i. Planning the globe over

In Europe, state interventions in the economy, begun during the Second World War, were continued into the peace in many countries. During the first post-war decade, planning was instituted nationally, with varying degrees of intensity, in Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, the UK and France, the latter case later becoming a model for many developing nations, including Turkey.Footnote ⁴ Nationalisation of strategic industries, the creation of the welfare state and theories of social citizenship redefined the state's role within the now patently ‘national’ economy. Added to this were the newly socialised countries of Eastern Europe which had, by 1950, all begun to implement national five-year plans on the Soviet model.

Planning was by no means a monopoly of national economies. The resumption of international trade, far from being left to market forces, was in many areas carried out deliberately either by national governments or supranational organisations. Both the Marshall Plan and Comecon were experiments in international planning designed to oversee the co-ordination and recovery of Western and Eastern European economies. By the late 1950s, regional initiatives such as the Association for Southeast Asia (ASA), the forerunner to the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Latin American Free Trade Association (LAFTA) and the European Economic Community (EEC) had been established to promote the economic and social development of their respective regions.

Planning had also become popular in the decolonising world, fuelled by the neo-Keynesian consensus among the founding theoreticians and practitioners of development theory.Footnote ⁵ By 1960 many countries in Asia were beginning to turn to import-substitution industrialisation (ISI) as the preferred planning strategy for developing post-colonial economies. These initiatives were all fuelled by, and themselves helped to foster, the ascendency of development and planning within the discipline of economics itself.Footnote ⁶ National, regional and international centres and institutes for the research of development were popping up around the world, both developing expertise in development planning and training a future generation of planners.Footnote ⁷

Planning in developing countries, far from being opposed by the West, drew support from Western states and financial sectors seeking accountability and the rational management of foreign investment and aid. Though initially a US-driven initiative seeking to both further US geo-strategic interests and create stable foreign markets for its manufactured goods, the post-war push towards development investment had, with US prodding, spread to the German miracle as well. By 1956 a large national campaign had established Entwicklungshilfe in the German national consciousness.Footnote ⁸ By 1960 the idea of national planning had the full support of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and US AID; in fact, ‘planned development’ had become the paradigm for underdeveloped countries.Footnote ⁹ In 1961 the United Nations issued A Handbook of Public Administration, geared towards developing nations, which detailed the benefits to be gained from planning in the pursuit of economic growth.Footnote ¹⁰ The reasoning behind such Western initiatives was clear: planning was to provide the national framework for the distribution of Western investment and aid, insuring that the flow of money was going towards a known and verifiable purpose.

At the birth of the SPO in Turkey, the culture of planning had achieved a global breadth. National planning had become the accepted framework for economic growth, a framework not at odds with Western financial interests, but rather conceived of with the latter's full blessing.

ii. A planless decade

Turkey, governed by the liberal Democrat Party (DP) throughout the 1950s, at first seemed to buck the global planning trend. Following the war, Turkey abandoned its avowed policy of neutrality and aligned itself with the West; an alliance which reintroduced foreign pressure for the liberalisation of the Turkish economy. Stipulations began with the Marshall Plan, with aid monies dependent upon the transformation of the Turkish economy along lines dictated by US regional policy: namely, to turn Turkey into a ‘cash country’ that would use US credits to purchase equipment directly from the US.Footnote ¹¹ In concrete terms, this equated to a forced abandonment of protectionism and industrialisation in favour of the commercialisation of agriculture.

These changes, while not sitting well with Turkey's bureaucratic-military elite, were welcomed by the newly formed populist DP, itself the product of external pressure to transition Turkey towards an open democratic regime. The DP's populist-liberal agenda and anti-Soviet rhetoric made it a vocal and unequivocal opponent of planning. Adnan Menderes, the DP prime minister throughout the 1950s, stated without irony that ‘our plan is not to have a plan’.Footnote ¹² The government's aversion to planning went so far as to oppose the annual economic programmes requested by the Americans as a condition of Marshall Aid, putting the DP at odds even with the liberal-corporatist agenda of the US.Footnote ¹³

