Herkesin bir tarihi var.

Herkesin bir dili.

Ne anlatır size yalnızlık

Bana, beni.

Ne anlatır size ölüm

Bana, kederli annemi.

Dokunsak ışığa…

Silinse yüzlerimiz.

Ah o gözlerimiz.

Gözlerimiz.

-Kemal Kahraman

A small, dark office in the basement floor of an apartment building in Taksim. The sound of traffic filtering in from the busy street outside. Color photographs tacked to a wall next to a secretary's desk: two young girls in red posing in the lush grass, with mountains in the background. These are the two worlds of Gülümser Kalık. One, the workaday world of the center city. The other, a small village in eastern Turkey. Memories and the dream of return.

Est-ce donc vers le passé qu'il regardait, plutôt que vers l'avenir? Il n'est pas facile de trancher. Après tout, l'avenir est fait de nos nostalgies, de quoi d'autre?

Cet âge où les hommes de toutes origines vivaient côte à côte dans les Echelles du Levant et mélangeaient leurs langues, est-ce une réminiscence d'autrefois? est-ce une préfiguration de l'avenir? Ceux qui demeurent attachés à ce rêve sont-ils des passéistes ou bien des visionnaires? Je serais incapable de répondre. Mais c'est en cela que mon père croyait. En un monde couleur sépia oû un Turc et un Arménien pouvaient encore être frères.

Maalouf 1996, p. 49

An overview of general elections and the party system from the beginning of multi-party politics in Turkey would indicate a proclivity towards an increasing number of major parties coupled with fragmentation of the party system. The predominant party system of the 1950s favored stability over representativeness (see Table 1). The 1961 Constitution established new electoral rules and a liberal political regime, which provided for more opportunity for representativeness. The 1965 and 1969 elections produced party governments, with a proportional representation formula that wasted almost no votes; even those parties with the smallest number of followers won some seats in the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) (see Table 1). For a while in the 1960s Turkey therefore appeared to have discovered the optimal ground of converging stable governments with consummate representativeness. The party governments of the 1960s, however, gave way to the unstable coalition governments of the 1970s, which coincided with a wave of terror and political instability. Coalition governments came to be equated with political instability and terror in the minds of not only the masses, but also the most powerful political forces in the country.

What is the export-oriented manufacturing potential of provinces that have historically claimed a minuscule share of Turkey's industrial output? The answer is relevant to the ongoing re-evaluation of the country's growth strategy. On one side are the optimists who see the spatial expansion of the industrial base as evidence of Turkish entrepreneurs' ability to respond to new opportunities in an increasingly globalized market. On the other are the pessimists who read the same evidence as proof that Turkey's place in the global division of labor is as shaky as ever because it rests on low productivity-low wage labor.

Although road traffic accidents are a matter of considerable public concern in Turkey, they have attracted little systematic analysis from social scientists. This paper seeks to examine accident trends from 1955 to 1995, in terms of changes in fatalities per vehicle as well as fatalities per head of population. It then critically surveys the adequacy and applicability to the Turkish case of theories of motorization and accidents and of risk compensation and homeostasis. Finally, the paper speculates on how accident variation over time in Turkey may relate to wider social and economic processes.

In an article entitled “Non-Market Mechanisms of Market Formation: The Development of the Consumer Durables Industry in Turkey” which appeared in the Fall 1998 issue of this journal, Ayşe Buğra analyzes the nationwide network of sales agents organized by Arçelik, the first and the largest consumer durables producer in Turkey, and its role in the development of the consumer durables industry in the postwar era. She argues that in the absence of a market-forming role of the state and the limited availability of modern channels of publicity, “the increased sales of household durables required special mechanisms -both to create the need for the products and to facilitate payments for them” (Buğra 1998, p. 7). According to Buğra, under these circumstances Arçelik formed a network of sales agents for its products and this contributed, to a large extent, to the formation of a mass consumer market for household durables.