CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VOLUME VIII (1) ContemporaryEurasia81 | Page 21

LEVON HOVSEPYAN
Turkey, which was unprecedented in the history of the Turkish Republic. As
a result, the army was deprived of its traditional dominant positions and
levers of social and political life. The AKP government has gradually
managed to neutralize the powerful role of the army in the country's social
and political spheres. The factor of the role of the army in Turkey and the
relations between the military and the civil authorities continue to be topical
in scholarly and analytical discussions. The experience of the coup d’état on
July 15, 2016 and the subsequent developments have also raised a number of
questions related to the trends and prospects of the TAF's institutional
identity change and systemic transformation.
The civil-military relationship in Turkey is in the limelight of
researchers and numerous studies have been conducted addressing the
political role of the army, its interference in political life, its diminishing role
during AKP rule and the increase of civilian control. Despite the diversity of
research, studies on the transformation of the TAF's value system and
identity, current trends and the factors affecting them are quite scarce.
Within the analytical framework issues related to the process of the
transformation of the army's identity and tendencies accompanying this
process have been discussed in recent years, a number of questions about the
transformation of the army's institutional identity have arisen. Therefore, the
subject is topical in terms of revealing current realities and trends.
From the Loss of Institutional Autonomy to Institutional Identity
Transformation
The institutional identity of the TAF, where Kemalism and secularism
have been of foundational significance, is undergoing a continuous
transformation, which is inter alia associated with the weakening and
neutralization of institutional autonomy in the state system. Ü. C.
Sakallioğlu, a well-known specialist in civil-military relations in Turkey,
considers the TAF's autonomy at two levels: institutional and political.
According to her, the first refers to the protection of the professional sphere
of the army from external undesirable interventions, and on the second level,
to the ideological and behavioral role of the latter, which enables the TAF to
refrain from civilian control and to interfere in social and political
processes. 2 It was ideological autonomy and behavior that enshrined the
guardian’s role of the army in Turkey. We see the Turkish army in the state
system as an institution in terms of the level of its autonomy, combining its
professional and value-oriented components. The institutional autonomy of
the TAF and the belief in the national state and republican regime as the
defender and guarantor of Kemalism's value system were formed by the
long-standing single-party regime (1923-1950) of Mustafa Kemal's
2
Ümit Cizre Sakallioğlu, “The Anatomy of the Turkish Military's Political Autonomy”,
Comparative Politics, Vol. 29, No. 2, (1997): 152
21