Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey: Governing Through Smoke 9781472594587, 9781472508737, 9781472509413

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The visible hands
Commodity
Belatedness
Outline
Part I: Politics
1. Travel of Experts, Policies, and Institutions
Technocrat as a superman
(Re)making the law
Good governance, bad governance
Framing the economy
Emerging institutions
2. Opening the Black Box of Law
The Tobacco Law
A gift to the IMF
A meeting in the Turkish Assembly
3. Policy in the Making
Regulating under uncertainty
Conflict I: Machines and reports
Conflict II: Tax and blends
Assessment
Part II: Markets
4. Remaking the Tobacco Market
Counting tobacco bales as votes
The representation of the oversupply
Framing tobacco
200 kilograms of tobacco
Dispossessed citizens
5. Borders of the Market
Complicit state
Outside the market
Western tobacco market
Eastern tobacco market
Part III: Citizens
6. Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and Resistance
Privatization of TEKEL
Providing “hizmet”
Different citizenships
Workers and the “people”
7. Making Healthy Good Citizens
Oriental tobacco cigarettes
New public health
Purification of bodies
Healthy non-smoking Muslims
8. Smoking Tobacco, Speaking Nationalism
Régie
Germans
Jews
Americans
Communists
Conclusion
Ethnographic questions
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey

Suspensions: Contemporary Middle Eastern and Islamicate Thought Series editors: Jason Mohaghegh and Lucian Stone This series interrupts standardized discourses involving the Middle East and the Islamicate world by introducing creative and emerging ideas. The incisive works included in this series provide a counterpoint to the reigning canons of theory, theology, philosophy, literature, and criticism through investigations of vast experiential typologies— such as violence, mourning, vulnerability, tension, and humor—in light of contemporary Middle Eastern and Islamicate thought. Iranian Identity and Cosmopolitanism, Lucian Stone On the Arab Revolts and the Iranian Revolution, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam The Politics of Writing Islam, Mahmut Mutman The Writing of Violence in the Middle East, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey Governing Through Smoke Ebru Kayaalp

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Ebru Kayaalp, 2015 Ebru Kayaalp has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-0873-7 PB: 978-1-4742-9600-7 ePDF: 978-1-4725-0941-3 ePub: 978-1-4725-1199-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Series: Suspensions: Contemporary Middle Eastern and Islamicate Thought Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Printed and bound in Great Britain

To my daughter

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction The visible hands Commodity Belatedness Outline

1 3 5 8 11

Part I  Politics 1

2

3

Travel of Experts, Policies, and Institutions Technocrat as a superman (Re)making the law Good governance, bad governance Framing the economy Emerging institutions

17

Opening the Black Box of Law The Tobacco Law A gift to the IMF A meeting in the Turkish Assembly

35

Policy in the Making Regulating under uncertainty Conflict I: Machines and reports Conflict II: Tax and blends Assessment

49

19 22 25 27 30

37 38 42

51 54 58 63

Part II  Markets 4

Remaking the Tobacco Market Counting tobacco bales as votes The representation of the oversupply

71 73 77

viii Contents

5

Framing tobacco 200 kilograms of tobacco Dispossessed citizens

78

Borders of the Market Complicit state Outside the market Western tobacco market Eastern tobacco market

91

82 85

93 95 99 102

Part III  Citizens 6

7

8

Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and Resistance Privatization of TEKEL Providing “hizmet” Different citizenships Workers and the “people”

109

Making Healthy Good Citizens Oriental tobacco cigarettes New public health Purification of bodies Healthy non-smoking Muslims

123

Smoking Tobacco, Speaking Nationalism Régie Germans Jews Americans Communists

135

111 113 116 118

125 127 129 130

136 140 142 145 148

Conclusion   Ethnographic questions

151

Notes Bibliography Index

157

153

197 213

Acknowledgments It would be impossible to name everyone who has helped me to produce this book. Yet there are a number of people who have remained particularly significant. The book grows out of research that I conducted for my doctoral dissertation at the Department of Rice Anthropology. My advisors, friends, and colleagues at Rice Anthropology have certainly played the most significant part in the formation of this book. I am deeply grateful to George Marcus and James Faubion for being endless sources of intellectual inspiration and guidance. I consider myself very lucky for the opportunity to have them as my mentors. My deepest gratitude also goes out to Chris Kelty who read and criticized a myriad of drafts, and provided much insightful feedback. I thank Hannah Landecker for her unfailing intellectual and moral support. She always shared my enthusiasm and became a constant source of motivation. I am also indebted to Stephen Tyler and Mahmoud Amin El-Gamal for their invaluable feedback in the early stages of this research. The fieldwork and writing phases of the book took place in various locations. In Turkey, my greatest debt goes to the tobacco experts in İzmir, Akhisar, Kiraz, Adıyaman, Batman, Malatya, Sason, Diyarbakır, Ankara, Bafra, Samsun, and Istanbul, who opened their community to me and provided every possible facility to make my life easier in the field. My thanks also go out to the wonderful people in TEKEL, the Tobacco Regulatory Agency, tobacco leaf companies, multinational cigarette manufacturers, and tobacco farmers, who were so kind as to offer me their support. I cannot emphasize enough the contributions of my friends to this book. In Houston, my friends Erkan Saka, Elitza Ranova, Nahal Naficy, Ayla Samlı, Anthony Potoczniak, Valerie Olson, Katia Belousova, and Ertan Sönmez provided emotional and intellectual support at crucial points of this project. In Istanbul, Çağla Diner, Asena Günal, Elif Pars, and Didem Danış were always with me through their unending expressions of friendship and belief in my research. In Ankara and İzmir, I want to thank my friends Gönül Ünal and Ebru Baydar for opening their hearts and homes to me. In New York, I offer my heartfelt thanks to Aslı Peker for years of friendship, support, and intellectual inspiration. I want to thank Katayoun Shafiee for sharing her knowledge

