Alman "Kas/Auslands-Informationen" Dergisi'nin Haziran 2000 Sayýsýnda Yayýmlanan Makalenin Ýngilizcesidir.

Turkey, in the sense of contemporary Turkish society constitutes an interesting ‘reading’. Billions of people are living on our planet today, in ‘cultural worlds’ not belonging to the ‘the Christian European civilisational tradition’. There are ‘worlds’ in our “world” and ‘worlds’ within ‘worlds’. Not all individuals among these billions live their lives with a sense of an existential problem arising from this fact. The fact that they live in a ‘world’ dominated, scientifically, technologically, economically, artistically, politically, and above all in military terms, by the ‘the Christian European’ civilisational tradition to which ‘their cultures’ do not belong historically may not be disturbing for some. But some are disturbed. And some are disturbed with such a strong sense of a problem that this constitutes ‘the problem’ of their lives. They are upset by and react against the global ‘Western Christian domination’. Some commit their lifes to the cause of recreating their own ‘local political world’ so that they may contain the uncontrolled infiltration of ‘the alien Christian West’. Some are less modest. They aim at challenging the ‘Christian Western world’ on global terms. These life commitments are not intellectual exercises or ‘club attendance’ like activities. These commitments are serious in the sense that they do result in unlimited violence done to others and life sacrifice by the self. They lead to, not individually contemplated murders or suicides, but killings and deaths in organised societal contexts. The so called ‘terrorists’ in Chechniya or Hizbullah in Turkey should be seen from the perspective of the problem of living a human life in a world dominated by a civilisational tradition to which the ‘person’ feels alien.

Among all these civilisational traditions other than the ‘the Christian European’ one, it is the Islamic World that seems to result in more widespread and stronger disturbance for ‘non Western souls’ entrapped in a ‘West dominated’ global situation.[1]

Turkey is probably at the heart of this “modern” Islamic problem. Together with that of Japan, Turkish history constitutes probably the most worthwhile to study experiment of coping with the problem of living in a ‘West’ dominated world as a ‘non Westerner’. The Jacobean ‘modernising’ elite of both countries tried to resolve this problem through ‘emulating the West’, trying to become ‘Western’, so to speak, so that the problem dissolves.

The Turkish ‘modernising’ reforms culminated in the so called ‘Kemalist’ political and cultural revolution that established a secular ‘West oriented’ Republic. The Republic of the Kemalists dismantled not only the Islamic legal foundations of the ‘public realm’, but also the key symbols of the Islamic ‘weltaanschaaung’ such as the weekly holiday, calendar, status of women and non-Muslims vis a vis men and Muslims. Many ‘believers’ in Turkey and other parts of the Islamic world saw these actions as blasphemy. For Ayatollah Homayne, the Turkish Republic was the greatest threat to Islam, more ‘evil’ than the “great Satan America” because it was internal.

Turkey of our days makes a thrilling reading because the fate of this ‘radical cultural revolution’ is still uncertain. If it settles as a success in the sense of a stable political and cultural consensus which integrates, ‘democratically’, a nation of about 70 million people, it will indeed permanently influence the fate of the rest of the Islamic world.

The agenda of contemporary Turkey as seen from the dimension of this global problem can be and should be read through the literature that is appearing in Turkey and revealing the multi-faceted aspects of the ‘discussion’ that is going on in the public consciousness, so to speak, of modern Turkey. I have selected five books to stimulate the interest of the potential readers of the Turkish scene.

Turkey of the 1920s emerged from the cataclysmic war years of the 1915-1922 period. Nearly all of the Christian communities of the local Armenians and Greeks have disappeared due to forced exile, death and population exchange between Greece and Turkey. More than a million Turkish/Muslim soldiers died in the wars. Population of the country decreased from 16 to 12 millions between 1915 and 1923, cities and towns witnessed greater population losses. Republic started with a country, predominantly, of Turkish speaking illiterate peasant communities, with a sizeable Kurdish speaking and partially nomadic population in the East and South East. Sunni Islam was the cultural substructure of the majority of the population, constituting a background of an integrating ‘weltaanschaaung’ for most of the Turkish and Kurdish speaking local communities. However, among the Turkish speaking peasantry there was a sizeable Alawi minority.

