Welfare state reconsidered: Social policy in the late
Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey
NADİR ÖZBEK
This article investigates welfare regimes and social policies in the late Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. Its major concern is to examine contemporary problems of social welfare and poverty in Turkey within a broader historical context. The article argues that the present crisis of welfare states should be understood as the demise of modern “governmentality” as it emerged during the period roughly from the early nineteenth century up to the end of World War II. The post-war Keynesian welfare state, as a particular form of this “governmentality,” represents a new consensus between labor and capital in which the state extends its activities in an enlarged social sphere. The global crisis of the Keynesian welfare state during the last several decades signifies the demise of modern “governmentality” as well as a search for new forms of social policy, with neo-liberalism and new-conservatism constituting its ideological context.
As for the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey, this article aims to depict the broader contours of the historical process and offers its own periodization. It considers the period that starts with the early nineteenth century Ottoman reforms and ends with World War II as a single period during which the social sphere extended gradually and the government’s concern with the welfare and productive capacities of the population increased. The article argues that the expansion of the social sphere and state activity towards regulating that sphere should be considered as the formation of a modern welfare system in the Ottoman-Turkish context. In the Turkish context, only after World War II did the social question became explicitly a labor question. The post-war welfare regime in Turkey followed the global patterns of the Keynesian welfare state in other parts of the world. During the last two decades Turkish government has been trying to accommodate its welfare system to the new conditions of global capitalism. In this new global conjuncture, as the social expenditures of the state decrease, the social control and regulatory aspects of welfare regimes become more apparent.
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The problem of labour force, social policy
and State Economic Enterprises
in the process of industrialization of Turkey:
The years 1930s and 1940s.
AHMET MAKAL
The experiences of Western Countries indicate that one of the basic problems in the process of industrialization is the scarcity of a qualified labour force and that agriculture and the sector of crafts are significant sources in overcoming this problem. The introduction of social policy measures in the utilization of labour force has had a positive effect on overcoming the problem as well as on production and productivity. In this paper, we evaluate, in the light of Western European experience, the connections between the problems of labour force confronted in the process of industrialization of Turkey in 1930s and 1940s, and the social policy measures used as a means of overcoming these problems. This study, as such, compares and contrasts the Turkish and Western experiences. In the periods in question, the structure of the agricultural sector based on petty production and low utilization of land made it rather difficult for the labour power needs of the industrial sector to be provided both in view of quantity, and in view of quality and permanency. The same evaluations were also valid as of the crafts. The problem of labour force impeded the emerging industrial sector in forming a permanent labour force, due to high rates of labour turnover and this in turn prevented the labour force from acquiring quality and prevented the increase in its productivity, and thus the desired increases in the level of production were not realized. In the course of time, various measures were taken so as to overcome the restrictions in labour force. On the one hand, the state regulated, through the 1936 Labour Law, the sphere of labour in harmony with the state-controlled industrialization process and with the rule of one party in the field of politics. While the Law made some authoritarian arrangements in the field of collective labour relations by the prohibition of strike and lockout and the introduction of compulsory arbitration; it brought, in the field of individual labour relations, protective arrangements and at the same time arrangements that would contribute to the formation of a permanent labour force. On the other hand, comprehensive social policy practices were undertaken in the State Economic Enterprises that were in the position of being the driving force of industrialization. Their level of wages was higher in comparison with the private sector. Furthermore, the employees were provided with extensive opportunities in such areas as housing, nourishment, social security, education, paid leave and vacation. In the course of time, these measures reduced the rates of labour turnover and thus a more permanent and qualified labour force was formed. Also, these developments affected the levels of productivity and production in a positive way and made a contribution to the process of industrialization. While the conception of the paternalistic populism prevalent in the period is effective on the comprehensive social policies in the State Economic Enterprises, the evaluation of populism and the connection in question is beyond the scope of this study.
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Justice, equality, and responsibility
MURAT BOROVALI
Especially over the last two decades, liberal approaches to distributive justice have tried to incorporate issues of personal responsibility. Accepting that justice requires equality at some level, there seems to be a broad consensus on the need for an understanding of justice that rejects full outcome equality on the one hand and simple equality of opportunity on the other. Consequently, it is held that a theory of egalitarian justice should equalize the effects of factors that are beyond the control of a person, while respecting inequalities that arise as a result of the choices of individuals. This article aims to provide a critical survey of theories of egalitarian justice that are, in various degrees, sensitive to this choice/circumstance distinction.
