POVERTY AND THE NATURE OF EARLY REPUBLICAN ETATISM

In the context of a study on the social-policy environment in the republican period, certain questions pertaining to the legacy of the Ottoman past inevitably emerge. Whether the context is Christian, Judaic, or Muslim, religious references always figure in private charity relations. Private benevolence in Turkey has also often been informed by religious sentiments and practices. Yet, perhaps because of the strength of the attempts at establishment of a secular order, references to Islamic instruments of charity such as zakat (alms tax) or sadaqa (alms giving) have been largely absent in the official discourse. The waqf (philanthropic foundation), on the other hand, appears as a very important element of the institutional legacy of the Ottoman era. Through the republican period, waqf has been frequently mentioned at least as a point of reference if not a model in arguments around the necessity of developing modern forms of philanthropy. In the academic literature, waqf has been presented both as being pernicious to the healthy functioning of the redistributive system and as an impressive system of humane charity.¹²

As an element of the historical background of republican approaches to poverty, the most interesting aspect of this institution is the enmeshing of public and private sources of revenue used for philanthropic purposes that it represents. These purposes are not limited to poverty alleviation; they also extend to that area that they shape in a hybrid form where public assistance becomes difficult to dissociate from private acts of benevolence.

The Ottoman waqf was situated in a context where rulers' generous acts of giving could appear both as welfare and charitable deeds.¹³

In this context, religious references have always been important in welfare provisioning. Yet, already in the 19th century, approaches to poverty and poverty relief incorporated distinctly modern elements in their condemnation of begging and vagrancy. For example, Darüءl-ʿaceze, which was established in Istanbul in 1896 to provide shelter to the needy with the objective of preventing begging, was clearly a modern institution. Yet, although the purposes for which it was designed were comparable to those of similar European establishments, Darüءl-ʿaceze reflected the traditional setting of Ottoman philanthropy as far as the funding mechanisms were concerned because charitable gifts of the emperor appeared to be important in the mobilization of financial resources that also included voluntary contributions from private individuals and associations.¹⁴

One observes certain continuities between the moral and institutional setting of early republican approaches to poverty and this late Ottoman one. In the difficult years of the Great Depression and World War II, beggars never disappeared from the public scene, but they remained as unchanging objects of scorn and contempt, and there were occasional attempts at their confinement in Darüءl-ʿaceze or deportation to the countryside.¹⁵

Such modern attitudes toward beggars were accompanied by the emphasis on voluntary initiatives as the proper way of dealing with poverty.

Yet, the single-party period's most important voluntary associations active in combating poverty could hardly be considered voluntary in the strict sense of the term. The early republican philanthropic associations functioned in an ambiguous area between the realm of public and private, with “providing support to the state in the policy process” as their objective. The Red Crescent (Kızılay) and the Society for the Protection of Children (Himaye-i Etfal Cemiyeti, later Çocuk Esirgeme Kurumu) were both established in response to the needs of military personnel and their families, the first in 1869 and the second in 1921. After the foundation of the republic, they both played some role in social assistance by using a limited amount of public resources through their share of earmarked revenues of the government budget. The Association of Philanthropists (Yardım Sevenler Derneği), an association run basically by women, was established in 1928 on the initiative of a leading politician, who also acted as the president of the Society for the Protection of Children. Although this third association also benefited from certain state favors, there were no public revenues earmarked exclusively for its activities until the 1970s.¹⁶

In fact, all three associations were expected to generate the bulk of their revenues through donations by appealing to the general public's sentiments of “cooperation and solidarity.” However, their funds remained too limited to make a truly meaningful contribution to poverty alleviation, especially through the World War II years of extreme poverty, when they tried to provide some food and clothing at least to schoolchildren. The scenes of indigence, especially the child poverty that newspapers thoroughly documented in the 1930s and 1940s, were almost invariably accompanied by accusations directed at the insensitivity of the rich. In this period when economy and society were dominated by state intervention in all areas, when etatism had made its way even to the constitution as one of the key principles of the regime, it was not the state but well-to-do citizens who were expected to take responsibility in the realm of social assistance.¹⁷

Although it is somewhat paradoxical for an etatist society to exempt the state from the responsibility of welfare provisioning, shifting the social responsibility of assisting the poor to wealthy individuals is not totally in contradiction with the spirit of times when profits and profitmaking activities were regarded with a deep-set suspicion. Power emanating from nonpolitical sources enjoyed little legitimacy on the basis of private property rights but required justification through contribution to socially useful causes.¹⁸

