Thinking about Turkey
This short post is about Turkey. We have been here for just over a week (although it has been so intense that it feels much longer), and I am starting to reach some preliminary conclusions about the place.
Turkey is a fascinating country, and will be an economic powerhouse over the next few decades. Some background that I didn’t know before we got here:
- Greater Istanbul has about 15 million residents. It is the 4th-largest city in the world, and the largest city in Europe. Its population has grown tenfold (!) in the last 30 years, with Turks migrating in from all over the country.
- Turkey has about 75 million residents (plus a few million more living in Germany and elsewhere), and per-capita GDP of just under $10,000. This means that Turkey has roughly the 15th biggest economy in the world.
- Two thirds of the Turkish population is under the age of 34. As a group, Turkish people are young, well educated, hard working, and ambitious.
- Foreign direct investment in Turkey has increased more than tenfold (to $22 billion) in the last ten years. There is a huge amount of infrastructure and manufacturing capacity just coming on stream
Barring the unforeseen, this basic fact pattern suggests that Turkey’s economy should grow rapidly for an extended period. If the EU grants Turkey membership (which it should), that growth will happen faster and lead to greater heights.
The story of Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s secular god, is also interesting. The breadth of change that Ataturk personally drove to modernize Turkey and to create a nation state in the 1920s and 1930s is staggering. For example: he required people to have surnames for the first time, he changed the alphabet from Arabic script to Latin (basically inventing written Turkish in the process), he forced a strict separation of church and state, he mandated primary education for girls and boys up to 8th grade, he developed the modern industrial infrastructure. The list of his accomplishments is amazing, and could only have been done by someone with his “father of the nation” credibility, earned on the battlefield.
The most interesting thing to me is the mechanisms that Ataturk put in place to make sure that “Kemalism” would replace Islam permanently as Turkey’s organizing set of beliefs. Most important, he charged the Turkish military with the solemn responsibility of keeping fundamentalist Islam out of power, and with staying true to the secular, Western-oriented, “Kemalist” principles. In the 70 years since Ataturk died, the military has taken this responsibility seriously, and has acted on it on multiple occasions.
Turkey has its share of challenges and its slightly repressive edge to be sure. It has not resolved its Kurdish separatist problem, and because of that still has a spotty human-rights record. The threat of fundamentalism is real, and creates an ongoing tension between religious citizens and the military. All of the recent growth has stretched Istanbul’s inrastructure to the breaking point. Turkey is in a rough neighborhood: it is bordered by Syria, Iran, Iraq and Armenia (plus 3 other countries of greater or lesser stability). Turkey and Armenia have had a closed border and very frosty relations for a long time.
All of this said, Turkey seems to really have its act together, and continues to build a strong, free, secular, nation state. Fascinating place.