12 milletvekilinin temsil ettiği görülmüştür. Bu milletvekillerinden Muhittin Nami Bey (2. ve 3. Dönemler) ve Muhtar Ertan (7. ve 8. Dönemler) ikişer dönem vekillik yapmışlardır. Gelinen noktada ele alınan çalışma döneminde Bitlis milletvekilliği görevini ifa eden 10 faklı vekilin özgeçmişi ve meclis çalışmaları incelenmiştir.

Narrow Responses to Social Movements: Evidence from Turkey’s Gezi Protests

ABSTRACT Research on the outcomes of major protests indicates that opposition parties tend to respond with a combination of support and negligence. This article suggests a novel mechanism through which opposition parties maintain this balancing act. Based on an original dataset of interventions in the Turkish Parliament around the 2013 Gezi Protests, I argue that representatives from two left-wing opposition parties supported the movement, but in narrow and even contradictory ways. The Kemalist opposition party CHP emphasised identity markers of the activists but downplayed the issues raised in the protests, while the pro-Kurdish BDP did the opposite. I argue that such narrow issue-centered or actor-centered responses reflected a strategy to simultaneously placate core supporters – Turkish nationalists and Kurdish voters – while giving the impression of being fully supportive of the movement as a whole. One implication of this study is that broad-based movements may be a mixed blessing for democratisation, as they enable opposition parties to cherry-pick their favourite aspects of the protests. Parties may explicitly support a movement but simultaneously deflect attention away from the core issues protesters raise or amplify a narrow set of their pre-established positions.

Agricultural infrastructures: Land, race, and statecraft in Turkey

This article argues that biopolitical infrastructures have been central features of Turkey’s ongoing colonization of Kurdish territories and populations and that the Green Revolution, despite its promise of progress and abundance, needs to be understood as part of this history of racialized state-making. In doing so, it joins recent literature that uncovers the local roots of the Green Revolution in domestic politics and land struggles in the global south, also revealing the entwined histories of accumulation and colonial and racial dispossession with agricultural norms and practices. Drawing on research in the records of the Economic Cooperation Administration, US Agency for International Development, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Turkish parliamentary debates, and contemporaneous journals, I show how the Green Revolution can in fact be retold as an episode in a longer history of struggles over the distribution and use of land, the construction of agricultural infrastructures, and how these questions have been complicated by class, ethnic, racial, gender, and political divisions. The paper thus situates Turkey in a transnational history of agrarian development, while also relating the adoption of high yield seeds, pesticides, and grain cultivation to projects of land consolidation, internal colonialism, and racialized methods of state formation.

Türkiye’de Siyasi Partilerin Teröre Yaklaşımları

Devletlerin güvenliklerini ve bekalarını tehdit eden en önemli sorunların başında terör sorunu gelmektedir. Bu bakımdan Türkiye, uzun yıllardan beri terörün etnik, ideolojik ve dini motifli her varyantıyla mücadele etmektedir. Demokratik siyasal sistemlerin vazgeçilmez unsurlarından olan ve yasama ve yürütme erkinde önemli rol sahibi olan siyasi partiler, ülkedeki mevcut sorunların tespiti, çözüm önerileri ve devlete aktarılmasına ve buna yönelik politikalar üretilmesine aracılık etmektedir. Dolayısıyla bu çalışmada, Türkiye’de siyasi partilerin terör sorununa yönelik yaklaşımları seçim beyannameleri ve parti programları üzerinden incelenmektedir. Bu doğrultuda, terörün siyasal partiler tarafından nasıl algılandığı sorusuna cevap arayan bu çalışmanın amacı, Türkiye’de Meclis’te grubu bulunan siyasi partilerin teröre yönelik yaklaşımlarını ortaya koymaktır. Çalışmada yöntem olarak, bu partilerin genel seçim beyannameleri, tüzükleri ve parti programları çerçevesinde doküman analizi yapılmıştır. Çalışma sonucunda HDP dışında tüm partilerin terörü bir sorun alanı olarak gördüğü ve buna yönelik çözüm önerileri geliştirdiği görülmektedir. Meclis’teki partilerin terör sorunu yalnızca güvenlik tedbirleriyle değil, sosyal ve ekonomik boyutlarıyla ele alınması ve bu kapsamda çözüm politikaları geliştirilmesi gerektiğini belirtmektedirler. Terörizm, kaynakları, çözüm yolları ve mücadele yöntemleri konusunda partilerin farklı yaklaşımları ve düşünceleri olmasına rağmen partilerin çoğunluğu tarafından terörün bir sorun alanı olarak görüldüğü de söylenebilir.

Patterns of the Parliamentary Debates: How Deliberative are Turkish Democratic Opening Debates?

Abstract This study attempts to measure the deliberation quality of the Democratic Opening Debates in the Turkish Parliament through the Discourse Quality Index (DQI). The majority of studies have been conducted on the deliberation quality of relatively homogenised and developed Western societies and on less conflictual or contentious topics. In these countries, democratic culture has been institutionalised. On the contrary, Turkey is a developing country and has been going through an ethnic conflict involving violence for many decades. Thus, this case study aims to make an original contribution to empirical deliberation studies. Researchers have examined the 88-page stenographic records of the Democratic Opening Debates and put forward a DQI score. According to the findings, the controversial debates fulfill only 40% of high-level deliberative discourse ethics. This result demonstrates that the ideal deliberation process does not exist in Turkey even though a convenient atmosphere is created for deliberations by means of official procedures. Ethnic division in the society has a profoundly negative impact on the quality of deliberations.

Dashnaktsutyun and its anti-human propaganda

Dashnaktsutyun and its anti-human propaganda

Economic Adversity and Voter Turnout: Evidence from Turkish Parliamentary Elections

Economic Adversity and Voter Turnout: Evidence from Turkish Parliamentary Elections

Armenians in Turkish politics and parliament (1923-1946)

There is a long and complicated history between Turks and Armenians. Armenians have consistently found a place for themselves in business, the economy, society, and government. Before the Constitutional Monarchy, Armenians began to participate actively in the governmental structure throughout the Ottoman Empire and attained a variety of high posts, including ministerial positions. After the Constitutional Monarchy, they were represented in the parliament by a sizable number of lawmakers as well as by employees and ministers. After the Turkish Republic was established, the same condition persisted. Armenian representatives have served in the Turkish Grand National Assembly from the beginning of the Turkish parliament. Atatürk also allocated quotas for the minorities for their deputies and allowed them to enter the parliament. In this article, you will find the activities of the deputy and parliamentary Armenian citizens who served in the Turkish Grand National Assembly between 1923-1946.