After winning the ‘Independence War’ (1919-1922) against the Allies which tried to partition Turkey, primarily through Greek occupation of Western Turkey, the leading elite launched a project of ‘nation building’ and therefore a project of ‘cultural engineering’ in such a ‘given social world’. What was going to be the “nomos”of the “loyal citizens” of the Turkish republic and in which new ‘weltaanschaaung’ were they going to live? How this Republic project was going to address the problem of ‘religion’ in the historical specificity of Turkey of the 1920s and 1930s? The first two books look at various issues emerging from the ‘state’ and ‘religion’ relations in the early republican decades and follow up these relations to present times as one of the major dimensions of the political process that took place in the country. These are: Türkler, Türkiye ve Ýslamiyet: yaklaþým, yöntem ve yorum denemeleri (Turks, Turkey and Islam: essays in approaching [the issue], method and interpretation) by Ahmet Yaþar Ocak (1999, Ýstanbul: Ýletiþim Yayýnlarý) and Türk dininin sosyolojik imkaný (The sociological possibility of the Turkish religion) by Yasin Aktay (1999, Ýstanbul: Ýletiþim Yayýnlarý).

Ocak is a professor of history at Hacettepe University in Ankara. In his book, he elaborates on how the Kemalist policy of “moving Islam out of politics, economy, science, education, arts … from the totality of the public realm” and trying to reduce it to a limited private space of “belief and worship of the people”[2] resulted, not in an integrated secular nation, but in a society “appearing” as if it is “split into two between … Kemalists and Islamicists”[3]. There are “two Turkish languages”, “two histories”, “two Islams” in Turkey, as parts of two competing “weltaanschaaung”s[4]. He points the irony of the ontological dichotomy between “the administrating state” and “the administrated society” in the context of modern democracies and investigates the genealogy of what he calls “the big mistake” which resulted in this “split into two”. According to him the Kemalists made “the big mistake” by giving “no space” to Islam in their “modernisation programme”[5]. This dividedness is “the major handicap in the road of becoming contemporary in Turkey”[6]. To stop this conflict and to promote integration, Kemalists, now, should “accept that Kemalism can be critisized” and “see the mistake in trying to impose Kemalism as a religion to the Turkish society competing with Islam which is undoubtedly the foundation of the social and cultural order of the Turkish nation for one thousand years” (my emphasis, Tezel). The “Islamicate section”, according to Ocak, should “remember that, Islam was not exclusively sent as a system, as a programme to establish a state but as a universal faith, as a social and therefore worldly ethical system” and avoid trying “to turn Islam into a political tool”. Ocak clearly writes as a Muslim and moves away from scholarly concerns in such statements like the one that I emphasised above. He does not address the ‘religious’ difficulties arising from the two inequalities that are imbedded in the textual and historic foundations of Islam: between men and women, and between Muslims and the ‘others’, others being both those ‘believing’ according to other ‘religions’ or not ‘believing’ at all. He also shies away from addressing the Kemalist claim that ‘religion’, if used to censure free social production of science and art, stultifies a culture, a society.

