Local uprisings and the Ottoman forces were defeated, principally by irregular forces, who at the end of 1920 were brought under Mustafa Kemal’s control. In 1920–21 the Greeks made major advances, almost to Ankara, but were defeated at the Battle of the Sakarya River (August 24, 1921) and began a long retreat that ended in the Turkish occupation of İzmir (September 9, 1922).
The Kemalists had already begun to gain European recognition. On March 16, 1921, the Soviet-Turkish Treaty gave Turkey a favourable settlement of its eastern frontier by restoring the cities of Kars and Ardahan to Turkey. Domestic problems induced Italy to begin withdrawal from the territory it occupied, and, by the Treaty of Ankara (Franklin-Bouillon Agreement, October 20, 1921), France agreed to evacuate the southern region of Cilicia. Finally, by the Armistice of Mudanya, the Allies agreed to Turkish reoccupation of Istanbul and eastern Thrace.
Kayaköy, Turkey: churchInterior of a church in the abandoned village of Kayaköy, near Fethiye, southwestern Turkey. The village was deserted largely as a result of the compulsory population exchange at the end of the second Greco-Turkish War (1921–22).© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Kayaköy, TurkeyAbandoned village of Kayaköy, near Fethiye, southwestern Turkey. It was deserted largely as a result of the compulsory population exchange at the end of the second Greco-Turkish War (1921–22).© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)A comprehensive settlement was eventually achieved via the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). The Turkish frontier in Thrace was established on the Maritsa River, and Greece returned the islands of Gökçeada (Imbros) and Bozcaada (Tenedos). A compulsory exchange of populations was arranged, as a result of which an estimated 1,300,000 Greeks left Turkey and 400,000 Turks were repatriated. The question of the city of Mosul was left to the League of Nations, which in 1925 recommended that it become part of the new state of Iraq. The Treaty of Lausanne also provided for the apportionment of the Ottoman public debt, for the gradual abolition of the capitulations (Turkey regained tariff autonomy in 1929), and for an international regime for the straits that controlled access to the Black Sea (see Straits Question). Turkey did not recover complete control of the straits until the 1936 Montreux Convention.
The result of the war and the peace settlement was a state in which the great majority spoke Turkish. Though there has been a tendency to see this as the almost inevitable consequence of the rise of Turkish and Arab nationalism, it seems in fact to have been the accident of war that broke off the Arab provinces. Whatever the views of Mustafa Kemal himself, it is clear that the majority of his followers thought of themselves primarily as Muslims; in the elaborate religious ceremony that preceded the opening of the Grand National Assembly, there was no mention of Turks or Turkey but only of the need to save “religion’s last country.” The creation of a sense of Turkish nationhood was the product of a long effort in which Mustafa Kemal played the dominant role.
Construction of a new political system began with the abolition of the sultanate and the declaration of a republic. Loyalty to the Ottoman dynasty was strong even among Kemalists, but Mehmed VI’s identification with the Allies weakened his support. An Allied invitation to the sultan to nominate representatives to Lausanne aided Mustafa Kemal; a split Turkish delegation would have been self-defeating. With a brilliant mixture of threats and persuasion, Mustafa Kemal was able, therefore, to induce the assembly to abolish the sultanate (November 1, 1922). Mehmed VI left Turkey, and his cousin Abdülmecid II was installed as the first and last Ottoman caliph who was not also sultan. Declaration of the Turkish republic
On October 29, 1923, the assembly declared Turkey to be a republic and elected Mustafa Kemal as its first president. The caliphate was abolished on March 3, 1924, and all members of the Ottoman dynasty were expelled from Turkey. A full republican constitution was adopted on April 20, 1924; it retained Islam as the state religion, but in April 1928 this clause was removed, and Turkey became a purely secular republic. Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Government
The assembly was the instrument of Mustafa Kemal’s will. The first assembly had contained large factions hostile to his policies, including religious conservatives, merchants, and former members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP; a Young Turks organization). In opposition to his 197 acknowledged supporters, who were known as the First Group, there were 118 opponents, members of the Second Group. The first assembly was dissolved on April 16, 1923, and Mustafa Kemal took care to keep his opponents out of the second assembly; only three of the Second Group were returned. Mustafa Kemal’s own party, which became the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi; CHP), dominated all assemblies until 1950; in this period the assemblies included a heavy preponderance of urban professional men and of officials with a university education. With an outlook different from that of the illiterate Turkish peasants, they carried out a revolution from the top. Opposition
There was little opposition to Mustafa Kemaclass="underline" the small Progressive Republican Party (November 1924–June 1925) had only 29 members and was suppressed because he feared that its leading members, who included some of his most notable associates in the war of independence, might have too much influence in the army; and the similarly short-lived Liberal Republican Party (August–December 1930) was an abortive attempt by Mustafa Kemal to organize a moderate opposition to his own party. Otherwise, he ruled quite autocratically. A plot against his life in 1926 gave him the chance to deal with his rivals, who were tried by a special court. Many of them were sentenced to death, imprisonment, or exile. Opposition outside the assembly—including the dangerous Kurdish revolts of 1925, 1930, and 1937—was suppressed vigorously. Kemalist policies
The bases of Mustafa Kemal’s policies were enshrined in the CHP program of 1931, which was written into the Turkish constitution in 1937. Mustafa Kemal’s six fundamental principles were republicanism (i.e., the creation of the republic), nationalism, populism, statism, secularism, and revolution. Revolution was implicit in the radical reorganization of the political, social, and economic systems. Populism was the effort to mobilize popular support from the top through such characteristic devices as the People’s Houses (1931–51), which spread the new concept of a national culture in provincial towns, and the village institutes, which performed the same educational and proselytizing role in the countryside. The creation of a sense of nationalism was encouraged by changes in school curricula, the rewriting of history to glorify the Turkish past, the “purification” of the language by a reduction of the number of words of foreign origin (sometime later, this effort appeared to be redundant in light of a declaration that all languages were descended from Turkish), and the renunciation of Pan-Islamic, Pan-Turkish, and Pan-Ottoman goals in foreign policy.
Statism was the movement toward state-controlled economic development; the shortage of skilled labour and entrepreneurs (caused largely by the reduction of the Greek and Armenian communities, which in 1914 had controlled four-fifths of Ottoman finance, industry, and commerce), the lack of capital, and the intense nationalist desire for industrial self-sufficiency that would banish foreign influence all stimulated a movement in the 1930s toward state ownership or control. This was achieved through investment banks, monopolies, state industrial enterprises, and planning. A five-year plan was instituted in 1934. Although the immediate results were disappointing, the policy of state-inspired economic growth was important for future economic advance.