Following a brief analysis of standard welfare egalitarianism, the approaches by John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin and Amartya Sen are critically analysed. A further section inquires whether it is sufficiency rather than equality that is the motivating principle in discussions of distributive justice. In this respect, left-libertarian and basic income perspectives are also briefly noted. The article concludes by looking at the possible practical implications of the theories of Rawls, Dworkin, and Sen.
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Respublica versus state
CEMAL BÂLİ AKAL
If the Turkish political-legal literature is mixing up Respublica with state, perhaps the reason hidden behind this is the fact that autocratic state type is still considered as the sole/single effective type of state: Throughout the whole 16th century, a painful transition period, when the philosophers were mixed up between the scholastic mentality and the modern mentality, the same autocratic structure was met with two concepts; state and respublica which were competing with each other. Before respublica expressed regime in today’s sense, it was used to express the initial structure of modern political unity along with the word state. But the problem is that what both concepts tried to explain was absolute monarchy: Absolute monarchy as the matrix of modern state and totalitarian mentality as its counterpart... If it is true that the words state and republic are used haphazardly in the Turkish political-legal literature, the danger which is tried to be pointed out above may exactly be this.
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Multiculturalism and the ethics of hospitality
in a globalizing world
MEYDA YE⁄ENO⁄LU
My paper problematizes the liberal imperative to tolerate and respect cultural difference within the limits of law. Asking whether the legal codification of respect for cultural differences is conducive for reinventing a political space that is beyond the rule of law, I suggest that not only such a political space is not flourishing out of a particularist liberal multiculturalism, but more importantly conditional hospitality regulates the destabilizing force of the political and hence entails its repudiation, suspension, denegation or foreclosure. In trying to understand the mechanism by which the foreclosure of politics is managed, I make a detour through Derrida’s reading of the apoiras of conditional hospitality. Welcoming the ‘other’ in the form of codified, multiculturalist tolerance implies a conditional welcoming as the hospitality offered remains limited within law and jurisdiction. The place from which multiculturalist tolerance welcomes the particularity of the other, fortified by codifications such as affirmative action, is what enables the disawoved and inverted self-referentiality of racist hospitality as this empties the host’s position from any positive content and asserts its sovereignty. Can we rethink the problematic of multiculturalist tolerance in ethical terms that does not circumscribe it in the form of a command, law or constitution? This paper suggests to rethink the relationship between conditional and unconditional hospitality in terms of the politics the latter implies. To examine the limitations and congealments conditional hospitality imposes on politics proper, I turn to Antonio Negri’s two important concepts: constituent and constitutive power and examine the ways in which the latter suffocates or neutralizes the former. I suggest establishing paralellism between constituted power and conditional hospitality since both entail a limitation of the destabilizing potential of the “right to have politics”. My paper locates the posssibility for a democratic politics in the ethical opening and impulse unconditional hospitality can bring forth for the creative force of the constituent power.
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Global distortions: Class, policy and violence
in post-industrial times
ÖZGÜR TABURO⁄LU
Globalization has intense and disruptive effects over class profile of industrial economic organizations. Marxist iconography for labour class has been transformed. Political actor of post-industrial times is defined with references to ethnic identity, rather than the place in economic activities. The economic structure for post-industrial organizations functions over a conspiracy level on which the direct references to labour gains an abject status. On that plane of economy, production is no more a privileged social activity. But the mechanisms of re-production, which has been despised by Marxist scholars, become the core of economic activities. The class profile isn’t defined as a dialectic between working and capitalist classes, but new forms of collectivities or semi-class formations emerge as the locus of main economic actors. The spaces of production in post-industrial times are designed to reflect this class dynamics. In global world, there isn’t a critical political theory to propose a “proper” policy to resolve emergent conflicts. The ethnic re-configuration of class dynamics after global economy, mainly formulated within multiculturalist and human right discourses. However, within these formulations the very dynamics of policy are lost which is a dynamic antagonism or dialectic. The policy is possible within an antagonistic level that is beyond the naive and flattening understanding of multiculturalism. On the other side, within conspiracy theories, there is a hyper-antagonistic political design which is the deterriorated form of modern political theories. The critical political thought in global world have to count the new dynamics and possible antagonistic stances. In such theories, the transnational political actors such as immigrants and refugees can be conceived as the ideal type of global political design. And the hatred or xenephobic reactions towards such people is the very source of prominent form of violence in global world. Finally the “proper” policy in global world scene can be defined within such a duality that is between transnational actors and global actors who are the sources of covert violence.
