vital. But what Pinochet had done in domestic matters was a different matter altogether, and here Ozal was stuck; perhaps he even wanted to be stuck, because he had an excuse to channel state funds in the direction of his friends. Privatization might have been an answer, but in practice there were great problems — not least because the constitutional court kept striking down the proposals on the grounds that they were against the national interest. Public spending took a quarter of the GNP in 1980, a fifth in 1984, slightly more than that in 1987, and there was a constant deficit, 3-5 per cent of GNP, to which the State boards’ deficits might be added (6 per cent). The outcome was chronic inflation. Up to 1985 the lira had fallen steadily, in fact faster in dollar terms than in domestic prices. This was, overall, healthier than the alternative which set in after 1985, when Turkey joined efforts at managed exchange rates. After 1985 domestic prices rose faster than the dollar. More paper emerged from the Turkish printing press, and it could be freely exchanged for dollars, as insurance, at a crawling-peg rate. Time deposits could be held at will and switched, after very large interest rate gains, into dollars, and the upshot for anyone with savings was a 25 per cent tax-free annual dollar profit.
The technicality was that the dollar rose from 14 lire in 1975 to 47 in 1979, 76 in 1980, 163 in 1982, 225 in 1983, 522 in 1985, 1,422 in 1988 and 2,609 in 1990 (by March 2000 it had reached 600,000, and in 2003 1.6 million). The US price index rose from 56.6 per cent of the figure for 1985, reaching 95 per cent in 1981, after which there was stabilization (by 1990, 113). From 1985 to 1990 the Turkish price index rose from 100 to 769. In other words, the Turkish currency was appreciating by roughly 25 per cent every year against the dollar. By then, about half of the Turkish money supply was in dollars (or Marks). If you had access to foreign currency you could, with sufficient agility, make substantial (and tax-free) interest. In this way the banks became lazy. There has never been an inflation quite like the Turkish one. With that level, either the currency takes off into hyper-inflation, as in Latin America, or there has to be some stabilization, usually exceedingly painful and sometimes with blood on the streets. This did not happen. The technicians at the central bank were very competent, knowing how to judge interest rates and bond yields. But beyond that was always the notion that Turkey was too important to be allowed to go: the IMF would always step in (as indeed it did). But this was hardly a healthy business: inflation was a sort of hidden taxation, hitting especially the poor, and it rewarded parasitism or even straightforward criminality. The Left of Bulent Ecevit had failed in dealing with this, and so, in the event, did Ozal, though his failure was much more interesting: eventually, his legacy was to be taken over by an astute Islamic party endorsed by the Americans. House prices in Istanbul at the highest level showed what vast sums of money were available, in a country whose nominal GDP per head was at least in theory of Third World type.
In effect there were two or perhaps even four economies at work in the Ozal era, apart from the criminal (drugs-related) one. Exports did very well indeed with the reduction of corporation tax and tariffs. They accounted for one fifth of GNP in 1989, more than double what they had been ten years before, and considerably more suitable for a country without oil. Export earnings grew at almost 20 per cent annually, from 1980 to 1988, which was all the more remarkable as world trade slowed in the early part of that period. Their character also changed. In 1976, agriculture had accounted for two thirds (just over a billion dollars) but by 1989 18 per cent ($2.1bn). Industrial exports rose from one third ($600 million) to four fifths ($9bn) and manufactures accounted for nearly all of this, as distinct from half-finished items. Textiles accounted for half, followed by chemicals and then steel, of which Turkey had hardly supported any in the 1970s, despite the enormous Karabuk plant. Now, Turkey’s exports were worth $1.5bn, an astonishing feat, given where she had started from. There was also a change of direction. The Middle East took more, in volume, but much less, in proportion; OECD countries, and especially Germany, now took two thirds of the exports. It became quite common for representatives of Turkish businesses to travel the world, probing markets — not a feature seen by the world since the later sixteenth century. Turkey could now, at least on economic grounds, advance her candidacy of the European Common Market which had been tabled as early as 1963; Europe in 1981 had accounted for about a quarter of trade, but by 1995 well over half ($28bn). In fact she weighed more than all other candidate countries put together, and then some. The same had of course occurred elsewhere, especially with Japan, in the fifties, and South Korea and Taiwan in the sixties. Was Turkey now catching up, and why had it taken her so long? The short answer was: other ‘miracles’ had had an American occupation. Turkey had a semi-demi American occupation, and Ozal was its symbol. Overall it had been a great success, but the price was debt — the international one rising from $13.5bn to $40bn, interest on which took 70 per cent of export earnings. By 1997 the World Trade Organization was optimistic about Turkey — noting that exports had grown by 11 per cent per annum as against a general 7 per cent. The Istanbul stock exchange, trading $300m every day, was among the top four of the ‘emerging’ ones; imports at $67bn, and exports at $57bn (including the estimated $10bn-15bn to Russia) were creditable, especially in the light of Turkey’s past. The Bosphorus was three times busier than the Suez Canal.
