Chasing the ‘Corporatist Wave’: The Parameters of This Study

Why did Bayar choose Lorenz? One hypothesis might explain Lorenz's invitation as part of a transnational corporatist moment. The spectre of corporatism exhilarated Europe in the early twentieth century. Counting among their ranks French solidarists, German romantics, Turkish nationalists, Italian fascists and at least one pope, corporatists shared the overarching notion that rapacious capitalists and riotous socialists were tearing industrial societies apart, and that new forms of solidarity had to be established (or old ones reestablished) in order to protect the common good. Interwar corporatism contained multiple strands but coalesced around two ideas. On a theoretical level, corporatists argued, against both liberalism and Marxism, that neither individuals nor classes ought to be privileged actors in society, but that the functional groups organising economic production – corporations – held the key to societal progress. Second, at the level of action, corporatists advocated for laws that would strengthen the legal or political status of these cross-class corporations, ranging from state recognition of corporatist institutions to reorganising parliamentary representation along corporatist lines.Footnote ¹⁰

Corporatism was a transnational phenomenon, and recent scholarship on corporatism and dictatorship in interwar Europe has focused on ‘the impact of political learning and diffusion from seemingly successful institutional innovations and precedents elsewhere’. As political scientist António Costa Pinto argues, ‘dynamic transnational entanglements between dictatorships and corporatist ideologies generated a rich field of circulation of ideas and practices that shaped the experience of inter-war dictatorships far more than has previously been assumed’.Footnote ¹¹ There is good reason to believe that Lorenz's invitation to Turkey was a phenomenon associated with this ‘corporatist wave’. Both Lorenz (explicitly) and the Turkish government that invited him (in theory) had attachments to corporatist ideologies. For its part, Lorenz's corporatism represented one flavour within a diverse banquet of right-wing ideologies that emerged in force in Switzerland during the 1930s to combat socialism and contest the liberal Swiss state.Footnote ¹² In 1933, Lorenz founded an energetic grassroots movement and newspaper he called Das Aufgebot (The Summons) to contribute to an (unsuccessful) campaign for a complete revision of the Swiss constitution along corporatist lines. Such ideological leanings should have resonated in the Turkey of the 1930s, whose state ideology, Kemalism, has since been described by several scholars as a form of corporatism.Footnote ¹³ One might thus assume that Bayar's invitation was motivated by ideological proximity, or that Lorenz's corporatism influenced his policy recommendations to the Turkish government.

Nevertheless, this article argues against the hypothesis that Lorenz's 1938 mission to Turkey served as a conduit of transnational corporatist interaction and influence, or a link in a burgeoning ‘corporatist international’ being forged on the eve of war. Lorenz's impassioned Korporatismus, inspired by Pope Pius XI's 1931 call for Catholics to guide societies toward a corporatist order, did not align with Turkish korporatizm, which had enjoyed a brief heyday in the protean days of the Turkish nation-state. (Official Turkish state ideology hoped to promote class solidarity and avoid class conflict without offering recognisably corporatist solutions.Footnote ¹⁴) What bound Lorenz and the Kemalists was a worldview common in the 1930s: the elevation of national solidarity and national economies at the expense of cosmopolitanism and internationalism. ‘Unity–Order–Independence’, a slogan Lorenz used to describe the aims of the Aufgebot movement, was generic enough to be easily confused with any number of Turkish pronouncements of the day.

Yet a shared worldview did not mean a shared project for society: Lorenz's vision of evolutionary corporatism, in which a democratic state would confer legitimacy on corporatist networks emerging organically from below, contradicted authoritarian Kemalism's official principle of ‘revolutionism’ (inkılâpçılık), which explicitly refused ‘to be bound by gradualist and evolutionist principles’.Footnote ¹⁵ Moreover, neither Lorenz nor the Kemalists believed in the transfer of economic ideologies between countries, as each nation had its sui generis character and historic path. (Such historicism was a feature of corporatism and other interwar nationalist ideologies.Footnote ¹⁶) ‘With regard to the development of a corporatist system’, Lorenz wrote, ‘every country must search for the forms that are appropriate to it. Just as there can be no general economic prescriptions that can be applied equally in all places, so too are there none for societal order’.Footnote ¹⁷ Representing the Kemalists, Bayar wrote plainly: ‘The economic doctrine of the Kemalist régime cannot be explained by reference to any known economic doctrine. For Turkey of the Republican régime has found herself faced by conditions and duties essentially different from those that have given birth to other doctrines’.Footnote ¹⁸ Rather than adding a node to corporatist internationalism, then, Lorenz's report can best be read in terms of a Turkish ‘politics of experts’ which did not always have a clear ideological trajectory beyond the support of the national economy.

