The 1934 Pivot
The year 1934 was a turning point for Thrace and the policy of marshaling development targeting the region. After 1934, the Turkish government began to articulate a vision of Thrace as a frontier of utmost significance. The regime conceived Thrace as a frontier in three main respects: First, Thrace was Turkey’s geographical frontier. It was the frontier separated from the Anatolian hinterland by the Turkish Straits. Second, Thrace was Turkey's symbolic frontier setting the country apart from the Orient. It was Turkey's vestigial land in Europe, and also the painful reminder of all the sacrifices that the Turks had made to remain in Europe, despite all the attempts of European powers to drive them off to where they supposedly belonged, Asia. Third, Thrace was Turkey's military frontier covering Istanbul and Anatolia. It was a bridgehead for possible enemy campaigns, a frontier whose vulnerability was amplified by its terrain, demography, infrastructure, and demilitarized condition.
Accordingly, from 1934 onward, one by one, government officials and the media took the stage and affirmed the indispensability and inviolability of Thrace. In a stark example of this renewed appreciation of Thrace, Abidin Daver, an influential columnist from the newspaper Cumhuriyet argued that "it would take an exceptional level of stupidity and blindness to fail to appreciate the significance of Thrace." Absent the sovereign right to militarize its territories, the same columnist remarked in allusion to the region's demilitarized condition, Turkey's defense posture resembled that of a man stretching his legs across a river and leaning back with a banana peel under his foot.
From where did Thrace's importance stem all this suddenly? Why did the regime and the media wait until the mid-30s to discover the paramount importance of Thrace after a decade-long fit of forgetfulness? With the exception of the 1923 population exchange, the government interventions in Thrace had remained very limited in scope, and the regime's leaders had only rarely visited Thrace during the postwar period.
To an extent, the regime's attitude resulted from a broader shift in Turkey's gravity center from the Balkans to Anatolia. With the capital’s relocation to Ankara and the loss of Balkan territories, Thrace was transformed from an imperial core region to a national periphery, also one neighboring the old sultan's seat. Moreover, the regime had not fully regained its fiscal autonomy after the war. A remarkable portion of the general budget went to the payment of Ottoman debts, foreign investment was limited due to wartime acrimonies, and the country could regain its tariff autonomy only after 1929.
More importantly than the domestic context, international developments cast a new light on the question of Thrace. Mussolini's expansionism in Italy, Turkey's naval neighbor in the Aegean at the time, was a point of great concern for the security of Western Turkey. A more immediate threat to Thrace could come through the Balkans from Bulgaria, which Turkey feared could align with Italy to reverse the status quo in Europe to regain its former possessions in the Balkans, including Thrace. The Turkish regime kept a close eye on both of its suspect neighbors.
The early 1930s also saw transformations in the global order that upset the fragile peace the Versailles order implemented. Japan officially withdrew from the League of Nations, and Germany followed suit by leaving both the League and the World Disarmament Conference under a rising Hitler, all in 1933. With the League's authority eroding, disarmament talks stalling, and polarized factions crystallizing, Turkey sought to enhance borderland security through diplomacy and domestic as well as military policy.
The most concrete diplomatic result of the changing political climate in Europe for Turkey was the Balkan Pact of 1934. In February 1934, Turkey, Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia signed a mutual security pact, committing themselves to collective military preparedness in the event of aggression against the signatories' common Balkan frontiers. The pact was also left open to future recruitment, forcing Bulgaria to choose between joining the anti-revisionist bloc or sliding deeper into isolation.
Ten days after the Pact, the government launched an Inspectorate General in Thrace, the second of its kind in Turkey. Inspectorate Generals were civilian administrations vested with authority on a supra-provincial scale, serving as the state's eyes and ears in its peripheries. The first head of the Inspectorate General of Thrace (IGT) was appointed in March, the same day Mussolini delivered a fiery speech about Italian ambitions in Asia and Africa.
IGT was the civilian leg of a policy that had three goals: Thrace’s repopulation, redevelopment, and refortification. It was formally concerned with the first two, tasked with settlement and infrastructural development. Yet, the government officials believed that neither of these goals could be achieved without the other. In their logic, Thrace's repopulation was a prerequisite for its development and security because without a fixed population tending the land and providing fighting power, borderland prosperity and defense would be compromised. However, without the means to sustain security and development, people could not be fixed on the land. The totality of coordinated civilian and military efforts to the integrated ends of repopulation, redevelopment, and refortification is what I call the policy of marshaling development.
"The view today is a nomadic one unsure of its moorings," the first IGT head, Tali Ongoren, wrote to describe the state of Thrace upon arrival. For him, Thrace’s progress, strength, security, and economic activity depended on population growth. But population growth was impossible with the prevailing mindset that setting down roots in Thrace would expose one to a future catastrophe. Thus, the local spirit had to be uplifted by molding Thrace into a fortified zone. Yet, coming back full circle, Thrace’s defense would demand at least a million settled people to repel a threat from the Balkans. For his successor, Kazım Dirik, the key to the policy was the conduct of settlement in proportion to the military situation at hand. Only in this way could a force that would be sufficient to sustain the military in wartime, the core of the policy for Dirik, be raised in Thrace.
In the next two sub-galleries, you will see how the government sought to achieve its goals by repopulating, redeveloping, and refortifying Thrace.