Excessive Bureaucracy: Discussions on Bureaucracy in Turkish Grand National Assembly (1920-1938)

Abstract

Bureaucracy leads to the problem of red tape business in practice as an administrative style used paper in all state administrations. The bureaucracy was one of the important problems of the Ottoman Empire and it was inherit to the Turkish Republic. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk plans that the outdated and traditional bureaucracy remaining from the Ottoman Empire should be structured with a new understanding based on legal foundations and in harmony with the newly established regime. Urgently the top brass of the Ottoman bureaucracy, which were still under the old regime, were liquidated and on the other hand, a renewal was made with different methods in order to create a class subject to the new regime. Member of TBMM offer extraordinary remedies to destroy bureaucracy but governments generally considered bureaucracy necessary for state affairs. Discussions and proposals for solutions were generally expressed by the same deputies. Turkey started to deal with this problem after the Second World War, which gained a momentum in the 1960s. This work shows that the struggle with stationery business started with foundation of TBMM. Although the Turkish Parliament was willing to end the problem, it was not able to achieve due to reasons such as lack of technical infrastructure and expertise and not examining all the state organizations with the desire to finish the stationery business.

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