Americanization was the watchword, and not one greatly liked by the old republican establishment. It stood for a sort of Turkish sixties, and in not dissimilar circumstances — in 1980, 60 per cent of Turks had lived on the land, and there was then a great flight, as happened a generation before in Italy or Spain — and it happened at every level. There was insider dealing in politics, and Ozal’s own family was involved. The Emlak Bank would make loans, its manager taking part of the proceeds, where no other bank would have lent; eleven state banks gave out loans that no private bank could have contemplated. In the cities there was illegal building, some of it of such poor quality that it collapsed in earthquakes that left stoutly built housing blocks unimpaired. Ozal just waved such corruption aside: to him, as to others of his way of thinking, it was less expensive than honest but idiotic state wastage. But the Westernization of Turkey went ahead in other ways. Students went to the West in great numbers — 25,000 to the USA. On the military and scientific level, the co-operation was intense: in Britain and the USA there was a substantial Turkish professional emigration, whereas in continental Europe ‘the Turks’ were, on the whole, of rural origin.
Private business might flourish, but much of the economy was still in the hands of the State. This was the same unhappy business as elsewhere — 2 million workers retiring early and underproducing, in factories varying in output from steel to pickles. Public enterprises undertook about a third of manufacturing. The State owned over half of the usable land, i.e. excluding mountain and forest, and there were a million farms and small plots, many simply squatted. The army owned almost one fifth of Ankara (often distinguished by tree-planting, sign of a military presence), and there was famous clientelism at work, with soft loans. Ozal himself believed in privatization but this was difficult — it even constituted a vicious circle. There was not enough capital in Turkey; it could only come from abroad; but because of inflation, and perhaps also opaque business practices, this would not happen until finances had been stabilized, which could only happen through privatization. Otherwise the budget deficit just went on and on, worsening in 1986 when ANAP spent money for the election (in which its vote fell to one third, although this meant two thirds of the seats). Privatization did not happen — or at any rate only on a small scale (under $3bn in eleven years). Meanwhile, state managers became demoralized; there was not much investment (and the railways especially suffered, though the resulting lengthy journeys could be romantically old-fashioned). The Zonguldak mines (employing 30,000 people) would have cost less had they simply been closed down; meanwhile, foreign investment banks for some time made fortunes out of advice to then naive Turks, and nothing much followed. Ozal’s one real contribution was a build-operate-transfer system for capital projects, by which foreigners could make their profit for some years before transferring the project to the State (as happened with the Bosphorus Bridge).
The Ozal years split the country. The foreign trade element had done enormously well, and continued to do so; and this was far from being just a matter for Istanbul and Izmir, as there were places far to the east, such as Antep, that were lifted off, and the new motorways through Kayseri, the chief town of Cappadocia, to the east and south became arteries of European trade. The perennial question, as to whether Turkey could become a member of the European Union, was debated endlessly at ministry level, but it was in effect being settled by voting with feet, or at any rate wheels. Maslak, where once, during the Crimean War, the French army had trained on the European shore of the Bosphorus, saw one Manhattanish skyscraper rise after another, and the multinational hotels also built. It meant the ruin of parts of the city, an especially scandalous instance being the destruction of the old Park Hotel, next to the former German embassy in Gumussuyu. It had been a Pasha’s house, had been turned into a grand hotel, and in its place half of a gruesome car park went up until it was stopped. The counterpart was that, as the money poured in, so did migrants. The city became, like Mexico City, a megalopolis, and although old Stambul survived, it was squashed in with concrete or clapboard suburbs, each taken over by a region in the east. It was a demonstration of the trickle-down effect, in that the crumbs from the tables of Maslak rolled down into Sutluce, and the parking arrangements of Galata were taken over by a Kurdish mob from Bitlis, near Lake Van.
The later years of Ozal have a shadowy resemblance to the later years of Margaret Thatcher, when the machine ran beyond the monetarist desert and entered upon richer and much more intractable soil. The real parallel
