On the geography of development
in Turkey

by Brian W. Beeley
The Open University

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Introduction

Since the foundation of the Republic in 1923, Turkish national space has altered only by the re-incorporation of Hatay in 1939. But the spatial structure within the state has changed considerably in response to national development priorities, external influences, and internal geographic realities. This essay outlines some principal trends in the spatial pattern of development.

The Republic inherited a residual - mostly "Turkish" - territory, replacing its previous central location within the Ottoman Empire. Its new boundaries reflected the extent to which the Ankara government, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, had been able to hold territory in the face of British and French ambitions following their victory in the first world war. The oil-rich area of northern Mesopotamia passed from Ottoman to British control, while Britain and France shared most of the rest of the Fertile Crescent, newly constituted politically as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. The remaining Ottoman lands in Europe, except for eastern Thrace, were also lost.

Substantial Turkish populations left outside the new political boundaries moved into the newly identified Republican space, especially from Greece, with which a massive exchange of populations was arranged. The Armenian communities of eastern Anatolia were largely expelled or massacred. In all the movements of peoples associated with the appearance of the Republic, an individual's identity was defined by religion. In some cases, Turkish-speaking Christians from Anatolia changed places with Greek-speaking Muslims from territories transferred to Greece. A diverse range of minority populations remained within the Turkish Republic, but the only two to retain numerical significance - the Kurds and the Alevis, being Muslim - were not part of the population transfers. The result of transfers was thus to make the national space more Muslim (up to 98 per cent) and, except notably in south-eastern areas, more "Turkish" than before. The population changes simplified the question of identity facing the new Republic's citizenry, at least until new challenges emerged in later years with growing Kurdish assertiveness.

The rejection of foreign intrusion - seen mainly in terms of the "capitulations" often made under duress by the Empire for more than a century - was another component of the new Republican Turkish identity. Such capitulations had left Turkey subject to an informal colonialism under which Western powers had succeeded in penetrating the Anatolian hinterland through key coastal gateways such as Istanbul and Izmir. By the early years of the twentieth century Turkey had a dual economy with an intrusive capitulations-based commercial activity along with a weaker indigenous Turkish sector. The ending of direct foreign manipulation of activity within the Republic's national space was linked to the removal of the minority Christian populations which had participated prominently in Turkey’s dependent relationship with the West. Members of minority communities had occasionally been seen as agents of outside economic intrusion and the removal of many of them - along with the dismantling of the unequal capitulatory system - left Republican Turks with a vigorous determination to avoid further foreign interference. The legacy of suspicion of outside interference has persisted towards foreign investment and development initiatives during most of this century, fading appreciably only under the more liberal economic order prevailing since 1980.

Although groups of people could be rearranged to a certain extent to suit new political patterns following the demise of the Ottoman Empire, physical resources - land, water, and minerals - could not be altered. Thus, the territorial rectangle delineated in 1923 found itself rich in resource potential with the emphasis often on the potential, given the rudimentary levels of infrastructure and basic development over much of the country’s central and eastern regions. Compared with many nearby states, Turkey is well endowed with resources, apart from hydrocarbons. Climatically, those resources range from the influences of the Mediterranean in the south and west to the wetter environments of the northern coasts and eastern uplands. Its major rivers have well-known names: Euphrates, Tigris, Sakarya, Menderes, and Kizilirmak. Its Pontic and Taurus mountain ranges define the northern and southern rims of the plateau which dominates central Anatolia from the highland east, including Mount Ararat itself, down to the gentler lands along Turkey's Aegean coast. Turkey retains its European foothold to the north-east in Thrace, while in the south-east it keeps a small share of the Fertile Crescent within the national space.