Official discourse on social assistance hardly incorporated the redistributive principle. However, there was one exception in this regard, constituted by measures considered and implemented to assist public sector employees in maintaining a “respectable” standard of living. These measures seem to reflect, first and foremost, an attempt to protect the dignity of the state's servants and prevent their misery to reflect upon the state itself. Hence, among the subsidized commodities distributed to public employees were not only items of basic necessity but also woolen fabrics to make formal suits for men.¹⁹

In this period, a study by the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce documented that between 1939 and 1942 consumer prices had increased by 50 percent and public sector salaries by 15–25 percent, whereas there was no increase at all in the wages received by the majority of the working population.²⁰

This study was used by some critics of government priorities in the use of public funds to draw attention to the plight of the working poor, and to the unbearable manifestations of child poverty stubbornly relegated to the realm of philanthropy.

Kathryn Libal justifiably draws attention to the emphasis placed on child poverty during the single-party period and explains it with reference to the early republican ideology, which presented the child as “the future citizen and the very building block on which the military strength and economic productivity and consumption were to be based.”²¹

Although the concern with child poverty was indeed very real, it was hardly translated into a serious disbursement of fiscal resources. A piece of legislation assigning the state responsibility for taking care of children in need through the use of public resources was enacted in 1949, at the very end of the RPP rule. Even then, during parliamentary debate it was repeatedly emphasized that this important task of protecting needy children could not be left to the state alone and that in this area there was much need for collaboration between public institutions and private charity organizations.²²

Given the constraints imposed by the truly exceptional domestic and international circumstances prevailing during the first decades of the republic, one could argue that the state had very limited resources to devote to the alleviation of poverty of crippling dimensions. Nevertheless, it is also true that often in difficult times institutional imagination is used most extensively and creatively to find ways of dealing with indigence. It could be said that in Turkey, during the single-party period, such institutional imagination was mainly used to prevent abject poverty in the countryside from spreading to the urban setting. What this strategy involved was less the regulation of poverty than the blocking of dislocations peculiar to modern societies. As such, it did not follow the main historical trends observed through the development of European capitalism, which was based on the use of the “free labor” of dispossessed individuals. In this sense, the Turkish strategy of containing poverty in the countryside was not in conformity with the basic tenets of economic rationality.

The Turkish republic was founded in a war-ravaged agrarian country, where the overwhelming majority of the population lived in the countryside. The Balkan War, World War I, and the War of Liberation, which was followed by a massive exchange of population according to the terms of the Lausanne Treaty, had left the Turkish countryside truly devastated. Drought that affected hundreds of villages in the Central Anatolian plane in 1928 exacerbated the plight in the countryside.²³

The effect of the Great Depression on the terms of trade of agricultural products appeared as another factor contributing to rural poverty.²⁴ Despite these developments with their highly negative effects on the rural economy, rural–urban migration remained very low until the 1950s. The urban population, which was about 24.2 percent of the total population in 1927, had only reached 25 percent in 1950.²⁵

This absence of a major population displacement despite the factors adversely affecting the countryside was the outcome of a deliberate policy choice, which consisted of measures designed to ensure the survival of peasant agriculture. Perhaps the most significant measure was the elimination of the agricultural tithe, the ʿaşar, in 1925. This tax had problems concerning both distributive justice and allocative efficiency. Yet, it constituted nearly 29 percent of public revenue, and, consequently, after 1925 there was a significant decline in the government's ability to allocate resources to much-needed investment projects and social expenditures. In return for this very important fiscal sacrifice, the government avoided confronting extreme forms of urban poverty, which would have inevitably increased if the tax policy had been of a nature to contribute to the disappearance of small farming.

In this regard, it is also interesting that, in the case of certain public enterprises using agricultural inputs, the enterprise managements chose to conduct the policy of input provisioning by establishing ties with small farmers rather than following expert advice and taking part in state-led development of large agricultural production units.²⁶

As a whole, the era's agricultural policy effectively prevented the rise of a rural proletariat with the potential to take to the road when their livelihood was threatened by economic developments affecting agricultural production.