The DP-led liberalisation reformulated some of the basic inter-war tenets of the Turkish Republic. Liberalisation severed the link between industrial development and the Turkish national project, a link formed during the Étatist period and one that had anchored Turkish nationalism to state-directed economic modernisation.Footnote ¹⁴ Liberalism also came into open conflict with the positivist understandings of a rationally planned and engineered society that had also been underscored by Étatisme.Footnote ¹⁵

Yet, with the precipitous drop in agricultural prices in 1954, Turkey's experiment in liberalism, in what would become a recurrent trend for export-led development in peripheral economies, began to spiral. The now all-too-familiar cycle of huge current account imbalances forcing inflationary policies, high-interest short-term loans and towering deficits finally culminated in a 1958 IMF-imposed devaluation and stabilisation programme with concomitant restrictions on Turkey's internal spending and external accounts.Footnote ¹⁶ In the face of economic catastrophe, the DP was forced to put in place import restrictions but remained steadfast to its economic principles. As late as 1959, the preamble to the DP-prepared national budget claimed that ‘We are against planning because we favour a rational economy.’Footnote ¹⁷

As the economic crisis deepened, critics of the DP resurrected the Étatist tradition, attacking the very ‘irrationality’ of the government's economic policies. Citing the short-sighted borrowing, politically motivated subsidies and inflationary policies of the DP era, these critics contended that the nation was off its course: that is, not developing according to a plan.Footnote ¹⁸ An early and leading current of this criticism centred on the journal ForumFootnote ¹⁹ and was soon picked up by the Republican Peoples Party (RPP) opposition, whose leader İnönü ‘insist[ed] on the need for an orderly plan and programme’.Footnote ²⁰ These arguments also made their way into many of the back-room debates of officers in the Turkish Armed Forces: debates that, in May 1960, would culminate in the first of Turkey's three military coups in a span of twenty years.

iii. The cultural institution of the State Planning Organisation

On 27 May 1960 the Turkish Armed Forces took control of the government and arrested the leaders of the DP. The new military government, the National Unity Committee (NUC), accused the DP of ‘straying from the intended path of the Turkish project’ and ‘becoming hostile to Atatürk's reforms’.Footnote ²¹ This statement, part of the first report issued by the Constitutional Commission led by Professor Onar, reasserted an understanding of the nation as a rational and directed progression, presumed to be lacking from the populist reign of the DP. These military men perceived Turkey as a long-term project that needed to be planned. Thus the officers carrying out the coup simultaneously laid out a plan for Turkey's future, claimed that this plan was a constitutional feature of the Turkish Republic, and justified itself on the grounds that the DP had placed this plan into jeopardy.

The centrepiece of the military government's reforms was the SPO, instituted in 1960 and charged with the comprehensive development of the nation according to a plan. Cemal Gürsel, chief of staff and leader of the NUC, did not mince words on this issue, ‘From now on it will not be possible for anyone in this country to just “do things as they please”. Every public initiative will be evaluated by the planning agency . . . which will decide whether to accept or reject its implementation.’Footnote ²² To ensure the centrality of planning within the Second Turkish Republic, the NUC enshrined the principle of a planned economy in the new Constitution. Article 129 stated that, ‘Economic, social, and cultural, development is based on a plan. Development is carried out according to this plan.’Footnote ²³ A fundamental recalibration in official understanding of the Turkish nation, a planned society now became a constituent feature of the Turkish Republic, linking the idea of state planning once again to the national project. From the perspective of the military commanders, the institution of state planning was part of a larger effort to both restore and further the modernisation reforms initiated by the interwar Kemalist regime. State planning was established to ensure the rational convergence of Turkish society and Western societies, to enable Turkey, as Atatürk often stated, to lift itself to the level of contemporary civilisation.Footnote ²⁴

The NUC's emphasis on planning found an enthusiastic partner in the international organisations of the Western economic system, which welcomed the new direction of the Turkish state. The collective arms of foreign financial capital had been pressuring the DP government to adopt some form of planning, but to little avail. As early as 1953, a World Bank mission, headed by its vice-president, had visited Turkey and urged the Prime Minister, Menderes, to reorient Turkish economic policy away from agriculture towards the internal production of consumer goods.Footnote ²⁵ By 1958, Turkey's foreign creditors had enrolled the help of US authorities and the IMF who promptly pressured the DP government to take concrete steps towards economic planning. The OEEC soon followed suit, criticising the DP for ‘handicapping the Turkish economy by refusing to implement an overall development programme’.Footnote ²⁶