The Circumstances of Lorenz's Invitation and Fieldwork

On 1 October 1937, the Turkish Ministry of Economy sent a letter, marked urgent, to the Economic and Financial Organisation of the League of Nations. The letter, signed by the ministry's undersecretary Faik Kurdoğlu, noted Turkey's struggle to maintain a low cost of living and asked for the ‘kind intervention’ of the League in inviting ‘a competent individual to come and study this problem on site, for one month, or longer if necessary’. The specialist was to recommend a policy to reduce the cost of living and ‘to develop a program of general measures to ensure the most favourable living conditions possible’. The specialist was not only to have the necessary scientific competence, but also a ‘mature and realist mind’, since, as the letter stated, ‘we are envisioning the development and immediate application of a plan based on his or her advice’. It was important, Kurdoğlu emphasised, that a researcher be designated as soon as possible.Footnote ¹⁹

The document is curious in many ways – its date, its sender and its supposed urgency. Indeed, all of these facets point to the political motives behind the request. In early October 1937, Turkish politics was in upheaval. İsmet İnönü, the country's first prime minister, had been forced to resign on 18 September after increasingly locking horns with Atatürk. Bayar was the minister of economy at the time of İnönü's resignation and thus responsible for the urgent request to the League of Nations. On 1 October, Bayar was already acting as İnönü's de facto replacement. Yet as League officials noted, it was unusual that a ministry of the Turkish government, rather than Turkey's representative at the League, should make the request. Nedim Veysel İlkin, Turkey's representative, had not even been informed that the request had taken place.Footnote ²⁰

The urgency of the request and the bypassing of the usual channels were related to Bayar's agenda-setting. In forming his new cabinet as prime minister, Bayar was to make combatting the high cost of living a priority of his government programme and a prominent talking point in public. To parliament, Bayar promised to ‘authorize a scientific committee’ from abroad to help formulate ‘a radical intervention plan’ against the high cost of living.Footnote ²¹ He enjoyed a large budget for this purpose.Footnote ²² To the public, Bayar presented his new government's intention to ‘make every sacrifice’ to ‘make the living standards of citizens easier and less expensive […] by considering each and every food item and making them less expensive’.Footnote ²³ Economic historians İlhan Tekeli and Selim İlkin argue that, in ‘constantly bringing up the issue’ of the high cost of living, Bayar, a proponent of more liberal economics, sought a way to criticise what he saw as the state's overreach in the economy. İnönü's replacement by Bayar had been interpreted as a signal that the Turkish state was moving away from the statist policies that had defined its economy for most of the decade.Footnote ²⁴ If, as Tekeli and İlkin argue, Bayar's aim was to retreat from statism, then advocating policies aimed at reducing the cost of living was a useful means of doing so, one which ‘had a populist facet […] and whose ideological orientation was to a large degree hidden’.Footnote ²⁵ By late September 1937, Bayar, expecting to be appointed prime minister, had already settled on his cost-of-living agenda and was seeking a means of leverage to press for it in the one-party regime. Inviting two renowned Western experts on cost of living would serve his (liberal) purpose nicely.

League officials were open to Turkey's request and may have considered recommending Lorenz. Between 1925–33, he had served as external expert at Switzerland's Federal Department of Economic Affairs (EVD/DFE), where he worked closely with the Federal Council on price policy. Between 1929–30, Lorenz was the interim director of the Federal Statistics Bureau. He also presided over the Commission on Social Statistics, served as a member of the Federal Price Formation Commission and, in 1932, became the spiritus rector and founding president of the EVD/DFE's Committee to Monitor Conjuncture, an organisation he would serve until his death.Footnote ²⁶ Starting in the mid-1920s, Lorenz, though personally opposed to Switzerland's membership in the League of Nations, had worked with the League in research on comparative cost-of-living indices and as an expert on international statistical harmonisation.Footnote ²⁷ Nevertheless, before the League could take action on the request, İlkin, the League's Turkish representative, informed the League secretary in December 1937 that Turkey's request was being cancelled. He had been notified by his government that two specialists, including Lorenz, had already been hired for the study.Footnote ²⁸

By what means, then, was Lorenz chosen to serve as an expert in Turkey? There is no record of Lorenz's invitation in the Turkish, Swiss or private archives consulted. A likely explanation is that Kurdoğlu, from the Turkish Ministry of Economy, took advantage of his personal connections to reach out to international experts on cost of living. In early 1938, Kurdoğlu was the chief of delegation negotiating a Swiss-Turkish agreement on commercial transactions with Hans Ludwig Ebrard, a close friend of Lorenz.Footnote ²⁹ Personal connections may also explain the choice of the other expert hired to assist Turkey, the English economist Frederic Benham. In late 1936, Kurdoğlu had been to Great Britain, where he, along with Talha Sabuncu, had been charged with preparing commercial agreements. Sabuncu was the Ministry of Economy's representative in Great Britain and Ireland, and, given his excellent academic background (a doctorate from Columbia University), may have sought contact with professors like Benham.Footnote ³⁰ Benham's invitation makes it clear that no consistent ideological agenda stood behind the choice of experts. Benham was not a corporatist but an avowed liberal and a future member of the Mont Pèlerin Society who argued, in line with colonialist economists, that ‘the main road to economic progress for underdeveloped countries is to increase their output per worker in agriculture and to specialize on producing for export those goods and services in which they have a comparative advantage’ – i.e. precisely the opposite of what Turkish policy was hoping to achieve in the 1930s.Footnote ³¹