The over-arching principle of Turkey's Republican administration after 1923 was integration, both in political and in developmental terms. Just as people were to be integrated as a nation on the basis of a reaffirmed Turkish identity, so too was the approach to the spatial economic organisation of the country to be centred on Ankara within the national space and, as far as possible, to the exclusion of outside interferences affecting the country’s geography. Indeed, the move of the national capital in 1923 from coastal European Istanbul to central Anatolian Ankara was itself a statement about the drive to integrate the country from a central Turkish location. That relocation contrasted sharply with the influence of entrenched interests in the old imperial capital of Istanbul which had found itself on the periphery of the new Republic's space. Other Anatolian towns, such as Eskisehir and Konya, similarly found their status enhanced as sub-national centres. It was now their role to stimulate integration and change in their hinterlands, linked by an expanded system of rail and road communication which was designed to develop a network within the Anatolian space where earlier emphasis had been only to reach a given area from the coastal sites or simply to cross it, as with such enterprises as the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway.

Despite defeat and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire following the first world war and the rejection of all capitulatory and other forms of interference from outside, the outstanding element of Ankara’s view of priorities for Turkey was the strengthening of its commitment to the European model. Turkish commitment to Europe originated at least as far back as the Tanzimat reforms of the 1830s, but the model accepted by Atatürk’s new administration was indeed far-reaching. Whole facets of the Turkish economy and society were modified, affecting every part of society from the legal and education systems to matters of dress. Change even touched on whether the Turkish weekly day-off should be the European-Christian Sunday or the Islamic Friday. For the geographic landscape of the country in the broadest sense, there were also profound implications. First, the Republic's commitment to nationalism underlined the rejection of outside involvement on levels reached in the past. Second, the move to secularism put the equality of individual citizens in pride of place as the basis for development initiatives. Although manifestly a goal rather than a reality, the notion of equal access to resources and participation in the national system led to the acceptance of equality in spatial and class terms, such that every development planning statement since 1923 has assumed that the removal of inequality - notably between parts of the national territory - is desirable. A third implication of the commitment to European forms was the new Republic’s reaffirmation of the highly centralised administrative system, in 1923 already attributed substantially to French and other European practice.

But the Ankara government continued to be a one-party authoritarian system until 1950 and even after retained a high degree of direct control at local levels. This type of dirigisme enabled the country to commit itself to the central direction of social and economic change from 1923 onwards. Since the 1930s - and especially since 1961 - Turkey has experienced a number of plans which have affected patterns of development within the national space. The important point is that under both planned and unplanned regimes, the Turkish national space has reflected varying changes and trends.

In geographic terms the decade immediately following 1923 saw the fundamental change in the Republic's spatial structure. Where Istanbul - on the edge of the national rectangle - had formerly provided the undisputed political, economic, and social core of the country, Ankara was now consciously chosen as the new national capital precisely because it was more central. The western coastal fringes of Anatolia and Thrace - including Istanbul - would, it was hoped, be peripheral to Ankara rather than to the economic arrangements dominated by outside powers. Thus, the new spatial arrangement centring on Ankara was a direct assertion of the Republic’s independence, with newly developing regional urban centres in Anatolia forming a hierarchy across the breadth of the national territory replacing the overwhelming traditional emphasis on the north-west and the west.

Not surprisingly, the newly contrived spatial pattern did not achieve all that might have been hoped of it, at least in the shorter and medium terms. During the 1920s Atatürk's government of autocratic reform found that private sector investment resources did not materialise to the extent that had been hoped for. Outside confidence in the country declined with the departure of minorities previously prominent in manufacturing and commerce. The prospects of a speedy return on investment were further diminished by the clearly apparent need for major infrastructural development, notably in the centre and east of the country. All this, coupled with what seemed to be extreme levels of protection from Ankara and continuing doubt in the Turkish establishment about allowing foreign economic penetration, saw disappointing inputs during the 1920s. The effects of the Depression only added to the growing readiness of Turks to accept the notion that economic development would inevitably depend primarily on the public sector. This attitude reached its peak in the étatiste years of the 1930s when the Turkish state itself took on the role of managing change by means of targeted industrial plans and massive investment in State Economic Enterprises. It was hoped that this would be a pragmatic response to the shortage of private investment in that the state - whose protective attitudes helped to deter such inputs - would assume for itself a pro-active role in development.