All this changed when the military assumed political power following the 27 May coup. As Jan Koopman, the assistant to Dutch planning adviser Jan Timbergen, stated plainly a week into the takeover, ‘The task of setting up a planning institution had been made much simpler by the military coup since elected governments had often proven reluctant to make changes that could, in the future, bind them.’Footnote ²⁷ With the establishment of a military government sympathetic to planning, the international economic agencies jumped head over heels to offer their assistance. US AID, which already had 200 foreign personnel in Ankara provided technical advice and offered to take the Turkish planners on a ‘global tour of planning agencies’ with stops in Holland, France and Puerto Rico.Footnote ²⁸ The Ford Foundation consulted with Turkey's economy minister, Professor Şefik İnan, and offered to have the Turkish plan designed by a Harvard University group which was putting together a similar project for Pakistan.Footnote ²⁹ When the planners in the SPO completed an initial draft of the first five-year plan, they organised an International Colloquium, bringing together representatives from US AID, the OECD, the IMF, the World Bank and UNFAO to review and endorse the work of the SPO.Footnote ³⁰ Taken together, the mutual overtures by the various international agencies and the Turkish planners ensured that Turkish planning would be commensurate with the Western economic system. Or, as Necat Erder, head of the Social Planning Department of the SPO put it, ‘The establishment of the State Planning Organisation was the historical moment when Turkish capitalism became re-integrated within the global capitalist order.’Footnote ³¹

i. National planning in a globalising world

Turkey first applied for membership to the EEC in the summer of 1959, a year before the institution of the SPO. Three years later, Turkey had drafted, negotiated and committed to two plans: one, the first five-year development plan for the national economy, and the second, the Association or Ankara Agreement, a blueprint for integration into the EEC. Discussing the same subject matter at roughly the same time, it is shocking that neither set of deliberations took account of the other in any more than a cursory manner.

The reason for this was temporal. The two plans referred, in effect, to two distinct periods in Turkey's future. The First Five-Year Plan was designed within a fifteen-year developmental timeframe, while the Association Agreement between Turkey and the EEC envisioned full membership some two decades later. Furthermore, the first stage of the Association Agreement required no concessions on Turkey's part, thus placing no immediate stipulations on Turkish economic policy.Footnote ³⁷ In fact, it was widely believed that once Turkish industry became globally competitive, integration with Europe would provide privileged access to European markets.Footnote ³⁸

The root of the SPO's opposition to the Common Market was an ideological difference of political economy, and for this reason, unavoidable in the long term. The EEC was driven, at least economically, on the principle of liberalisation. The creation of a common market required the elimination of barriers to the free movement of goods, capital and people within its borders. This meant that countries or regions would gradually concentrate on industries in which they held a comparative advantage. The SPO, on the other hand, was founded upon the development of the national economy through state investment and intervention. Its guiding principle was a variant of import-substitution industrialisation (ISI): that is, locally producing goods that Turkey had previously purchased abroad. This implied, at least in theory, a high tariff rate for industrial goods in order to protect infant national industries. Within a few years, the paradoxical paths of state-directed industrialisation and economic liberalisation, unresolved by the two plans, would clash, with much higher stakes, around the SPO's relations with the EEC.Footnote ³⁹

ii. Bureaucratic warfare and notions of nationhood

The SPO's involvement in Turkish-EEC integration began in 1967 when the Foreign Minister, Sabri Çağlayangil, declared Turkey's intention of moving to the transitional phase of the Association Agreement. This second phase, to be entered into upon the signing of an Additional Protocol, would, for the first time, require concessions from Turkey, mainly in the form of tariff reductions on industrial imports.

By this date the planners had become enmeshed in a broad range of foreign and domestic issues. In addition to directing state industrial investment, the SPO concerned itself with state subsidies and taxation, foreign trade, investment and loans, infrastructure, interest rates, the money supply and the labour force. Directing the industrialisation of the country through import substitution also embroiled the SPO in Turkey's regulated and highly politicised import regime. All available foreign exchange resources were to be spent and distributed among the different sectors of the economy in accordance with the government and SPO's development programmes and goals.Footnote ⁴⁰ It was hardly surprising that when the path of European integration stipulated a severe reduction in Turkish tariffs, the SPO would take an avid interest in Turkey's relations with the EEC.