x Acknowledgments

and friendship with me. I am also grateful to Janet Roitman for her thoughtful insights, comments, and criticisms on one of my chapters. I was extremely fortunate to receive generous financial support at all stages of researching and writing process. I wish to thank the Social Science Research Council (through two grants), the American Research Institute in Turkey and the Rice University for generously supporting my research and writing. Thanks are due also to the Department of Politics at New York University, where much of this book was revised by the grant provided by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. I am grateful to these institutions for making this book possible. A different version of Chapter 3 was originally published in Regulation and Governance 6 (2): 225–41, with the title, “Torn in Translation: An Ethnographic Study of Regulatory Decision-Making in Turkey” and Chapter 5 was published in Turkish in Toplum ve Bilim, 124 (2012): 165–84, with the title, “Piyasanın Sınırları: Yeni bir Tütün Piyasası Nasıl Kurulur?” I am grateful to these journals for permission to reprint these essays here. This book took its final shape during the years that I spent as an assistant professor at Istanbul Şehir University, Turkey. At Şehir, I have been blessed to find a community of friends who enthusiastically gave me invaluable assistance and encouragement. I would especially like to thank Fatih Altuğ, Fahrettin Altun, Canan Balan, Ümit Cizre, Peyami Çelikcan, Aslı Telli, Fatih Uslu, and Zeynep Merve Uygun. I am particularly indebted to Mahmut Mutman for his unflagging support from the beginning to the end of the writing process. I am very fortunate to have the help of Eylem Akçay, Alba Brunetti, Will Day, Baran Karsak, Derya Jurich, Oya Pars, and Ayşe Yılmaz, who supplied enormous assistance when I was writing the book. I am also grateful to my editors, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh and Lucian Stone, whose comments and attention have enriched this book deeply. I could have accomplished nothing without the patience and love of my parents, Turan and Perihan Kayaalp. My brother Cüneyt and his wife Firdevs Kayaalp were always with me, selflessly providing practical support and constant motivation. My deepest gratitude goes to Jack Jurich, who listened to, read, and edited this book countless times. I am thankful to him for his care, encouragement, and love, and moreover, for the pleasure of life beyond work. I dedicate this book to my daughter, Zeynep Thalia, who was with me all the time on this journey.

Introduction It was the first week of my temporary work at the Tobacco Experts Association in İzmir. I was spending all my time there, carrying out archival research, working on the tobacco experts’ grant application to the European Union, and hosting visitors to the Association’s small apartment in the center of town. I was extremely careful about everything. Mostly sitting at the desk reserved for me, I spent much time trying to figure out what would be the “right time” to ask questions, join in the conversation, or even go to the kitchen to have another cup of tea. This overly controlled life was upsetting. Although I knew it was a temporary situation, it was quite exhausting to be so self-conscious all the time. I wondered if my paranoid state of mind stemmed simply from the anxiety of being in the field for a while, or originated from a sense of my interlocutors’ possible doubts about my research. In any case, I knew that something big was coming. One morning, my “boss” Ahmet Bey,1 who helped me to secure the position at the Association, came into the office and closed the door behind him in a serious manner. I had learned by experience that when the door was closed, the experts would talk about politics, and in the first days, I was always left out. But this time, the door was closed for me, and in his quick and straightforward way, Ahmet Bey practically spat the words out: AB: I know it is not true. But there is a rumour among the experts that you might have been sent by the CIA. EK: Me? A CIA agent? And I was sent for what? To check the tobacco quality of Turkey? To secretly smuggle tobacco leaves to the US? To provide them with information about the cultivation of tobacco produced in Turkey?

I could not help but to burst into laughter. It was too sudden, too unexpected, and too ridiculous. I thought it was a joke, but it was not. Ahmet Bey, although assuring me that he did not believe the rumors, was not smiling at all. This awkward confrontation magically broke the ice between the experts and myself, and made us counterparts, looking at the same object, tobacco, albeit for different reasons. After the shock of this event, I was intrigued by the possibility that the experts believed that tobacco cultivated in Turkey had such

2

Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey

global significance that the US would send CIA agents to gather information about it. Did they honestly think that the world’s eyes were on Turkish tobacco? What was so special about tobacco that it led the experts to fabricate conspiracy theories about it? In the following days, this encounter with the eccentric world of tobacco would assure me that there was something more to tobacco than it being a simple crop. I felt that I was on the right track and decided to enter this world with the experts. I have chosen to study tobacco not only because Turkey ranks as the seventh largest tobacco producing country in the world, but also because this crop has lately become the basis of controversial economic and political debates in Turkey, such as the implementation of the new tobacco law enacted in response to demands from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the establishment of the tobacco regulatory board, the restructuring of the tobacco market, the privatization of the state run tobacco monopoly, the massive protests of tobacco workers, and the contentious smoking-ban in public spaces. Through following tobacco from fields to multinational cigarette factories, I have connected local issues to a broader global picture in which emerging neoliberal policies, regulations, and standards introduced in the tobacco sector, though guided by different forms of expertise, are linked to each other. The recent legal, economic, and technical changes are intertwined and complementary (though not always harmonious), and govern every detail of the tobacco sector. This book is an ethnographic investigation of how neoliberal ideas, policies, experts, and institutions are being adopted from the West, translated into a national setting, and sometimes articulated with Islamic conservatism in Turkey. It aims to reveal the repercussions of neoliberal policies unleashed in the areas of law and market over the last ten years of Turkey’s history. This broad topic is analyzed through a particular methodology—namely, an ethnographic investigation of the newly established tobacco market in Turkey. In spite of the outset impression that the book would cover wide-ranging issues, from legal restructuring to neoliberal economic and political reforms and different citizenship regimes, it does not seek to give an encompassing, comprehensive account of each realm. Rather, it is an attempt to reveal the stitches connecting these different realms through analyzing the processes by which a crop becomes a commodity. In neoliberal times, although the amount of time required to produce agricultural crops may have decreased, the number of actors involved in this process has gradually increased. As the chain between production and consumption of a commodity grows longer and

Introduction

3

more complicated, different actors, new institutional mechanisms, and diverse processes are required for a given thing to become a commodity. In this book, I seek to shed light on the connections among such actors and reveal their hidden networks.

The visible hands Making visible the invisible hands of the new tobacco market is one of the goals of this book. However, since a brief introduction to the tobacco sector is required to understand the first-hand relations among major actors, in this section only the visible hands and connections will be discussed. Similar to many other developing countries, Turkey followed a path of planned economic development across the 1960s and 1970s that could be described as statist, protectionist, and inward looking. Yet in the aftermath of a wave of crises that started with the Mexican debt crisis of 1982 and spread to other developing countries, such inward looking policies became subject to heavy criticism, particularly by the IMF and the World Bank. Under pressure from this criticism, the Turkish government implemented a number of major stabilization programs, with strong external support from international financial institutions. However, these programs, which aimed to reduce government regulation of the economy by increasing the involvement of market forces, came to an end with the outbreak of several financial downturns. Among them was the most severe economic turmoil to date in Turkish history: the February 2001 crisis, which in many ways is the starting point of this book, as it provided an avenue for a new wave of economic restructuring. Financial crisis brings new blueprints. Together with the crisis in Turkey came a political project to legitimize the swift implementation of far-reaching neoliberal policies meant to fix the collapsed economy. In order to receive the loans from the IMF and the World Bank, the Turkish government passed a number of sweeping laws in a very short period of time—among them, a new tobacco law. In line with commitments to the IMF and the World Bank, on January 3, 2002, the Turkish Parliament ratified a new law to deregulate the tobacco industry. The proposed law replaced a price support system with one based on contract farming, and eliminated tobacco purchases by the state. It mandated a gradual privatization of the state tobacco monopoly, TEKEL,2 and reorganized the manufacturing of tobacco products and trading. Lastly, it established a tobacco regulatory agency, TAPDK,3 the sole agent authorized to regulate the sector.

