The main purpose of this paper is to present some basic information about the population of Turkey and its interpretation in a manner which readers of New Perspectives will find interesting for their purposes. One way to do this is to notice how certain population issues are handled in the public and scholarly discourse. Then, as a demographer and social scientist I will comment on some of these issues and hope to clarify them. Second is to present some of the main features of the macro-demography of Turkey. The account is unavoidably quantitative, but I hope digestible even by those who have aversions to numerical analysis. When the truly large changes in the size and age structure of the population are seen, important questions about the effect of these changes on other fields arise, and it is interesting to think about them. Third, the urbanization of Turkey is one of the central and most important changes in the demographic structure of the society during the last 40 years. I mention its characteristics along with a brief look at the effects on the demography of Istanbul.

While there are no less than 51 ethnic groups in Turkey according to a recent and comprehensive study (Andrews 1989b, pp.53-178), there is little that is demonstratively known on their present numbers and spatial distribution. Even on the size of the second largest ethnic group, the Kurds, the estimates vary between 3 to 20 million (Özsoy, Koç and Toros 1992, pp.101-114; Abramowitz 1993, p.174; Dickey 1993, p.33; Pelletiere 1985, pp.15-16, 28-31; Bayrak 1993, p.585; van Bruinessen 1992, p.35; Burkay 1992, pp.22-25). Yet knowledge of the sizes of ethnic groups and their geographic location, especially of the Kurds, is of immediate public interest from the standpoint of search, design and implementation of policies towards the solution of what has come to be called the Kurdish or the Southeastern problem, depending upon the protagonist's ethnic affiliation or sympathies.

The role of conflict has been integral to the state and nation formation in Turkey since the inception of the Republic in 1923. Faced with the twin tasks of democratic legitimacy and maintaining control, or security and civil-centered politics, the state has historically opted for authority and control. Ironically enough, while Republican politics has emphasized unity and uniformity to limit diversity and conflict caused by class, ethnicity and Islam, the result has been the opposite. So much so that the present conflict between the state and the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), which has cost nearly fourteen thousand lives since 1984, has reached an abysmal point: “in the end Turkey's victory may be a Pyrrhic one. If the conflict continues without exploration of other avenues, it will most likely jeopardize Turkey's relations with Europe and the United States” (Brown 1995, p. 128). Moreover, it has become increasingly clear that Kurdish nationalism is not just a simple expression of discontent and opposition but also a challenge to the very premises on which the Turkish nation-state has been built. In that sense, the resolution of the Kurdish “problem” is of concern not only to the Kurdish population of the Republic, but involves the future shape and substance of the Turkish state and society in their entirety as well.

In accord with a widespread belief that “modernization” brings about improvement in the quality of life, it is also sometimes assumed that in communities undergoing urbanization, industrialization, and mechanization the older generation will enjoy more leisure time than did their own parents. Whether or not this might be true generally, the reverse seems to be true for farm families in two villages in southwestern Turkey.

Thirty years ago, living in one of these villages, I was struck by a pattern that contrasted with my own experiences first as a Midwestern farmgirl and later as an urbanite in the Midwest and California. That is, parents in this village, dubbed Dutluk (Mulberry Orchard), typically enjoyed semi-retirement by the time their oldest son was in his mid-twenties. During this stage of their lives, these middle-aged and older people spent a good deal of their time in civic activities, socializing with friends, playing with the grandchildren, grooming the cows, etc. The older generation was also more likely than the younger one to perform the namaz (ritual prayer) daily. The married son(s) and daughter(s)-in-law did most of the strenuous work, although unmarried sons and daughters also did increasing amounts of work as they matured.

For a Turkish historian of the Ottoman Empire of the late nineteenth century, venturing into the Armenian crisis is like venturing into a minefield. It is fraught with dangers, the least of which is to be labeled a traitor by one's countrymen, and the worst of which is to be accused of being a “denialist” by one's Armenian colleagues. Even “balanced” analysis seems to have become politically incorrect of late, at least in some circles. The basic problem in the Armenian-Turkish polemic is that the sides do not actually address each other. They seize upon various capsule phrases, clichés and assumed political positions to heap opprobrium and abuse upon one another, to the point where we are confronted by something resembling a blood-feud. Thus Richard Hovanissian's obsession is to have the “Turkish side” admit, in a great ceremony of mea culpa, the claim of Genocide. On the other hand, Turkish historians and their like-minded foreign colleagues, at best, do contortionist acts to show that what happened to the Armenian people in 1915 does not fit the UN definition of genocide, which was fashioned after the Second World War to account for the Jewish Holocaust.