The SPO noted as much in a series of reports on the Common Market a few months after the Foreign Minister's announcement. It stated in unambiguous terms that, ‘Turkey, in order to become a full member of the EEC, first needs to industrialise. Only through industrialisation can the advantages of membership be maximised and its disadvantages minimised.’Footnote ⁴¹ In the same report, the SPO made clear just what kind of industrialisation it meant: it argued not for the establishment of assembly industry, where Turkey would presumably have a comparative local advantage within a liberalised Common Market, but rather heavy or ‘main’ industry, ‘metallurgy, machines, oil, and chemicals’; an industrialisation model that would require high tariffs in these sectors well into the future.

These first reports brought the SPO into direct confrontation with the sacred cow of the Turkish state establishment, the diplomatic corps, which had, since Turkey's initial application to the EEC in 1959, seen Turkish membership as the final milestone of Atatürk's project to raise Turkey to the standard of contemporary civilisation.Footnote ⁴² For the next decade the Common Market became an incendiary issue between the planners and the diplomats within the Turkish state bureaucracy. As one commentator put it, ‘The Additional Protocol was not so much negotiated by Turkey and the EEC as it was between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and the SPO. The real battle took place within these corridors.’Footnote ⁴³ A diplomat returning from his tour of duty as part of Turkey's permanent delegation to the EEC remarked,

Analysis of the SPO's opposition to the EEC and its main domestic proponent, the MFA, reveals a significant discrepancy between the self-perception of the planners as technocratic experts and the ideological language they invoked against the EEC. The planners thought of themselves, both by vocation and orientation, as technocrats. They saw themselves as the final products of Atatürk's project, a new generation of civil servants that had been trained by the ‘standards of contemporary civilisation’ insofar as these standards meant western scientific and technical expertise. As one of their inner cadre pointed out, ‘The SPO was essentially made up of technicians and engineers. We approached the EEC with tables and charts, spoke of it through numbers.’Footnote ⁴⁵ It was the diplomats, the SPO argued, who, ‘in the grip of cheap and sentimental politics’, were, ‘preventing the industrialization, growth, and development of the country’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The idea of a new technical discourse found currency with other members of the Turkish elite as well. As Oral Sander, a prominent social science professor, scathingly noted in his 1978 critique of the Foreign Ministry, ‘In an age when diplomacy is conducted by technocrats too busy to tuck their shirts in, our diplomats look more as if they belonged at the 1815 Conference of Vienna.’Footnote ⁴⁷

Tellingly, however, the SPO's main response to the EEC was not the statistical kind of economics conducted by planning and economics ministries in Europe, but one based upon explicitly ideological arguments that shared much in common with the emerging field of dependency theory.Footnote ⁴⁸ A major strain of SPO opposition to Turkish-EEC integration was anchored in notions of economic independence and national sovereignty. While it acknowledged that European social democracy allowed for a certain amount of planning as part of the ‘mixed economy’, it shrewdly perceived that ‘liberalism, as the fundamental engine of European integration, would soon do away with national manoeuvrability’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The planners felt that for a relatively under-developed country, this harmonisation of policy would be devastating.

A second reservation raised by the planners regarded the related issue of unequal development. The establishment of the SPO had prompted a debate on the planning model best suited for an under-developed or developing nation. This debate helped popularise the newly emergent field of dependency theory and resurrected arguments made by the Kadro movement during Turkey's initial foray into planning during the 1930s.Footnote ⁵⁰ The ideologues of Étatisme had perceived the world as divided between industrialised and non-industrialised nations. Inequality in industrialisation, the Kadro movement believed, was the source of continued global exploitation and colonialism.Footnote ⁵¹ Modern Turkey had, through its national war of independence, taken an important first step towards ending this inequality, but only through a ‘second, revolutionary, state-directed industrialisation’ would it achieve parity with, and thus avoid being recolonised by, the industrialised nations of the world.Footnote ⁵² The SPO extended this understanding of unequal global development to Turkish–EEC relations. The EEC ‘six’ were all advanced industrial economies and thus contrasted sharply with Turkey's under-development. Integration into a customs union under these conditions, the SPO argued, would ‘permanently inhibit Turkey's industrialisation’, turning it into a colony of the West.

