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Survey of Turkey Economist.com http://www.economist.com/specialreports/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=... Ataturk’s long shadow Jun 8th 2000 From The Economist print edition If Turkey wants to become a thoroughly modern European state, it must embrace the spirit, not the letter, of its founding father’s teachings, argues Edward McBride FEW museums would make such a meal of three stale chickpeas. Yet there they sit in their plate-glass display, shrivelled and grey but lovingly lit and labelled in two languages. As the labels explain, these are not just any chickpeas. They belonged to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, “Father of the Turks”, the founder of modern Turkey. When Ataturk died, in 1938, the government of the day commissioned a shrine to house not only his body but also his old cars, suits, golfing plus-fours, pyjamas, socks, unsmoked cigarettes, even his nail-clippers. In a souvenir shop you can buy Ataturk carpets, fridge magnets and CD-ROMs, not to mention a selection of snaps of a sun-kissed Ataturk in tight-fitting swimming trunks. A diverse stream of visitors shuffles by: giggling lovers, veiled housewives, impish children, conscripts, businessmen, pensioners, all united by their fascination with the most mundane details of Ataturk’s daily life. Turks undoubtedly owe Ataturk an enormous debt of gratitude. After all, he almost single-handed saved their country from destruction. At the end of the first world war, it looked as though, after centuries of Ottoman decline, Turkey might disappear from the map altogether. But Ataturk rallied the bedraggled remnants of the Ottoman army, defeated the invading Greeks, threw out the humiliating treaty of Sèvres and won international recognition of an expanded and revitalised Turkish state. Over the next 15 years, Ataturk reinvented Turkey on the model of a European nation-state. He replaced an absolute monarchy with a democratic republic, an explicitly Islamic ethos with staunch secularism, a fractured and inefficient administrative system with a centralised bureaucracy, and an agrarian economy with an increasingly urban and industrial society. For Turkey, Ataturk was the equivalent of the Pilgrim Fathers, George Washington and Henry Ford all rolled into one. Astonishingly enough, it worked. Ataturk’s creation has not only survived but thrived. The remnants of a tattered empire have become an important country by any measure, with the world’s 17th-largest population as well as economy. Its armed forces are the second-largest in NATO. It exports everything from T-shirts to F-16 fighters, not to mention workers by the million. It has football teams that can challenge the best in Europe, and an airline that flies all over the world. For decades, Turkey has managed to preserve—albeit with the occasional interruption—both a vibrant economy and a functioning democracy. Preserved in aspic Even so, standing in front of the 70-year-old cocktail snack painstakingly preserved because Ataturk almost ate it, you cannot help feeling that Turkey’s reverence for its founder is a little short on perspective. What applies to Ataturk’s chickpeas applies even more strongly to his philosophy. At times, it seems, Turks are so busy defending the details of his reforms that they forget about the big picture. Ataturk wanted to make Turkey into a modern, dynamic European country, not to replace one ossified and archaic system with another. Both Europe and Turkey have changed out of all recognition since Ataturk danced the Viennese waltz as Ottoman military attaché in Sofia, but Kemalist orthodoxy has not. The buzzwords in the European Union these days are autonomy, devolution, regionalism and subsidiarity; but Turkey’s rulers are still harping on about the sacred and indivisible unity of the state. When Ataturk first conceived that policy 77 years ago, invasions and uprisings had already lopped Turkey in half, and looked set to continue. Today, Turkey could thump any of its neighbours in a war, and has thumped the separatist guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK). Yet it remains paranoid about being dismembered. 1 of 3 10/24/2009 6:01 PM Economist.com http://www.economist.com/specialreports/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=... Likewise, when Ataturk banished all traces of religion from public life, Muslim traditionalists had been resisting all innovation, education and development, causing Turkey to fall far behind Europe. Nowadays, the most Islamically inclined political party is also one of the keenest on Turkish membership of the EU, and secularists are making it harder for devout Muslims to get a proper education. In the topsy-turvy world of Turkish secularism, the state has prevented women from wearing what they want, and banned the country’s most popular political party—in the name of democracy. All-powerful state In this and other ways, Turkey clings to the idea of a know-it-all state. The