A central emphasis on investment for planned change meshed neatly with the highly centralised system of Turkish administration in which regions of the country (provinces, sub-provinces, special project areas, etc.) looked first to Ankara and only later to their own neighbours. Inevitably, central thinking was about sectors rather than about regions and the notion of special attention to selected parts of the national space would have seemed to be inconsistent indeed with the over-riding emphasis on integration within the boundaries of the Republic. In other words, anything which looked like "regional" planning might seem at least divisive and even potentially subversive. This deep-rooted attitude to the spatial allocation of resources for change left the authorities less well-placed than their central directive role might have indicated in compensating for disadvantages in relatively backward areas.

In the 1920s and 1930s the Turkish state had to face the dilemma that outside investment was not attracted to the country. But, even if such resources had arrived in significant quantities during that period, they would have been aimed at the already more developed and largely western parts of the Republic where the return on inputs would have seemed the most promising. At its worst, the logic of concentration of development under capitalism might have reinforced the very imbalances which concerned the authorities in Ankara, the imbalances between the western regions and the rest of the country. To this extent the decision in the 1930s to commit Turkey to state-directed change gave the country an opportunity to face up to the implications - in input-output terms - of sustained efforts to remove the differences between regions. But the main constraint for Ankara was that investment capital was unavailable at levels which could promise any wide-spread impact. Like private investors, the government in Ankara looked to targeted inputs at selected points across the national space to make optimum use of resources. Investment in manufacturing or mining or certain types of farming was thus usually of limited spatial impact, whatever the degree of success at sites in question.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Turkish national space showed a development mozaic more complex than that suggested by simplistic east-west contrasts. Very obviously not all the west was - or is - more highly developed than the centre and east. Indeed, a more significant division may have been that between town and country. Seen from Ankara - as from Istanbul before 1923 - the national space was made up mostly of villages and rural areas scattered across Anatolia. The cities and towns were relatively more developed. A Western visitor to Turkey would have felt the difference between town and village to be greater than that between Europe and Ankara or another major urban centre. Most of Turkey's citizens were rural people, according to census definitions, until as late as the 1980s. Until then the model for change was an urban - and European - one. Maps of Turkey showing, "development" by province or group of provinces consistently blur the country’s urban-rural split and reinforce the perception of west-east contrasts. Such images are of practical importance when they influence the choice of locations for investment.

During the 1940s change in the Turkish national landscape was affected by external events and trends. Neutral during almost all the hostilities of world war two, Ankara's concern during those years was to limit the impact of conflict on the country, practically surrounded by belligerents and occupied territories. Emerging intact in 1945, Turkey's first endeavour was to attempt again the type of industrial planning of the 1930s with the prospect of outside development funding. Such aid, from government to government, had the advantage that Ankara could expect to have a principal say in what should be done with it. But the post-war aid, largely for the United States, brought with it the notion that private initiative was to be preferred as much as possible over state initiative. After 1950 Turkey moved to a multi-party system of government which further complicated the efforts of those inclined to top-down, directive development inputs in line with nationally focused priorities. Emphasis on "regional development" or on any other form of a priori selective initiative, seemed inconsistent with the democratic system, though elected representatives naturally saw investment priorities from the viewpoint of their particular constituencies.

Growing authoritarianism in the late 1950s was followed in May 1960 by a military take-over. In the next year, the founding of the State Planning Organisation brought in an era of coordinated planning set out in a series of five-year plans and annual programmes. These were comprehensive plans, where earlier ones had had an industrial or other narrow focus. They were plans which stressed the need for a public-private mix and which reiterated the ideals of equality between individuals and between regions. As such, planning in Turkey attracted Western money and expertise, although the low levels of local income from taxation and other sources remained a major limitation. Plans have, however, continued to appear up to the present time and they have remained as sectoral statements about the Turkish economy and its development priorities. "Regional planning" has been given limited attention, except for special one-off initiatives in selected parts of the country. Outstanding among these has been the South East Anatolia Project (GAP) involving power generation and irrigation in some of the Republic’s least developed parts.

In the early years of comprehensive central planning after 1961, gestures were made towards the evident problem of contrasting levels of development between parts of Turkey. One dimension of such concern - the urban-rural divide - led to the creation of a ministry of village affairs in 1964 whose responsibilities would clearly overlap those of agriculture, water, and others. Another dimension - the west-east dichotomy - was recognised to the extent that from 1968 relatively underdeveloped and largely eastern provinces (and, later, sub-provinces in some cases) were given special help in the form of financial and other inducements to investors. In all initiatives involving discrimination between parts of Turkey, control has remained firmly at the national centre. Regional spatial entities were - and remain - defined in terms of the provincial boundaries of the administrative system.