The Kemalist ‘Republic’ was not the result of a ‘social revolution’ sustained by ‘classes’ of the ‘civil society’. The ‘Republican reforms’ did not reflect demands emanating from the ‘Turkish nation’. The ‘Republic’ was itself a ‘nation building project, of a small elite educated and socialised within ‘alla franca’ schools that were established upon the ‘image of Europe’, in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. More and more, Turkish speaking Muslim born young men were recruited into ‘alla franca’ institutions, taught a European language, read not only calculus and anatomy but, in spite of ‘political control’ to limit emulating Europeans to technicalities, also philosophy, history and literature texts of the ‘infidel paradigm’. Their major concern was the survival of the Ottoman/Turkish military and political entity. They were dedicated to ‘save’ their ‘state’ against conquering Europe, when many, like Gladstone, wanted to push the ‘Barbarian Turk’ back into the steppes of inner Asia. As the Islamic world contracted in the Balkans, Crimea and Caucasus, ‘defeated’ millions lost their ‘fatherland’s. Survivors retreated into the remainder of the Ottoman state. This ‘saving the state’ mission had nothing to do with democracy, popular mandate or social consensus. It was a life or death issue for an elite, consisting of officers, civil administrators, literati, men of ‘alla franca’ professions. They believed that it was up to them to address the question of ‘what is to be done’. And some reached the conclusion that European power was the result of a cultural environment in which ‘religion’ and/or ‘monarchy’ were no more able to hinder free production of science, philosophy and art. By the end o the 19^th century, there were many Turkish speaking Muslim born individuals with control of or access to political power in the Ottoman Empire who were authentically students and followers of the ‘Age of enlightenment’ and the ‘French revolution’. Their answer to ‘what is to be dane?’, resulting from nearly two centuries of thinking and debate was simple. A ‘state’ that they will see as their own could only be preserved in what was left of the Empire, by transforming the local Muslim communities most of whom were speaking Turkish, into a ‘secular Turkish nation’. So they turned into, whatever the ethnic origin of their own families were, ‘Turkish nationalists’.[7] They had their own clear idea about the results of the relations between society, culture, religion and state in the context of Ottoman history. They believed that in order to have a social environment in which free production of science, technology, philosophy and art was possible, which they taught were constituents of modernity, domination of religion over the public realm should be broken. So they became, in spite of the fact that many continued to believe according to Islamic credo, committed to ‘political secularism’.

History of inter-state politics is as authentic as the history of ‘religions’ and ‘ethnicities’. Kemalist Republic was an authentic result of history.

Kemalists had to face two serious difficulties. First, Islam, however it was ‘understood’ and ‘lived’ in illiterate peasant and nomad communities of various ethnic origins, was a political religion with an old and articulate high culture of legal theory, cosmology linking ‘God’, ‘men’, ‘society’ and ‘world’. The Sunni intelligentsia with a strong sense of owning a ‘correct weltaanschaaung’ was not going to evaporate. Second, there was a Kurdish speaking minority, predominantly Sunni, not enthusiastic about melting in the new ‘Turkish nation’. Indeed, the Kurdish rebellions of 1925-1938, in which religious and ethnic motivations had mixed together, constituted the most violent resistance that the ‘Republic’ faced. Our second book by Yasin Aktay, who is now teaching at Selçuk University in Konya, studies the evolution of the strategies of the Kemalist establishment to tackle the first difficulty. In a fascinating exercise of political and religious sociology he examines the apparent contradiction between the Republican governments’ ‘officialisation’, ‘Republicanisation so to speak, of Sunni Islam and the special loyalty of the Alawi minority to the ‘Republican project’. Alawis were loyal in spite of the fact that their version of Islam was reckoned to be ‘unofficial’, ‘heretic’ and discriminated against.

The most interesting theme of the book is a convincing ‘reading’ of the Kemalist establishment’s policy vis a vis Islam in Turkey from late 1940s onwards. The previous single party period ‘secularism’ of ignoring religion as social reality, pointing at the naïve assumption that religion will ‘go away’ as the new nation is forged together and repressing the intellectual expression of Islam to emphasise the Islamic unity between the private and public realms, came to its logical dead end after the Second World War. In the Cold War environment Turkey moved towards alliance with the USA. When the leaders decided to allow free elections and formation of opposition parties, the Kemalist Republican People’s Party suddenly felt a political need for a rapprochement with religious voters, constituting the bulk of the electorate. The ban on religious educational institutions was lifted. The ‘secular Republican state’ began to open Islamic training high schools and Islamic theology faculties in universities. Aktay ‘reads’ the policies, ideological constructions, official rhetoric of the so called ‘secular state’ in this new era extending into our own times, as the Kemalist strategy to establish a “Turkish religion”, a “Turkish Islam”, an “enlightened Islam” or a “Protestant Islam”. The historical claim, which is empirically true, that Islam(s) in the Ottoman Empire, especially in Anatolia with a sizeable Turkish Alawi minority, was (were) different from other Islams, was turned into a project of creating a unique interpretation of Islam which was not Arabic, not Persian but Turkish, not radical and fundamentalist but cultural and humanist, not political but secular. There is a brilliant chapter on the reflections of this policy in life in Islamic theology faculties of the so called ‘secular republican state’.[8]