Much of the discussion today concerning economic development is confined to the polar opposites of the private market and centralized bureaucratic intervention. The dominant paradigm in economics nowadays bluntly claims that state economic interventionism strangles the economy and hinders the development of productive forces. Such a view leads to the neoconservative fallacy in politics that privatizing the public enterprises and rolling back the frontiers of the state will somehow “unstrangle” the economy.

Ottoman society and its medical system of the early modern period and the nineteenth-century demonstrate the marriage of medicine and power. I present the view from the imperial center and focus on the aims and wishes of the Ottoman elite and imperial authorities in İstanbul as they were embodied in state activities, such as formal decrees and policies meant to be implemented all over the empire. For the Ottoman elite, medicine was always a significant imperial tool, but it was neither the only tool of control, nor the most important one. The extent to which the Ottoman elite used medicine in its social policies changed over time. A comparison between the Ottoman use and distribution of health and food from the early modern period until the nineteenth century illustrates this point. It was especially during the nineteenth century that medicine was intentionally-and successfully-implemented as a mechanism of control in the Ottoman Empire.

As Islam becomes an increasingly salient element of political life in various countries around the world, there is a growing need to make sense of the new forms and meanings Islam assumes in its various manifestations. It is obvious by now that complex mechanisms surrounding the politics of Islam cannot be adequately understood by the employment of such broad and overgeneralizing categories as “reactionism”, “fundamentalism” or “conservatism.” Political Islam, far from being a unified social movement with a coherent political aim, is a fragmented, multi-faceted phenomenon which cannot, therefore, be adequately understood through singular categories.

This paper aims to propose a political economy framework to analyze environmental problems in Turkey. A political economy approach seems to be the appropriate way of investigating environmental issues, as not only are economy and the environment interwoven entities, changes in one affecting the other, but also collective actions are almost always required in dealing with such problems. With this integrated approach one can thus better understand the causes of such a degradation and subsequently search for the economic and political conditions that are conducive to halt environmental degradation.

Despite its theoretical and implementational problems, conventional economic theory has a well developed body of tools for examining environmental degradation, i.e. pollution and overuse of natural resources. But the theory assumes the existence and competence of a rather sterile political authority which enforces corrective measures. The corollary of this assumption is that the enforceability of these measures will become lax should there exist various forms of government failures. This paper will focus on Turkey as an example of a country where such government failures have been a priori accepted.

Anyone who watched the televison coverage of, or read about the African famine some years ago could not help but be appalled by the many obstacles erected to impede the progress of getting food to the starving millions in Ethiopia, Somalia and the Sudan. While it is true that the difficult terrain, an inhospitable climate and the lack of rain were partly responsible for the large-scale spread of famine and dearth in the African sub-continent, it is also true that local governments were responsible for creating impediments to the alleviation of mass hunger and starvation. Governments waging war against secessionist regimes and rebel armies used political means—primarily blockades of grain and other foodstuffs—to starve the enemy forces, creating misery among the military as well as civilian populations in the rebel areas.

Like in other parts of Europe and, indeed, the United States, early initiatives in the Ottoman Empire for higher education in business date back to the second half of the 19th century. After a number of aborted attempts, the opening of a commercial school in İstanbul (Hamidiye Ticaret Mektebi) in 1883 under the auspices of the Ministry of Trade marked the beginning of business education in the Empire, purportedly, at the “higher” level. The Commercial School was closed down in 1890 and re-opened in 1894, attached this time to the Ministry of Education. It went through a restructuring in 1915 that led to a demarcation between an upper and a junior division. The School served as the sole provider of business education till it was inherited by the Turkish Republic and remained so for more than another decade. From the second opening until the founding of the Republic, it had an average of around 12 graduates per year, which increased to about 24 in the period up to the mid-1930s.

Throughout the Ottoman Empire, land was always the major source of revenue and surplus and thus inevitably a major source of contention. Myriad property-rights disputes were recorded in the registers of the local kadı courts and archives of the various ministries in Istanbul. Conflicts over the agricultural surplus revealed in such documentation demonstrate, for instance, that peasants in the sixteenth century not only contested taxes imposed on them but also opposed the illegal transfer of land titles by the sipahis (İnalcık 1997, p. 72). By the middle of the sixteenth century, the practice of selling state-owned miri lands–which by legal definition could not be bought or sold–had become widespread, sometimes even confirmed by the rulings of the local kadı courts. The stamp of şeriyye implicit in the kadı's ruling meant in effect that the land subject to sale was taken out of the miri land regime and placed in the legal category of freehold mülk lands (İnalcık 1997, p. 112).