Martial Law as a Pulling Mechanism and Civil Military Relations in Turkey

There is a consensus in research on civil-military relations (CMR) that militaries actively “push” to involve themselves in politics to increase their authority, even in the face of opposition from civilian authorities. However, political authorities may, also, “pull” the military into politics. The paper examines the period of martial law declared in Turkey in 1974, which continued under three successive governments, and a second period of martial law declared in 1978, as mechanisms of pulling led by civilian authorities. Based on parliamentary debates and official documents, this paper argues that civilian decisions for the use of the military in the context of martial law merged with the functional dimension of the role conception of the Turkish military (that is, roughly, the consensus regarding the institution’s purpose) and paved the way toward military domination of decision-making, triggering the pushing mechanism and the military’s active participation in politics.