Neoliberal Turkey and its Discontents

Economic Policy and the Environment under Erdogan

Fikret Adaman, Bengi Akbulut, Murat Arsel, Fikret Adaman, Bengi Akbulut, Murat Arsel

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781784538729
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786722096
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

The 'neoliberal' economic policy of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP Party, which has delivered extraordinary growth in Turkish GDP over the last decade, has been one of the foundations of the party's popular appeal. Here, a group of experts on Turkish political economy show how these policies have also had a detrimental impact on the environment, sustainability and the long-term health of the Turkish economy. Taking the two main sectors of growth during the past decade-energy and construction-as its primary focus, the book engages broadly with the political economy of inequality and sustainability in contemporary Turkey. Ultimately, the authors argue that 'environmental conflicts' in Turkey are not merely about the environment but intersect with contemporary politics of religion, ethnicity, gender, and class within the context of top-down, modernising economic development. Neoliberal Turkey and its Discontents marks an important contribution to debates around the economic growth of Turkey and the future of the AKP's long-term economic plan.

CHAPTER 1

THE STATE OF PROPERTY: FROM THE EMPIRE TO THE NEOLIBERAL REPUBLIC

Z. Umut Türem

Introduction

Recently an interesting piece of statistics was compiled and reported by the Anatolian News Agency (Anadolu Ajansı), a semi-official Turkish media outlet. Accordingly, in the five years leading up to the end of 2014, the size of immoveable property registered in the name of the Turkish State Treasury had increased by 20 per cent. The area/size of the immoveables in Turkey that are registered at the State Treasury had increased to almost 230 billion square metres. Moreover, according to the story, nearly half of Istanbul's land, 43.5 per cent to be more precise, is owned by the Treasury, either in the form of land/parcels of land, or in the form of buildings and the property that houses such buildings.¹

That the state owns almost half of Istanbul, or a substantial part of Turkey's overall land, is certainly interesting but not striking, especially considering that this figure includes forests and mountains, uncultivable and uninhabitable land. Similarly, the land/property regime that was inherited from the Ottoman Empire rendered the Turkish Treasury a major owner of land, which again, makes the above figures not so surprising. What is striking, however, is the increase in ownership by the Treasury and that this increase came about in the last five years, during which the Turkish state appeared to be moving in the direction of full-scale neoliberalisation and privatisation.

Easy conclusions cannot be reached by these statistics, and I will touch upon the complexity of the question later, but here, I wish to use this increase in the size and amount of state property as a means to enter a broader discussion on the neoliberalisation of the ways the Turkish state relates to its land. This chapter is about the transformation of the modality the central Turkish state manages its (public) land. It constructs a sociological/historical framework to make sense of the ‘state of property’ in the neoliberal Turkey of today.

Among scholars who study urban transformations in Turkey, there appears to be a consensus that Turkey's state policy has shifted from a previous normal towards neoliberalism. Kuyucu and Ünsal write that ‘since 2001, there has been a radical shift in the governance of urban land and housing markets in Turkey from a populist to a neoliberal mode’.² Kayasü and Yetişkul³ offer a similar reading, with a slightly different periodisation: based on the former phase of the neoliberalism of the 1980s, that is a ‘roll back neoliberalism’, following Peck and Tickell,⁴ ‘the new government of the 2000s also followed to implement various forms of neoliberal governance in the face of the EU Accession Process’. This second phase, which would be the ‘roll out neoliberalism’, has not been successful, and indeed has been quite frail in many respects according to these authors. Lovering and Türkmen label the Turkish experience in the post-2000s as ‘bulldozer neo-liberalism’ and point to the heavy-handed role of the state in the construction of property markets.⁵

Agreeing with the consensus that there has been a neoliberal shift in how the state governs its land, this paper nevertheless employs a slightly wider historical lens to understand the ways in which neoliberalism articulates with the broad macro historical structures and trends in Turkey. This broadening of focus is needed because the Turkish state possesses large chunks of land inherited from its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire. Legally speaking, most land was owned by the central state in the Ottoman Empire and private property was the exception until relatively late in the Empire's lifespan. Despite the legal recognition of private property in the last phases of the Ottoman Empire, and later in the Turkish Republic, which inherited part of the administrative structure of the Empire, a certain modality of managing public lands continued until the neoliberal 1990s/2000s. In other words, the historico-institutional legacy of the Ottoman Empire conditioned the property regime in Turkey.