4

Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey

Turkey is the world’s largest producer and a major exporter of Oriental tobacco.4 But in recent years the amount of tobacco grown in Turkey has been in steady decline, with the number of cultivators dropping by 63 percent: from 583,000 in 2000 to 215,000 in 2006.5 Accelerating the downward trend was the introduction of contract farming implemented under the new tobacco law, a matter central to this study. Not only tobacco production rates, but also rates of consumption are quite high in Turkey. The old expression “smokes like a Turk” is still valid; the country has become one of the largest consumers of cigarettes over the years. In the years 1960–2000, cigarette sales grew more than four times. However, due to a series of laws banning smoking, the annual per capita cigarette consumption fell by 22.8 percent between 2000 and 2011.6 Turkish smokers, who used to consume the low-priced, Oriental tobacco cigarettes of the state monopoly TEKEL, were introduced to American blend cigarettes during the 1970s, when foreign brands were smuggled into the country, evading the gaze of TEKEL, which was then the sole institution with the right to manufacture and sell tobacco products.7 In 1984, the ban on importing foreign brand cigarettes was lifted. And in 1986, the Turkish government announced that it would open its market to foreign cigarette manufacturers as part of an effort to follow economic liberalization policies and to prevent a black market in American blend cigarettes. Yet foreign companies faced a precondition: they were compelled to make joint investments with TEKEL. Later, in 1991, cigarette multinationals were granted the right to market, price, and distribute their own cigarettes, and establish their own facilities in the country. One of the immediate effects of this new regulation was the establishment of Philsa, a joint venture of Philip Morris and one of the largest holding companies in Turkey, Sabancı Holding. R. J. Reynolds, which would later be bought by Japanese Tobacco International (JTI), followed Philip Morris and established a factory in 1993. British American Tobacco (BAT), European Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco, and Gallaher also invested in Turkey in the following years. The tobacco commodity chain also involves tobacco leaf companies, which work as intermediary merchants between tobacco growers and multinational cigarette manufacturers. After buying the yield from growers on contracted terms, they process it (such as cleaning, grading, resorting, and drying) and then sell it to cigarette companies. Over the years a number of local companies operating with relatively low levels of capital were marginalized and eventually disappeared from the competitive leaf market, leaving international companies to dominate the tobacco leaf sector in Turkey. These companies, along with

Introduction

5

TEKEL, export processed tobacco to cigarette manufacturers abroad and meet leaf demand in Turkey. In the 1960s and 1970s, TEKEL’s revenues made up 6–7 percent of the country’s total budget.8 And in the 1990s, the monopoly was ranked as the fifth largest producer of cigarettes in the world. However, the market share of Virginia tobacco, which is used in American blend cigarettes, rapidly grew with a concomitant decline in the demand for Oriental tobacco. With the influx of American blend cigarettes, TEKEL quickly lost its dominance in the tobacco market. In 2002, when the tobacco law was enacted, TEKEL’s regulatory role was delegated to the newly established tobacco regulatory agency, TAPDK, and the monopoly was privatized in 2008. With the new tobacco law, new actors (technocrats), new policies (contract farming), and new institutions (regulatory agency) were introduced to rearrange the tobacco sector. The economic restructuring has created and empowered some actors while marginalizing others. The basic actors in this story are the tobacco monopoly (TEKEL), the tobacco regulatory agency (TAPDK), the Ministry of Finance, tobacco leaf companies, multinational cigarette manufacturers, tobacco experts, policymakers, farmers, and of course tobacco.

Commodity From the first day of this research, I have stuck to the idea of studying a commodity. This starting point has made my life in the field (ethnography) and at the desk (writing) easier. Making a commodity the object of analysis has enabled me not only to bypass dilemmas in the representation of people and cultures so widely discussed and criticized in anthropology,9 but also to transcend facile distinctions between humans and nonhumans so often drawn in the social sciences. Since the foundational studies of Mauss10 and Malinowski,11 anthropologists have recognized the significance of the exchange and circulation of things. Commodity analysis has become a means to understand the connections and contrasts across multiple research sites.12 Mintz’s study13 on sugar is an excellent example of how the analysis of particular commodities in circulation can reveal barely visible social, political, and economic relations. Following a thing, which “involves tracing the circulation through different contexts,” is “perhaps the most common approach to the ethnographic study of

6

Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey

processes in the capitalist world system.”14 This mode is one of the techniques of multi-sited ethnography.15 Yet, as Marcus suggests, there are only a small number of truly multi-sited ethnographies examining the contemporary capitalist political economy through a thing-oriented perspective. This book, focusing on a particular commodity in order to map out the connections across multiple research sites, aims to add to this number. Overall, there are three main perspectives focusing on commodities as their unit of analysis in the social sciences: 1) Commodity Chain Analysis, introduced and developed by Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein; 2) Regimes of Value, adopted by Arjun Appadurai; and 3) Things as Actants, employed by Actor Network theorists. Each places commodities/things at the center of its analysis, but differs in its particular approach to commodities. Within world system theory, Hopkins and Wallerstein16 introduce commodity chain analysis to investigate processes between micro and macro levels. This approach is further developed by Gereffi and Korzeniewicz,17 who introduce the concept of the global commodity chain, and discuss this concept through specific case studies, with a particular focus on industrial products. Several studies18 discuss the circulation of agricultural crops in a globalized world. Although these works introduce new methodological tools to the study of connections between micro and macro structures by tracking the circulation of commodities, they have several shortcomings. One of the most fundamental criticisms is that the principal interzonal movements across commodity chains are in the direction of periphery to core. Although these studies acknowledge the complexity of the world economy, their analysis still rests upon a dichotomous geographical imagination of core and periphery, metropolis and satellite. States situated in the core enjoy competitive power over peripheral areas, and changes in the circulation of commodity chains are explained by the cyclical rhythms of the world economy as the outcome of the hierarchical relationship between core and periphery countries. Furthermore, the picture drawn in commodity chain analysis falls apart when tasked with representing the realities of life. In spite of its strong emphasis on process and circulation, this perspective, so reliant on historical data rather than ethnographic fact, does not consider the daily life practices of concrete social actors. This absence of ethnographic research leads to deterministic, oversimplified representations. Through the concept of “regimes of value,” Appadurai brings a fresh perspective to commodity studies.19 First, Appadurai shows that values attached to certain commodities reflect power relations: local producers and consumers “are intimately tied to larger regimes of value defined by large-scale polities.”20

