Contesting the Kemalist State: The Land Question and the Grass Root Civic Activity in the 1920–1930s Turkey

The author scrutinizes the development of civil society in the early republican Turkey focusing on the models of its interaction with the state in the context of Kemalist revolution, namely the large-scale reforms of the 1920s and 1930s aimed at building the “New Turkey” as a modern secular nation-state. He analyses various manifestations of grass root civic activity in Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s. In doing so, it focuses on the rural population’s reaction to the Kemalist land and taxation reforms. The article contributes to the exiting literature in two following ways. First, it challenges the existing assumption that the rural population of the early Republican Turkey sporadically protested against only the most visible cases of social injustice. It also suggests counterarguments to the thesis that at that time the center and periphery had their own socio-political dynamics isolated one from another. Second, the article introduces to the reader a wide range of Turkish sources (e.g., “public columns” in the main periodicals of that time, petitions published in the yearly books of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, party inspectors’ reports stored in the fund of the Republican People’s Party). An analysis of the data presented in these sources and its comparison against already known historical facts form the article’s methodological framework. The author explains the key social contradictions about the land question. He further on defines the main forms of systemic grass root civic activity and the structural elements of the Kemalists social basis on the periphery. The main findings are that in the 1920–30s the rural Turkey witnessed both legal and illegal forms of resistance. The absence of a full-scale working formal state structure on the periphery made the Kemalist state curbing this resistance by using patron-client networks centered on the figures of “aga”, the wealthy local landlords and merchants.