Aktay also looks at the difficulty’ that the Sunni religious intellectuals face, emanating from living in a world where “many happenings are witnessed which do not fit into the frame with which one gives meaning to and codes this world and the volume of happenings that spill outside this [religious] frame increases more and more”.[9] In another chapter he first notes the remarkable economic success of the rising Islamic/conservative businessmen class of the Anatolian towns and then questions whether the Weberian theorem of “internalised ethics” or the Sombartian theorem of the “survival and expression response of defranchised minorities” has better explanatory power. He concludes that the Sombartian view is relevant. Like the Jews in Europe, the Muslims in Turkey, who felt that they had become “refugees and pariah in their won country, reacted to political exclusion by communitarian solidarity which paved the way to economic success.[10]

Our first two books do show that Kemalists were indeed struggling with immensely difficult tasks. Were they fools to go on with their ‘social engineering project’? Or were they just another cadre of individuals with faith or faith like belief in the possibility of success in the execution of their ‘received’ or ‘perceived project for a better world’, like many other individuals or cadres had done before including Mohammed and his friends.

In order to try to understand what Mustafa Kemal and his friends were trying to do, let us put ourselves into their shoes and ‘imagine’ the role of a ‘social engineer with a project’. The project being to create a ‘new society’ where

i) the political/legal public realm does not make any reference to ‘religion;

ii) men and women ‘citizens’ with legal equality, endowed with ‘civil rights’, above all ‘property rights, constitute and belong to a ‘nation’ which;

iii) participates constructively in ‘the civilisation’, not only sharing its values and institutions but contributing to their-production.

Let us also imagine that the major human resource constraints of the project were

iv) an ethnically heterogeneous population ninety per cent of which were illiterate and disease stricken peasants and nomads living in segmented communities and producing mostly for subsistence with ancient techniques and

v) re-producing a ‘world picture’ where the individual man and woman are subjects of political and/or religious ‘centres’ and/or ‘communities’ believed to be ontologically endowed with ‘transcendent power’ and are not at all constituent citizens of a man/woman made public realm.

Given that our project and constraints are as stated above, which ‘social engineering instruments’ are we likely to resort to, to obtain our goals?

It is highly probable and logical that we will give priority to creating institutions to ‘educate’ children so that they may become i) the constituent citizens of our ‘enlightened republic’ and ii) they may produce ‘science’, ‘philosophy’ and ‘art’ constructively in civilisation and to using such institutions and informational networks   to ‘forge the existing adult population into a nation’.

