Military Counterterrorism Measures, Civil–Military Relations, and Democracy: The Cases of Turkey and the United States

This study examines how military counter-terrorism (CT) measures affect the quality of democracy by altering civil-military relations (CMR) and focuses on civil-military relations as the main causal mechanism. We argue that the use of a military approach in counter-terrorism jeopardizes democracy at the societal level by increasing the belief that only the military is equipped to deal with the threat at hand. Therefore, erosions of civil liberties are tolerated in exchange for security. Second, we argue that military CT measures change the balance between the military and executive powers in procedural and liberal democracies. While the military’s executive power increases in procedural democracies, the civilian ruler’s control of the military power increases in liberal ones. Case studies of the U.S. and Turkey show that a military counter-terrorism approach affects CMR in these countries, which generate a similar tradeoff between security and the quality of democracy, albeit via different causal mechanisms. While that tradeoff is less severe in the U.S., Turkey is more vulnerable to erosion of democracy

Civil-Military Relations and the Demise of Turkish Democracy

A growing body of scholarship shows that Turkey has been part of a broader trend toward authoritarianism in the 2010s. As democratization scholars explore a myriad of factors underlying this, including but not limited to institutional misuse such as holding unfair elections to consolidate authoritarian power, this chapter examines how and why the end of military tutelage resulted in the civilian control of the Turkish military but not democratic consolidation. What factors explain the rise and eventual demise of the Turkish army as a major political power in Turkey? How has civilian control of the military gradually taken place in Turkey? What are the reasons why Turkish democracy failed to consolidate despite civilian control? The chapter argues and demonstrates that two internal threats, namely Kurdish nationalism and political Islam, were strategically used by both the military and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government to subdue rival actors and consolidate power. In other words, both the military and the AKP government have limited political competition while depending on distinct sources of legitimacy: the military’s legitimacy was predicated primarily on its coercive capabilities, that of the AKP on electoral victories