Starting in February 1938, Lorenz's ‘honourable mission’ was widely announced in the Swiss and Turkish press.Footnote ³² In Turkish parliament, he was portrayed not as an ideological fellow traveller but as a renowned expert ‘with great scholarly authority’.Footnote ³³ His fieldwork began in Ankara on 3 March. He was accompanied by his fixer, Sabuncu, who was working at Türkofis, the Ministry of Economy's trade promotion agency. Lorenz respected Sabuncu, who was twenty-one years his junior, and they developed a friendly relationship.Footnote ³⁴ Turkish press reports give us an idea of Lorenz's itinerary: From Ankara, Lorenz went to İzmir, followed by Bursa, Balıkesir and Istanbul. After Istanbul, he returned to central Anatolia, circling around Afyonkarahisar, Konya, Kayseri, Sivas and Samsun. Lorenz completed his fieldwork around 15 April.

Lorenz's fieldwork was short and faced a number of hurdles: incomplete Turkish statistics and price indices whose calculation was based on hypothetical family budgets, Lorenz's unfamiliarity with Turkish consumption and purchasing habits or the vast differences in lifestyle between cities.Footnote ³⁵ Compared with other experts on economics and society, who were given salaried positions, access to the countryside and teams of assistants to conduct research over months or years, Lorenz was provided with limited resources.Footnote ³⁶ Many limitations were freely admitted by Lorenz, who had to justify his narrow focus on urban consumption patterns. Even in the cities, Lorenz limited his study to the price of foodstuffs, particularly meat (the expensive item at the forefront of people's minds) and bread. This, too, he justified by noting that costs for food constituted the leading expense in household budgets and the leading factor in determining changes in standards of living.Footnote ³⁷

Lorenz's Report: Price Policy and Ideology

Lorenz's report, submitted in September 1938, constitutes the other piece of evidence against the corporatist hypothesis. In theory, a report like Lorenz's, covering both theoretical and practical considerations on price formation and statistics, might have been a helpful tool for the Turkish government. Turkey and Switzerland faced similar problems arising out of the Great Depression and the collapse of prices for the country's main agricultural commodities (wheat in Turkey, milk in Switzerland). Both sought ways to stabilise or raise prices for these commodities without exacerbating the cost of living for the broader population, and both pursued price-stabilising measures in favour of agricultural producers, whether through the subvention of milk prices in Switzerland or through the state purchase of wheat in Turkey.Footnote ³⁸ Thus, despite some key differences in their countries’ price policies (Turkey maintained state monopolies on a handful of goods), the analysis of a Swiss price expert could have been of considerable use. Nevertheless, the ideological ambivalence with which Lorenz approached price policy was one factor that prevented him from making clear recommendations.

The question of price formation was central to Lorenz's corporatism, at least in its most fervent form in the early 1930s. Pius XI, Lorenz's lodestar, had written of the balance between fair prices and fair wages (the price of labour) as critical for the harmonious functioning of a social body. One of the moral flaws of unfettered capitalism, the pope had argued, was the ability of businesses to raise and lower prices at will.Footnote ³⁹ In his 1932 manifesto on corporatism, Korporativer Aufbau, Lorenz had also written that ‘one can only speak of a fair wage, of a wage sufficient for life, when the free market formation of product prices is replaced by another norm on prices’. While the arbitrary formation of prices in a free market meant that fair wages only arose accidentally, Lorenz argued, the cooperation of employers and employees in corporations would ensure the correct balance between prices and wages. Agreeing on the price of goods that would ensure the payment of a commonly agreed fair wage was, in fact, the primary function Lorenz ascribed to corporations.Footnote ⁴⁰

Lorenz's ideological pronouncements of corporatist price policy, however, were tempered by his practical experience shaping Swiss price policy through the 1930s. The Swiss government implemented a wide range of policies – from currency devaluation to a blanket freeze on prices – that often included corporatist elements.Footnote ⁴¹ Corporatists like Lorenz tended to retreat from idealised notions of price formation when faced with complex realities. Unwilling to leave prices entirely to the market, but also unable to control them entirely through state fiat, corporatism had an ambiguous relationship to actual price policy. Even fascist Italy, seen as the quintessential model of corporatism in practice, found its corporations ‘not technically equipped’ to set prices.Footnote ⁴² Lorenz, writing about rising prices in Switzerland, showed more concern for consumer behaviour, frugality and moral economy than for the negotiated solution to prices he had supported in theory. In 1937, for example, Lorenz brushed aside workers’ complaints about the rising cost of living. ‘For some, it goes up, for others, it goes down’, he wrote. ‘That is, after all, the usual way of the world. The only unfortunate thing about it is that people don't want to accept this as something entirely natural, they don't want to accept the fact that each of us has to stay nimble and adapt’.Footnote ⁴³ Lorenz, whose corporatism had envisioned organic, spontaneous deliberations on prices between producers and consumers, thus began to describe the Swiss economy as a mechanism bound by ‘natural’ economic laws to which producers and consumers simply had to submit.