In the 1930s and 1940s, there were, of course, many cases of desperate peasants trying to reach cities where they hoped to find better conditions of life.²⁷

Peasants on the outskirts of cities, “with their mattresses on their backs,” constitute an important image in the Turkish middle-class consciousness in the single-party era, as in later periods. It is not possible to suggest that the uneasiness generated by this unpleasant image could be balanced by the prospects of making money by employing these uprooted individuals on their way to becoming “free labor.” There is, in fact, a strange contrast between accounts of rural misery through the years of the Great Depression and World War II on the one hand, and constant complaints about the labor shortage that crippled the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) established in this period on the other hand. Quite contrary to what economic rationality would dictate in a context where transportation and communication technologies were in a very backward stage, these enterprises were not concentrated in or around big cities but were scattered all over the country. They were often not integrated into town life but constituted separate enclaves, with dormitories for workers.

These arrangements were often indicative of an approach whereby industrial employment was considered a national duty of male workers rather than an economic activity carried out on the basis of economic incentives. Economic incentives, where they accompanied purely coercive measures used to mobilize labor power, mainly encouraged mixed strategies of economic survival for the peasant family. Hence, agriculture remained the main source of livelihood, with employment in industry or in the mining sector providing a supplementary income for those workers who allocated part of their time to these nonagricultural jobs in periods of low demand for agricultural labor. Certain articles and reports written in the 1930s and 1940s referred to this “peasant-worker phenomenon” as an impediment to the rise of industrial productivity and economic development. It was suggested that severing workers' ties with the village was a prerequisite for the emergence of a genuine industrial working class and hence of the industrialization of the country, and this could only be achieved through mechanisms to generate a rural push and an urban pull.²⁸

This type of reasoning seems to have remained ineffective in influencing decisionmakers of the single-party period. Hence, a report on the state of the Turkish economy prepared by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 1951 remarked on the low level of urbanization and the underdevelopment of an industrial working class as problems to be addressed by economic policymakers.²⁹

Peasantist ideologies, with their aversion to urbanization and urban proletariat, were quite influential in shaping the single-party government's efforts to keep Turkish peasants in their villages. Projects such as “village institutes” and “people's houses” were designed to prevent the dissolution of the village economy and social relations it sustained.³⁰

Village institutes, for example, were to teach peasant children rudiments of grammar and arithmetic followed by strictly practical instruction in skills that would be immediately useful to them in village daily life, regardless of their motivations and talents. That peasants were supposed to remain in the countryside was also reflected in the establishment of “people's houses” in 1932 as an ideological initiative of the Republican People's Party “to enable the urban intellectuals to embrace the village.”³¹ Although the objective was to build bridges between the urban elite and the peasant population, it was very clear that the meeting place was to be the village and not the city.

Early republican approaches to poverty and social policy were situated in an international conjecture that enabled, even necessitated, an isolationist strategy whereby the political authority could remain largely oblivious to the requirements of both capital accumulation and political democracy. However, even in this context, the state's relations with the majority of the population were not defined merely by repressive measures. Although it was mainly the appeal to voluntary initiatives that compensated the absence of redistributive action to deal with urban poverty, the state made a serious fiscal sacrifice to support the survival of peasants. The exemption of the peasantry from payment of taxes in return for its restricted mobility and isolation in the countryside was the most salient feature of what could be called an implicit authoritarian pact between state and society.

Toward the end of the single-party regime, wartime difficulties made it necessary for the government to impose a heavy tax burden on agricultural producers. It could be suggested that this constituted a unilateral infringement of the implicit authoritarian pact of the single-party period. According to some economic historians, these developments caused the RPP the definite loss of electoral support in the countryside and accounted for the victory of the DP in the general elections of 1950.³²

It was actually before this change of government that the wartime measures that had disadvantaged the peasantry were reversed and several steps were taken to improve conditions prevailing in rural areas. For example, between 1947 and 1950, some peasant families benefited from state land distribution on the basis of the Land Reform Act of 1945. Under the DP government, not only the scope of these state land redistribution schemes³³

but also the opportunities of social integration available to the peasant population were greatly expanded.

FROM AUTHORITARIANISM TO AN INFORMAL SOCIAL PACT

The end of World War II ushered in a new era in state–society relations in Turkey, as in many other countries. Outside socialist countries, welfare-state arrangements in the West and developmentalist states in the “Third World” marked the character of the times. In Turkey, the transition to the multiparty system was another important aspect of changing times.

