Portrait of a Turkish social democrat : İsmail Cem
Author
Örmeci, Ozan
Advisor
Burçak, Berrak
Date
2011Publisher
Bilkent University
Language
English
Type
ThesisItem Usage Stats
147
views
views
57
downloads
downloads
Abstract
İsmail Cem (1940-2007) was a Turkish intellectual and social democratic
politician who spent his life investigating the characteristics and problems of Turkish
modernization and social democratic solutions to these problems. Cem started his career
as a peculiar socialist journalist who had a special curiosity towards the Ottoman past in
the late 1960s and early 1970s. With his books and articles he became an influential and
prestigious figure in the leftist intellectual and political circles and served as the manager
of Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT). Unlike usual leftist-modernist
intellectuals, he was very critical of “top to bottom” Turkish modernization and had
propositions to solve Turkey’s political problems within the limits of democracy. During
these years, Cem’s democratic socialism slowly evolved into social democracy. Starting
from the 1980s, Cem appeared this time as a social democratic politician and tried to
realize his projects and reduce his theories into practice. He was one of the leading
figures of Turkish social democracy and was the creator of the “Anatolian Left” together
with Deniz Baykal. In the mid-1990s he served for a short time as the Minister of
Culture and starting from 1997 -with short interruptions- for five years he worked as the
Foreign Minister of Turkey. He continued to write about Turkish politics and foreign
policy and left behind an important collection of books and articles.
İsmail Cem saw his life’s work as involving basically three tasks: to reconcile
Turkey with its Ottoman past by softening the radical modernist mentality of the earlier
Republican period both on the intellectual and social levels, to find solutions to Turkey’s
various political problems by making a social democratic interpretation of Kemalism
and thus, achieving democratic consolidation in Turkey and to transform his country into
a respected regional power in international relations by pursuing an active foreign policy
through full membership to the European Union as well as by developing relations with
Middle Eastern and Eurasian countries. Both as a public intellectual and politician, he
was able to take considerable steps in order to realize these three tasks, though he did not
have chance to complete his mission. Although he was an important part of the
intellectual force behind Turkey’s pro-Western secular segments, we do not know too
much about Cem’s personal life and intellectual development throughout the years. This
thesis is an attempt to analyze İsmail Cem by focusing on his life, his ideas, his political
career, his propositions to Turkey’s major democratic problems and his foreign policy
understanding and practices analytically.
Keywords
Ismail CemRepublican People’s Party
Social Democracy
Turkish Left
Kemalism
New Left
Turkish Foreign Policy