Introduction

7

Second, Appadurai’s schema highlights the importance of larger, often hidden, knowledge relations that characterize commodities. Third, he treats objects as living beings, having “social lives,” and only through the analysis of the “lives” of things can their social context be appreciated. Equally important in Appadurai’s analysis is the argument that things-in-motion have different “paths and diversions.” Every society determines paths for the production, exchange, and circulation of objects, and “determinations are made about what objects may be exchanged for what, by whom, when, and under what conditions.”21 The commodity status of an object within a given context is always socially determined: the value of a commodity changes according to different contexts. Appadurai’s insights on “regimes of value” are similar to Thomas’s work on “contexts.”22 Thomas emphasizes the movement of things into and out of different categories and their relationships to persons. The movement of objects across contexts, which he calls “recontextualizations,” lies at the complex intersection of temporal, cultural, and social factors. Similarly, for Weiner, Myers, and Miller, 23 the movement of commodities is essential. These studies all place commodities and their circulation at the center of analysis, examining different “regimes of value” in different contexts. Although Appadurai’s argument—that whereas “from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context”24—pays sufficient attention to things, at the same time it implies a distinction between things and human beings. It situates things at the center of analysis without granting them agency. In the last analysis, it is still human beings who possess transformative power over the social. Actor Network Theory (ANT), by contrast, endows nonhumans with agency.25 Not only humans, but also nonhumans (such as machines, things, bacteria) have agencies. Actants, in Latour’s terms, have their own forms of transformative power, and human survival is significantly dependent on the capabilities of nonhumans. These studies clearly illustrate that agency is not solely contained in either human beings or social structures. In a similar vein, this book, along with human subjects, considers tobacco as a main actor, a crop with its own forms of agency and transformative power. Although ANT has greatly inspired my work, this study also diverges from an ANT perspective in certain ways. I have made use of ANT mainly as a methodology, a tool enabling me to uncover invisible connections spanning multiple sites. As tobacco circulates, I follow it across different sites, institutions, markets, and fields. The path tobacco follows shows an assemblage of

8

Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey

both humans (policymakers, experts, bureaucrats, farmers, merchants) and nonhumans (machines, technical reports, formulas, cigarettes). ANT has helped me to envision and map out this complicated and sprawling field. Further inspired by ANT, I have concentrated on documenting processes of “knowledge in the making” through which the tobacco world is being constantly governed. In other words, rather than relying on pre-existing structures or a priori assumptions, I am more interested in studying the emergent processes of decision-making concerning political and economic issues. Yet ANT is not without its critics, particularly for its alleged inability to expose structures of domination and power such as racism, patriarchy, and Eurocentrism. The goal of ANT, in this line of criticism, remains limited to documenting the ways in which different actors contribute to shaping a network, rather than uncovering hidden power relations.26 Thanks to ANT’s methodological flexibility, however, the incorporation of questions of power into ANT’s framework is not a difficult task, as evidenced by several studies27 combining ANT with Foucauldian analyzes of power relations. In Turkey, where the laws are enacted in the context of commitments made to international financial institutions, analysis must attend to the role of power relations in the constitution of knowledge-making. Thus, while borrowing certain methodological and theoretical tools from ANT to analyze the processes of knowledge creation in networks, I try to complement such an analysis with a substantive study of power relations.

Belatedness Sometimes anthropologists do not have to travel. People, things, metaphors, and conflicts we chase after find us somewhere in their itineraries. Our ways somehow overlap. And sometimes we travel to places where our subjects are located but as soon as we settle down in these cities, forests, villages, institutions, and laboratories, we see them leaving. They have their own lives. Experts come and go. Markets open and close. Metaphors appear and disappear. Not being as fast, fluid, and flexible as our subjects, we try to figure out what the next step will be. We always follow them one step behind. We are belated anthropologists.28 When I started conducting fieldwork, several issues that I was interested in were already over. The most severe financial crisis to date in Turkish history occurred in 2001. The tobacco law was enacted in 2002. A series of corruption cases in the tobacco sector had come and gone. Yet the present was no less

Introduction

9

troublesome than the past. Markets have always changed faster than their followers. And nor was I the only one struggling with this ever-changing amorphous assemblage. Policymakers have faced similar problems in their efforts to understand the uncertainty of markets. Because of the “temporal incongruity”29 between the knowledge of markets and transformations taking place therein, unconventional strategies such as following speculations, rumors, and intuition provide windows onto these messy worlds. On the one hand, following a commodity has made my life easier by enabling me to situate fieldwork “out of time,” but on the other, focusing on the emergent and conducting research with temporal distinctiveness (“everything started after the February 2001 crisis in Turkey”) has made my life difficult. The reconciliation of these different tempos, and the movement from events to conceptual ideas, are some of the challenges animating this work. Another challenge had to do with being a mobile ethnographer chasing after a commodity in multiple sites. Localized fieldwork originates from the traditional ethnographic idea of travelling to a place where your informants live and staying there long enough to understand their habits and norms, followed by a period of writing up your observations. But what if the anthropologist is not merely studying people, but a fluid network of humans and nonhumans? What if her subjects travel, change, and even expire? What if the boundaries of her research are not limited to a community, neighborhood, religion, or ethnicity? A growing number of anthropological studies no longer fit the conventional form of ethnography in single sites with traditional writing tropes of “being there.”30 An anthropology of the contemporary31 seeks to go beyond descriptive accounts of other cultures and to concentrate on knowledge-making processes, as is the case with my research. I believe that the only way to understand the complexities of the tobacco world is to pass through its fluid networks. Sticking to fieldwork conducted in a tobacco town would simply have led me to an identity-dominated cultural analysis, the challenges and problems of which are well-established. The study of culture is not the central object of the ethnographic work I conducted. Keeping a “critical distance” with culture and questions of representing my interlocutors no longer make sense in this study, as the scale of the project has shifted from the investigation of culture to the assemblages emerging around a crop. On such a new scale, there is neither an “Other” to be investigated, nor an “Other culture” to be found.32 I carried out multi-sited ethnography33 for more than two years (September 2005–March 2008). In following the tobacco leaf from fields to factories, the sites of my fieldwork expanded from vast tobacco fields to the fancy rooms of