As far as approaches to poverty and social policy are concerned, a certain awareness of postwar developments leading to the establishment of the welfare state was present in Turkey.³⁴

In this new environment, social-risk coverage for formal-sector workers came as a new development with the establishment of a social-security organization for workers (İşçi Sigortaları Kurumu, which later became Sosyal Sigortalar Kurumu) in 1945. Even in the case of civil servants, who had previously enjoyed social protection from the risks of old age and ill health, the establishment of the Retirement Chest for Civil Servants (Emekli Sandığı) in 1949 constituted an important step toward the unification of different schemes spread through different government offices and ministries.³⁵

Such social-policy issues formed the subject of intense debates carried out by social scientists gathered around the Institute of Economics and Social Policy of Istanbul University, which, starting in 1948, hosted a Conference Series on Social Policy (İçtimai Siyaset Konferansları). Some of the papers presented at the series highlighted a serious birth defect of the new social-security system by pointing to the fact that coverage was limited to employees of enterprises subject to the labor law, that is, to some 500,000 workers in a country with a working population over 14.5 million.³⁶

Beyond the limits of risk coverage, contributors to the series also discussed the need for social-assistance schemes such as family allowances involving tax exemptions as well as direct income supplements to alleviate poverty.³⁷ The problems of the “working poor,” a generally overlooked reality of Turkish society, were also debated, especially in relation to the circumstances of seasonal agricultural workers.³⁸

It would be an overstatement to say that these views made an important impact on the ruling politicians of the multiparty era. Approaching poverty alleviation through a formal institution-building effort was still not on the agenda. In this area, one stillborn project pertained to the project to establish an institute of social work as part of a modern orientation toward alleviating poverty and combating social exclusion. The establishment of such an institute came on the agenda in 1954, basically as a response to the availability of foreign funds that could be used for the “social development” of Turkey. The draft law that was prepared to set the institutional basis necessary for the transfer of these financial resources was sent to the United Nations, but it was not enacted until 1959. In the media, there were few criticisms of authorities' reluctance to systematically deal with the “social problem,” and such criticism mainly reflected nationalist sentiments injured by the “visibility” of abject poverty to “foreign” observers. The continuing presence of beggars in the urban environment was found to be outrageous, and it was argued that poverty, as a national problem, required the collaboration of philanthropic associations and benevolent individuals with the state.³⁹

The use of public resources in rights-based social assistance schemes was not even considered to be an important way of combating poverty outside the intellectual circles contributing to the Conference Series on Social Policy.

In the meantime, political authorities continued to see the “social problem” principally as a rural problem. As Adnan Menderes, who acted as the country's prime minister through the DP rule in the 1950s, once stated, “In our country, social justice, rather than being a matter of concern for the problems of the proletariat, is a question pertaining to the problems of the farmer and the countryside.”⁴⁰

The agricultural sector was the priority area for the DP government, whose first program clearly stated that this sector, which had hitherto never received more than one third of government spending, would now have an increased share, and this would be compensated for by economies made on other items in the budget.⁴¹

Thanks in particular to price-support mechanisms involving guaranteed state purchases of certain commodities, domestic terms of trade remained favorable to agriculture during the period of 1948–78. Mechanization of farming also gained impetus in the 1950s, without leading to a concentration of land in the hands of large capitalist farmers. On the contrary, small peasant property seemed to be well consolidated with the aid of land-distribution schemes as well as the privileged status of the peasantry within the redistributive system, where it enjoyed the benefit of a low tax burden and a consistent policy of price supports.⁴²

As in the single-party era before, the choice to leave the peasantry outside the tax system seriously limited funds available for capital accumulation and industrial development. The order of economic and sociopolitical priorities this policy reflected was clearly documented by a report on the Turkish tax system prepared by Nicholas Kaldor after the establishment of the State Planning Organization following the military intervention of 1960.⁴³

The low level of public revenue was a point of emphasis in the report. As Kaldor noted without hiding his surprise, in the beginning of the 1960s, when the report was being written, the agricultural sector, which accounted for 42.5 percent of domestic product, only paid 0.8 percent of direct taxes. When indirect taxes were included, the contribution of the sector did not exceed, at the most, one eighth of the total public revenue.⁴⁴

The report recommended imposing a property tax on cultivated plots calculated on the basis of the average productivity of land in different regions. Taxing rural producers on the potential yield of their land would create incentives to increase productivity, and the failure to do so would accelerate rural–urban migration in a way to prevent the decimation of land with each generation and thus hamper efficiency of production. Consequently, the pressure on industrial wages would be alleviated both through the increase in the supply of labor and the fall in the prices of agricultural “wage goods” following the increase in productivity. In sum, the measure would contribute to the industrialization effort that Turkish policymakers were beginning to take seriously in the planned development period.