Instead, the SPO, especially its Islamic wing, suggested further economic integration with the organisation for Regional Cooperation and Development (RCD), founded in 1964 between Iran, Pakistan and Turkey. The SPO claimed that ‘integration with countries sharing a similar level of economic development could go hand in hand with industrialisation’.Footnote ⁵³ This last point is of interest as it undermines a common misconception about the SPO: namely, that the planners desired a closed autarkic economy based on ISI or that they felt economic planning to be wholly described by import substitution policies. As Ali Sait Yüksel, the SPO's Common Market expert, made clear in 1970:

For the planners, the liberal principle of trade through comparative advantage need not necessarily hinder industrialisation.

It is possible to view these reservations through an institutional account of the SPO, either by attributing anti-EEC rhetoric to the early politicisation of the SPO by socialists and Islamists or by seeing the planners's opposition as a self-interested posture to maintain their reach within institutional power-politics.Footnote ⁵⁵ The structure of the SPO's arguments, however, suggests another interpretation.

Turkey's integration into the EEC posed a threat to the SPO, to be sure, but this threat was perceived as one to the entire nation. Among post-colonial theorists of nationalism, the role of planning has been viewed as central to the conceptualisation of the nation state.Footnote ⁵⁶ The economic critique of colonialism as exploitative of the nation has been seen as the foundation from which the independent nation state formed its positive content.Footnote ⁵⁷ The new state represented the only legitimate form of power because it alone allowed for the planned development of the nation. As Partha Chatterjee has argued, ‘The [post-colonial] state was connected to the nation-people through both the procedural forms of representative government and represented the nation-people by directing a programme of economic development on behalf of the nation’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The former linked the legal-political sovereignty of the state with the sovereignty of the people. The latter legitimised the sovereign powers of the state directly with the economic well-being of the people. Since developmentalism was presumably a process done for and affecting the whole of society, it was premised on one consciousness or one will: that of the nation as a whole.

The SPO, in an informational communiqué outlining its purpose and functions, echoed these thoughts:

In July of 1973, the SPO released a Long Term Strategy Report which summarised the basics of its third five-year plan, and was intended for a broad audience both within the bureaucracy and civil society. Its opening message read as follows:

Turkish integration into the EEC, to the extent that it breached the autonomy of the SPO, was thus seen as undermining the economic sovereignty and independence of the Turkish nation. When one of the SPO's Common Market experts likened the diplomats in the FM to Mustafa Reşit PaşaFootnote ⁶¹, and the Additional Protocol to the 1838 Turkish–English Trade Agreement (which, it was pointed out, ‘had effectively dismantled Ottoman industrialisation’), he reproduced this global historical argument.Footnote ⁶² So did the SPO delegates who, at an inter-ministry co-ordination meeting in 1969, ‘threatened to take the pro-EEC men in the FM to Kızılay Meydanı [Ankara's central public square] and hang them all!’ as national traitors.Footnote ⁶³

These arguments were a far cry from the intentions of the both the military officers that had established the SPO and the international agencies that had advised the initial planners. Instead of a Turkish planning agency overseeing the rational and harmonious integration of the Turkish economy within the Western economic order, the SPO perceived this order in a starkly antagonistic light. Integration with the developed states of ‘contemporary civilisation’ would not accelerate Turkish development as an earlier generation of modernisation theorists had claimed, but rather guarantee the nation's continued impoverishment. Picking up on arguments made by the Kadro movement (one of the earliest proponents of dependency theory) as well as the post-war Latin American School led by Raúl Prebisch, the SPO was adamant on maintaining Turkey's distance, through ISI, from the Western economic system.

