Demythologyzing the National Security Concept: The Case of Turkey

Since the second half of the 1990s, a new national security discourse in Turkey sanctifies security over democratic and developmental objectives. By organizing itself around the concepts and issues raised by the former Deputy Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz 's pathbreaking speech on August 4, 2001 on "national security syndrome," this essay problematizes the increased security concerns of the TSK against the democratic priorities of the EU which Turkey aspires to join. Secondly, the essay analyzes the problems involved in Turkey's process of formulating its national security policy. "The importance of our army is increasing because of those who are against the republic, democracy and secularism. "1 Turkey's former Deputy Prime Minister, Mesut Yilmaz, the leader of the Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi-ANAP), a junior partner in the three-party coalition government between 1999- 2002, made a speech to his party's convention on August 4, 2001 which sent shock waves right across the political divide. In it, he argued that Turkish politics was afflicted by a 'national security syndrome' which, so he claimed, only served to frustrate the reforms necessary to democratize and integrate the Turkish political system into the European Union (EU). 2 Moreover, he urged the public and political fora to question the concept of national security. It seems, however, that his primary agenda was to imply that the language of national security was being used as a tool to legitimize the need for a military role in civilian affairs. More specifically, it was being utilized by the military establishment and its supporters to convince themselves of the need to prioritize the indivisible and secular character of the regime as more important than the need for democratic reform. On the other hand, the European Union (EU) had prescribed a package of political reforms that must be fulfilled to start accession negotiations by the end of 2002 to qualify Turkey for full membership of the Union. The enhanced importance of the national security concept conflicted with the underlying implications of the EU's democratic standards regarding civil-military relations. The effect of Mesut Yilmaz's speech on the military was chilling: the military hierarchy -represented by the General Staff-released a four-page document lashing out at Yilmaz.3 It is ironical that the debate that followed was not about the "substance" of the national security syndrome. Nor was Yilmaz's speech expected to change drastically the way national security threats and policies were defined and formulated. What little debate that it did spark was more concerned with the way the speech represented a departure from the previously near-total absence of any empirical and theory-based problematisation of the topic. The importance of the speech quite clearly lay in its being the first of its kind. In that sense, the clamor that followed represents the high start-up costs of a fundamental attitudinal shift by the political class on a sacrosanct topic. This article will seek to open the Pandora's box of national security by way of Yilmaz's August 4 speech. As such, it will address three underlying issues, in three parts. The first part is centered on the threshold shift in the political autonomy of the Turkish military, particularly since its last explicit intervention into politics on February 28, 1997. The main instrument effecting that change has been a new national security discourse fuelled by the perceived need to protect the republic against Kurdish separatism and Islamic extremism. There are three areas of sub-focus in the first part: the first is on connecting the reconceptualisation of national security by the military establishment with the domestic and global changes in the 1990s. The second subfocus offers an analysis of the significance of the military's control and oversight of "public policy" which has been made possible by blurring the distinctions between national security and politics. …