It was a time -- I believe it is called the “wasted 1990s” -- when public finances were in a muddle and the government borrowed at such a prodigious rate that only an idiot would have invested in their own business rather than high-yield government bonds. People’s wallets were like baskets of currency, with dollars and marks (remember them?) as hedges against two and even three-figure inflation. It was a time when there was a dirty war going on in the Southeast of the country replete with assassination squads, and the state matched the activities of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) with lawlessness of its own. Earnest commentators fretted about an Islamic revival in Turkey and about the inevitable confrontation of Turkey’s Islamist leader (though admittedly Necmettin Erbakan was more W.C. Fields than mad mullah) and the epaulette-wearing guardians of the secular state.People typically saw Turkey as a country whose vast potential was shackled by its inability to address structural problems. It was an age when it was hard to write about Turkey without including the word “reform.”
The articles began with a list of problems and a list of solutions and a sense of skepticism that any timetable would ever be met. Turkey promised to privatize state-owned enterprises -- but cancelled sale after sale except the ones which had the suspicious whiff of cronyism about them. Would governments ever enact human rights legislation, stop torture and abandon attempts to control the press? And could Turkey ever come to terms with the Kurds’ sense of their own ethnicity and even people’s expression of their own faith?
The point here is not to ask whether all these questions received answers -- some did and some didn’t. Rather, it is to remember a time the world viewed Turkey while clutching a very long to-do list. There were any number of organizations who presented Turkey with long catalogues of the things it needed to do to get its house in order. These ranged from organizations like Journalists without Frontiers and Amnesty International to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, of course, the European Union.
Not surprisingly, this got on a lot of Turkish nerves. “We don’t have a problem with Kurdishness, just with terrorism,” was not just a cry of denial, but a way of telling the outside world to mind its own business. However, at a certain point, the need for reform became too great. When the Turkish economy collapsed in 2001, Turkey had no option but to sign on to the cure. Getting a seat at the EU negotiating table was a way of restoring credibility for the new Justice and Development Party (AK Party). So it got on with the job of fulfilling the Copenhagen criteria and the requirements of a standby agreement. And things did improve.
The economy settled and began to grow; suddenly Turkey began to see it self not as a country with potential, but one with clout. At the same time, the war in Iraq, coupled with the sub-prime crisis, deprived those who stood in judgement over Turkey of the moral high ground. Turkey is convinced it has entered a new paradigm, one where it no longer has to listen to the outside world describe the seriousness of its problems. It now has a new set of friends in places where public institutions are in far worse shape than Turkey’s own. Syria and Sudan are sublimely uncritical of the state of Turkish democracy.
In many ways Turkey is pointed in the right direction. The latest bit of arm wrestling between the military and the government is long overdue. At the same time, there are still those inside Turkey who realize that getting the institutional balance in Turkey right is not a nirvana but the minimum requirement for even beginning to deal with those reforms still waiting to be addressed. A “yes” vote in this September’s referendum on a constitutional reform package will not in itself solve anything. At the very most it will provide some tools to get on with the job of governance.
