Change and Continuity: Military-Civilian Relations and Coups in Turkey’s Citizenship and Social Studies Textbooks (1950-2012)

The Turkish military, one of the significant actors in Turkey’s nationalisation and modernisation, has had a dominant position within the Turkey’s state system. Its political autonomy in the state system and its interventions in politics have not complied with the norms and principles of democracy. By using public discourse production means like education, the military has attempted to normalise and legitimise its anti-democratic status and behaviours that constitute an anomaly according to democratic norms. Existing studies have not paid sufficient attention to ways in which the discourses legitimising the military’s anti-democratic status and behaviours were re-produced via social education. The present research aims to illustrate how militarist discourses was resonated in education by providing a critical discourse analysis of 16 middle school level citizenship and social studies textbooks, which were taught from 1950 to 2012. Findings revealed that, from the 1950s, the militarist discourses had found their expressions in the textbooks with varying degree of intensity and culminated in the post-1997 coup years. The militarist discourses in the textbooks normalised, legitimised and even glorified the anti-democratic political autonomy of the military within the state system and the military’s interventions in politics that either disrupted or harmed the functioning of Turkey’s democratic order. After the European Union (EU) recognised Turkey as a candidate state for membership in the 1999 Helsinki Summit, the militarist discourses in the textbooks began to dissipate and disappeared to a great extent in the 2010s. The present study, which puts forward that the EU membership reforms played a decisive role in clearing the textbooks from the militarist discourses, can contribute to the prevention of a possible come-back of militarist discourses in education and the democratisation of social education in Turkey