Volume 42 | Number 1 Fall 2006
VIII. Conclusion
Turkey’s democratic and secular regime is not perfect. Yet, no democracy is perfect. Even the most advanced governments around the world have their shortcomings. Nevertheless, one can only judge the success of a country’s regime by looking at the progress it has made over the years and comparing it to other countries that were historically similarly situated.
This Article examined how Atatürk and his supporters created the secular Republic of Turkey in less than thirty years from the remains of the most fundamentalist empire in the world. Today, Turkey is one of the only two secular states among the fifty-two majority-Muslim countries.463 Less than ninety years ago, women, who now stand on an equal legal footing with men in Turkish society, were forced to wear veils, be servants to their husbands, and remain in the background of all social life under Islamic law.464 While women who commit adultery are awarded death sentences by stoning in the bordering Islamic Republic of Iran,465 Turkey awarded the office of the Prime Minister to a female in 1993.466
Needless to say, maintaining a democratic regime in the unique context of Turkey requires the implementation of safeguards and protections, the most important of which is a strict system of secularism. In its decision approving the dissolution of the Islamist Welfare Party, the ECHR stated: “Pluralism and democracy are based on a compromise that requires various concessions by individuals or groups of individuals, who must sometimes agree to limit some of the freedoms they enjoy in order to guarantee greater stability of the country as a whole.”467 The ECHR continued:
The possibility cannot be excluded that a political party, in pleading the rights enshrined in Article 11 [(Freedom of Association)] and also in Articles 9 [(Freedom of Religion)] and 10 of the Convention, might attempt to derive therefrom the right to conduct what amounts in practice to activities intended to destroy the rights or freedoms set forth in the Convention and thus bring about the destruction of democracy.468
Likewise, in the words of the Turkish Constitutional Court: “In old and new democracies alike, there is no such thing as freedom for individuals to do anything they want. People cannot use their freedom to defeat the freedom of others.”469 The strict secularism system in the unique historical, geographical, and demographical context of Turkey is a necessary concession to protect the democratic order of the Republic.
In many ways, the Republic of Turkey is one of the few shining lights in the darkness that has plagued the Middle East. Even though that light may flicker from time to time, the strictly secular, democratic country, which has struggled and will continue to struggle between the clash of its Islamic roots and its secular regime, will no doubt continue to be a unique and exemplary nation in Europe and the Middle East.
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Footnotes
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