Ýsmail Kaplan’s book, Türkiye’de milli eðitim ideolojisi ve siyasal toplumsallaþma üzerindeki etkisi (National education ideology and its impact on political socialisation in Turkey), published in 1999 (Ýletiþim: Ýstanbul), looks analytically at the history of the way that Republican governments used education as the major tool of their social engineering endeavour. This is Kaplan’s Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Bosphorus University in Ýstanbul where he is now working. Kaplan first makes a survey of some “philosophies of education” and some conspicuous political usages of education in recent history.[11] He thus establishes a frame of reference for his evaluation of the Turkish republican experience. In his survey of the development of republican educational policies he brings out the contradictory value elements in the roots of the Kemalist ‘national education’ paradigm. Most contradictory values/goals being, on one hand almost ‘racist’ nationalism and xenophobic insularism and on the other hand, putting the definitive emphasis on the need to “surpass contemporary civilisation”. Kaplan, as, if not a Marxist, a Marxian overlooks the liberal, the Age of Enlightenment face of the Kemalist Janus. Nevertheless, his emphasis on the authoritarian and somewhat militarist face, helps us to understand why the ‘Republican project’ is finding it difficult to stabilise into an ‘open democracy’ based on universal human rights in our own days. He clearly demonstrates that many leading members of the original Kemalist cadre saw ‘Turks’ as masters of Turkey, and non-Turks as, politically subservient to Turks[12]. They were determined to protect “national Turkish culture” from the infiltration of “foreign ideas, all effects coming from the East [read Islam, Tezel] and from the West [read universalist values, Tezel]. They defined ‘national education’ by negation of “religious education” and “internationalist education” which was deemed to be in contradiction with the ‘national character of Turks’[13]. Such anti-universalist ideological usage of ‘national education continued up until the end of the Second World War, with strong elements of building a personality cult around the two key figures, Atatürk and Ýnönü.[14] However, as mentioned above with reference to Aktay’s book, a significant change took place in the political use of the state controlled educational system with the transition to multi-party democracy and change of government after election success of the Democrats in 1950. This was giving a ‘space’ to ‘Islam’ in the general curriculum of elementary and secondary schools, as well as opening of Islamic high schools and university faculties of Islamic theology.[15]

Present Turkish political culture exhibit difficulties with regards to a public realm which rests on commitment to universal human rights; which is shared equally by ethnic Turkish citizens and ethnic non-Turkish citizens; where the state, inclusive of its military and security institutions, is subservient to civil society. Kaplan is an essential reading to see why these difficulties are, as if, imbedded in the origins Kemalist Republicanism.

Was the Kemalist project a total failure in terms of transformation of Turkey into an open society based on supremacy of law and commitment to universal human rights? We all know that the answer is definitely “no”! Turkey is, among the nations of the Islamic world, the only country in which i) women participate in the public/legal realm as equals of men thanks to the secular, ie. non-Islamic nature of  the law of the country, ii) governments are formed and changed as a result of freely contested elections [in spite of the limitations posed by two overt and two covert military interventions] and iii) art, philosophy and science is being produced in interaction with rest of the world without political/religious control of the state or of communities. Dozens of theatres, most of which are commercial ventures open their curtains every night. Several symphonic orchestras have a growing audience not only in Ýstanbul and Ankara but other major towns of the country. Jazz festivals are sold out. There is a thriving and diversified publishing and broadcasting industry that is not subject to political control. More and more, books, periodicals and audio discs are being produced in Kurdish and other local languages. In spite of all the imperfections in the previous record of the political and administrative system, there is an open struggle for a political system that has a commitment to universal human rights irrespective of sex, class, religious or ethnic identity or sexual preference of individuals living in Turkey. Turkey has indeed progressed towards bringing the entire political and administrative system under the control of an independent judiciary. The Kemalist project has, in a way proved to be a great success, from the view point of the ambitions of the Age of Enlightenment ‘head’ of the Janus of Turkish transformation. Where did these positive developments draw their energy?

Our fourth book indicates one of the major sources of these positive developments and is written by the young Turkish piano genius Fazýl Say. However, before moving to his book let us expand on a Huntingtonian theme.

Some time ago, during a summer vacation in my Mediterranean village, I invited a German friend and his family for tea. He is a lawyer with political experience in Munich and has a home at this beautiful Turkish coastal spot. As they came in, my daughter had been listening to a cassette of classical (Western!) music. As soon as he sat he asked laughingly: “is it true that Atatürk wanted Turkish people to listen to Bach and Beethoven?” I was frozen and did not answer. I must have felt offended. I have been elaborating on this question since then, using it as a problematic theme in my thinking, lecturing and writing.

