Politics & Power Quote by Bulent Ecevit

Ecevit’s sentence reads like a calm administrative checklist, but the politics are hiding in the syntax. “If we leave them alone” is doing the real work: it frames interference as the primary obstacle and recasts Turkey (and its state project) as the rational actor forced to proceed under pressure. The vagueness of “them” is strategic. It allows the audience to fill in the antagonist of the moment - foreign powers, domestic spoilers, armed factions - without Ecevit naming anyone and triggering diplomatic or internal blowback.

Then comes the pivot: “just satisfying ourselves” with three pillars - social work, economic work, and “the building up of a national army.” On paper, that sounds like development rhetoric. In practice, it’s a claim about sovereignty. Social and economic reform are the soft legitimacy; the national army is the hard guarantee. Placing “national army” alongside social work normalizes militarization as nation-building rather than coercion, a familiar move in states trying to consolidate authority while insisting they’re simply modernizing.

The final clause - “progress, hopefully within a short time” - is the tell. Ecevit is selling patience and urgency at once: patience because progress requires being “left alone,” urgency because “short time” reassures a public tired of instability that the program is not endless sacrifice. The intent is coalition-friendly: technocratic enough for moderates, firm enough for security-minded voters, and ambiguous enough to travel internationally without sounding openly defiant.