Henri J. Barkey - The State and the Industrialization Crisis in Turkey

Henri J. Barkey

First published 1990 by Westview Press

Published 2019 by Routledge
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ISBN 13: 978-0-367-29630-8 (hbk)

This book would not have been completed had it not been for the help, encouragement and advice of a great number of friends and colleagues. I would like to express my appreciation to Youssef Cohen, Ahmet . Evin, Frederick Frey, Rajan Menon, Bruce Moon, evket Pamuk and Karen Barkey for the comments, insights and advice; and to Eda Amado for taking the time to do the cover. I would also like to express my gratitude to Milica Zarkovic Bookman and Richard J. Bookman, whose friendship over the years has been truly indispensable.

In addition, my debt to Jak and Tuna Barkey, who have endured this process longer than anyone, is incalculable. As it is to Alvin Z. Rubinstein who pushed me relentlessly.

Finally, I would like to thank Cathy Barkey, without whose extraordinary patience, support and time commitment this book would never have seen the light of day.

Henri J. Barkey

The emergence of the Bureaucratic Authoritarian State in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s has been linked to the failure of import substituting industrialization (ISI). Guillermo O'Donnell and others have argued that the hopes engendered by import substitution were dashed as this method of industrialization ran out of steam causing severe economic and political crises. Balance of payments deficits, inflation combined with the political activation of popular classes strained the political system beyond its capacity. As a result, Argentina, Brazil and Chile, which have had remarkably similar industrialization policies, succumbed to brutal military dictatorships. The new rulers jettisoned the inward-looking economic policies in favor of more orthodox and outward-looking ones. The Bureaucratic Authoritarian State spelled the end of the import substituting regimes.

The case of Turkey has been interpreted in the same light. The politico-economic crisis at the end of the 1970s reminiscent of its Latin American counterparts first gave rise to the transformation of the economic relationships on January 24,1980 and then culminated in the September 12, 1980 military intervention which established a Bureaucratic Authoritarian State. Again industrialization policies were blamed for the failures. Did import substitution deserve such blame?

This book re-evaluates the politics of this much maligned industrialization strategy and examines Turkey's attempts to implement it in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that ISI itself is not responsible for the failure of Turkey's industrialization efforts. It points instead to the state and its inability to successfully implement the development policy. Faced with the emergence of powerful and competing vested interests among those segments of the private sector directly affected by import substitution, the state was deprived of its autonomy. Consequently, it lost its ability to lead, correct for the shortcomings of ISI and ensure that long-term goals are not sacrificed in the pursuit of immediate ones. The Turkish case therefore demonstrates how political-economic cleavages in the private sector contribute to the politicization and paralysis of industrialization policies, reducing the state to the role of a spectator unable to take the necessary decisions. In Turkey, as elsewhere, it is the army's intervention that restored the state its autonomy, enabling it to rise above societal divisions, redirect and execute its economic priorities.

This book contributes to the theoretical literature on the role of the state in industrialization processes, specifying the need for an autonomous state in the implementation of ISI. It questions the role of ISI as a key factor in the rise of the Bureaucratic Authoritarian State, and provides a more complete explanation by introducing state autonomy as a variable to contend with. The new specified model argues that the success of ISI is dependent on the existence of an autonomous state capable of undertaking initiatives to correct ISI's inherent problems. It also elucidates the particulars of the Turkish case by bringing to light new sources of information regarding private sector cleavages and linking these to the loss of state autonomy.

This chapter starts the analysis by placing ISI in the broader context of industrialization. It then discusses the problems inherent to ISI and concentrates on the causes for its exhaustion as elaborated in the literature.

The success of industrialization is influenced by two factors: timing and the political-economic context in which the effort is undertaken. The timing of each successive wave of industrializes played a critical role in determining the nature of the process. As Alexander Gerschenkron and Albert Hirschman show, there were qualitative differences between the first set of industrializing countries and their immediate successors. Differences between the third wave and their predecessors were even more pronounced than those separating the first two. The timing of the undertaking, in turn, influenced the political and economic environment: societies had to contend with different forms of external competition and domestic political and class structures.