Alongside the inception of co-ordinated national planning, the 1960s saw the growth of an unplanned trend which was to affect the spatial structure of development with Turkey, perhaps more than any other single factor. This was the rise of migration. Movement of Turks was not new, but the scale of migration in the second half of the twentieth century contributed to a major relocation of people and initiatives for change. Internal, rural-urban movement was already noticeable in 1950s, but by 1960 lines of people seeking transit visas formed outside the Bulgarian and other embassies in Ankara where would-be gastarbeiters made their first moves towards getting work in Germany and elsewhere in western Europe.

Within the country most movement was from smaller to larger settlements within the urban system. "Built by night" gecekondu districts appeared on the edges of Ankara, Istanbul, and other large cities. Sometimes extended families or even local community groups moved together. Frequently, close links were retained with the place of origin, at least for some years after the move. Turkish planners were unprepared for the scale of the relocation. Conventional wisdom had been that the evidently high population growth rates would increase numbers in a spread across all the national space. No one had expected to see some of the faster net urban growth rates. Ankara, for example, had been the subject of a 1932 plan envisaging a population of something over 300,000 within three decades. By the 1960s, though, the capital already had some 600,000 and today the figures move beyond three million. In Istanbul, the growth from a larger base has been even more challenging to the organisation of Turkish urban space. No one had anticipated that some less developed provinces and parts of provinces would be showing net losses of population by the 1980s because of emigration. Such changes were exacerbated in some areas by unrest within sections of the Kurdish community and by official reactions to it. The first province to show an overall net loss was, significantly, Tunceli with a substantial Kurdish population, while more generally in the south-east people moved from villages to swell the totals in regional urban centres such as Diyarbakir. One outcome of concerns about the Kurdish identity within Turkey has been the stimulation of movement of many Kurds from the south-east to towns and cities in the centre and west. Part of the growth of Istanbul, for example, is accounted for by immigrants from the country’s south-east.

Tourism is another element in the distribution of Turkey's population, attracting incomers to the mostly coastal areas affected by the building of resorts and support enterprises. Once a small Mediterranean town, Antalya, for example, has grown to a population of several hundred thousand. Many smaller towns and one-time villages on the southern and Aegean coasts have likewise responded to the developments in tourism, construction, and agriculture. The effects on the pattern of population by such exceptional developments as tourism have added to, and partly redirected, the main trends of migration from smaller and poorer locations towards places which were not only larger or much larger but which also seemed to hold out the prospect of some improvement in standards of living. The failure of many people to find formal employment in the city does not seem to have significantly discouraged others. The growth of the informal urban economy has had a visible effect on the evolving economic geography of urban Turkey, though its very nature - fluid, fragmented, and largely unmeasured - makes its impact hard to assess precisely.

In the late 1980s another significant novelty was the net loss of population in some central urban areas of Istanbul. This may be a function of the special spatial constraint facing Turkey's leading metropolis, but it may also show the beginnings of the trend to urban-centre loss of resident population which has been evident in large Western urban agglomerations. Certainly the once sharp distinction which could be made between town and country is blurring rapidly. This is because many urban dwellers are relocated villagers and because of the effectiveness of the economic and social integration of the whole national space which, since the 1920s, has been a dominant theme in attitudes towards change in general and to planning in particular. Inter-urban journeys which a generation ago took days to accomplish can now be completed in hours. The electrification of most of Turkey's 36,000 villages and the wide-spread distribution of piped water have raised rural amenity levels towards those of the town. Most effective of all is the expanding educational provision which has brought basic schooling within the reach of Turkey's people, both girls and boys. And this secular education system has taught them that urban Turkey - reflecting a national commitment to European forms and priorities - is the preferred model.

