[A-List] Turkey through the eyes of a Blogorrhoea patient - II

[Sabri Oncu <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Last time I was talking about the Copenhagen Criteria for
accession to the EU and the heroic efforts of the Turkish
Parliament to pass the "adjustment" laws to meet them.

For those of you who don't know, the Copenhagen Criteria are that
the candidate country has _achieved_:

 1) stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of
law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities;

 2) the existence of a functioning market economy as well as the
capacity to cope with competitive pressure and market forces
within the Union;

 3) the ability to take on the obligations of membership
including adherence to the aims of political, economic and
monetary union.

Further it is required that the candidate has _created_ the
conditions for its integration through the adjustment of its
administrative structures, so that European Community legislation
transposed into national legislations implemented effectively
through appropriate administrative and judicial structures.

The laws passed by the parliament were "adjustments" to meet the
first criterion.

Apparently, history repeats itself, albeit each time differently:

The first EU, that is, western, accession "adjustment" we had had
to go through was the first Tanzimat (reorganization) program.
The first Tanzimat, which was defined in a document in 1839, now
called the first Tanzimat Decree, had taken place from 1839 to
1876, only to be terminated by a tyrant by the name of Sultan
Abdulhamit II, who always reminds me of our beloved Dubya. Since
then we keep "adjusting" ourselves to the "west" periodically,
apparently never sufficiently, and I wonder why? Nonetheless, I
am getting sick and tired of all these "adjustments". As if it is
not painful enough to go through these IMF structural
adjustments, now we have to "adjust" ourselves to the EU. Not
that I have anything against further democratization of and
increased respect for human rights and civil liberties in my
country but these never-ending adjustments to the west,
especially the economic ones, are "tiresome", to say the least.

As they say, enough is enough!

For the time being, I leave these adjustment laws, that is, the
third Tanzimat Decree, aside and proceed with another table that
hit all the newspapers from left to right on July 29, 2002. As
this table, presumably from a report prepared by the Ministry of
Finance, shows, yours truly is a bankrupt individual:

                             Debt($)        Per Capita
           Population  Internal Foreign   Income($) Debt($)
  Year     (millions)     (billions)
 _______  ____________ _________________  _________________

  1985        50.3         12.1    25.6    1,330     928
  1986        51.4         13.9    32.2    1,462     896
  1987        52.5         16.9    40.3    1,636   1,089
  1988        53.7         15.7    40.7    1,684   1,050
  1989        54.8         18.1    41.7    1,959   1,091
  1990        56.2         19.5    49.0    2,682   1,218
  1991        57.3         19.2    50.4    2,621   1,214
  1992        58.4         22.7    55.5    2,708   1,339
  1993        59.4         24.7    67.3    3,004   1,548
  1994        60.5         20.6    65.6    2,184   1,424
  1995        61.6         22.8    73.2    2,759   1,558
  1996        62.6         29.2    79.6    2,928   1,738
  1997        62.4         30.6    84.9    3,079   1,849
  1998        63.4         37.1    97.2    3,255   2,111
  1999        64.3         42.4   103.1    2,879   2,265
  2000        67.3         54.2   119.6    2,986   2,530
  2001        68.0         83.3   115.1    2,219   2,918
  2002/6      68.1*        85.0^  118.0^   2,367** 2,984*
 __________________________________________________________
  *  Estimate for the first half of 2002
  ^  Actual as of the end of May 2002
  ** Forecast for the end of 2002
 __________________________________________________________

Note that the last IMF Structural Adjustment Program in Turkey
started in 2000. I wish the data were available for the period
1980-1985 as well so that we would see what neoliberalization
does to a semi-peripheral country better, at least, partially.

While we are speaking of Tanzimats, the neoliberalization of
Turkey started in 1980 with another Tanzimat Decree, the
so-called January 24 Decisions, but this time they were economic
and their implementation were guaranteed with the fascist
military take over of September 12, 2002. Many died during the
rule of this fascist junta but, of course, this is of no
significance, at least, to the likes of Milton Fried-man or Brad
DeLong or Larry Summers. As the above table demonstrates, the
neoliberalization program in Turkey has been extremely
successful, so why should they care?

In case there are those who wonder, I believe the above explains
to some extent why I am not particularly fond of these
never-ending Tanzimats, whether they are adjustments for the
"non-progressive imperialist" US, that is, globalization, or the
"progressive imperialist" EU.

And now let me stop here to continue later.

Best,
Sabri