constitution not only defines the country as “loyal to the nationalism of Ataturk”, but also attempts to keep it that way forever, by expressly forbidding any change to the clauses containing that definition. It weighs down its protection of civil liberties with so many restrictions that Turks jokingly refer to it as the constitution of exceptions. They are not allowed to elect their president (the parliament does that), nor to insult him. Likewise, Turkey’s laws do little to subordinate the army to civilian control, but take great pains to protect its “moral character” from criticism. Policemen feel free to torture, soldiers to meddle in political affairs and civil servants to whitewash their abuses. Such paternalism may have helped to shake Turkey out of its Ottoman torpor, but it goes down badly in liberal-democratic modern Europe. That said, Turkey has managed to shake off some of its most dated Kemalist practices. Over the past 20 years, successive governments have been trying to disentangle the state from the economy. The late Turgut Ozal, who held office both as prime minister and, subsequently, president, is said to have devised the now familiar “build-operate-transfer” formula for private infrastructure investment back in the 1980s. The public sector’s once huge share in industry and commerce has shrunk to about 12% today. With state steel mills, petrol stations and meat-packing factories among the many public enterprises on the auction block, Ataturk’s legacy of state-led industrialisation will soon have rusted away. That should make it easier to tame Turkey’s reckless spending and runaway inflation. There are grounds for optimism on the political front as well. The capture of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the PKK, may pave the way for a more dispassionate debate of the Kurds’ place in Turkish society. Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a judge who has just become president with the support of all the big political parties, has called for reform of the constitution. And both press and public have become quicker to denounce misbehaviour by generals, politicians and bureaucrats. In 1950, 12 years after Ataturk’s death, the income of the average Turk was marginally higher than that of his counterpart in Spain or Portugal. Since then, Spain and Portugal have erased most traces of their authoritarian and statist past, whereas Turkey has dawdled. Nowadays, the income of the average Portuguese, Spaniard or Greek is three to five times that of his Turkish equivalent (see chart 1). 2 of 3 10/24/2009 6:01 PM Economist.com http://www.economist.com/specialreports/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=... By following the spirit rather than the letter of Kemalism, Turkey could yet make up the lost ground. Whereas, by sticking to a narrow interpretation of Ataturk’s legacy it might actually encourage the very problems he was trying to head off: religious extremism, ethnic separatism and institutional decay. That would be very bad news for Turkey’s 66m people, and at least a pity for the world. Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved. 3 of 3 10/24/2009 6:01 PM Economist.com http://www.economist.com/surveys/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=315567 Fundamental separation Jun 8th 2000 From The Economist print edition In its anxiety to keep state and religion apart, Turkey sometimes goes too far IF YOU are looking at the humdrum Ankara skyline from Ataturk’s hilltop mausoleum, one building stands out: the Kocatepe mosque. Its four minarets hem in a massive vanilla sundae of domes and semi-domes, in a modern pastiche of the traditional Ottoman style. But the architects planned as much for convenience as for tradition. The muezzins ride to the top of the minarets in purpose-built lifts. A huge underground car park offers the congregation an instant earthly reward after the snarled city streets. Best of all, when God begins to pall, visitors can turn their attention to mammon, in the form of a large subterranean shopping mall. Few Turks seem to see anything odd about shopping for miniskirts and hair-dye in the basement of Ankara’s biggest mosque. In a recent survey conducted by TESEV, a respected Turkish think-tank, 97% of those questioned identified themselves as Muslim, 92% said they fasted during the holy month of Ramadan, and 46% claimed to pray five times a day. But 91% also said different religious beliefs should be respected, and clear majorities thought it did not matter if Muslims consumed alcohol, failed to fast and pray or, if they were women, went outside without covering their heads. Only 21% called for an Islamic state, and once the implications were pointed out to them, some were not so sure. But even if ordinary Turks do not get worked up about religion, their government does. The constitution bars “even partially basing the fundamental social, economic, political and legal order of the state on religious tenets”.
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