Army and Modern Autocrats: Civilianization Paradox in Civil-Military Relations

• In Event: Civil-Military Relations

Abstract

The military lies at the heart of each political system, explicitly or implicitly. It may stimulate, facilitate, or obstruct transitions across regime types. Officers can topple dictators and build their own military dictatorships or open the path for gradual democratic transition. On the contrary, they can cooperate with autocrats and serve as their primary repressive instrument, helping them entrench or elongate their rule. Oftentimes, one of the power-grabbing officers may dominate the military junta and personalize the power, establishing a durable personalist autocracy. What factors affect the military’s role in regime type and change? Focusing on the Turkish case, the paper theorizes the conditions under which the military helps the emergence and sustainment of personalist autocracies under a civilian leader. I preliminarily argue that the military’s prior civil-military relations experience, level of institutionalization, and organizational structure and culture condition its relationship with autocrats and attitude toward autocrats’ repressive policies toward the general population, however breakdown of its merit-based recruitment and promotion system appears as the most determining factor.

Drawing on original military recruitment, promotion, and purge data and interviews with military officers, politicians, and journalists, this article reveals how the military’s forcible and voluntary transformation paved the way for Turkey’s rapid slide into an authoritarian regime. The Turkish officer corps’ politicization, fractured nature, and long-standing estrangement from society have facilitated Erdogan’s efforts to sideline the military in the political stage and transform it into an obedient semi-regime force. Turkey experienced rapid democratic backsliding under civilian leaders in two instances: (1) Under Adnan Menderes between 1956 and 1960 and (2) under Recep T. Erdogan after 2011. Extensive politicization of the officer corps and aggressive interventions in recruitment and promotion practices mark both periods.

Scholars have widely seen the military’s autonomy as harmful to democracy and political stability, ignoring the military’s function as a critical safeguard against personalist authoritarian threats and that a military too open to politician’s influence is more likely to be coopted by an autocrat or less likely to resist its institutional cooptation. Civil-military relations theories offer valuable theoretical frameworks to understand how to establish and maintain civilian control over the armed forces. However, they fail to delineate when and how the military should fend off the attempts to subjugate it into a partisan force or a regime guard. My paper seeks to provide a theory of responsible military autonomy drawing on the Turkish experience that proposes civilians to oversee and audit the merit-based, inclusive, and equitable nature of recruitment, selection, and promotion processes in the military instead of involving directly in selection and promotion processes.

Author

• Ozgur Ozkan, Bates College