When it came to prices, national economists like Lorenz had little choice other than to appeal to the moral character of consumers, salespeople and farmers, alongside a vague ‘atmosphere of mutual understanding’ within which everyone sought ‘solutions in everybody's interest’.Footnote ⁴⁴ The primary three functions Das Aufgebot ascribed to corporations were not strictly economic: ‘to alleviate class conflict and to dampen selfishness; to foster a spirit of sobriety, frugality and honesty; to foster feelings of obligation and the sense of mutual connectedness in economic life’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Moral appeals were a necessary recourse for Bayar, too. Talking to livestock merchants in January 1938, Bayar launched a campaign to lower the cost of meat. It was an issue, he said, that concerned not only the government but his audience's conscience. The national pride of livestock merchants would be enough to obtain lower prices without government intervention: ‘Just as a commander demands sacrifices from his soldiers on the front, so too will we demand sacrifices of profit from you on the professional front, in the name of the national goal’, he told them.Footnote ⁴⁶

Kemalism and Turkey's High Cost of Living

Lorenz would have dismissed one of Nizamettin Nazif's complaints about Turkish prices. ‘It would not be correct’, he told a journalist from Akşam while in Istanbul, ‘to compare Switzerland and Turkey. Each country's conditions are very different’.Footnote ⁴⁷ In his report, however, Lorenz did paint a picture of a society susceptible to high prices (relative to income). A direct comparison with other European countries’ cost of living was impossible due to the unreliability of Turkish statistics and the differences in the kinds of goods consumed in daily life, but Lorenz estimated the cost of living in Turkey to be 30 to 40 per cent higher than in neighbouring Balkan countries, with whom the Turkish population shared basic consumption patterns. For urban residents, the proportion of income spent on ‘the most basic foodstuffs’ was ‘abnormally’ high.Footnote ⁴⁸

Lorenz agreed with Bayar that high prices had the potential to become a serious issue, since negative popular opinion, particularly in urban areas, could cause social tensions and a reduction in purchasing power could lead to broader economic decline.Footnote ⁴⁹ He asked whether merchants and consumers could do their part to reduce prices. The practice of haggling and the lack of standardised prices, for example, were to the advantage of the retailer and made prices higher than necessary. Moreover, the prudence with which Turkish consumers purchased food seemed to vanish when it came to clothing. Lorenz (a close observer of textile production in Switzerland) found Turkish consumers to be ill informed about textile quality and susceptible to marketing and presentation.Footnote ⁵⁰

Overall, however, Lorenz argued that state spending, not consumer behaviour, was the main driver of the high cost of living in Turkey. Here, Lorenz had to reframe the question: Turkey's high cost of living per se was not the real issue, Lorenz argued, but rather the willingness of the population to shoulder it for the sake of the government's programme. The way individual members of society could influence the equation was not by keeping prices low, but by keeping expectations low and living frugally.Footnote ⁵¹ ‘It was thanks to the simple way of life of the masses, the low expectations they had of life, that made the economic development seen in Europe possible’, he wrote. The same was true for Turkey: ‘If Turkey is to raise its own living standards and Europeanize the lifestyle of the nation, it must know that it cannot do this by imposing an imitation’. The demand for a higher standard of living had to come incrementally, rising parallel with the strength of the national economy. ‘An artificial intervention in demands’, he warned, ‘results in an unpleasant reaction between cost of living and income’.Footnote ⁵²

In this way, Lorenz arrived at a discussion of Kemalism. The Turkish state's official ideology in the 1930s, Kemalism entailed efforts by the state to propel independent Turkey into European prosperity and, by extension, European civilisation. Lorenz, surrounded during his fieldwork by committed Kemalists like Sabuncu, had much praise for the ideology, but also saw the imperatives of Kemalism as a major drive of the artificial demand he warned would raise prices. The ‘Europeanization of life’ was one of these imperatives. Fast fashion – flimsy but well-marketed clothes and hats – had replaced the traditional but durable clothes of old, compelling the Turkish consumer to be ‘sucked into an ever more frequent regime of replacement’ in which they were ‘more affected by fluctuations in price, fluctuations which they used to perceive only slightly, if at all’. Bureaucrats moving to Ankara followed fashions in home appliances, leaving less room in their budget to compensate for rising food prices. Municipalities copied the latest European sanitary regulations without concern for local conditions; such measures, like the banning of porterage (hamallık) or increased surveillance of points of sale, unnecessarily led to increased prices.Footnote ⁵³

