Dev Diary: Turkey

So, let’s address the obvious - Turkey did not formally enter the Second World War until 1945, and never participated in any active fighting, yet as a nation they consistently held the dubious honour of being able to fundamentally alter the war’s trajectory with their own participation throughout almost the entire conflict. They were courted by every alliance but maintained and leveraged their position of strength so that they could maintain their neutrality while still winning all the favours of courtship from the Allies, the Comintern, and the Axis. The other factor in considering Turkey for a rework was… well, a lot of people love to play it. Turkey, to this day, remains the most played non-reworked minor in Hearts of Iron IV! So, it was very important that playing Turkey felt like playing a country with a potentially winning hand, but in a scenario where if they lost they’d lose everything.

The Turks had some prior experience with wars where they’d have everything to gain by winning, and everything to lose by failing. When the Ottoman Empire exploded, the Entente imposed one of their signature devastating treaties on the Turkish people by carving up the new Ottoman state into a small rump state in Anatolia. This state of affairs didn’t sit too well with many of the Turkish people, so an alliance of revolutionaries set to work - the most prominent of which was the legendary Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (more on him in a bit!). The Turkish revolutionaries repulsed the Entente and the encroaching Greeks (who we discussed two weeks ago), and cast down the Ottoman Sultanate in favour of the nascent Republic of Turkey. Of course, Turkey was not totally let off the hook as a former Central Powers member, but compared to their former comrades-in-arms the Turkish Republic got off relatively light!

By Hearts of Iron IV’s start, the Republic of Turkey was a mere twelve years old! Atatürk’s Republican People’s Party (the CHP) wasted no time in reforming Turkish society top-to-bottom in order to modernise and westernise (to a degree) the entire nation. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s messianic founding father, was dedicated to the concept of a liberal democratic Turkish state but that doesn’t mean every Kemalist figure was. Kemalism was the unique ideology of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the framework through which the entire Turkish state was supposed to be moulded, but even though Atatürk’s own views were unshakeable Kemalism itself was very flexible as an ideology. Kemalism, all at once, had elements of socialism, western liberalism, and Italian fascism - and these elements could be enhanced or obliterated at the snap of the Atatürk’s finger. It could be (and has been) argued that it was the dynamism of Kemalism that shielded the Republic of Turkey from the worst of the Great Depression.

Turkey would remain a one-party state under the CHP until May of 1950, where under the leadership of İsmet İnönü the Kemalists received a thumping in the elections and gave the conservatives a majority until they were couped out by the Kemalist officers. However, there were attempts to hold multi-party elections during Atatürk’s lifetime - but when these opposition parties were inevitably taken over by Islamic Conservatives the opposition parties would be banned and the elections called off. Now,