The demographic map of Turkey is evidently changing quantitatively and spatially in ways not envisaged even half a century ago. The country has reported some dramatic economic growth rates, but these seem to be overtaken by hyper-inflation, unemployment, underemployment, and continuing unevenness in access to wealth. Substantial developments in infrastructure have provided a basis for the physical integration which was a principal target of the Republic's founders. Expansion in education and the media have further helped to give most Turks a sense of involvement at the national level, instead of at the local or community level only.

Against such trends, the structure of Turkey's national space at present can be compared with that of 1923. The urban-rural divide at the inception of the Republic has changed most completely. People have moved from village to town, while urban life-styles and priorities have likewise spread in the reverse direction. Turkey now has a majority of urban people and some rural areas are experiencing net population loss. The country's centre of gravity is more substantially urban than in pre-Republican times when Istanbul, Izmir and other western cities looked eastwards to a rural hinterland. Ankara and other cities within that pre-1923 hinterland - including Adana, Antalya, Eskisehir, Konya, and others - now constitute an urban hierarchy within the Turkish space and incorporate the western cities with their traditionally Aegean orientation.

The impact on the national space of state planning since the early years of the Republic remains to be assessed. How different would Turkey be today if there had been no plans nor any commitment to a central initiative for change? Critics of the command approach point, for example, to the State Economic Enterprises which are now seen in many cases as costly burdens on the state and as targets for privatisation. Others point to the social support function of these enterprises and to the fact that they stimulated some change in a desired direction where there might otherwise have been no change at all. Would private capital have appeared in the absence of assertively protectionist state policies? There seems little evidence that it would have done to any significant degree. And would infrastructural amenities have spread as widely as they have done if there had been no state commitment to more equitable provisions across the country? That seems unlikely since private money prefers to invest in something which promises returns sooner rather than later. And private money is less likely to build roads and other facilities which produce no immediate yield - except perhaps to help local people move out to search for better living conditions elsewhere.

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Conclusion

In summary, six phases of change in Turkey's attitudes to its national space can be identified. The first of these phases, from 1923 to 1930, saw the newly defined Republic's territory as undivided space emphasising national integration centred on major urban areas within a hierarchy focused on the new capital, Ankara. The Depression era from 1930 to 1939 saw Turkey move to its étatiste phase of greatest reliance on central direction with two industrial plans and development initiatives concentrating on points of change. From 1939 to 1950, Turkey remained outside the world war and then accepted military and economic links with the West through NATO and USAID. There was stress on private sector initiative, but there were limited resources for new spatial development on any significant scale. During the fourth phase from 1950 to 1960, with a multi-party system in place, emphasis fell on project-based change, an approach with spatially concentrated "point" impact rather than one likely to affect substantial areas or to reduce inter-regional unevenness. From 1960 to 1980, the Republic's fifth phase was that of co-ordinated sectoral planning with at least a recognition of spatial implications of change - if not in planning - for regions as such. In this phase, stress on import-substitution did, however, have an appreciable impact on the country’s economic and social landscape.

Economic liberalisation in the sixth phase in the 1980s and 1990s has seen the first substantial break with the notion of the "responsible" state since the 1920s. Outside investment has certainly been attracted into the country and Koç, Sabanci and other Turkish company names have become well-known. But key indicators remain discouraging, including a heavy level of state debt requiring interest support. In these same years, some of the entrenched principles of Atatürk's state reforms have come to be questioned. One of these is the commitment to the European model and another is the acceptance of secularism as a basis of national ideology.

Turkey's European dimension, formalised by its admission to Associate Membership of the European Community in 1963, is now questioned because of the evident reluctance of the European Union to up-grade Turkey’s link to full membership. And for the first time since 1923, links with the Middle East and with the wider Islamic world have reappeared as realistic areas of interest for Turks, partly because of Turkish business successes in some Arab countries. Turkic Central Asia, moreover, has re-emerged as a potential dimension of foreign involvement since 1991. What remains constant is that the spatial structure and mosaic of economic and social development within the Turkish rectangle is affected by external as well as by internal challenges and by increasing connections between the two. Internally, Turkish geographic patterns reflect the wider international moves towards globalisation and changing roles for states. Ultimately, the country is likely to be even less - instead of more - "independent" than it was before.