A second expense-driving imperative of Kemalism was economic independence. Turkey was still paying off its share of the Ottoman debt while also pursuing state-led development, leading to expenditures that were ‘exceptionally high in proportion to the GDP’. While other states could finance such policies by borrowing domestically, the lack of capital accumulation among the Turkish population meant this option was unavailable; so, too, was the option of taking out foreign debt. (Lorenz could have added the fact that Ankara had abolished the in-kind tax on agricultural products, which had provided up to 22 per cent of the Ottoman state's budget.) To make up for lost income, the Turkish government had no choice but to add various taxes and fees throughout the production chain. Making up a quarter or even a third of the price of most goods, taxes were ‘without a doubt the primary reason why price levels are high in Turkey with respect to income’.Footnote ⁵⁴

In pointing out the cost-driving effects of Kemalism, however, Lorenz was not critiquing the ideology as such. The drive for economic development and its effects on rising prices were inevitable, if not positive. Forced to spend within its means, the Turkish state would avoid the debt crisis Lorenz believed loomed over Western European states. More importantly, Kemalism gave society a purpose worth sacrificing for:

In Switzerland, Lorenz defended the Turkish population vehemently against readers of Das Aufgebot who wondered whether ‘the Turk’ was as lazy as his reputation. ‘These are no lazy people’, he wrote back. ‘They are poor people who rarely reap the fruits of what they sow’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The enormous tax burden was even more heavy on a people who lived so humbly. ‘It is a draconian regime they have here’, he admitted, ‘but one sees where the money goes: Construction is happening, and that is what gives the people confidence. A mind-boggling amount of activity is taking place, and that makes the situation bearable, even if the standard of living is very difficult’.Footnote ⁵⁷ It was the Swiss, he often wrote, who were ‘complacent and slack, torn apart’, dreaming either about private wealth or the ‘regiment of the masses’ without any courageous men in politics to take ‘strong acts’ and remind them of the unity of the country.Footnote ⁵⁸ If in the Turkish people Lorenz saw a stoic willingness to sacrifice for a common societal purpose, in Atatürk, the prudent ‘father of the Turks’, he saw the man who moved them to do so. Historian Stefan Ihrig writes of the way Nazis were motivated by the figure of Atatürk, but Lorenz, whose own ideology skirted the far right, presented Atatürk as an inspiration for the Swiss people to preserve their independence against Nazism. Lorenz, after all, had arrived in Ankara just as the Third Reich was absorbing (corporatist) Austria.Footnote ⁵⁹

Lorenz was either unaware of or indifferent to the violence inherent in nation-state building, including Ankara's ongoing military operations against the Kurdish Alevi population of Dersim/Tunceli that would culminate in a campaign of ethnic cleansing that summer. In his report, Lorenz did speculate on the effect on prices of the loss of multiconfessional life in Turkey, but to readers of Das Aufgebot the leader of a movement explicitly based on a revival of Christian values showed remarkable indifference to the fate of Turkey's Christian communities. In the new regime, he wrote, there was no privileged position for the Christians, just as there was no privileged position for Islam in Turkey.Footnote ⁶⁰ Lorenz acknowledged the authoritarian nature of the Kemalist regime, noting that he refrained from writing openly in the newspaper for fear of censorship. ‘It is truly not a liberal Turkey’, wrote Lorenz. ‘It is the modern [von heute], nationalist Turkey. Whether one likes it or not, one has to understand it’. Yet Lorenz, while admitting a formal similarity with one-party states elsewhere in Europe, vehemently opposed comparing the Turkish dictatorship to that of the Nazis or fascists, noting the lack of mass mobilisation, the lack of extralegal militias and the room given to express certain criticisms of the regime.Footnote ⁶¹

Lorenz did indeed criticise the priorities of the regime in his cost-of-living report to Bayar, focusing his attention on two aspects: superficial Europeanisation and ‘revolutionism’. Superficial Europeanisation included state policies that ‘did not respect fundamental economic law’, like the construction of expensive, just-for-show projects meant for the cultural elite while the country lacked basic infrastructure.Footnote ⁶² In line with his evolutionist approach to Swiss politics, Lorenz also expressed scepticism toward the impatience inherent in Kemalism's revolutionism. Kemalism was not only about civilisational progress, it seemed to Lorenz, but about enjoying an urbane, affluent lifestyle in the quickest way possible. Current European standards of living, Lorenz told Bayar, were a product of a century of industrialisation and could hardly be precipitated artificially. These standards were not only on the distant horizon, they were also a mirage: When Turks looked to Europe and saw the ‘cleanliness, ease and elegance’ of a Paris or Geneva, they ignored the humble life of European villagers.Footnote ⁶³ Lorenz, inspired by his and his fellow conservatives’ deep-seated scepticism toward the course of Western civilisation, sometimes wondered if Europe was worth emulating at all. Looking into the crystal ball of Turkey's future, Lorenz saw present-day Swiss society, with its precipitous pace of life. ‘The Turk’ was as capable as any other of adapting to modernity, wrote Lorenz, if the Turkish government succeeded in ensuring sustainable socioeconomic development. ‘But will he become a European?’ he asked, rhetorically. ‘Do we really wish that upon him? Do we really wish that upon us? We are in no position to look down on anybody from our supposed heights. Hasn't history shown that those who imagine themselves too highly always come down?’Footnote ⁶⁴

