Hotels and Highways is a story of experts’ encounters between the United States and Turkey and of the concomitant production of modernization theory in the 1950s. The critique of modernization theory has been taken on faith in academia, so much so that it is simply viewed as an abstract fallacy that, on the ground, worked only as a top-down tool of American global governance during the Cold War. Begüm Adalet’s fascinating work clears the aura around the theory by putting flesh on the bones of modernization’s theorizers and practitioners, while also debunking the idea of modernization as an American export one-sidedly imposed on other countries. In regards to American-Turkish relations, modernization theory was constructed by an intense dialogue, albeit an unequal one, between the experts of the two countries. Far from being a eureka moment, though, the formative phase of the model was in fact full of hesitations, U-turns, uncertainties, disagreements, and mutual criticisms. As a result, Turkey emerged as a laboratory both for defining the theory and for testing it, together with all its paradoxes. Was she not, after all, the most modern non-modern country in the Middle East?
The book consists of five main chapters, each of which sheds light on a specific encounter among different experts. The first two chapters deal with the production and implementation of modernization theory in Turkey by focusing on two influential social scientists, Dankwart A. Rustow and Daniel Lerner, respectively. Rustow, a political scientist of Princeton and Columbia universities, did research on the political élite and party politics in Turkey in the 1950s and 1960s, when he was known as one of the leading theoreticians of the modernization theory. In his writings, as well as those of his colleagues, Turkey emerged as a viable model for all “emerging nations” to the west of the Iron Curtain. This scientific endeavor was circumscribed by the Cold War in every respect, a fact made most visible in the institutional network, from the Rockefeller Foundation to government-funded departments of near eastern studies, and from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This first chapter, however, goes beyond simply revealing the political dark side of these area studies to focus on how the experience in Turkey transformed Rustow’s ideas on modernization. By reading his unpublished papers, Adalet shows how, thanks to his Turkish colleagues’ critical views as well as his own fieldwork, Rustow developed a “disillusionment with the science of comparison” (p. 49) and came to recognize the shortcomings of unilinear development theories. Such encounters ultimately “enabled him to contribute to the pathologies of the theory.” (p. 53)
During World War II, Daniel Lerner, later a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), made a career as an expert on propaganda and the measurement thereof in the US Army’s Psychological Warfare Division. In 1951, when the new concern of the US Department of State was Soviet propaganda in the frontier countries, Lerner participated in the analysis of an extensive Voice of America survey that was conducted in Turkey. This involvement in Turkey would prove to be a crucial step in the production of 1958’s The Passing of Traditional Society, a key work of modernization theory. Through a concentration on Lerner’s work, Chapter 2 explores the popularization of survey methodology in Turkey and its relationship to modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition, it is this chapter that introduces what is arguably the most exciting trope in the book—empathy. For Lerner, the ability to empathize with a stranger and/or strange situation was a fundamental index of modern subjectivity. Surveys, then, were the most preferred research method not only because they gather big data through numerous individuals, but also because they meant to test the interviewee’s ability to “project himself into the interviewer’s place” (p. 67) and thus properly understand and answer the questions. In other words, surveys were useful “in not merely capturing and measuring processes of change but inducing them” (p. 59). Even so, as Adalet shows through her use of the unpublished survey samples, interviewers as well as interviewees occasionally frustrated the supervisors by questioning and criticizing the very process of the survey.
In the following two chapters, Hotels and Highways moves from the abstract to the concrete, from paths of thought to actual roads. Mirroring the structure of the previous two chapters, we first read into the world of the experts—this time, engineers—and then delve into practice on the ground in the form of highway construction. Chapter 3 brings the Marshall Plan down to earth by focusing on its real agents, American and Turkish engineers, who were the key intermediary figures in a collaboration that was by no means always happy. Representatives of both sides visited the other side’s country multiple times, producing for their respective government institutions extensive reports about the infrastructural facilities they observed. This exchange of knowledge and experience was hardly equally balanced, though: American experts, like Max Thornburg and Harold Hilts, assumed a superior role over Turkish engineers, like Vecdi Diker. The outcome, as Adalet meticulously demonstrates, was that Americans repeatedly charged their Turkish colleagues and workmen with lacking a modern work ethic, while the latter criticized the former for being bossy and imposing. Similar to the survey business, the American aim in kind (machines) and in cash went hand-in-hand with aspirations of building modern subjectivity. Yet again, derailments on the ground disrupted the homogeneous narrative of modernization theory.
