Four Studies on the Economic Development of Turkey

John F. Kolars, Dankwart A. Rustow, Frederic C. Shorter, Oktay Yenai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136230851
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

First Published in 1967. This volume brings together four studies that seek to update the known images of the Ottoman Turks and of a Republican Turkey. For an understanding of present-day Turkey, the traditional sources are central, but they no longer stand alone or even unchallenged. Today, scholars are bringing the perspectives and tools of economics, sociology, anthropology, politics, cultural geography, and other social disciplines to the study of Turkey. Their findings are broadening and deepening knowledge concerning Turkey's history and her present position.

Chapter 1

Introduction

by Frederic C. Shorter

THE traditional interpreters of Turkey to Western readers are the historians and orientalists who, together with occasional journalists, diplomats, and travellers, have built our images of the Ottoman Turks and of Republican Turkey. For an understanding of present-day Turkey, therefore, the traditional sources are central, but they no longer stand alone or even unchallenged. Today, scholars are bringing the perspectives and tools of economics, sociology, anthropology, politics, cultural geography, and other social disciplines to the study of Turkey. Their findings are broadening and deepening knowledge concerning Turkey’s history and her present position. These contributions are an early indication of a forthcoming expansion of sources and methods of study which is already making new demands on both the consumers and producers of knowledge concerning contemporary Turkey.

The consumers of Turkish studies have long depended upon historians and orientalists to gather and interpret the significant social materials. In continuation of that tradition there is a vigorous school which insists that historians and orientalists have today, as earlier, both the responsibility and the capacity to present the “whole” society and its most essential themes. Theirs is a creative aspiration which remains valid as aspiration, and a few may succeed in fulfilling it to some degree. Meanwhile, however, consumers face the prospect that the rising volume of specialized materials will not all be read by the historians and orientalists, and if it is, may not all be understood or used well.

A sign of change in the role of the general interpreter of Turkish society is the avoidance of questions which are regarded as “too complex” or “difficult” for anyone except the specialists, for example economic questions. Such avoidance soon transforms the generalist into a specialist himself. The trend is explicable, and even justifiable as necessary, because producers should employ the best tools available for each subject. The time required to become and remain a skilled craftsman in all the relevant fields is more than one scholar has at his disposal. While specialization thus suits scholars as producers, it suits neither them nor other students of modern Turkey as consumers. As the latter, they have need to become literate in all the main subdivisions of social knowledge if they would understand Turkey well.

For the producers of Turkish studies their direct confrontation with a group of ultimate consumers should be a welcome, even if it is a disturbing, challenge in certain respects. It avoids having to speak first to the historians, and through them to the final consumers, which is fine when it works well, but which is more often than not restrictive of the flow of information and ideas. Unfortunately, many in the social disciplines are trained, and rewarded, for selecting and interpreting reality only as their respective disciplines see it. They do so within the discipline itself, where a high degree of technical literacy may be assumed and where a body of agreed interpretations already exists. Consequently, few have had experience in sharing their findings with those who see the same reality from a different perspective and who lack prior conditioning and training in the discipline. Still fewer have been satisfied by their experience with multi-disciplinary interchange.

The solution to this difficulty of communication is not for the producers of new works on Turkey to dilute, and thus to weaken, their methods of inquiry. It is up to the users of Turkish materials, especially when they are themselves scholars, to extend the range of their common intellectual experience. They can make the effort to understand and to appreciate both the perspectives and the findings of each other. It is an established psychological principle that shared experience while in the pursuit of common goals leads to an ability to perceive reality similarly. The eventual effect of such a convergence in perceptions should be an improved capacity of specialists to communicate findings to their consumers, because they will have a larger stock of common imagery to draw upon. For consumers and producers alike, therefore, direct confrontation in the pursuit of a full and deep knowledge of Turkey should be rewarding even though it requires much patience and diligence.

Accordingly, a confrontation among specialists on Turkey and Egypt took place at Princeton University in 1964. The group which gathered met regularly during a five-month period and exchanged the results of current research on economic development in Turkey and, although not directly related to this volume, on Egyptian development as well. Most of the relevant disciplines were represented. Selected topics were examined further in a research conference which reviewed the work at the end of the period and to which scholars from more distant locations were invited.

Even if the encounters between producers and consumers had gone no further, the attempts to communicate, to listen, and to understand would have rewarded those who attended sufficiently to justify the effort. Certain topics succeeded quickly. Others appeared to be excessively technical or obscure. Each had its advocates, which made it significant, if not as a report of new and important findings, then as representative of a perspective prevalent in one of the disciplines. In all cases the producers were induced to become more, rather than less, precise in handling materials because they found that they needed to know, and to say, exactly what they meant when addressing persons who came to the subject with assumptions different from their own.