Through its opposition to the European Common Market, the SPO was influenced by and helped revive an understanding of the Turkish nation as one whose sovereign development was threatened by the imperialistic intentions of the West. This strain of Turkish nationalism, stretching back into the late Ottoman period and the Turkish War of Independence, was resurrected by the increasingly influential leftist, Islamist and ultra-nationalist movements of the Second Republic. These movements were key to vocalising the SPO's concerns outside the narrow corridors of Turkish bureaucracy. It is to the interaction between the SPO and the political movements that we now turn.

iii. Milli olmak (Going national)

As Tekeli and İlkin have pointed out, by the mid 1960s, Turkish industrialisation and development had become the core paradigm of Turkish politics. The legitimacy of every political movement rested on proving how their particular ideology was best suited to achieve these twin goals.Footnote ⁶⁴ Consequently, the SPO, as the state institution charged with Turkish industrialisation and development, became a central nexus of Turkish political culture. Yet, through its confrontation with the Foreign Ministry and its anti-EEC stance, the SPO also changed the terrain of this political culture; it made the question of Turkish industrialisation, previously restricted to domestic politics, central to Turkish understandings of itself within the global world order.

In its opposition to the EEC, the SPO articulated an understanding of Turkey as a developing nation state whose sovereignty depended on the autonomy of its planned national economy. Utilising both its technocratic/scientific image and the centrality of economic planning to the new conception of the Turkish nation, the SPO situated itself in a privileged position above and outside of politics and was thereby able to speak for the nation as a whole.

Yet to ignore the political dimension of the SPO is impossible. The SPO entered politics not so much through its inter-bureaucratic battle with the Foreign Ministry, but, more importantly, by how it came to be signified within Turkish society at large. To the extent that the SPO was referenced as representing Turkey's national interests by other anti-EEC groups within the socio-political structure it operated on both a political and supra-political level. Specifically, the SPO was drawn into the political arena by various anti-EEC groups precisely because of its position above politics as a constituent element of the Turkish nation.

To understand how this occurred, it is necessary to trace the evolution of anti-EEC groups within Turkey. Opposition to the EEC first required an open discussion about Turkey's Western-oriented foreign policy, a domain of Turkish life that had gone unquestioned in the first two decades of the post-war period. As Duygu Sezer has noted, beginning in the mid 1960s, Turks became more self-reflexive and critical about where their country was headed and under whose steerage. As a new generation of Turks entered the political debate, old unquestioned assumptions over Turkey's Western path came under review.Footnote ⁶⁵ This re-questioning coincided with the negotiations for the Additional Protocol to the Association Agreement, anchoring the often abstract and ideological debates over the future of the Turkish project to the Common Market.

As a result, Turkish integration with the EEC became the concern of a much larger swath of the Turkish population. By the 1970s, particular projects of all shapes and sizes, ranging from the Institute of Weights and Measures to paramilitary right-wing youth groups like the Idealist Hearths Union, began to reformulate their concerns in relation to Turkey's integration into the Common Market. As the centre-left prime minister Bülent Ecevit remarked in 1975, ‘The EEC has caused deep divisions both within our state bureaucracy and in Turkish society at large. It can properly be called a National Problem.’Footnote ⁶⁶

Turkey's relationship with the EEC not only vaulted into the limelight of Turkey's social-imaginary, but also underwent a radical transformation: from the symbol of Turkey's accomplishments and putative future, it became the antagonised object of all that was wrong with the country. As opposition to the Common Market expanded, the SPO became a major reference point for anti-EEC movements across the political spectrum. These groups began to co-opt and extend the planners's understanding of the Turkish nation to a global economic framework. While Demirel's JP remained in steadfast liberal opposition to planning, throughout the 1970s, Islamists, radical nationalists, socialists and the centre-left all clamoured to appropriate the SPO and its privileged supra-political platform to their own particular agendas.

The Turkish left was the first to make widespread use of the SPO's opposition for its own ends. As early as 1963, the statist-socialist weekly Yön attacked supporters of Turkish integration, accusing them of unabashed Westernisation at the expense of Turkey's economic interests. Turkey's path to true Westernisation, it claimed, ‘passed through state-directed industrialisation’. ‘If the Common Market, as many economists have argued, should stall this industrialisation, we will not Westernise but become the West's servant.’Footnote ⁶⁷Yön also began a series of editorials on the EEC's relations with the newly decolonised African countries, drawing parallels between the Common Market's imperial intentions in Turkey and the rest of the developing world.Footnote ⁶⁸

Following a more populist-nationalist strain, Turkey's first socialist party, the Turkish Worker's Party (TWP), recast contemporary Turkey as lying precariously between a past colonialism heroically averted and the threat of a looming imperialism about to come. Mehmet Ali Aybar, the leader of the TWP, called for a ‘second war of independence’ on the economic front: a continuation of Atatürk's revolutionary nation state towards heavy state-directed industrialisation orchestrated by the SPO:

Behice Boran, the leader of the TWP following Aybar, echoed these sentiments in a 1969 attack on the ruling liberal JP government and its growing irritation with the recalcitrant SPO:

Boran's message was clear: by interfering with the autonomy of the SPO, the JP was acting, almost treasonously, against the national interests of Turkey.