Lorenz's Meagre Solutions

Having thus identified a cause of high cost of living with no viable solution, Lorenz was hardly able to deliver on the Turkish government's expectation of immediate, practicable policy suggestions. Analysing the markets for livestock and bread, Lorenz did make a handful of simple recommendations: reducing the influence of intermediaries at wholesale markets, standardising or reducing taxes on bread and meat production or paying out salaries on different days of the month.Footnote ⁶⁵ Yet he downplayed the potential of such policies to reduce the cost of living. ‘I do not believe, Your Excellency, that it will be possible to achieve a significant reduction in the cost of living in the near future’, Lorenz wrote. As the country developed infrastructure and expanded its GDP, prices could be expected to drop of their own accord, but this process would take decades.Footnote ⁶⁶ As such, ‘a policy of cheap prices [ucuzluk siyaseti]’ that promised quick fixes would only be counterproductive, because it raised popular expectations that could never be fulfilled.Footnote ⁶⁷ Direct policies were also doomed. The mandated posting of prices at points of sale, for example, would have no effect, since retailers would always find ways of compensating for loss of income by cheating the consumer.Footnote ⁶⁸

The most prudent course for the government, then, would be simply to observe and inform. The lion's share of Lorenz's policy recommendations was devoted to such issues: which agencies should be responsible, what authority they should have, what kind of data their surveys should record and how composite price indices should be calculated. His recommendations to establish an agency to monitor conjuncture and price formation, along with what he called a ‘coordination conference’ of other government agencies, reflected his intimate experience with such institutions in Switzerland.Footnote ⁶⁹ Once in command of accurate data, the government would simply have to inform the population regularly and convince them that state-led development was worth suffering lower living standards.

Lorenz's insistence that politicians not make populist, ‘sweet-sounding’ promises reflected his criticism of the Swiss government, whose failure to inform the public about the negative effects of economic policies like devaluation of the franc had been a point of criticism.

What, then, was corporatist about Lorenz's recommended price policy? Aside from an off-hand suggestion to include the category ‘social status within the profession’ in future population censuses and a long-term recommendation to promote agricultural cooperatives (buried at the end of the report and hardly a suggestion exclusive to corporatism), very little.Footnote ⁷¹ In fact, near the end of the report, Lorenz again reverted to a mechanistic view of price formation. The state, he said, ‘should refrain from setting prices for meat or especially bread, but rather allow them to evolve freely’. Leaving price formation to the market, while making sure to prevent monopoly formation, would curb the influence of intermediaries and prevent the unexpected harm from poorly planned state price-setting. ‘Setting the correct price is so difficult’, warned Lorenz, ‘that if the authority setting the price does not fully control its consumption or the market, […] such a policy does more to encourage abuse than to eliminate it. Under no circumstances should prices be set without conducting analysis’.Footnote ⁷² This liberal recommendation, more in line with Switzerland's constitutionally protected freedom of commerce, contradicted not only Lorenz's own report statement that a liberal economy would be inappropriate for Turkey, but also Lorenz's own corporatist approach to price policy.Footnote ⁷³

Practically, Lorenz's report had little impact on Turkish price policy. Press reports intimated government dissatisfaction with the extent of Lorenz's empirical investigations.Footnote ⁷⁴ Some of Lorenz's theoretical musings on prices – the ineffectiveness of price supervision or the effect of Turkey's underdeveloped transportation infrastructure – were hardly news to Turkish economists. Bayar himself, as economics minister, had stated as much in a speech before parliament a year before Lorenz's mission.Footnote ⁷⁵ Lorenz's practical suggestions were mainly superfluous. Official meat prices had been reduced on the day Lorenz arrived for fieldwork. During Lorenz's stay, Ankara had ordered new boats for cheaper transportation of goods and authorised the Economic Protection Commission (Korunma Komisyonu) to introduce more sugar and coke to the market.Footnote ⁷⁶ The biggest change in price policy, enacted shortly after Lorenz's mission, was a ban on haggling for prices. Turkish lawmakers characterised high prices as a moral failing of individual salespeople and seized on this opportunity to try and abolish a tradition they derided as immoral and a ‘waste of time’.Footnote ⁷⁷

As for Lorenz's call to establish a commission to observe trade and price fluctuations, Turkey was already well aware of the need for improved statistics and monitoring. As early as 1928, the High Economic Council (Âli İktisat Meclisi), a government advisory board consisting of dozens of experts, had already made meticulous recommendations on cost of living and price statistics.Footnote ⁷⁸ A Conjuncture Agency (Konjonktür Servisi) had been established in 1935 under the direction of Franz Eppenstein, though its aim (calculating the Turkish GDP), differed from the Swiss commission on which Lorenz sat and based his recommendation. Encouraged by Lorenz and Benham's reports, the Turkish government did charge Aydemir, who had assisted Lorenz in Ankara, with organising an ‘Agency on the Struggle Against High Cost of Living’ (Hayat Pahalılığı ile Mücadele Servisi). Nevertheless, Aydemir's provisional plans for this agency were never realised, as Aydemir was appointed head of the Committee to Investigate Industry (Sanayî Tetkik Heyeti) shortly before the war.Footnote ⁷⁹ The war itself led to a state of economic exception, followed by a radical liberalisation.Footnote ⁸⁰ Lorenz's report was obsolete almost before it was submitted.