The decision to publish four of the seminar’s Turkish studies in one place, rather than as scattered contributions in journals of economics, politics, and geography, is a way of asserting that the present generation of contributors to Turkish studies aspires, in their capacity as readers, to an ability to range over materials which are diverse in their topics, points of view, and methods. The authors make the assumption that other users, like themselves, will welcome these contributions in order to help build their own understanding of Turkey’s economic development. This book presents four studies having that end in view.

Chapter 2

Politics and Development Policy

by Dankwart A. Rustow

THE political upheaval of 1960–61 has thrown Turkey into a condition of accelerated social change where politics and economics interact with redoubled intensity. Economic development is widely acknowledged as a goal and pursued with a new sense of urgency. For the last two decades, Turkey’s population has been expanding faster than ever and flocking into the sprawling cities in unprecedented numbers. There is more social as well as geographic mobility. Group demands for economic advantage are being pressed with new vigour by businessmen, labour unions, and landowners. A greater variety of political ideologies is being advocated than ever before. Planning and social justice are principles invoked on all sides, but there is little agreement on the goals of planning or the standards of justice. Throughout the 1960s, economic issues have outclamoured most others in a continuous debate within the government, in the legislature, and before the electorate. But democracy and freedom of expression are themselves coming under attack. If at any future time ambitious colonels or doctrinaire professors should force democratic institutions into a sterner authoritarian mould, the requirements of economic development are likely to furnish the rationale, or at least a major pretext, for such a change.

The following pages will attempt to identify the economic attitudes and policies characteristic of major political and social groups and the impact that these groups are likely to have on economic policy and development.

ELITE ATTITUDES: OTTOMANISM, KEMALISM, AND MODERNITY

The men who are responsible for the government of Turkey, including its economic policies, still are sufficiently homogeneous in background and outlook and sufficiently distinct from the rest of the population to be called a ruling élite. Turkey’s rulers are city-dwellers and they are the products of a uniform state system of higher education. The older state universities of Istanbul and Ankara have in the past supplied virtually all positions in the country’s administration. Graduates of the Ankara Faculty of Political Sciences, successor of the Mülkiye (or Ottoman Civil Service School), fill most of the positions in the ministry of the interior with its centralized system of provincial and local administration. Many tax collectors and diplomats are products of this same Faculty. Law school graduates from Istanbul and Ankara serve as judges and prosecutors and as legal experts in the many public economic enterprises. Young men and women with diplomas from the Istanbul Faculty of Letters or the Ankara Faculty of Language, History, and Geography serve as secondary school teachers throughout the sixty-seven provinces. Only the military services have their own, separate hierarchy of schools including the Officers’ School (Harbiye Mektebi) and the General Staff College (Harp Akademileri). In addition to the professional officers who emerge from these institutions, all male graduates of lycées (until 1960) and universities have been brought into close contact with the military system of education during their prescribed tours of duty as reserve officers.

The distinction between rulers and subjects in Turkey traditionally has rested on education. Just as a major branch of the Ottoman state machinery was the Imperial palace school, founded in the fifteenth century for the training of military and civilian officials, so the training of future public officials remains one of the major functions of government today. In theory, the state system of higher education for nearly a century has been open to any graduates of secondary schools throughout the country. Any peasant who can spare his son’s labour in the fields and can put him through primary school (ilk mektep and orta mektep) and high school (lise, or lycée) may see him enter the university on a government scholarship and, on that basis, rise to the highest positions in society. In practice, such social ascent is severely restricted by rural poverty and by the shortage of schools. As late as the 1950s, fully half the students at the Faculty of Political Sciences were themselves the children of public servants.

Although Turkey still is far from universal education or complete social mobility, the age-old monopoly of the governmental élite has now at last been challenged. The change is most obvious in the composition of the legislative branch, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. During the one-party system of the First Republic, from 1923 to 1946, from forty-six to fifty-four per cent of all assemblymen were government officials.¹ The transition to a competitive party system reduced the percentage of government officials to thirty-six in 1946, to twenty-two in 1950, and twenty-one in 1954. Although no comparable figures are available for the 1957–60 assembly or for the parliaments of the Second Republic elected since 1961, there is no doubt that the same trend continues. Lawyers, gentleman farmers, physicians, and businessmen in growing numbers have taken the legislative seats once reserved for civil servants, army officers, and teachers. The social pressures that have had such striking effect within the halls of parliament are felt if anything more strongly on the outside. The governmental élite no longer can rule the country in haughty isolation from the rest of the citizenry. The government’s actions now are subject to close scrutiny by the press, to influence by chambers of commerce and labour unions, to demagogical attack by partisan orators, and to the ambiguous verdict of a peasant electorate. Conversely, where only a generation ago the state was almost the sole employer for the university graduate, there now are ample opportunities in business, in the press, in private legal and medical practice, and in other private careers to provide major competition. Whereas the educated and the ruling élite once were identical, the former now is much larger than the latter.

