Politicized armies, militarized politics : civil-military relations in Turkey and Greece

Abstract

Despite their common Ottoman heritage, Greece and Turkey have diverged widely in their modem history of civil-military relations. The armed forces have a long record of intervention in both countries, but there is a crucial difference: the military emerged as a roughly unitary, independent political actor in Turkey, whereas in Greece it remained divided into factions aligned with civilian political parties through patronage relationships. This empirical observation is then used as a basis for an attempt at theory building. Several countries exhibit a pattern of military interventions more similar to Turkey and others to those found in Greece. Societies which developed a strong parliamentary tradition early in the modernization process also acquired organized civilian political groups with clientelist networks extending into the armed forces. On the contrary, in countries with limited or weak parliamentary development and strong security pressures, political activism was often channeled through the military, which emerged as a hotbed of political thinking, predating and pre-empting any civilian party tradition. The former type of civil-military relations was more commonly found in Southern European and Latin American countries while the latter was predominant in non-Western societies that resisted Western colonization.