Why the Kemalists hate capitalism

Do you think that Turkey would be better off if it achieves “economic independence”? Would we Turks be wealthier if, for example, we drive all foreign companies out and “nationalize” the whole economy?

I don’t know how you would answer these questions, but some circles in Turkey certainly answer them very positively. These are often the Marxist-Leninists, and other shades and grades of the radical left, who believe that global capitalism is a monster that plunders the nations it breaks into. The solution they suggest is to drive out the “imperialists,” and then create a completely national economy totally dominated by the state. Only then, they think, will we have a wonderful country such as, say, North Korea.

The North Korean dream

Since I am really not the greatest fan of North Korea, or any other communist dictatorship of the past century, I am not inspired by this “anti-imperialist” vision of the Turkish radical left. But this group doesn’t keep me awake at night, for it is really a marginal force in Turkish politics. However, there are other forces in the country that have a similar vision and are not marginal at all.

This recently became exposed with the controversial “Sledgehammer” scheme, which was, apparently, a military coup plan devised by a team of hotheaded generals in 2002. The media has been discussing the plan very heatedly, focusing mostly on its extravagant elements, such as the bombing of a few Istanbul mosques in order to stir up instability.

So far, the generals under the spotlight have denied these criminal elements in the scheme. But, as far as I am aware, they have not denied the economic ideas in the plan, which are most interesting.

These ideas are articulated in a specific chapter of the long “Sledgehammer” document under the title “Economic Policies.” The generals start with a general analysis of what went wrong in the Turkish economy: Atatürk established a brilliant “economic independence” in the mid-’20s, and Turkey arguably was able to have a great leap forward thanks to its “national character.” Then the post-Kemalist dark age began, the generals argue, with the coming of democracy. Center-right governments opened up the economy to “the imperialists,” constantly “selling” the homeland to these “plunderers.”

What really happened after 1945 (i.e., after full Kemalist dictatorship), according to the generals, was this:

“Our country has been politically, culturally and economically besieged, and Western countries have been able to realize the Treaty of Sevres (to tear Turkey into pieces), which they could not realize in Atatürk’s time, via the IMF, World Bank and the European Union.”

So, what is to be done, as Lenin would have asked?

The solution, as the “Sledgehammer” document nicely explains, is to stage a military coup that will return Turkey to the “freshness of 1923.” Some of the measures that will follow include:

- All relations with “non-national” economic institutions such as the IMF will be called off, and all properties within Turkey owned by foreign capital will be confiscated.

- All previous state companies that were privatized by the current government and its predecessors will be restored back to state ownership.

- Financial assets of the “Islamists” and non-Muslim minorities will be inspected, and their transfer to foreign banks will be blocked.

- Retired generals will be appointed to the administrative posts of the Central Bank, all banks and big holdings.

According to Cemil Ertem, who teaches economics at Istanbul University, these ideas “reflect the anti-market programs of the orthodox left” and are “even bolder than those of the Turkish Communist Party.”

But why? Why have our die-hard Kemalist generals, who have considered the Marxist Left a threat for long, turned so lefty?

Reviving corporatism

The generals, of course, are not Marxists. The reason they sound like the latter is their distaste for free-market capitalism. And the reason that they have this distaste is that they realize something important: Free markets erode the dictatorial powers of the state, and open the way for a free society.

Kemalism has always been an anti-capitalist ideology for this very reason. The economic model it accepted in the early ’30s was corporatism, which defined the society as a giant organism orchestrated by the all-powerful state. Kemalist ideologue Recep Peker, the secretary-general of Atatürk’s party, adopted this doctrine from the Italian National Fascist Party, who leader, Benito Mussolini, had put the idea in a nice nutshell: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

This was how Turkey was structured in the ’30s. In subsequent decades, we saw three important eras of economic liberalization: First under the Democrat Party (1950-60), then under Turgut Özal (1983-93) and under the AKP since 2002. The Kemalists, as you can guess, have despised all these actors. They even launched a military coup against the first one, and killed its leader, Adnan Menderes.

The only frustration they have now is that they can’t do the same thing with the AKP, and bring back to the “freshness of 1923.”