The ethos of the educated Turk reflects historic tradition as well as present pressure for change. The élite is heir to a continuous tradition of political responsibility that goes back to the beginnings of the Ottoman state in the thirteenth century. Although there have been profound changes in political institutions and in the recruitment of rulers, Turkey has never experienced such sudden discontinuities as colonial occupation or class revolution. In contrast to Egypt, for example, Turkey has never undergone the equivalent of Muhammad Ali’s dispossession of Mamluk power, Cromer’s establishment of a British administration in the Nile Valley, or even Nasir’s social revolution unleashed from above.

The attitudes of the Turkish administrator and political leader therefore are likely to be a mixture, in proportions varying for each individual, of successive historic residues. The oldest of these is an Ottoman legacy. Any government official is a gentleman, a bey, a member of a ruling class, and to maintain that status he must conform to the manners of that class. Before he can govern others he must learn to govern his own passions and strive for moderation in word and deed. He disdains physical work, which is the lot of the lower social orders. Instead he must master the subtleties of refined speech; for the spoken word and a knowledge of human motives are the proper instruments of the true ruler. He takes pride not in his birth but in his upbringing. His social position is defined primarily by his service to the state, and it is from the state that he expects his economic rewards. In this Ottoman tradition social relations, like governmental affairs, are regulated by a sense of strict hierarchy, based on such visible factors as rank, age, and sex, and acknowledged by the use of different forms of speech to superiors and to inferiors. Any concerted activity requires a clearly recognized leader: there is no sense of group responsibility, let alone of anonymity in committee or council. The desire for power—for office, honour and wealth— is recognized as a universal human instinct. For a member of the ruling class, the pursuit of power is entirely honourable as long as he uses honourable means of service to the state, of deference to superiors, of personal and family connections. Family loyalty is the only restraint upon the individual’s pursuit of power. In interpreting the actions of others, personal or family advantage therefore suggest themselves as ubiquitous motives. The proper business of the state in the Ottoman tradition is warfare and the training of future servants of the state; the maintenance of law and order and the collection of taxes are necessary adjuncts to these primary concerns. Economic production, however, whether in agriculture or in handicrafts, and trade are the specific pursuits of the subject classes and hence altogether unworthy of the ruler. The validity of this subtle and complex ethical structure is sanctioned by the truth of the Islamic revelation, whose staunchest defenders for over six hundred years the Ottomans were proud to be.

The second historical residue we may call the Kemalist legacy, even though it embraces many attitudes already developed in the Tanzimat and Young Turk periods. It contrasts sharply with the classical pre-Tanzimat Ottoman attitudes just described; yet it, too, has become historic—a legacy of education and memory rather than a response to current stimuli. The central aim of Kemalism was, in Atatürk’s own words, “to make the Turkish nation attain the place that is its due within the civilized world”.² The Kemalist is a nationalist and a modernizer. As a nationalist he acknowledges a common bond with other Turks of all social stations and holds Turkish virtue and strength to be superior to those of other peoples. While he has no desire to see Turks rule over others, he cherishes national independence as the supreme good. Hence military strength is important not for conquest as in Ottoman times, but for defence in a world of warring states. As a modernizer he admires the industrial civilization of the West and its values of scientific inquiry, of technical progress, of individual expression in the arts. He is a firm believer in the efficacy of education as an instrument of national unity and of liberating the peasant masses from ignorance and backwardness. The populism which is an article of the Kemalist creed implies government not by the people but for the people, at least until such time as education and reformist legislation shall have raised the people to requisite degrees of maturity and understanding. To the Kemalist, economic affairs are a proper preoccupation of the state, but here, too, the first imperative is independence from abroad. There must be no privileged position for foreign enterprises or for non-Muslim minorities. While Turkey should make full use of foreign technology and foreign experts, there should be no dependence on foreign capital. It is better that the economy develop more slowly from its own resources than that it develop faster in a state of foreign dependence. There must be no assertion of conflicting group interests or ideologies within the body politic. The mere suggestion that there are distinct social classes is, to the more thin-skinned Kemalists, a slur on national honour and a threat to national unity. Ideologies, moreover, are likely to be of foreign derivation and hence in conflict with a true nationalist spirit. The only group that the Kemalist regularly singles out for special attention is youth, for youth is the guardian of the Kemalist heritage, the present generation’s pledge of a better future. Religion is to be respected as a matter of private conscience but should be conceded no influence on public life. Like most new nationalisms, Kemalism is ambivalent in its evaluation of the national self and of others. At times the Kemalist asserts that the Turks are already the world’s foremost people and hence have nothing to learn from others: “We resemble ourselves” was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Politics and Development Policy
• 3. Military Expenditures and the Allocation of Resources
• 4. Types of Rural Development
• 5. Development of the Financial System