Military Professionalism and Regime Personalization in Turkey and Russia

• In Event: Society, Regimes and the Military

Abstract

Why do some militaries resist, and others comply with, and even support, the establishment of a personalist autocracy? Since the early 2000s, why did, for instance, Turkish officers initially defy and later defer to Erdogan’s coercive and persuasive efforts to control the military? Conversely, why did the Russian army succumb to the emergence of a personalist regime under Putin without much resistance? Contrary to the conventional view in the extant literature emphasizing the role of bargaining between an autocrat and military brass over the military’s material benefits and institutional autonomy, I suggest that three factors related to the military’s organizational characteristics and political experience condition officers’ response to autocratic cooptation: the military’s (1) past coup history, (2) the level of institutionalization with regards to recruitment and promotion practices, and (3) professionalism. I argue that an army with prior coup experience and a higher degree of institutionalization and professionalism is less susceptible to autocratic cooptation, making regime personalization harder, and the likelihood of officers’ resistance, in the form of a coup, higher. I test this argument through an in-depth investigation of different historical periods from the Russian and Turkish cases, as well as a cross-national statistical analysis covering the period from 1946 to 2020.

The paper reveals that different degrees of professionalism and civil-military histories explain divergent levels of regime personalization in Erdogan’s Turkey and Putin’s Russia. In Turkey, the military’s long-standing professionalism and political interventionism have inhibited the entrenchment of a durable personalist autocracy, whereas in Russia, absence of a professional tradition in the officer crops and the army’s long standing political pacificism have facilitated personalization of political power.

Although Erdogan could ensure the obedience of the military, he has failed to win officer’s loyalty entirely. Erdogan reshuffled the military brass, and recruited young officers from his own political base, but the majority of officer corps have remained disloyal to him. In addition to the coup attempt in 2016, officers’ disaffection with Erdogan best exemplified in their voting patterns in the 2023 elections, when officers and their families overwhelmingly supported Erdogan’s opponent. My interviews with retired officers also show their disillusionment with Erdogan regime, despite his militaristic foreign policy, emphasis on military technology, and improvement of officers’ benefits. In contrast, in Russia, the officer corps were often compliant in line with their historical civil-military relations patterns. Putin quickly established a firm control over the Russian military and embarked on a massive reform since 2007.

Scholars have widely seen the military’s autonomy as harmful to democracy and political stability ignoring the military’s function as a critical safeguard to personalist authoritarian threats and that a military too open to politicians’ influence is more likely to be coopted by an autocrat or less likely to resist its institutional cooptation. Civil-military relations theories offer valuable theoretical frameworks to understand how to establish and maintain civilian control over the armed forces but lacks when and how the military should fend off the attempts to subjugate it into a partisan force or a regime guard. My paper provides a novel theory of responsible military autonomy drawing on Turkish and Russian experiences that proposes civilians to oversee and audit primarily the merit-based, inclusive, and equitable nature of recruitment, selection, and promotion processes instead of involving directly in selection and promotion processes. It also uniquely distinguishes how professional armies can safeguard democracy and constraint authoritarianism.

Author

• Ozgur Ozkan, Harvard University