Chapter 4 zooms in on the domestic politics of highway construction in Turkey and its socioeconomic consequences. This shift in the focus of her narrative helps Adalet to substantiate her argument that “modernization was not imposed in a uniform or unidirectional fashion” (p. 196) from the American to the Turkish side. Rather, highways served, for the Turkish élite, as real and imagined channels of colonizing and civilizing the countryside in both an economic and a cultural sense. Postwar Turkey left behind the economic policy of industrialization predicated on the construction of a railway network, replacing it with a focus on agricultural development and highway construction. Together with the beginning of democratic elections in 1946 and 1950, this new era witnessed the rise of “a new type of farmer” (pp. 142–144), who in political terms was to be a voter and, in economic terms, a producer for the national and international market. At the same time, the newly founded Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti) inherited the legacy of anti-Kurdish discrimination from the early republican era, reposing it as a question of underdevelopment and framing the highway system as a means of internal colonization. In line with the earlier chapters, this chapter highlights how the contradictions of modernization surfaced through the medium of highways that aimed to create “mobile people,” but also to control their mobility.
The readers of popular magazines of the 1950s, like Hayat (Life), would attest that the İstanbul Hilton was not simply a hotel—it was a performance, a cultural icon, and an attraction point in the city. Accordingly, the last chapter of Hotels and Highways is deservedly dedicated to the construction of the Hilton building in 1955 and, more broadly, to the promotion of modern tourism in Turkey. As a product of American-Turkish partnership, the hotel’s architectural design and construction created both dialogue and contestation. What governors and the media represented as a happy and equal cooperation was, most of the time, “a fraught collaboration” (p. 161). For example, the dialogue between architects Sedad Hakkı Eldem and Gordon Bunshaft was marked by disagreements, while the construction experts on each side criticized one another. Moreover, the opening of the Hilton was understood and presented as a milestone event in “the cultivation of hospitality and empathy” (p. 167) in the non-Communist world. Just as in the case of the survey and highway construction projects, however, Turkey’s place within this larger project was paradoxical: on the one hand, it served as a model thanks to so-called “Turkish hospitality”; on the other hand, it was a place where a specifically modern hospitality had to be cultivated via modern hotels (and highways).
Like all sophisticated works, Hotels and Highways will raise questions and trigger discussions, regarding which I would like to propose three points of departure. First, the main argument of the book—namely, that “modernization was not imposed in a uniform or unidirectional fashion” (p. 196)—needs further elaboration, since the contentions exemplified in each chapter may well point to a non-uniform process but, at the end of the day, they are destined to remain minor disruptions in a nevertheless unidirectional imposition. When we look at the results rather than the processes, how much do such hesitations and disagreements really matter? Second, for each main theme of the book, Adalet brings to the table moments of oppression by the Turkish state during the same time period; however, notwithstanding the political value of this, she still fails to connect these moments to the main text in a manner that goes beyond mere evocation and conjunction (e.g., Hilton and the pogroms of September 6–7, 1955 plus the long-standing discriminatory politics against non-Muslims; highways and the forced migration of Kurds; experts and Adnan Menderes’ purges of leftist scholars). Considering the unquestioned appeal of bringing such events to the attention of critical scholarship, making a mere passing mention of them has, in my view, almost a contrary effect, especially given the highly esteemed intentions of the author. Finally, Adalet is rightfully skeptical of certain representations of Turkish people by both American experts and Turkish politicians; witness, for instance, the reportedly loose time conception of the Turkish engineers and workers (Chapter 3) or Turkish peasants’ purported overexcitement about the new roads (Chapter 4). Even so, she abstains from assessing the ultimate relevance of such representations; instead, it is implied that such “narrative” (p. 122) and “official imaginary” (p. 118) are untrue inventions. But what if they were not? How can we make sense of such character attributions? I suspect that the anthropological literature on hospitality, empathy, and conceptions of time will have a lot to say on this subject. To conclude, I believe that the rare combination of detailed archival research and multilayered political theory gives Adalet’s Hotels and Highways great potential to open up productive discussions among scholars.