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The music of Metin-Kemal Kahraman:
The reinvention of the identity of Dersim through
the memory of the older generation
LEYLA NEYZİ
Using the case of the music group Metin-Kemal Kahraman, this article suggests that studies of hybrid identities and fractured subjectivities highlight the constructedness of presumably original singular identities in Turkey, whether national or counter-national. Addressing the revival of Alevi identity, it argues that a legacy of oral poetry and music acted as a link between the assimilationist generation of the early Republic, the leftist generation of the 1970s, and the contemporary generation rediscovering Alevism in the context of neo-liberal globalization. It suggests that, performing in transnational space, Metin-Kemal Kahraman achieve a link to the multicultural space of Dersim in eastern Turkey in their imaginary, and thereby to the elders they rejected as youths.
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Provincial images in contemporary Turkish cinema:
Cycle, imprisonement, claustrophobia and irony
in Masumiyet
F. ASUMAN SUNER
There emerged a “new Turkish cinema” during the 1990s around the films by a young generation of directors. This article aims to investigate the defining characteristics of the “new Turkish cinema” of the 1990s on the basis of a close reading of Zeki Demirkubuz’s 1996 film, Masumiyet (Innocence).
Thematically, the “new Turkish cinema” revolves around the issues of crisis of identity and belongingness. “Provincial identity” appears to be a critical site of investigation in these films. This is not only to say that new Turkish films tend to have stories taking place in the province, but also that “provinciality” as an existential condition becomes a recurrent topic in the films. Problems of identity and belongingness are discussed in relation to Turkey’s “provincial” status in the contemporary globalizing world. The new Turkish cinema’s approach to “provinciality” decidedly differs from the approach of the “social realist” tradition of the previous period. While the social realist tradition sought to reflect the “reality” of Turkish society and convey certain political messages on the basis of this “reality”, the new Turkish cinema tends to demonstrate a critical self-awareness about the constructed nature of cinematic representation. Intertextuality, metafiction, over-stylization, irony, parody are among the commonly adopted strategies by the Turkish films of the 1990s in dealing with the issues of identity, belongingness and provinciality.
This paper analyzes Masumiyet within the conceptual framework presented above. The first part is devoted to the discussion of the concepts of “belongingness,” “identity” and “provinciality” in the context of the social transformation of Turkish society during the 1990s. This part also seeks to locate the emergence of a “new Turkish cinema” in relation to the social dynamics of this period. The second part presents a close reading of Masumiyet on the basis of the argument that the film constructs “provinciality” as a condition of confinement and entrapment. Masumiyet creates a markedly gloomy and claustrophobic mood. This part examines the sense of confinement and claustrophobia prevalent in the film at four levels: visual atmosphere and the use of space; circular narrative structure; intertextual references to classical Turkish melodramas; and the motif of muteness. The last part demonstrates how the sense of closure and totality reached at the end of the film is shattered by the intervention of situational and textual ironies.
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The figure of servant and master in Turkish novel
ÇİÇEK ÖZTEK
This article aims at analysing transformation of social hierarchies as represented in the Turkish novel from Tanzimat to today by focusing on the figure of the servant in relation to its masters. That figure combines both class and gender hierarchies and creates a sharp encounter between the low and the high at home. However as a critical strategy this article will intend to interpret these hierarchies not as a ‘reflection’ of the actual hierarchies existing in society, but as traces of those social realities as ‘refracted’ through the lens and ideological perspective of the writer as expressed in terms of the specificity of the literary realm. It is believed that the figure of servant makes an exception to the marginal position of the elements and figures of ‘low’ life in the novel as it had been present in the houses and novels from Tanzimat till today in various forms and faces. This article will lay out a comparative frame to compare the representations of the figure of servant in the Western -especially 19th century French and English- and Turkish novels; and then concentrate on various Turkish novels by adopting a historical approach.
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Capitalist transformation process,
corruption and neoliberalism in Russia
PINAR BEDİRHANO⁄LU
In the tenth year of its ambiguous ‘transition to market economy and liberal democracy’, the early Western optimism about the establishment of a liberal state-society complex in Russia seems to be disrupted by the rise of corruption besides other socio-economic problems such as crime, authoritarianism and the development of an oligopolistic market structure. The dominant liberal transition approaches, namely the shock therapy perspective and its institutionalist critique, have examined the problem as a heritage of the USSR and tended to put the blame on the irresponsible and rent-seeking Russian ruling elite for the aggravation of this problem.