The Politics of Experts and the Expert Himself

The hypothesis that transnational corporatism is a meaningful concept to understand Lorenz's economic mission to Turkey in 1938 stands disproven: Lorenz's corporatism was too distinct from Turkey's official ideology; his invitation was made within the relatively liberal agenda of a rising prime minister, and the recommendations Lorenz himself made were both unactionable and incompatible with his own understanding of corporatism. Why, then, was he invited at all? Lorenz's report offers us a means of better understanding another transnational phenomenon in early republican Turkey: the role of the expert. Soviet, American and Western European experts appeared in great numbers in Turkey in the 1920s and ’30s; Lorenz himself noted upon his arrival in Ankara that ‘one encounters foreign experts as advisers almost everywhere – French, German, English – while the Swiss are especially active in the Labour Ministry’.Footnote ⁸¹ (Swiss experts were also sought out in the fields of legal reform and statistics.) (Figure 1)

Figure 1. ‘Foreign experts brought to the Ministry of Economy, at a meeting’. The photo appears to depict the visit of American Assistant Secretary of Commerce Julius Klein to Ankara in November 1930 (personal collection of the author).

Intuitively, this expert phenomenon might be explained as a simple form of knowledge transfer. In this view, the fledgling Turkish regime, lacking the know-how to fulfil certain tasks it had set for itself on the ‘road to civilisation’, relied on the technical knowledge of experts.Footnote ⁸² The impartiality of technical experts was an assumption partly promoted by Bayar himself. In mid-March 1938, as Lorenz was busy with his fieldwork, Bayar gave a speech on ‘the economic doctrine of Kemalism’. ‘Above all, we are realists’, the prime minister said. ‘Theories and doctrines are less relevant to us than realities and successes’.Footnote ⁸³ Yet it is difficult to see how Lorenz's expertise on reducing the cost of living was strictly necessary in the Turkish case, as Bayar took measures independent or even in contradiction of the report.

While there were certainly fields of development for which few suitable members of the Turkish population could be found, these processes ought to be understood, argues Heinrich Hartmann, ‘beyond an interpretative framework that understands expert knowledge as disseminating from informed academic agents to passive and ignorant target audiences’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Rather than a means of knowledge transfer, the deployment of experts was a measure used by Turkish politicians to push for particular policy aims, both within the ruling party and in public opinion.Footnote ⁸⁵ The stamp of approval, or even the bestowal of attention, from a Western European expert conferred legitimacy on the intended measure and was meant to prove that the government was ‘doing something’. This was especially true for Swiss experts, whose positive public reputation preceded Lorenz and were quoted in the contemporary press on issues ranging from the legal status of Hatay to the health benefits of milk. Lorenz's invitation, unbeknownst to Lorenz himself, served as a political instrument independent of the actual outcome of his research or the ideology he held. The press, too, pinned their hopes on Lorenz, almost creating the expectation that his mere gaze would be enough to reduce prices.Footnote ⁸⁶ The Swiss government also had an interest in such exchanges. As Tosca Martini argues, ‘the reputation of Swiss academia both as a privileged site for training foreign elites and as a reservoir of experts ready to be dispatched to markets abroad was, over the long term, a key element of Swiss economic promotion at the gates of Europe and around the world’.Footnote ⁸⁷

Just as experts could be mobilised by Turkish politicians for specific purposes, this mobilisation could be contested. Lorenz's visit came at a time at which the suffusion of Turkish state institutions with foreign experts was a point of vocal opposition. In 1939, for example, one member of Turkish parliament complained in frank language about the ‘report issue’. So-called experts travelled frequently, spending money that could have instead gone to the actual implementation of policy. Meanwhile, their reports were of questionable quality, sometimes simply repeating the content of previous reports. ‘This report business is a scourge on this country, my friends’, the deputy proclaimed.Footnote ⁸⁸ Experts’ findings could be contested and were frequently disregarded when they proved politically undesirable.Footnote ⁸⁹ The politics of experts was especially visible in a proposed transfer of expertise on statistics which did not happen in 1938. In that year, the League of Nations, as part of an effort to harmonise statistics and reduce the barriers to free trade, sought to facilitate a study tour in Europe for, among others, Turkey's deputy director of statistics, Sabit Aykut. Nevertheless, the attempt ended in failure after the two sides could not agree on the terms of the tour. The tour's organiser expressed exasperation with Aykut. ‘He seems’, he wrote privately to the League, ‘to have no very serious interest in any real improvement in the Turkish Statistical Services’. Yet Aykut's explanation for the frosty exchange is meaningful as well. He told the organisers ‘that if the Turkish Government needed to improve in any way their statistical services they could easily send the necessary personnel abroad without having to consult the League or to accept funds from foreign organizations’.Footnote ⁹⁰ The message was clear: Transfers of expertise from Western Europe would take place, if necessary, on Turkey's terms.

