Everyday politics of ordinary people : public opinion, dissent, and resistance in early Republican Turkey 1925-1939

Abstract

This study examines the everyday and mostly informal forms of peasant and working class politics during the first two decades of the Turkish Republic by scrutinizing the daily protests and resistance of these groups to the social and economic policies of the single-party state and adverse economic conditions. Furthermore, this study explores the influence of the everyday politics of these groups on the political decision-making process of the state. The Turkish single-party period was by all means an extraordinary era marked by profound changes. Historical scholarship has conventionally focused on high and formal politics, and state policies. Due to the barriers before the formal and organizational participation of peasants and workers in legal politics, both these groups have been regarded to be fully excluded from the policy-making. Accordingly, the single-party state has generally been assumed to be based on solely coercive and rigid polity isolated from society. Scholars have barely touched upon the popular discontent and the daily ways in which ordinary people reacted against the state policies, power holders, and adverse economic conditions, and consequently influenced the state decisions. This dissertation takes on this challenging task and depicts an alternative picture in which the ordinary people participated in politics in everyday life, by uncovering the ordinary people’s dissenting opinions, demanding voices, everyday struggles, diverse patterns of protest and resistance strategies. On the basis of new archival sources giving information about daily contacts between the state and society and of a re-reading “against-the-grain” of conventional sources and theoretically drawing on a broader conception of politics as an everyday struggle over the allocation of scarce economic sources, emphasizing non-institutional and mostly informal patterns of the peasant and working class politics, this study delves into the popular dynamics of the political life during the early Republican era. Addressing wider debates about the relations between the state, society and class by focusing on the everyday and mostly informal contestation and negotiation process between the lower classes and state that compelled the state to modify its decisions, this dissertation suggests to see the relations between the state and ordinary people not as dichotomous, but as an interactive process. In this respect, the findings of this work propose a redefinition of the single-party state as “flexible authoritarian,” exposed and responsive to social inputs.