What is happening when a person like Fazýl Say is playing Mozart or Bach for a world audience? Who is Say culturally, born to a modest family in Ankara in 1970, began to learn the piano at the age of four from a teacher of Ankara Conservatory, finished this school, studied at Dusseldorf Music Academy and became famous with his debut Mozart disc in the late 1990s? Let us expand. What is happening when Seiji Osawa is conducting Boston Philharmonic or Zubin Mehta, the Israeli Philharmonic? Are Fazýl Say, Seiji Osawa and Zubin Mehta ‘fake’? Are millions of boys and girls learning the Spanish Guitar in Japan ‘aping’, hopelessly, an alien culture and becoming ‘funny’? Was it a folly for the Mahmud the Second to start, in the 19^th century, an ‘alla franca’ palace orchestra, or for Atatürk and his friends to establish a ‘conservatory’ to teach music and drama to Anatolian children, to build opera, theatre and concert halls, to have scores of masterpieces of world literature translated into Turkish? No. Say, Osawa and Mehta are not ‘fake’ and Mahmud or Atatürk did not become ‘funny’ with their cultural endeavours.

Most of cultures and civilisational traditions have interacted with each other throughout history and more so in this part of the world where Turkey is. There is nothing original in transformations of ‘world pictures’, values and life and art styles as a result of such inter cultural exchanges. Germans had not become less authentic when they converted to Christianity, or Arabs, Persians and Turks when they converted to Islam. The implicit Huntingtonian axiom that cultures are what they are and are destined to remain what they are; that they can not mix; that end results will be sterile, mute, if they try to mix is false.

Cultural history of Turkey over centuries had been shaped with interaction with the outer world. The ‘westernisation’ or ‘Europeanisation’ of Turkish culture is a historic given. It has taken place, partially perhaps regarding the total population, but irreversibly. It is not only political culture which has changed but also aesthetics and moral values, forms and styles of art, daily life of individuals as they try to solve their own problem of living a ‘meaningful’ human life from cradle to grave. Fazýl Say’s book gives us a clear insight into the successful part of the Turkish story.

Uçak notlarý (Airplane notes) published in 1999 by (Ankara: Muzik Ansiklopedisi Yayýnlarý) are memoirs of Say. It was the existence of, if not hundreds, a sufficiently large number of qualified and dedicated individuals constituting a milieu of music, plastic arts and literature that enabled a prodigy like child to receive formal education which helped him develop his soul as an artist, in Ankara of the 1970’s and 1980’s which is striking. As political Ankara went through first, violent clashes between radical left and right and then through politically sterile but economically innovating military intervention years, concerts went on at the Presidential Symphony Orchestra Hall, theatres opened their curtains and Fazýl Say received his remarkable education.[16] The end product is Fazýl Say, a man able to locate himself in the totality of human experience as a Turk, enchant world audience with his interpretation of Bach[17], reflect on Heraclites, Nietsche and Zen Budhism, and enjoy life and help others to enjoy it too. Fazýl Say successfully participates in the re-production of ‘world civilisation’. And he is definitely the product of the Kemalist ‘social engineering project’. And there are many others like him, socialised in Turkey in the cultural milieu generated by the Kemalist republic and contributing to science, philosophy and arts in Turkey or elsewhere.

Kemalist leaders were authoritarian. The leading figures like Atatürk and Ýnönü were indeed dictators as they ruled Turkey, but they were not ‘banana republic dictators’. Atatürk’s showed courage and universalist wisdom in stopping the usage of the Byzantine cathedral church Saint Sophia as a mosque and turning it into a museum. He invited Jewish German professors escaping from the Nazis in the 1930 to Turkey and employed them to found the faculties of medicine, law, science and agriculture in Istanbul and Ankara universities. Ýnönü’s case is more colourful. In his Presidential years in the 1940s, he learned English as his second foreign language, set up a laboratory in the presidential palace to learn chemistry from the dean of Faculty of Sciences of Ankara University and learned to play the violoncello enough to want to give a radio concert. The founding fathers of the Turkish republic indeed took science, philosophy, scholarship and arts personally and seriously. It is extremely important for us if we want to avoid underestimating the subtleties of the Republican era. The intellectual and institutional foundations of the Kemalist ‘cultural revolution’ had been laid in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The institutional structuration of state’s developmental role in arts and philanthropic activities was ‘engineered’ quite well. Plastic arts, music, dramatic arts, literary publications that were financed predominantly by the state as ‘infant industries’ in the early decades of the Republic are mature now to sustain their life, to a large extent, in the market and civil society.