It is apparent that this evaluation, besides its popularity in ‘transition’ studies, serves to preserve an idealized Western model of democracy and market economy intact by placing all the burden of corruption on peculiar Russian dynamics. It ultimately reproduces an ahistoric and highly Eurocentric worldview by refraining effectively from comprehending the problem as also a globally conditioned process.
Criticizing this analysis, this paper aims to examine the aggravation of corruption in Russia in the 1990s as an inevitable result of Yeltsin’s struggle to incorporate powerful oppositional interests in the society into the neoliberal path, which has been also globally imposed through the international financial institutions, most notably the IMF. It argues that Yeltsin’s strategy to promote new stakes and rents to those who did not comply with the neoliberal project by using the state mechanism itself invites one to examine the corruption problem in Russia as a qualitatively new phenomenon in the 1990s, which needs to be associated with the shock therapy perspective’s Machiavellian attitude. It has been a problem aggravated not by a frequently blamed conservative state bureaucracy but by the advocates of a neoliberal capitalist transformation in the country.
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Afet İnan vs. Fuat Köprülü: A debate
in the First Congress of History
ASLI DALDAL
An important aspect of Kemalism was its engagement of some politicians as historians. In fact, it was not peculiar to Turkey. In societies where “the old was dying, but the new could not be born” the State had the obligation to give a new cultural identity to its citizens to “build the new regime, to assure the loyalty and cooperation of the citizens and to justify its legitimacy”. In other words the cultural history had to be rewritten. This was mainly the task of the “engagé” type of historians; in other words, the “apparatchiks” of the post 1923 RPP bureaucracy.
This study aims at comparing and contrasting the historical approaches of Afet İnan and Fuat Köprülü within the framework of the debates in the First Congress of History. As the loyal disciple of Atatürk’s basic ideological premises, Afet İnan is a good example of an “apparatchik” whose thesis of history is mainly based on subjective evaluations of historical data. On the other hand, as a faithful follower of the scientific approach to historiography, Fuat Köprülü represents the intellectual whose respect for academic ethics overrides his nationalistic biases.
In the First Turkish Congress of History convened in 1932 with the aim of discussing and developing the “National Thesis of History”, Afet İnan gives a conference on the “true origins of the Turks” and “the aboriginal people of Central Asia”. Briefly, İnan concludes that the real fatherland of the Turks is Central Asia, and the Brachicephalic civilization that constitutes the origins of today’s modern Europe is created by the autoctonic people of Central Asia who were of Turcic descent. Fuat Köprülü who has been opposing this type of ideological history writing since his famous debate with Yusuf Ziya can only show a “weak-willed” opposition in the Congress, giving the adverse political context of the era. Nevertheless Köprülü goes on to criticize İnan’s speech on four basic points: The impossibility of jumping to such conclusions by the available historical documents; the mistaken attitude of trying to adopt the language of Western imperialism; the necessity of avoiding biased and predetermined judgements; and the insufficiency of secondary sources as the sole sources of reference. In the afternoon session, following the delicately angry remarks of İnan and Hasan Cemil Çamlıbel against himself, Köprülü appeases further his criticims and apologize for having misexpressed himself.
The Kemalist Turkish Thesis of History has never been totally accepted. The inadequacy of the historical data is finally admitted and the decision is taken to better analyse the historical evidences before putting forward novel historical hypothesis. This paper tried to clarify the type of “politician-historian” identity that played the major role in shaping the Turkish Thesis of History. In the persons of Afet İnan and Fuat Köprülü, we saw how the “local” preferences of ideologically motivated history writer clashed with the “universalist” penchants of scientific thinker.
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Why do we need development economics?
ESTER BİTON RUBEN
Development economics, both as a sub-branch of economics and as a university course in economics departments, seems to have lost its importance. The purpose of this paper is to explain why it is still of vital importance. It is known that the problem of underdevelopment covers the majority of existing countries. The solutions offered to this problem by the international institutions and developed countries are generally insufficient. Therefore, the re-birth of development economics seems to be of crucial importance. In this realm, the reasons of the birth of development economics, and the factors contributed to its decline are explained. The ways and means for its re-birth are discussed.
