| Growth and Changes Speed Scale Complexity Paul Stirling Turkey: Multiple Changes Turkey became a nation state in 1923. From then on, it grew prodigiously. In round figures, by 1986, the population had multiplied by 4, from about 12.5 to over 50 million, and Gross National Product by about 20. So the GNP per cap., that is, in theory, the average wealth created annually by each separate citizen, grew five times - 500 per cent - in just over sixty years. True that this internationally established econometric construction is seriously misleading; that it ignores distribution, that it is a sieve of statistical loopholes, and that it in no way measures material welfare, let alone subjective sense of well being. But an increase of five times in the value of things produced on average by every individual, achieved within sixty odd years - one life time, two and a bit generations - is not just surprising, it is fabulous; what other superlatives can I use?(l) Of course, this growth began from a trough. In 1923, eleven years of war had severely disrupted the traditional agricultural and craft production systems of an agrarian society, and almost destroyed its tiny modern industry.Wars and then the exchange of population with Greece had caused what Keyder (Chapter 12) calls a demographic catastrophe. But from 1923 on, the Second World War apart, theTurkish economy grew by almost 7 per cent till l978, and resumed growth at around 5 per cent in 1980. Changes on this scale at this pace over decades are unprecedented in human history, and almost unparalleled even in recent times, except perhaps for Japan, one or two other contemporary nations, and countries with mineral windfalls. Certainly, both nationally and in local detail, they are breathtaking; and extremely complex. They are of |
| course part of world capitalist industrialisation, which, for all the great minds, and billions of words, still defies description, let alone explanation. But even in the context of the 'world economy', they are exceptional; and a set of facts which virtually no one seems adequately to take into account. Such a speed of economic growth imposes speed in numerous other changes. The movement and the uneven accumulation of old and new capital in dozens of different ways and thousands of different hands; uneven increases - and some decreases - in income, some very large; a new national occupational structure; the migration of millions from villages to towns and cities, and abroad; the introduction and invention of new ways of organising people, both in the private sector, economic and otherwise, and in a hugely increased state sector; masses of new legislation; vast new stocks of unevenly distributed 'social knowledge' - information, science and technology, alternative world views, political and religious ideas, familiarity with other societies. And so on and so on. In the first years of this growth, when the economy was still recovering its former levels, Ataturk carried though his renowned and astonishing political reforms. The central provinces of the heterogeneous Islamic Ottoman Empire, legitimated by God, became a sovereign, national, secular Republic, formally legitimated by the Will of the People (Berkes, 1974). The pragmatic, now 'sacred', boundaries of this newly enacted people nation enclosed a population, following exchanges and departures, almost wholly Islamic - the majority Sunni of the Hanefi rite. Over three-quarters spoke a form of Turkish as their mother tongue; the rest were conveniently decreed to be Turks also.(2) Ten per cent were literate, and about 80 per cent were villagers. The basic State services, and the formal basis of orderly social relations - law and the judiciary, education, the constitutional status of Islam, the script, even clothes, names, and the calendar - were transformed from the top down; in a European and secular direction, which explicitly rejected the Ottoman and Islamic past. It is one thing to pass laws, and impose conformity on the elites in the main cities. It is quite another to set up the |
| institutions necessary to provide courts, lawyers, police, schools, teachers, medical services, government offices, all with adequately trained and loyal personnel. It is even more difficult to get people all over the country to change their personal habits, talk, thoughts, customs, moralities. The reforms took decades to put into effective practice. The interactions between the demographic and economic growth, the new ideas, and the new laws and institutions are immensely complex. One very general link was economic growth, and especially the migration of the villagers to towns and cities that integrated the new nation, by gradually forcing people to apply the reforms in daily detail. Theme and Contradiction One theme is complexity. Almost all refutations of specific social science 'theories' amount to establishing that the theory or model is too simple. Usually rightly, because none of the models or theories discussed or proposed so far, measure up to the complexity of social processes, still less to the scale and speed of the changes in those processes. Not only the 'ordinary' people, the educated elite, and the politicians, professionals, and business men who make decisions for others, but we the accredited social science experts cannot do other than use models which are too simple.The opposite is often claimed, and is highly plausible. Simplicity is the essence of scientific advance; atoms, viruses, the double helix. A major controversy. The great simplifiers in the social sciences are less precise, and less accepted; the hidden hand, the class struggle, false consciousness, reciprocity, segmentary structures, binary opposites, power and prestige, clientelism. And while simplifying is a necessary condition for working at all, we are not ready enough to recognise that simplifying also - inevitably misrepresents.In practice, all social scientists, even those who deny it, use the idea of a complex set of related processes which enable a society both recognisably to continue its existence and at the same time to change. I cannot see how to conceive of 'process' if not as a set, a tangled web, of interacting causes and effects. When the changes are rapid, the devising of adequate 'models' is prodigiously difficult.The title of this book is a simplification. By setting 'culture' and the ‘economy' side by side, I suggest, |
| fallaciously, two entities between which causes and effects are possible. The same fallacy is implicit in distinguishing between culture and social structure, as I also did in my the first invitation to the Conference. I was restating the one time anthropological orthodoxy - 'substantivism' - that purely economic models of social processes grossly underestimate both 'culture', in the anthropological sense, and social structure, in the sense of the whole intricate pattern of social relations. But if culture is defined as everything learned, it cannot strictly be separate from, and opposed to, the economy or to the social structure; it must include them. But the word is a chameleon, overused for convenience. It offers multiple escapes from precision. So let me make my point in more verbose rhetoric. The fund of cosmologies, myths, religious ideas, historical narratives, political models, private moralities, customs, rites, technologies, scientific ideas, which exists in any society at any given point in time must profoundly affect the way that economy functions and the way it changes; and economic growth must in turn have profound and multifarious consequences for that fund. A truism, but one largely ignored in practice; which is why economists and marxists get so many things so very wrong. I used 'culture' because it is fashionable, and convenient. The notion of 'social structure' as a pattern of social relations - once called role relations - is less fashionable, but no less fundamental. It covers all social conduct, from minute by minute social encounters to the national and international distribution of power and resources. But who would allow 'Culture-and/or-Social Structure, and the Economy' as a title for anything? The Two Theories Let me caricature the two main 'economistic' ways of thinking about Turkey's experience. Modernisation theories implicitly assume that, with minor hiccoughs and accidents, all human societies, are being carried by unbeatable market forces towards a blessed, competitive state of advanced capitalist industrial prosperity, in a set of sovereign 'nation' states, each with, sooner or later, liberal elections. All |