The State Planning Organization and Prime Minister İnönü stood behind the report during the parliamentary debates around the issue. Yet, Kaldor's recommendations were rejected by the coalition government in power, which resulted in the resignation en bloc of the direction of the State Planning Organization. The fear of destabilizing the countryside and causing rural misery to inundate the urban setting by a policy measure that would endanger the survival of the peasantry thus dominated the objective of planned development and industrialization of the country.⁴⁵

Nevertheless, the persistence of this particular balance of economic and sociopolitical priorities could merely contain and not eradicate rural poverty. In the first half of the 1960s, 60 percent of Turkish villages lacked drinkable water resources, 98 percent lacked electricity, and 90 percent did not have proper road access.⁴⁶

Under these circumstances, the isolation of the peasantry in the countryside was clearly not a feasible project in an electoral system. Hence, the share of urban population, which had increased only from 24.2 to 25 percent between 1927 and 1950, reached 31.9 percent in 1960, 38.5 percent in 1970, and 43.9 percent in 1980.⁴⁷

For the early republican elite, survival of small peasant holdings was an insurance against the social problems that uncontrolled migration from rural to urban areas could cause. Although it might sound paradoxical, the developments of the post World War II era could be interpreted as a reversal of the terms of this equation. The possibility of finding seasonal work in commercial farms in different areas or the remittances from family members who had settled in the city without severing ties with the village made a significant contribution to the resilience of small peasant holdings in Turkey.⁴⁸

At the same time, with one foot remaining in the village, it was also easier for those who had moved to the city to integrate in the urban setting.

However, employment opportunities in the formal manufacturing sector remained limited, and controlling urban poverty required additional mechanisms to complement the contribution of ongoing links with the countryside and family solidarity in supporting the livelihood of people. Gecekondu, the Turkish version of irregular housing, constituted a highly effective mechanism of this kind.⁴⁹

Until quite recently, the reciprocal exchange of votes for irregular access to urban land appeared as one of the crucial characteristics of Turkish democracy. The first law of amnesty for already built gecekondu (shacks built “overnight”) enacted in 1949⁵⁰ was followed by similar pieces of legislation under successive governments. In the middle of the 1950s, gecekondu was such an established part of the society that an “Association for the Beautification of the Gecekondu” could demand, from the government, the allocation of a certain portion of Marshall Plan aid to needs specific to irregular settlements.⁵¹

In the 1960s, media coverage of gecekondu came to include recurrent news about epidemics that spread in these settlements without adequate clean water resources and proper sewage channels.⁵²

These middle-class concerns about diseases such as typhoid and hepatitis were at the background of the amnesty law enacted in 1966. Unlike the earlier legislation in the same area, it not only gave title deeds to already built gecekondu but enabled the irregular settlements to become a part of the municipal order with the same access to municipal services as middle-class dwellings.⁵³

To this day, the length and intensity of debates around this 1966 law remain unmatched as far as the attention paid by the Turkish parliament to the problem of urban poverty is concerned. Members of the parliament from different parties debated the problem of urban poverty for months and ended up voting for a piece of legislation that clearly reflected the nature of the moral economy in which the informal pact between the state and people operated. The logic of redistribution, which could be made effective by the extension of social-security coverage to the majority of the population or through social-assistance schemes and social housing projects, had almost no role in shaping this outcome. The latter endorsed, rather, what was already happening by way of informal relations between the political authority and the masses outside the legislative process.⁵⁴

The informal pact between state and society that emerged in the multiparty era was clearly superior to the authoritarianism of the previous period in keeping poverty under control without formal social-policy measures specifically designed to that end. The peasant-worker phenomenon of the single-party period was maintained in a “flexible,” nonauthoritarian manner by allowing people to voluntarily pursue multiple livelihoods in a process of urbanization that did not suggest total rupture with the countryside. In more than one way, gecekondu also constituted a “flexible” solution to urban poverty. As a form of dwelling, it would undergo a series of transformations in legal status, in its access to municipal services, and in its size and structure. There would be rooms or floors added to the original building and endless improvements would be introduced to fortify the construction or to make it more comfortable. This fluidity of poor people's homes also reflected the fluidity of the condition of poverty. “Poverty in turns,” the title of a study conducted in an irregular settlement in Istanbul,⁵⁵

seemed to capture a situation where at least some of the poor immigrants to the city could take advantage of the opportunity space provided by the informal pact between state and society not only to integrate in the urban society but also to move up the social ladder and thereby leave the place of the urban poor to be filled by those more recently settled in the city.