What will be the fate of the Republican venture? Many outsiders may continue to laugh at what they see as the deficiencies and idiosyncraties of the Turkish scene, but it is unlikely to collapse into a failure. It is indeed the greatest innovation within Islamic experience. As secular Turks will have to learn to live with Islam, Muslims in Turkey and outside will have to learn to live with ‘secular Turkey’. Turkey is an ‘open society/culture’, ‘open’ in the sense of creative interaction with other cultures. It is also ‘open’ in the sense of self reflection, criticism, and political and social debate for improvement. It is hypothetically possible that the situation may change for the worse as turkey drifts into political chaos or militaristic or communitarian authoritarianism. But such a scenario is not very probable. On the contrary, it is much more probable that Turkey will progress towards a genuine pluralistic democracy where the military is subservient to civil authority and where rule of law, committed to universal human rights is the established nomos of the public realm. As the sage of Turkish social science scholars Þerif Mardin, who is among last to be classified as an economic reductionist, once said, much will depend on sustaining economic growth and spreading welfare gains justly. Here we come to our last book by two authors: Seyfettin Gürsel, Veysel Ulusoy (1999) Türkiye’de iþsizlik ve istihdam (Unemployment and employment in Turkey) (Ýstanbul: Yapý Kredi Yayýnlarý). Gürsel is the head of the economics department of Galatasaray University in Istanbul with an educational background in France. Ulusoy took his Ph.D. at Syracuse University in the USA and is also working at Galatasaray University. They provide a through analysis of data provided in the “household labour force” surveys conducted twice a year by the Turkish State Statistical Institute. Turkey is indeed going through dramatic changes in population dynamics as the crude birth rate rapidly declines and agricultural labour force, which still accounts for 40 % of employment, begins to decline in absolute terms. What will happen to labour force dynamics will play a crucial role in alleviation of poverty in Turkey and her acceptability into European Union as a full member.

The book starts with a comparative evaluation of demographic and sectoral employment data and relation between growth of output and employment in Turkey and some select developing countries. Turkey has succeeded in increasing employment over population growth concomitantly with real wage increases over the last three decades. However, the authors show that, employment has to grow by about 3 % and real output by about 6 % during the present decade in order to stabilise an unemployment rate of 10 %. They analyse relations between sex, age and education and participation in labour force and employment, unemployment and underemployment.[18] Second part of the book deals with an ‘anatomy of unemployment”. Authors associate the recorded decline in unemployment rate in Turkey with ‘early retirement’ practices and increase in average schooling period, indicating the adverse effects on unemployment rate, of the recent prolongation of the ‘minumum work tenure’ to earn retirement benefits in the Turkish social security system. They also emphasise the present low female participation rate in work force and anticipate increase in participation and therefore pressure on unemployment in the coming years.[19] Their concluding remarks are: “although unemployment in Turkey is not as high as such EU members as France, Germany and Italy … it is high enough to make [EU members] anxious about the [possible labour market results] of [Turkey’s] membership to the Union. More important is the fact that there is no guarantee for unemployment rate to continue to decline in the coming 10 years.  … Turkey may prove successful in bringing unemployment rate to lower levels only if she achieves macro stability in 2 or 3 years and then launches a process of fast development”.[20]

The present conjuncture of Turkish politics indeed confirm Gürsel’s and Ulusoy’s concluding remarks. Turkey in the year 2000 has a governmental system, more over, a state system committed to bringing down inflation to single digit by the end of 2002. It seems that the future of civil government subservient to a civil society hinges on the successful transformation of the Turkish economy where a defunct semi-socialist state apparatus is an economic predator, into an open market where property rights are consolidated and where fair competition shapes efficient resource use.