Convergence and divergence during the twentieth century and the further flow of ideas

The Republic of Turkey was internationally recognized with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. The same treaty had economic stipulations that set a transitional period as far as trade and monetary policies were concerned.

The Kadro, published between 1932 and 1935 in Ankara, was a short-lived but highly influential journal in this respect. The mentor of the journal was Sevket Sureyya Aydemir, and his economics-minded colleagues included Vedat Nedim Tor, Ismail Husrev Tokin and Burhan Asaf Belge. Sevket Sureyya and Ismail Husrev had been to post-revolutionary Moscow in the early 1920s in order to pursue studies in an exemplary party school, whereas Vedat Nedim and Burhan Asaf had studied in postwar Germany. Vedat Nedim had stayed in Berlin and did his PhD (1922) under the supervision of Werner Sombart. In their view, the Great Depression, by crippling the metropolitan economies and international trade, offered a golden opportunity for countries like Turkey to appropriate Western technology and to institute it within the context of a planned mixed-economy. They envisaged etatisme as an economic policy to this end. They argued that one could overcome by such an active policy the kind of underdevelopment fostered by the unequal exchange-ridden international economic division of labor (Ozveren, 1996). They developed “the most articulate and authentic Turkish school of political economy... that prefigured post-Second World War dependency approaches” (Ozveren, 2002, 141—2).

At about the same time, Turkish government, on the verge of reforming Darulfunun into modern Istanbul University, launched a program to recruit ex-German academics in Turkey. Among the recruits to the would-be Faculty of Economics, the first of its kind in Turkey, were Wilhelm Ropke (1899-1966), Fritz Neumark (1900-91), Gerhard Kessler (1883-1963), Alexander Rustow (1885-1963), Josef Dobretsberger (1903-70), and Alfred Isaac (1888-1956). There was also Umberto Ricci, the Italian (Fιndιkoglu, 1946; Neumark, 2008). In retrospect, Neumark came first in terms of influence. Hence this was also a period when the “dissident” German influence over Turkish economic thought was at its highest level.

As of the 1930s, in line with the Kadro’s expectations, the new regime initiated an ambitious national economic development program along the line of import-substituting industrialization. The realization of such an economic plan required foreign financial and technical assistance that came forth from the Soviet Union as a friendly neighbor. As such, there occurred a convergence of economic interests. This brief but critically important period lasted until the Second World War which disrupted the industrialization effort. Nevertheless, preferences of both the Soviet Union and Turkey in favor of economic planning with the state assuming an active role implied also a convergence among Turkey on the one side and the Turkic republics of the USSR on the other. Policy preferences might have cultivated a stronger structural resemblance if only the Second World War was not succeeded by the Cold War. In any case, the period of 1878-1945 witnessed the closest rapprochement and interaction among the Russian and Turkish spheres of influence that could not have left the intermediate Turkic republics unaffected.

The Cold War placed Turkey and the Turkic republics in hostile camps and made any further contact, even via Russian intermediation, impossible. Hence convergence of the 1930s gave way to the protracted divergence that lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall. After the Second World War, Turkey turned to the West. This also reflected itself in the reorientation of economic policy and economic thought. The preference for a mixed economic system was practical given the achievements of the previous economic planning phase. The heyday of Keynesianism until the 1970s by way of the neoclassical synthesis had its repercussions in Turkey. After the war, students and young academics were sent to the UK and the USA. They came back with a Keynesian formation. Sabri Ulgener from Istanbul University and Sadun Aren from Ankara University went to Harvard and Cambridge respectively (Sayar, 1998; Aren, 2006). They played a key role in the dissemination of Keynesian ideas among Turkish academia. Gulten Kazgan of Istanbul University was a third name important not only because she went for research to the USA but also because she became the first female academic economist, who trained generations of students until recently (Kazgan, 2009).

Visits by economists such as Gunnar Myrdal, Nicholas Kaldor, and Jan Tinbergen during the 1950s and 1960s prepared the political establishment to receive these ideas well. In this context, the 1960s∕early 1970s in Turkey witnessed a synthesis of Keynesian, neoclassical, and pro- developmental economic ideas and policies. During this period, an American-inspired university, the Middle East Technical University (1956) came into the academic scene and brought fresh air to economics education, along with the voluntarily nationalized Robert Academy that became Bogaziςi University (1971). Even so, the total number of universities had not yet exceeded ten.

The picture was made more complex with the outbreak of the world economic crisis of the 1970s.

The worldwide economic crisis of the 1970s coincided with the domestic crisis of import­substituting industrialization strategy in Turkey, which triggered a political crisis in turn. The subsequent shift to an export-oriented growth strategy coupled with a trade liberalization regime renewed popular interest in the prospects and priorities of economics as a profession. The initiation with Bilkent University (1984) of a wave of foundation-supported private universities gave a new turn to the Americanization of economics education. In general, on the one side, increasing adherence to International Monetary Fund and World Bank policy recommendations helped streamline economics education after the Anglo-American model promoting neoclassical economic analysis.

On the other side, dissatisfaction with the social consequences of economic policies cultivated an interest in academic dissidence. As Marxism itself fell into disrepute with the decline and fall of the Soviet Empire, heterodox leaning economists increased in number and felt all the more liberated from the deadweight of orthodoxy. Consequently, among Turkish academics, names like Karl Polanyi and Joseph Schumpeter gained a new following. The quality of followers outweighed their quantity. In this sense, one can safely infer that during the last three decades both mainstream economic analysis and its more promising heterodox rivals gained strength. This means an enrichment of the spectrum of economics. This has been helped by the progress of graduate level economics education in general. The crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession initiated an interest in Keynes's economics manifest in a number of workshops and conferences leading to publications defying the international orthodoxy.

After the 1990s, the strengthening of ties with the Turkic republics after a long interval arose much enthusiasm. The greater circulation of goods and services along with populations did not bring about a corresponding enrichment of economic thought through interaction and cross­fertilization. On the contrary, economics curriculum and thought in the Turkic republics remain a bizarre combination of discredited Soviet topics and mainstream economics of the worst sort. As global recipes of shock therapy, gradual gradualism, privatization, and development pace the neo-liberal Washington Consensus penetrated into this hitherto protected Russian domain (Papava, 2005), economic thought and policy seem to have fallen prey to these new shortsighted orthodoxies. It seems unlikely that further cultural and intellectual exchanges among Turkey and the Turkic republics will bear any fruits in the realm of economic thought in the foreseeable future.

Poles apart, both parties will remain subject to influx of further foreign economic ideas and practices. Originality will be wanting in the first place. Be that as it may, the quality of mainstream economics and economists may still experience a certain improvement albeit unevenly as the standardization of curricula and professionalism is spread. This is indeed an optimistic forecast given the inflationary rise in the number of institutions of higher learning, most of which amount to little more than dubious backyard operations. In Turkey alone, there exist now some one hundred universities with programs in economics. It is more realistic to anticipate that Turkey will be further integrated as a peripheral end to European circuits, while the rest will wait for yet another wind of change.