What Comes Next -- Loyalty Oaths?

The real damage of last week’s abortive coup in Turkey is only now becoming apparent. Using the excuse of the coup, Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan has moved to implement political and administrative changes he could not get through the normal political process. Key to this move is purging thousands of civil servants, educators, judges, army officers who just might hold an opinion he doesn’t like. Then he declares a state of emergency.

The ‘cleansing’ was so swift and so thorough that very few people doubt these lists had been prepared long before the coup attempt. Now the state of emergency will give him unprecedented and unchecked powers to transform the country any way he likes. It would not be surprising if a new condition of military or civil service employment is swearing an oath of loyalty to Tayyip Erdoğan.

Could it get this bad in Turkey?

While the political damage is bad enough, the real long-term damage is to the country’s educational system. Erdoğan simply is not comfortable around very well educated, well-travelled people – people who tend to ask awkward questions. Thousands of teachers have been fired, university rectors forced to resign, and anyone identified as an ‘academic’ – formerly a title of some pride – has been banned from leaving the country. Erdoğan considers universities as breeding grounds for opposition to his grand ideas of a reformed Turkey. The only problem is that his vision of reform doesn’t include things like dissent, innovation, creativity, or – God forbid – smoking and drinking. Oh, and by the way, in Erdoğan’s Turkey, each bride would produce at least three children.

He gave lip service to the idea of more universities and then failed to staff them or staffed them mainly with his henchmen whose idea of a ‘proper’ student was someone who kept his mouth shut and did what he was told. A vice-rector of one of these new universities was quoted as saying how much more he preferred the company of illiterate peasants to his educated colleagues.

Turkey used to have a university system that proudly stood out in the region. Universities like the Middle East Technical University, the private Koç and Sabancı universities, Bosphorus University and others were centres of real scholarship. Now their very independence, the independence without which real scholarship and research do not exist, is under threat. Erdoğan cannot stand dissent or free thinking in any form. And can you think of any self-respecting university where dissent and free thinking are not critical parts of the entire process? He has yet to grasp the fact that some pretty good ideas emerge from just such messy dissent.

Erdoğan doesn’t care much about cultural creativity because such creativity is by definition messy and rebellious. One gets the impression that he and his followers much prefer the traditional sound of the Janissary band to the rebellious and defiant notes of Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony.

But Erdoğan should care a great deal about economic creativity and innovation – without which the country will remain buried in the Third Division. His loud chorus of supporters loves the statistics that Turkey is so much better off now than when the ruling party took power in 2002. True enough, but completely irrelevant. When the ruling Justice and Development Party took over the country was in a deep depression with a ruined financial system. By comparison, anything would look good. But the main reason for the improvement is that the government’s economic team followed the International Monetary Fund’s recovery prescription to the letter. By about 2010, Erdoğan got tired of those constraints and thought he could run things better. Big mistake.

The current trend is not healthy. Inflation is creeping back up, the currency is depreciating rapidly, unemployment is up, investment is down, growth has slowed, and the private sector is heavily indebted in foreign currency. Not a recipe for strong performance.

But more than the raw numbers, the very structure of the economy should concern any serious official. The Turkish economy is filled with yesterday’s businesses -- businesses like construction, cement, bottling, simple metal bashing, or assembly of someone else’s products. None of these produce much value added. Turkey has a strong food processing industry, but take a look at the equipment all those companies use. You will have a very hard time finding any part that is Made in Turkey.

Where is the innovation? Where is the investment? Where are the new, ground-breaking industries – industries that didn’t exist a few years ago and will lead the way into the future? Part of the answer is that Turkish businessmen tend to prefer construction – with a fairly definite payoff – to the potential, if unsure, rewards of investing in innovation.

Beyond investment, such innovation requires the very messy, creative, free-thinking environment that Erdoğan hates. Can you imagine that icon of free thinking, Steve Jobs, flourishing in an environment where dissent and free speech are crushed? Or just imagine Einstein with his radical theory of how the world really works flourishing in the oppressive Turkish environment.

Turkey does not lack for brilliant, talented people. But it is very hard to see them sticking around in such a stifling cultural, academic and economic environment. It is much easier to see that brilliance and talent flourishing in other countries.