Nevertheless, the pact could only be sustainable in a context where economic rationality did not dominate social arrangements. Disregarding the principles of sound fiscal management, trying to industrialize with concern neither for nonindustrial sources of capital accumulation nor for the impact on labor productivity of a workforce that sustained ties with the countryside, and sanctioning urban land-market arrangements with little relationship to modern norms of property were all problematic from the economic rationality viewpoint. Moreover, employment opportunities, although limited, constituted a condition for the prevailing regime of “poverty in turns,” and the state owned enterprises (SOEs) played an important role in employment creation. With their management following the dictates of political rather than economic rationality, these SOEs still provided one-third of the manufacturing employment in the early 1980s.⁵⁶

The developments of the 1980s led to the insertion of Turkey in the world economy in the neoliberal age. None of the pillars of the informal social contract of the previous period remained unaffected by the socioeconomic transformations under way, and urban poverty appeared in hitherto unknown forms.⁵⁷

POVERTY IN A MARKET ECONOMY

In the post-1980 period, the new significance attached to the “logic of the economy” became an unquestioned constraint in policymaking. The opportunity space available to the masses was significantly modified with declining formal employment possibilities in SOEs, and the modern private sector was now faced with the imperative of competitiveness. Many of the programs of agricultural input subsidy and output price support were revoked in conformity with principles of market rationality.⁵⁸

With these policy changes, along with the secular decline in agricultural productivity,⁵⁹ the survival of peasant agriculture became increasingly difficult and the capacity of the rural hinterland to support family strategies, which could successfully mix different livelihoods even after migration to the city, was seriously undermined.

At the same time, urban livelihood came under pressure with the changing place of irregular settlements in the urban environment. With the geographic expansion of cities and the new popularity of suburban middle-class residences, new immigrants found themselves in intense competition over urban peripheral land with developers catering to the middle-class housing market or building big commercial complexes. The fact that the market-economy logic had extended to the urban real-estate market could be clearly seen in the changing moral attitudes toward inhabitants of gecekondu, whose indisputable need for shelter could hitherto justify the invasion of public land. With new and rather spectacular rent opportunities and with private property and exchange relations as the centerpiece of new economic arrangements, the previous tolerance for irregular settlers pretty well disappeared.⁶⁰

These developments were all the more significant in their interface with the changing economic significance of the extended family.⁶¹

In the post-1980 period, the importance of informal networks for individual livelihoods was also undermined by the changing balance of pull and push factors in determining patterns of internal migration. Violent conflict in the southeast between the Turkish army and Kurdish separatist forces, which started in the mid-1980s and continued through most of the 1990s, caused many Kurdish people to leave their villages under threat of violence or simply because of total loss of livelihood. Unlike the previous migrants, Kurdish people arrived in the city without assurances provided by existing networks formed by family members or co-locals. Hence, urban poverty also acquired an ethnic dimension, and the process of socioeconomic integration was further complicated.⁶²

Although the 1980s was a period when Turkey's newly discovered faith in the ability of the self-regulating market system largely precluded demands for state intervention to solve economic and social problems, the need to respond to emerging forms of poverty did not remain unrecognized. A relatively early response, which came with legislation enacted in 1986, was rooted in the tendency to regard poverty as a problem that could be best dealt with through the country's traditional ethos of charity involving a society-specific form of state–society cooperation without proper delineation of private and public funds used to assist the needy. Hence, the Fund for the Encouragement of Social Cooperation and Solidarity (now reorganized as a directorate) was established as an umbrella organization covering over 900 local foundations managed by representatives of the central government at the district level with the aid of a board of directors that included prominent members of the local population.