The left also used the idea of planning to formulate a new understanding of Turkish democracy, one that sought to rescue planning from the elitist authoritarian legacies of both inter-war Kemalism and the communist Eastern Bloc, but also one that would challenge the ‘bourgeois’ liberal democracies of the developed world. The early ideologues of the SPO had touched upon this very issue, seeking to reconcile planning in under-developed nations to the new democratic world order.Footnote ⁷¹ Commenting on the legal integration between Turkey and the EEC, Hasan Ceyhan, the educational expert for the Turkish Miners Union and author of a lengthy study commissioned by the Confederation of Revolutionary Labour Unions (DİSK) to inform the proletariat on Turkish–EEC relations, argued that paradoxically, in under-developed countries such as Turkey:

Ceyhan claimed that the 1961 constitution, especially Article 129 concerning planning, was founded upon the regulation of Turkey's development, that legal-political sovereignty for the developing nation was based on a plan of what Turkey ought to be, not on the regulation of life in present Turkey.

On the radical right, the weekly Devlet, a semi-official organ of the ultra-nationalist National Action Party (NAP), praised ‘the nationalists in the SPO for defending the true national interests of Turkey’Footnote ⁷³ while the youth branch of the NAP published an anti-EEC informational leaflet arguing that ‘foreign capital investment would turn Turkey into a colony of the Common Market’. It pointed out how many of Turkey's most important decisions, including her economic development and foreign trade regimes currently directed by the SPO, would have to comply with the EEC, ‘eroding our national independence’ and ‘making Brussels, not Ankara, our capital’. It concluded with the following message:

The leader of the Turkey's first Islamic party and arguably the fiercest critique of the Common Market, Necmettin Erbakan, went so far as to bring two separate interpellations against the JP government, one in 1970 and the other five days before the 12 September 1980 military coup. In both instances, Erbakan arraigned the government with dereliction of duty in its dealings with the EEC. Top among the charges Erbakan cited was ‘a failure to heed the recommendations of experts in the State Planning Organisation’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Professional organisations were also quick to appropriate the planners's vision of the nation. The Izmir Industrial Hearth and the Eskişehir Chamber of Industry became outspoken critics of the EEC, the latter contending that, ‘Membership in the Common Market conflicts with Turkey's desire for planned industriali-sation . . . Therefore as industrialists with social awareness, we must use our influence [to prevent such membership].’Footnote ⁷⁶ The Chamber of Mechanical Engineers (a group whose livelihood depended on Turkish industrialisation) appointed a special commission in 1969 to examine Turkey's integration into the EEC. The commission concluded that, ‘Further integration with the Common Market would restrict the competence of the SPO to develop the Turkish economy since the EEC is founded upon a liberal economic order incommensurable with the idea of planning.’Footnote ⁷⁷

By far the largest and most influential of the anti-EEC groups was the left-wing of the Republican Peoples Party (RPP) led by Bülent Ecevit and Besim Üstünel. Üstünel, the vice general secretary of the RPP and head of the Economic Planning Department of the SPO in 1963–4, had been one of the earliest critics of the Common Market. Between 1969 and 1973, writing for the daily Milliyet, he argued that Turkey was totally unprepared to enter and should therefore postpone the second stage of the Association Agreement for twelve years. Whatever the ideological or political reasons were for forging the Association Agreement, Üstünel argued:

By the 1970s, the SPO had become the fulcrum around which opposition to the EEC revolved. It grouped the various anti-EEC camps around a unified demand: to uphold the planned development of the national economy against the perceived intrusion of the Common Market. In turn, the SPO's conceptualisation of the nation was reproduced and amplified well beyond the corridors of Turkish bureaucracy.