Until recently, the vacant public lands the Turkish state inherited from its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire, seemed to constitute a resource for popular redistribution: the land on the fringes of the valuable urban centres, Istanbul in particular, was appropriated by migrants from the countryside. The Turkish state turned a blind eye to such appropriation, even eased it through several mechanisms. This has acted on the one hand as a redistribution mechanism, benefiting those whose livelihoods were no longer sustained in the countryside due to macro-level trends such as the mechanisation in agriculture and the shift towards an industrial economic development model. On the other hand, easing the appropriation of public lands served to sustain the Turkish state's viability, even legitimacy,⁶ particularly among the large urban masses whose poverty and dislocation could have posed a potential danger for the state. Distributing land in this manner not only provided a means to integrate internal migrants to the city, but also provided them with a valuable resource, urban land, thereby redistributing part of the national (and historical) wealth to them. This mode of relating to the land, and the use of it as a patrimonial resource, presents a line of continuity between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish state.⁷

More recently, however, we are witnessing a state that jealously guards its (urban) land against ‘intruders’. Not only are newcomers not welcome anymore, but the earlier migrants who managed to settle under the last phase of the old regime of (informal and formal) land distribution are being kicked out by various methods; by practices and ambiguities of urban transformation. It appears that state-owned lands are no longer up for grabs by the relatively less affluent. ‘What we are witnessing’, writes Kuyucu, ‘is a major reorientation of public policy from tacit acceptance and encouragement of informal settlements as the dominant mechanism of low income housing provision to a policy of “clearing” such settlements’.⁸

In the pages that follow, I analyse this shift in how the Turkish state relates to its land. To be more concrete, I contrast the period that begins with multi-party democracy (1950) in Turkey and lasts until the early 1980s – which can roughly be called the developmentalist era, or the populist period regarding the property regime in land – with the neoliberal 2000s. In my analysis, I focus on whether or to what extent the deeply ingrained institutional, legal and political practices from the Ottoman times persist in these periods.

This chapter is an initial step towards thinking about the bearing of historical, institutional and political legacies on current state practices in Turkey. As such, situating practices of the Turkish state regarding land and property along a line of continuity with (late) Ottoman practices will make it possible to analyse the deep-seated changes that neoliberalism has been achieving in the Turkish context. While a shift from populism to neoliberalism is significant enough, this article probes whether there is an even broader transformation of statehood at work by looking at the connections between property and the state in Turkey.

In a nutshell, I start with the assumption that the neoliberal transition in the property regime in Turkey is not a wholesale, monolithic transformation, but involves moments of continuity and change. Within this broad framework, I make three related arguments: first, in the central state of Turkey, we see the continuation of a trend observed in the late Ottoman state as a way of garnering legitimacy: distributing land, among other resources. In 2016, public lands are similarly being mobilised as a resource for ensuring economic benefits, and by extension, generating legitimacy.

Second, despite this continuity, the distribution of land is increasingly mediated by the market and market mechanisms during the neoliberal period, in contrast to the post-World War II practices of the Turkish state. Moreover, market mediation is accompanied by the massive commodification of land as well. Third and finally, this neoliberal shift and the commodification and market mediation of land becomes possible, again in a seemingly contradictory manner, in the context of the increased material capabilities of the Turkish state. The laissez faire approach of the developmentalist period was partly conditioned by the relatively weak capacities of the Turkish state to enforce its gaze and control over its land. When the cadastral operations of the state were completed in the post-1990 period, the capacity of the Turkish state to ‘see like a state’⁹ was greatly enhanced. Similarly, the post-2000s saw a major concentration of power in the executive branch of government, leading to a record number of laws and regulations concerning urban renewal and construction. Such capacities and concentrations have facilitated the constitution of the market as a mechanism that allocates public resources, but this constitution and mediation through the market does not mean the absence of ‘distribution’.

