Talking Turkey.

AuthorStone, Norman
PositionEconomic and political progress

THE earthquake of August 1999 struck Turkey very hard, and did so at a time that could not have been worse--at three o'clock in the morning during a summer holiday, when homes were crowded with visiting relatives. But it also struck at a desperately unfortunate moment for Turkey as a whole: the point at which it was at last becoming a First World country. This fact occurred to some of the international teams who came in to help sift through the rubble: with some surprise, they acknowledged on television that Turkey actually did have earth-moving equipment and life-saving devices on hand. The earthquake set the economy back some way, of course, but as economic modernity these days is really a matter of knowledge and organization rather than of material goods, the country will no doubt continue on a promising path.

The list of positive trends is impressive. Turkey is a NATO ally, with a substantial army of proven efficiency. It is a crucial friend of both the United States and Israel, and is just about the only Islamic county with fair elections. It wields far more economic power than any of its Arab neighbors to the south (and does so despite having no oil to speak of). The Bosporus is a chief conduit for oil tankers, and the chief proposed pipeline for Caspian oil will pass substantially through eastern Turkey. Turkey's foreign trade, approaching $100 billion annually, may well overtake Russia's in the next five years, even though the county has little in the way of raw materials. The twelve million Turks of 1923 have now become sixty-five million, and, as the demographic pressure is at last easing, there will be eighty-five million by 2020.

But say "Turkey" and various problems are at once on offer: weak governments, the Kurds, Islamism, human rights violations and military interventions in politics. One problem stands out: inflation. For thirty years the currency has been losing value at anywhere between 60 and 80 percent per annum. [1] It is not a real inflation, in the sense that prices in dollars do not go up by very much, and the currency can be exchanged at the press of a few buttons in a bank machine (of which Turkey has many, even in outlying parts). But it is a headache for people who derive their money in the local currency and a deterrent for foreign investors. The truth is, inflation has been a weapon of last resort for governments that could not otherwise pay their bills, and help from the International Monetary Fund (IMF)--that is, America--has been essential. The trick is simple enough. In a state of great flux, with a very large black economy (maybe a third of the total), you cannot really collect direct taxes. Yet there are thr ee fixed budget items that can only grow: defense (quite apart from the need to modernize and upgrade the armed forces, there is a guerrilla war in the southeast); state enterprises, which are extensively subsidized; and social spending.

An extremely important process is now under way to turn Turkey into a modern, democratic and more or less European country and the first step in that process is to stabilize the currency. This cannot be done without a government with a substantial and stable majority Elections in April 1999 at last threw together such a thing: a coalition of three rather unlikely allies led by a socialist reformer, Bulent Ecevit. The main economic posts are held by liberals (in the free-trade sense of the word). True, they share power with one-time socialists and also with nationalists, who believe in a strong Turkish state and in the past have distrusted foreigners, especially Europeans. But now that they are in government these nationalists seem to regard Europe as useful. It is, as the Germans said of a similar such coalition in 1907, a mating of carps and rabbits, but nonetheless it is a coalition with a coherent program.

Turkey has been undergoing the rigors of the by now familiar IMF "package" in hopes of stabilizing the currency. Much remains to be done. Government deficits must be curtailed, drastic privatization measures must be undertaken. On the political side, human rights must be respected, and the army's role in politics reduced. These aims will likely be achieved, for Turkey desires to become a Spain, which, subcutaneously, Turkey quite resembles. Its reward for trying has been a place on the European Union s candidate list since late 1999.

Is Turkey, then, going to become, as so many of its educated people seem to think it should, a full member of the European Union? The European Christian Democrats, meeting in Brussels in 1997, had something of a fit about the prospect: Europe, said a Belgian, could only be a Christian club. This is pretty well nonsense, not least because there are more practicing Muslims than Christians (in the sense of churchgoers) in many European countries today, and in any case there are powerful arguments for regarding Turkey historically as a European country There is an interesting debate among historians as to how much the Ottoman Empire was actually a continuation of the eastern Roman Empire. The conqueror of Constantinople, Mehmet Fatih, described himself as "successor of Constantine", corresponded with the Pope, and had Bellini paint his portrait--not Islamic things to have done. To this day some Kurds call Anatolian Turks "Rumi", meaning, "Romans."

But the Europeans, nevertheless, have been reluctant to admit Turkey into the EU, even as a candidate, and did so only under considerable American (and British) pressure. As I write...

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