10

Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey

multinationals, the dark offices of the tobacco monopoly, the cubicles of the regulatory agency, the formal corridors of the Assembly, the dusty archives in libraries, and the front seats of tobacco experts’ cars by which we traveled to villages. I spent a year at the Tobacco Experts Association in İzmir, which has been actively working to promote the interests of the tobacco sector since 1948. The experts, without whom this study would not be possible, allowed me to see how they work, and the ways in which they determine the value and standards of tobacco. I traveled with them to numerous villages, interviewed high ranking government bureaucrats, attended tobacco-related parliamentary meetings in Ankara, graded tobacco leaves in farmers’ barns, and witnessed tobacco smuggling in villages. Further fieldwork took place in the vast tobacco fields in eastern and western Turkey, where I had the chance to interview tobacco cultivators. I was also able to examine marketing practices through visits to both public and private cigarette manufacturing factories, as well as to tobacco leaf companies. My fieldwork in the tobacco regulatory agency and the Assembly also aimed to scrutinize the legal transformations that occurred after the enactment of the tobacco law in 2002. This delocalized study not only enabled me to pursue a very mobile process across different sites, but also to unfold hidden connections and relations in an emerging tobacco market. Fieldwork sometimes tells one more about the past than the present. While the past unfolds itself, it then reveals the present. Certain moments in the field constantly denoting the events of the past in the form of persistent themes and metaphors become shortcut ways to summarize the entire story happening today without resorting to an abundance of words. For example, “It is the return of Régie”34 has been the motto of tobacco experts while describing a series of unfavorable situations in the Turkish tobacco sector stretching from the privatization of the monopoly to the dominance of the multinational cigarette companies. The same themes pop up over and over again with undeniable significance. For me, these sentences are valuable as they represent simply how my informants imagine the “tobacco world.” This world is established in consistent reference to the past. This is the reason why, as an anthropologist, I spent a considerable amount of time doing archival research. Rather than looking for a coherent, unilinear explanation in the history of events, a deconstruction of these particular moments is required to disclose the present. This book is about neither peasants nor agrarian studies. Rather, it looks at how policies are made, markets are reconstituted and citizens are governed

Introduction

11

in non-Western countries. Drawing on a unique combination of Science and Technology Studies with a Foucauldian analysis of governmentality,35 I consider the diverse effects of neoliberalism on policy-making, markets, and citizenship. The book discusses current debates on economic and political transformation in Turkey, and contributes to the development of theories of neoliberal governmentality in the Middle East. In this respect, it seeks to provide an innovative contribution to anthropology, sociology, political economy, and Middle Eastern studies, and constitutes a significant departure from the regrettably small corpus of anthropological work on Turkey, a rather neglected area of study in the social sciences.

Outline Chapter 1 is an historical and critical explanation of the emergence of the technocratic practices and institutions established after the February 2001 financial downturn. The crisis not only accelerated the implementation of economic liberalization, but also assisted the legitimization of a neoliberal agenda enforced by the IMF and the World Bank. In order to bring the political and economic structures of Turkey into line with the so-called global standards of the West, a number of institutions were established to separate politics from economics. The chapter discusses this history in the context of an emerging bureaucratic environment wherein the political domain is considered supplementary to the economy, and the mingling of politics and economics must be prevented to avoid corrupt practices in non-Western countries. What I investigate here, in other words, is a neoliberal project that involves reframing politics as a set of technical practices, institutions, and experts tasked with establishing a legitimate environment for the operation of markets, limiting all forms of political debate and confrontation to the confined, determined boundaries of institutions, boards, committees, and agencies. On January 3, 2002, the Turkish Parliament ratified a law designed to deregulate the tobacco industry in accordance with commitments made to the IMF and the World Bank. Although the consequences of the tobacco law were substantial, what I discuss in Chapter 2 is another significant but understudied aspect of this legal process, namely how the tobacco law was put into practice in Turkey. First, I analyze the parliamentary minutes of the debates concerning the tobacco law, and second, I relay an ethnographic account of a meeting I attended in the assembly almost four years after the legislation. The “past” and

12

Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey

“present” cases illustrate some of the ways in which the separation between the political and technical aspects of the law has resulted not only in premature and superficial discussions in the parliament, but also in the exclusion of vulnerable populations from debate, deliberation, and decision-making. Based upon an ethnographic account of Turkey’s tobacco regulatory agency, TAPDK, Chapter 3 is an attempt to disclose the ways in which institutions “imported” from the West function in receiving countries. Specifically, in order to understand the decision-making process of these institutions, I look at two conflicting cases brought before the tobacco regulatory board. I argue that the travelling of standardized institutions and their policies has not resulted in a simple process of replication, since global institutional models are transformed as they move into new settings. What is significant here is the dynamic process of translation itself, which produces something new, regardless of pre-existing choices and categories. Therefore, quite apart from arguments to the effect that the policies of regulatory agencies are designed to be rational, structured, and carefully considered ideas, my ethnographic research suggests that in terms of policy-making in the tobacco regulatory agency, a myriad of interactions emerging from a heterogeneous network play a critical governing role. Chapter 4 examines efforts to create a new tobacco market in Turkey. With the introduction of neoliberal agricultural reform policies, particularly the tobacco law of 2002, the Turkish government, working in conjunction with international financial institutions, initiated an all-encompassing project that would restructure tobacco production and marketing. One part of the project aimed to introduce contract farming, which would come to reregulate tobacco production and thus diminish the oversupply of tobacco that had been accumulating in the depots of the state-run monopoly, TEKEL. This chapter examines how the introduction of contract farming has led to the emergence of an unregulated market in which the “contract” itself, by taking the place of tobacco, has become a commodity. By a feat of abstraction, the “contract” removes tobacco production from its context and transforms it into a calculable space. The chapter concludes that in this new arrangement, the bundle of entitlements that frames and reframes tobacco has transformed not only the production process, but also the actors (the farmer and the crop) involved therein. Chapter 5 examines attempts to create a new tobacco market in Turkey. It argues that there is no single model of the market, but multiple markets working in various ways. Based on fieldwork conducted in different tobacco markets, I show how markets function through a complicit relationship between state

Introduction

13

officials and criminal networks, and hence, I question the absolute divide between binary opposites such as informal/formal, official/unofficial, and legal/illegal. I argue that the presupposed boundary between “the market” and what lies outside of it is arbitrary and artificial, yet quite efficacious. The redefinition of the boundaries of “the market” can turn what were once legal transactions into illegal ones. Traditional modes of market transactions can fall into illegality in a day, and this switch, emerging from redefinitions of “the market,” can provide a new source of wealth accessible only to certain actors. In other words, new economic policies that aim at constituting “the market,” in a way understood by Western capitalist economies, can open new avenues for the accumulation and redistribution of wealth. After the enactment of the tobacco law, the ruling Justice and Development Party (JDP)36 initiated privatization procedures for the state-run tobacco monopoly, TEKEL. Following two unsuccessful attempts, the monopoly was at last privatized in March 2008. In the end, roughly 12,000 workers were laid off, ending in mass protests against the government in the streets of the capital that lasted more than 70 days. Through an analysis of the monopoly’s privatization, Chapter 6 examines the transforming relationship between state and citizen in Turkey. The TEKEL case lucidly illustrates how a social rightsbased approach is neither universally defined nor equally distributed across wide populations, but is rather specifically granted to certain groups. In other words, the JDP government does not work on one singular, fixed, uniform, and equally calibrated relationship with every citizen, but applies varying citizenship regimes to different groups. In 2008, the JDP government passed legislation prohibiting smoking in government buildings, offices, bars, and restaurants, and imposed penalties for noncompliance. The bill passed with strong backing from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who claimed that the fight against smoking was as important as the fight against terrorism. Although the enacted law aimed to comply with a broader anti-smoking discourse evident in global health policies, the strict and swift implementation of the law also echoed the Islamic-rooted government’s deep distaste for tobacco consumption. Through an analysis of anti-smoking health discourses in both the late 1950s and 2000s in Turkey, Chapter 7 illustrates how a global medical and scientific discourse against smoking was translated in this setting into nationalistic and conservative projects, respectively. In both cases, smokers were envisioned, disciplined, and governed as healthy, responsible, and rational citizens through these anti-tobacco campaigns under the pretext of complying with global health standards.

