It was Jan. 24, 1980 that the then-prime minister, Süleyman Demirel, introduced what The Economist magazine of the time described as an “economic earthquake” -- a hugely controversial package of measures credited with having changed the course of republican history. The architect of the package was his principal undersecretary, Turgut Özal.In essence they were designed to move the real sector into the real world -- to globalize the Turkish private sector and remove the politically motivated subsidies from what was then a disproportionately large state sector. State controlled prices -- oil, cement, sugar, paper coal all went up, alcohol rose by 70 percent, rail fares by 170 percent. An already devalued lira was devalued by another 30 percent against the dollar. A protected Turkish market was suddenly ushered into the tough competitive world of an export-oriented economy. The Jan. 24 package was not more royalist than the king but more Washington consensus than the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
How, one might ask, could a government take such draconian measures? The simple answer is that a Turkey on the brink of collapse had no choice. The other answer is that the government didn’t get away with it. There was a coup in the September of that year and ultimately it was the Turkish military that provided the backdrop for Özal’s policies. For those who place Özal in the pantheon of the struggle of civilian authority against the military, it is well worth remembering that his first prominence was as the important civilian figure in the post 1980 martial-law cabinet -- deputy prime minister in charge of the economy.
If the current paradigm for looking at Turkey is based on the conflict between the civilian authority and the vestiges of militarism with the state, it was not always the case. Turkey adopted economic liberalism under very illiberal political traditions and though Özal, the party politician and president, wouldn’t allow himself to be bossed around by the military, his relationship with the authoritarian 1982 Constitution was symbiotic at least. He was not the figurehead of a movement which also took root in the 1980s whose manifesto was that the best defense against authoritarianism was a strong and accountable civil society. Özal was all about reforming the relationship of the private sector to the state, and not so much about reforming the state itself.
It was during the 1990s that Turkish politicians as a class demonstrated their moral bankruptcy and that elections were transformed into a competition over who would get to control the spoils. It is worth stopping the frame on the period between 1996-97 when Necmettin Erbakan was prime minister and leader of the Welfare (Refah) Party (RP), the highly eccentric parent of the current Justice and Development Party (AK Party). There was a stand-off between the military and the government and the RP did not have the confidence in its own legitimacy to turn the matter over to the electorate at an early general election.
The last 10 years have been a successful confidence-building exercise by the civilian government. It has at least cultivated a belief in itself. Whether the government actually signs up to an IMF standby is one thing, but it would not occur to anyone that it would need martial law to do so. Indeed, it was the saber rattling by the military against its own government in 2007 which threatened to undo the progress Turkey had made up until then in getting its finances on track. The AK Party has successfully fended off any number of challenges by the military and their bureaucratic allies and has gone on counter-attack. There is currently a police raid into the very heart of the military HQ after officers were suspected of mounting a surveillance operation with some criminal intent against senior government figures.
But of course, all authority has to be accountable. That is the essence of democracy. So Turkey’s project for the next decade is to build up those channels: to have a balanced press, an effective opposition, an impartial judiciary, a bureaucracy whose priority is sound advice. The trick is not just being confident, but inspiring confidence.