If we are to take seriously the notion that expertise could not be abstracted from politics, we should not be surprised to find a more fundamental worldview at work behind Lorenz's invitation. Indeed, Lorenz and Turkish leaders were bound by a shared drive to establish a world order made up of discreet national economies. J. Adam Tooze writes of the role of economic statistical experts in the ‘metaphorical constitution of the concept of national economy’ in the first half of the twentieth century. The rhetoric of de-ideologisation and push for rationalisation in the economy, now understood as a national unity, were part and parcel of this worldview. States did not just collect statistics, they needed them to achieve their desired balance of various sectors in the economy.Footnote ⁹¹ While Lorenz was a pioneer of cost-of-living statistics in Switzerland, his recruitment by Turkey should thus not be read as the transfer of knowledge from an advanced expert to a primitive state, but rather part of a simultaneous global transformation of economic statistics taking place between the 1920s and ’50s. He followed in the footsteps of German sociologists like Gerhard Kessler or national economists like Anton Fleck and Friedrich Hoffmann, who had for decades helped construct the Turkish national economy.Footnote ⁹² This shared international transformation took economic statistics from the realm of the liberal to the realm of the collective, to questions about prices, wages, production and costs that transcended individual ideologies but envisioned a more active role of the state in shaping the national economy as quickly as possible.Footnote ⁹³

While this article has argued that Lorenz's invitation to submit a report can best be understood in its Turkish domestic political context, it also argues that the report's contents must be understood in the personal context of Lorenz's ideological ambivalence. Lorenz has been remembered primarily in light of his Christian nationalism, antisemitism and xenophobia. While these are all important aspects of his ideology, his mission to Turkey adds a layer of complexity to our understanding of his character and advocacy. Lorenz's Aufgebot movement, Nicolas Haymoz claims, ‘stood squarely on the foundation of Christian-Western culture, for which it saw no alternative’. Nevertheless, Lorenz's admiration for Turkey and his portrayal of upstanding Turkish citizens as a model for the Swiss enjoin us to question Haymoz's claim that Das Aufgebot held an absolutely ‘clear line dividing the Christian Swiss from non-Christians […] or foreigners’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Lorenz was, above all, committed to the national economy; the xenophobia he expressed in the Swiss context did not preclude his enthusiasm for shared values he saw in non-Western, non-Christian Turkish society. Lorenz returned to Switzerland from Turkey only to zealously adopt the slogan ‘Switzerland for the Swiss’ (Die Schweiz den Schweizern), but he also certainly agreed with Atatürk's dictum, popular in Turkey at the time, ‘Turkey belongs to the Turks’ (Türkiye Türklerindir). The shedding of its multiethnic empire and its newfound ‘internal coherence’ was a key, Lorenz believed, to Turkey's future economic success.Footnote ⁹⁵

Aside from his ideological pursuits in Switzerland, this article has also presented Lorenz as a citizen-expert in the service of the Swiss state, the League of Nations and Turkish politics. An erstwhile colleague of pioneers of economic statistics like Ernst Wagemann or Corrado Gini,Footnote ⁹⁶ the nostalgic Lorenz nevertheless wore the mantle of expert statistician uncomfortably. Initially frustrated by statistics’ powerlessness during the war, he increasingly came to reject a modern world in which statistics alone defined value. His passion for numbers, admitted Lorenz in his autobiography, had ‘subsided’ over the years.

Lorenz's experience in Turkey, too, was a testament to this ambivalence. His official report shows what he was hired to do: crunch numbers. But his travel writings in Das Aufgebot belie his scepticism. In Turkey he saw a society not yet corrupted by the dictates of performance, measurability and efficiency that would inevitably come if his own recommendations were implemented. Strolling around the back streets of Istanbul's Spice Bazaar (Mısır Çarşısı), Lorenz, feeding his lifelong fascination with handicraft trades, stopped to observe a turner at work. He marvelled at the turner's command of his entire body as he fashioned a square piece of wood into a table leg, left hand spinning, right hand carving, feet guiding, shoulders hunching. ‘You never tire of watching’, he wrote. ‘And there are artisans like this of all varieties, who carry on creating according to age-old traditions – until one day, Turkey, too, will come to be ruled by the machine and you can buy a dozen, or a hundred, or ten thousand copies of something that today is produced excruciatingly, piece by piece’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Frugal, God-fearing artisans, content with their lot in life and confident in the direction their government was taking them: in Turkey, Lorenz found not a society to be reformed but the nostalgic and utopian vision he had for his own Switzerland.