14

Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey

The last chapter aims to retell the history of Turkish nationalism through the perspective of Oriental tobacco with an analysis of the tobacco-related debates that took place from the late nineteenth century up until the early 1960s. By situating a nonhuman actor at the center of the argument, the chapter investigates the controversies surrounding Oriental tobacco in order to explore a broader theme—i.e. nationalism. Whenever there was a decline either in the tobacco export revenues or the amount of cultivated tobacco because of wars, economic downturns, or agricultural diseases, there was always someone to blame in or outside of the country. Through the world of Oriental tobacco, the relationship of the Turkish state with Germans, Americans, the Soviets, as well as the minorities living in Turkey, will be analyzed. Nationalism, which was on the rise after the establishment of the Republic, showed and fortified itself further when the human calculations and rationalizations did not hold true. Tobacco could not speak but the people spoke on behalf of tobacco, and it was the speech of nationalism.

Part I

Politics

1

Travel of Experts, Policies, and Institutions I thought Madonna had arrived. The place was the Ulus restaurant on an Istanbul bluff overlooking the Bosporus. The commotion started with police sirens blaring. Then there was a gaggle of a dozen television cameras and reporters, flashes popping. A murmur started to spread through the restaurant. Then the doors flew open, the reporters cleared a path, and the star walked in: Turkey’s minister of Economy, Kemal Dervis, had arrived for dinner. Say what? Turkey’s Economy minister getting the Madonna treatment? Gotta tell you, it’s the darndest thing I’ve ever seen. “Everywhere I go they follow me,” shrugged Mr. Dervis sheepishly. This scene tells you everything you need to know about the unusual drama playing out in Turkey today.1

The New York Times eminent columnist, Thomas Friedman, wrote these lines four months after the most severe economic crisis hit Turkey in February 2001. As Friedman stated bluntly, Turkey was on the brink of a financial disaster. To be precise, the Turkish currency was devalued by 50 percent in one day.2 Friedman, like many people, explained the financial turmoil as “the culmination of decades of mismanagement and corruption” in Turkey.3 A financial rescue package from the IMF and the World Bank was granted to the country, but with a condition: Turkey had to get real “[b]ecause there would be no next time. Turkey’s feckless and squabbling politicians had no choice but to look for someone outside the political system who knew Turkey, knew economics and was not corrupt.”4 The savior who would rescue the country from the financial crisis as well as from the incompetent, corrupt, and old-fashioned politicians was Kemal Derviş. Derviş used to work at the World Bank; he had graduated from LSE and Princeton with honors degrees; and more importantly, he was “untainted” like the Turkish politicians who are “insanely jealous” of him.5 The Turkish public was fascinated with his every move. In the media, every day another story popped up about him, his German mother, pasha grandfather, American wife, or bourgeois father.6 The stories created a mysterious and eccentric character. Derviş, who was born to a German mother and a Turkish

18

Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey

father, was like “us,” but not quite with his way of soft speaking, habit of playing tennis, and good command of four languages. As Derviş stated in several interviews, he was not a “real politician.”7 The reason behind his coming to Turkey was to fix the economy. As a Westerneducated expert in economics, he was immersed in the world of global policy-making at international financial institutions and has been working for the recognition and implementation of these policies as standards in developing countries. In brief, Derviş has been a “technocratic interlocutor”8 transmitting “traveling rationalities”9 of international financial institutions around the world. He makes the global economic policies mobile.10 This chapter aims to expose the ways in which global policies are transferred and put into practice in developing countries. It is an historical and critical explanation of the emergence of the technocratic practices and institutions established after the February 2001 financial downturn. The crisis not only accelerated the implementation of this economic liberalization, but also assisted the legitimization of the neoliberal agenda enforced by the international financial institutions, the IMF and the World Bank. In order to bring the political and economic structures of Turkey into line with so-called “global standards” of the West, a number of institutions were established and global policies were diffused by global experts. Hence, the chapter also explores the transmitting of these policies through experts as ideas in motion. It is pertinent to note two points beforehand. First, there is no coherent and monolithic global institutional consensus on policies, as it is represented.11 What I call global policy then is the overdrawn outcome of the fractured and fissured opinions among different international institutions, which are being represented by global experts as inevitable, unified, and consistent. The second point is that the travelling global policies do not create their own replicas in different countries, but they are recontextualized and reformulated as they travel. However, this chapter is not much concerned with the question of the recontextualization of these policies, but rather focuses on the process of how new global standards, with their accompanying laws and institutions, are being imported, justified, and put into practice in Turkey. It is basically about the travel of ideas, experts, policies, and institutions from the West to Turkey, and how this new set of emerging governance converts politics in Turkey.



Travel of Experts, Policies, and Institutions

19

Technocrat as a superman In Turkey, neoliberal economic reforms started in 1980 with the Structural Adjustment Programs. Basically, the program required an abrupt abandonment of Keynesian policies that resulted in the minimization of social welfare and the embrace of free market policies for the integration of the Turkish economy into world capitalist markets. The process of integration, however, was not smooth and uninterrupted, and the economy did not continue to grow without running into problems and crises. The Turkish economy got considerably worse in the 1990s with huge deficits in the budget and increases in the inflation rate. In 1999, another ambitious disinflation program was put into operation under the supervision of the IMF. The ultimate goal of this new program was to decrease the inflation rate to a single digit by the end of 2002. The plan aimed at solving substantial structural problems in the areas of taxation, privatization, banking, and the agricultural sector.12 After the general elections of 1999, a coalition government was established under the partnership of the Kemalist-Nationalist Democratic Left Party, the radical right Nationalist Action Party, and the right-wing Motherland Party. Although the three parties in the coalition worked harmoniously for a year, their opinions began to diverge on substantial aspects of economic policy, especially on the issue of privatization.13 The environment of dissent slowed down the pace of the implementation of the 1999 disinflation program. Finally, the program came to an end with the outbreak of the November 2000 turmoil, followed by the February 2001 crisis. The February 2001 crisis hit Turkey immediately after the regular monthly meeting of the National Security Council, where high-ranking generals came together with the president, the prime minister and ministers in the cabinet. In the meeting, Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer condemned the coalition government for its passive stance on corruption.14 According to media news, the heated argument ended with the president throwing a copy of the constitution at the prime minister and accusing him of knowing nothing of its contents. Prime Minister Ecevit’s abrupt walkout from the meeting was followed by one of his most loyal ministers calling the president “an ungrateful cat.” This tragicomic event prompted immediate panic in the volatile Turkish financial markets. Within hours, the Istanbul stock market fell by 14.6 percent. Foreign investors pulled out cash and overnight loan rates soared to 1,000 percent.