As the name and the administrative structure of this social-assistance organization indicate, it was hoped that the organization would function by mobilizing private donations to alleviate the burden of welfare provisioning on the state budget. However, the model could not work as it was planned initially, and public resources came to constitute the bulk of resources used for poverty alleviation. Welfare spending by the fund was not negligible,⁶³

but the targeting of beneficiaries and the mode of disbursement of aid lacked transparency and efficiency, and the administrative structure seemed to reflect a desire (at least implicit desire) to keep social assistance outside the realm of social rights defined in the context of the formal redistributive system. In fact, the idea that the provision of public assistance as a social right would create dependency and encourage laziness was and is very widespread among welfare administrators, and any field researcher in the area is bound to hear several times the cliché “one should teach people how to fish rather than giving them fish.”

This is the institutional setup for welfare provisioning under the current government formed by the JDP that came to power in 2002. Approaches to poverty and social policy under current JDP rule reflect elements of both continuity and change with earlier approaches. The emphasis on private benevolence and voluntary initiatives in poverty alleviation is an important element of continuity and, in this regard, it is possible to see an interesting similarity between discourses on poverty typical of the single-party period and contemporary ones. Nevertheless, given the centrality of Islamic references in the formation of the JDP's political outlook, contemporary appeal to philanthropy takes place in a different ideological context characterized by the mutually reinforcing role of Islam and neoliberalism, which together provide a uniquely strong support to the traditional tendency to undermine the responsibility of the political authority in combating poverty.

Appeal to Islamic charity has clearly proven to be superior to the nationalistic language of the early republican elite in mobilizing benevolence.⁶⁴

Both the nongovernmental organizations and municipalities that approach poverty alleviation on the basis of Islamic norms of charitable conduct are very successful in providing for the needy, especially in-kind assistance.⁶⁵ In the case of municipal-assistance schemes, the language of Islam is used in practices that often lack transparency both in the use of public funds and in local-government favors granted to businessmen in exchange for donations to the municipality's charity fund. In this regard, it is revealing that a recent government report on current social-assistance measures taken by central and local authorities explicitly acknowledges that the amount of municipal assistance, although substantial, is impossible to document.⁶⁶

In the contemporary social-policy discourse where both the role of the family and traditional norms of charity are frequently evoked,⁶⁷

it is impossible to miss the commonality between Islamic and Christian value universes currently salient in the formation of the conservative liberal position against public assistance. What references to Islam signify seems to be little different from what a conservative outlook introduces in the realm of social assistance in any religious context. The notions of communal solidarity are as attractive in an Islamic context as they are in a Christian one, especially as supporting elements of contemporary neoliberalism. As Hayek underlines in his attempts to qualify the nature of his conservative liberalism, a free-market economy requires the moral basis provided by traditional values and institutions. An unqualified individualism where the importance of the latter is undermined would be incompatible with liberalism because it would necessitate an ever-increasing dose of state intervention to ensure social cohesion.⁶⁸ It is not surprising that this conservative liberal outlook is very popular in the context of the current demise of the welfare state.

Islamic neoliberalism in Turkey is situated in a setting where a clear shift is observed in the ordering of economic and sociopolitical priorities governing policy processes. Unlike in previous periods in republican history, the logic of a market economy is now accepted without much questioning. Although this new setting of social policy is not really conducive to a rights-based approach to social assistance, increasingly serious manifestations of poverty in a market economy call for formal assistance schemes even in the currently prevailing conservative liberal atmosphere. This brings us to the perhaps most typical characteristic of the contemporary context of Turkey's poverty debate, which could be defined with reference to the coexistence of two tendencies acting in opposite directions. The tendency to undermine the need for state action, which is both rooted in tradition and in conformity to the neoliberal spirit of our times, is accompanied by a novel consciousness of the need for a systematic approach to poverty alleviation through redistributive channels.

The latter tendency is also related to Turkey's aspiration to become a member of the European Union (EU), an aspiration that has become more serious than ever before with the December 2004 decision of the European Commission to formally accept Turkey's status as a candidate for full EU membership. Negotiations with the EU began in October 2005, and Turkey is currently preparing a joint inclusion memorandum as the first step toward taking part in European level social-policy processes. Hence, for the first time in Turkish history, combating poverty and social exclusion unambiguously appears as a matter of concern to the political authority. With the country's historical legacy, it would undoubtedly be difficult to realize the necessary change in outlook that would take poverty beyond the realm of voluntary initiatives and private benevolence to that of the state's responsibilities toward rights-bearing citizens. Nevertheless, the mere fact that the recent social-reform bill prepared by the government situates social assistance within the same administrative framework as social-security arrangements for the employed presents a step in a direction where the logic of redistribution would have a greater role than in the past.⁶⁹