State and Property in the Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey

‘[F]ew concepts’ write Gray and Gray ‘are quite so fragile, elusive and so often misused as the idea of property. Frequently’, they continue,

the lay person (and even the lawyer) falls into the trap of supposing the term ‘property’ to connote the thing which is the object of ‘ownership’. But the beginning of the truth about property is the realisation that property is not a thing but rather a relationship which one has with a thing.¹⁰ (original emphases)

Realising the relational nature of property is important, yet it does little to further our understanding, for as İnce suggests, ‘[w]hile most people agree that property relations form the backbone of any social formation […] there is considerable disagreement over how to define, interpret, and regulate them’ (original emphasis).¹¹

In the liberal understanding, which has constituted a globally hegemonic imaginary from the mid-nineteenth century onwards – with the exception, perhaps, of the interwar period – private property is essentially considered an individual's exclusive ownership and agenda-setting power over a ‘thing’, be it land, a household item, or at worst, other human beings in the form of slaves. The crucial point is that the individual is imagined as a fully formed sovereign entity with the ability to own a thing that stands outside of his or her own self.¹²

Needless to say, such a legalistic understanding of property is extremely narrow and in fact frequently works as an ideological mask that conceals the true nature and workings of property in society. As Cotterrell suggests, the designation of property as the legal relation between a person who owns and the thing he or she owns, and a strict separation between the two (the owner and the owned) is a ‘truly remarkable ideological feat’.¹³ ‘The property form’, Cotterrell continues, ‘depends as a commonsense idea on our being able to conceptualise a person owning a thing’, and by making sure that ‘the attributes of power are seen as separate from the owner and attached to the assets which are owned’.¹⁴ The property as a legal form, in other words, serves not only to erase social relations from property, but also exclude power from social relations.

Certainly nowhere, including the liberal West, has a complete merging/overlap of a legal understanding of property and social power been successfully achieved. It is impossible to hide the social power relations behind property in all its forms. From very early on, private property was the object of sociological and political critique as well. Marx was an early and influential critic. Under ‘the misleadingly simple slogan “the abolition of private property”’, Marx's objective was disentangling and ‘transcending a social relation, “bourgeois property”, which serves as the crucial nexus between the state […] and the economy’, and showing the system of domination that has been abstracted from what is essentially a social relation.¹⁵

Perspectives like these offer pathways for understanding property as a relational and social institution. While they suggest taking the ‘legal fiction’ of property seriously, they also suggest viewing such legal fictions in a critical light and analysing how actual property regimes co-exist with and in fact constitute the legal fiction. Similarly, these works suggest analysing legal fictions of property as discursive/ideological mechanisms that help constitute, stabilise and mask regimes of exploitation.

The land system and its management in the Ottoman Empire in the pre-modern era was based on the central state's ownership. ‘All arable land belonged to the state as it had the right of absolute ownership (rakabe) over all land and the cultivators were tenants of the state. Thus, when public land changed hands, it was called “transfer”, not “sale”’.¹⁶ Certainly, as Aytekin emphasises, this was the ‘legal fiction’ that the system was based on, and the actual regime and politics of property in the Ottoman Empire were much more complex. The social relations of property were much richer and there were many actors – tax farmers, malikane (relatively large estate) owners, to name just two – between the central state and its subjects.

Still, in a major move, the Empire's legal fiction shifted towards recognising private property on ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Neoliberal Developmentalism in Turkey: Continuity, Rupture, Consolidation
• 1. The State of Property: From the Empire to the Neoliberal Republic
• 2. Two Crises, Two Trajectories: The Impact of the 2001 and 2008 Economic Crises on Urban Governance in Turkey
• 3. The Politics of Agricultural Production in Turkey
• 4. The ‘Politics of Serving’ and Neoliberal Developmentalism: The Megaprojects of the AKP as tools of Hegemony
• 5. Turkey’s Hydropower Renaissance: Nature, Neoliberalism and Development in the Cracks of Infrastructure
• 6. Environmental Concerns in Turkey: A Comparative Perspective
• 7. The Radioactive Inertia: Deciphering Turkey’s Anti-Nuclear Movement
• 8. ‘A Few Environmentalists’? Interrogating the ‘Political’ in Gezi Park
• 9. Alternative Food Initiatives in Turkey
• 10. Commons Against the Tide: The Project of Democratic Economy
• Conclusion: Neoliberal Modernisation Cast in Concrete
• Epilogue: Post-truth and the Politics of Autocratic Neoliberalisation
• List of Contributors