20

Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey

The country’s central bank was forced to channel one-sixth of its cash reserves into the currency markets to defend the value of the Turkish lira against a speculative run.15 According to the State Institute of Statistics, in the first half of 2001, more than 800,000 people lost their jobs.16 Unlike the previous crises, not only bluecollar workers, but also highly educated and skilled employees were laid off.17 A large number of small and medium sized companies went out of business. International financial institutions held the Turkish government responsible for the crisis. They claimed that the crisis emerged as a result of the Turkish government’s failure to maintain the austerity targets. The incompetence of political actors pursuing an extensive series of populist entitlements for short-term goals was one of the major reasons for the collapse of the economic program. In brief, for international institutions, the political mismanagement of the Turkish government triggered the collapse of the economy.18 The reasons for the outbreak of the economic crisis are beyond the scope of this chapter. However, the claimed explanations for the economic crisis, as put forward by international financial institutions and their national proponents, are significant in the sense that they have paved the way for the emergence of new policies and institutions. As Callon suggests, “financial crisis is a crisis for the formula.”19 “New adjustments are made” that lead to the emergence of alterations in “the socio-technical agencements” with the help of professionals.20 Where governments face uncertainty in economics, they usually turn to networks of professionals within international institutions. Especially at the time of economic crisis, the impact of international financial institutions magnifies. They often step into situations in which governments are uncertain and force them to recognize certain policies. As put forward by the first deputy managing director of the IMF, “a crisis can suspend ‘politics as usual’ and provide a government with ‘considerable freedom’—more than is usual in politics—to undertake reforms.”21 The result is to give specific policymakers and agencies considerable leverage; as happened in the case of the Turkish financial turmoil, in which Derviş was equipped with far-reaching authority in governing the economy of the country. After the February crisis, the Turkish government invited Kemal Derviş, who had been working as a senior employee in the World Bank for 22 years, to take charge of the Turkish economy. Derviş was initially considered for the president of the Central Bank of Turkey. However, upon his rejection of this role, he was assigned as the minister of State for Economic Affairs. Being unattached to any party, and thus remaining as an unelected member of the government, Derviş



Travel of Experts, Policies, and Institutions

21

took over his job as a technocrat. Such an appointment over the heads of the democratically elected politicians was extra-constitutional and contradicted the legitimacy of the democratic system. Derviş’s dubious appointment was neither challenged in international financial circles, which greeted him as a Westerneducated technocrat with more credibility and knowledge than local politicians, nor in the mainstream national media, which designated him a “superman.”22 In spite of several skeptical comments,23 his popularity rose in a short period of time owing to his well-educated, presentable, successful cosmopolitan image, in contrast to the stereotypical Oriental image of the Turkish politicians regarded as incompetent, corrupt, and self-interested. As his first task, Derviş established an expert team to fix the economic situation in Turkey and made it clear that external financial aid would be available, if the Turkish government was able to undertake serious steps not only in the economy, but also in the political realm. International support would be received only if the legal framework was changed in a way that would facilitate the proper functioning of a market economy. After his visit to the US, Derviş straightforwardly explained the agenda: 15 laws had to be enacted in 15 days in order for Turkey to receive the essential financial aid.24 Any sign of hesitation on the side of policymakers to enact the laws was denounced for deepening the economic crisis and missing an important chance to receive loans from international financial institutions. A situation of emergency was created. Bülent Arınç,25 the spokesman of the main opposition party, stated that: We are against most of the laws. We have some reservations; however, it is not the time to discuss these now. Since they are telling us that “if these legislations are not passed by April 15, no loans will arrive, Turkey will enter into chaos, the country will end up with a provisional regime and no government will be able to face this”. We cannot see any other choice but to support them. We put politics or our party behind the priorities of our people. We have to say “yes” to any solutions that will alleviate people’s suffering.26

The opposition party’s relinquishment made it clear that there was no alternative left for the Turkish government other than to enact the laws to fix the economic disaster. As a result, 12 out of the 15 laws were swiftly enacted in two months. The laws were passed one by one without any substantial political discussions in the parliament. The only concern at the moment was to accomplish the necessary changes in the political structure to receive the international financial rescue package.

22

Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey

In the meantime, Derviş introduced the “Transition to a Strong Economy Program.” The goal of the program was comprehensive. It aimed to overcome the impacts of the crisis and sustain stability in the economy by reforming the financial, agricultural, and social security system. It also aimed to bring in a floating exchange rate system and speed up privatization. Under the leadership of Derviş, as it was planned, the new economic program received the necessary loan from the IMF. International financial institutions praised the results of the new economic program on the grounds that the impacts of the crisis were alleviated by the policies favoring free marketism and good governance. According to Derviş and his supporters, one of the most important lessons of the February 2001 crisis was to separate politics from economics. On many occasions, Derviş expressed the idea that economics and politics interact with each other to a degree that both “suffer from that. Politics should stop using economy.”27 That the mingling of politics and economics would lead to a corrupt system remains a very common argument in the discourse of international institutions. For example, two months after the outbreak of the February crisis, Horst Köhler, chairman of the IMF, announced the decision to grant a loan to Turkey, and reiterated that the goal of the Stand-By Agreement was to combat corruption and separate economics from politics. Corruption has become a pretext for the future political rearrangements planned for Turkey. The connection between economics and politics has been redefined in different stages of Turkish history. Especially the Turgut Özal era, when the first economic liberalization policies were fiercely implemented in the 1980s, the role of politics was strictly circumscribed while economics was prioritized. A brief description of the Özal period illustrates not only the ways in which the interpretation and implementation of neoliberal policies diverged from the policies of the 2000s, but also sheds light on how the relationship between politics and economics are restructured.

(Re)making the law Özal is a key figure in Turkey’s transition to a neoliberal economy. He was employed as a bureaucrat in several departments of the Turkish government. Following work experience at the World Bank for two years in the 1970s, he returned to Turkey and worked at one of the biggest corporations in the country, Sabancı Holding. It is interesting to see that Özal and Derviş have parallel stories in the Turkish political culture. Both of them received training



Travel of Experts, Policies, and Institutions

23

at Western universities, worked for the World Bank, and returned to Turkey and commenced a path-breaking era in the country. However, unlike Özal who depended on his conservative and Islamist roots, Derviş’s experience in the political arena was quite different as he was always regarded as an “outsider” owing to his Western manners. When Özal ran in the elections in 1983, his party received a majority in parliament, with support coming from different segments of society. After coming to power, he appointed new cadres, known as “Özal’s princes” (a group of young technocrats mostly educated in Western countries), to the managerial positions of critical agencies and state-run banks. Under the Özal administration, the legislation process was transformed. Özal had the “tendency to underestimate the importance of the rule of law and the need to develop a strong legal infrastructure for a well-functioning market economy. His preference was for ruling by decrees, hence bypassing normal parliamentary procedures and constraints.”28 Contrary to the conventional understanding of bureaucracy, Özal preferred to apply policies by sidestepping the legal procedures.29 He regarded laws and legal procedures as impediments to speedy decision-making in economic matters. Moreover, he favored shortcut methods of enacting laws, took advantage of loopholes, and ignored moral codes. An interesting example of Özal’s way of legislation is the enactment of the law allowing multinational cigarette companies to establish production facilities in Turkey. The bill was introduced in the middle of a completely unrelated subject about universities in the midnight hours in parliament. Özal was able to pass the bill with a simple majority of his party’s deputies. Most delegates of other parties who were absent at the moment learned about the law the next day. Knowing that he would never be able to enact the controversial law in the presence of opposition parties’ delegates, Özal simply created and took advantage of an entirely “legal” but “unethical” political environment. In fact, Özal’s desire for a swift executive process would be criticized in the following years. His radical policy of opening up Turkey for foreign capital in particular would be seen as a premature decision in the presence of pervasive macroeconomic instability and the absence of strong political structures. Even the successive crises that Turkey experienced over a short interval in 1994, 2000, and 2001 would be claimed to have their origins in key decisions implemented during the Özal era.30 In order to provide markets with complete autonomy, Özal ignored legal procedures. His prioritization of the economy over the political realm created new economic opportunities that had not previously existed. Özal’s policies

24

Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey

resulted in the enrichment of entrepreneurial individuals, who took advantage of the opportunities or mere loopholes in the system. His idea was truly based on neoliberal ideology which aims at creating “active citizens” who seek to “fulfil themselves as free individuals.”31 What is demanded of individuals is to take the responsibility for their futures and look for opportunities in the market. Now, every individual, even a shepherd in the countryside, is responsible for his destiny. Paul Wolfowitz, then the Deputy Secretary of Defense, gave a lecture on the memorial day of Turgut Özal and explained Özal’s idea of entrepreneurship with an anecdote: I am told that Turgut Özal often used to tell a story that illustrates his view of the process of economic reform in Turkey. A police official came to Özal to talk about some border problems. The official told him, “Many of our shepherds have made arrangements to take their flocks across the border to fatten them up because it is cheaper. Then they are smuggling them back into Turkey in violation of our customs laws.” And Özal is said to have replied: “You may regard that as a violation of customs; I regard it as trade. [Laughter.] We should be encouraging such enterprise, not making it a criminal act.” And with that, Özal added, “There’s a simple solution: change the law.” So they changed the law and it became legal to import sheep with a license. Some months later, the senior official came back to Özal and said, “We have a problem now. A lot of shepherds are applying for import licenses.” [Laughter.] Özal replied: “What is the problem with that?” The answer: “We can’t grant the licenses to many of these shepherds—most of them used to be smugglers [Laughter.]”32

The anecdote, which was interrupted several times by the laughter of the audience, does not explain further if Özal was able to solve the legal problem of the “smuggling shepherds,” but the story is explicit enough to reveal that his aim was to create self-confident, self-interested, entrepreneurial individuals responsible for their own lives. The indeterminacy of the law would be exploited not for the purpose of providing social welfare for citizens, but to open the way for individuals to fulfil their potential. Unmaking and remaking of the rules became a routine practice under his administration. As Shore and Haller explain, in many cases “politicians (such as Italy’s premier Silvio Berlusconi) change the law so that their previously illegal practices of book-keeping, are reclassified as legal.”33 The switch from “illegal smuggling” to “legal imports of sheep” became possible with a simple change in the law. For Özal, law and legal procedures existed to serve the economy and could be exploited as long as they were facilitating the effective working of the market. And in cases when the legal structure



Travel of Experts, Policies, and Institutions

25

seemed to block the unrestrained functioning of the market, unmaking and remaking of the law always appeared as an alternative. During the Özal era, a period when economic liberalization policies were fully embraced, corruption cases increased remarkably due to the government’s flexible attitude to observing laws. The free market policies adopted during the Özal administration aimed at creating entrepreneurs in every segment of society who were very much involved in activities of making quick money.34 Özal’s famous statement that “my bureaucrats know their business” became the motto for state-sponsored encouragement of bribes and embezzlement. Being legitimized and recognized in the transition process to the free market economy, corruption appeared as a regular and inevitable phenomenon. Years later, corruption would “play a central role in the initiation of the second generation of reforms in Turkey in the aftermath of the 2001 financial crisis.”35 Derviş would suggest that the problems in Turkey arose from corrupt politics, and the remedy was to establish strong political and administrative structures to promote accountability and transparency. To achieve this goal, Derviş would introduce the “good governance” perspective. The incentive behind this idea lays in the fact that a self-regulating market was not realizable alone. The necessary political infrastructure is crucial for the functioning of market economy.

Good governance, bad governance In the 1980s, one of the principal requirements for receiving loans from the IMF and the World Bank was to reduce the size of the state. Likewise in Turkey, the Özal government applied excessive economic reforms by curbing the intervention of the state in the market. The legal background of the liberalization policies in finance and trade was nonexistent and this was not necessarily considered a problem. However, during the 1990s, international financial institutions’ claims regarding the functioning of markets changed. The World Bank and the IMF declared that the proper functioning of markets required the rule of law and basic regulation, and several developing countries failed to reach economic success due to their inability to tackle corruption.36 The idea of good governance37 was promoted with the goal of creating an effective and efficient state that would regulate the political arena for sustainable growth. Good governance has become a standard, as Anders argues,38 a technology, circulating and being applied in different countries to transform

26

Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey

the “dysfunctional” state bureaucracies into efficient and transparent institutions. Moreover, this standard has become a precondition to qualifying for international loans. The conditions attached to receiving aid are defined within the category of good governance. By itself, the concept, however, has signified nothing but the presence of “bad governance.” However, there has hardly been a consensus about what it really means. International organizations have preferred to draw the borders of the concept with “its pillars.”39 Among many pillars and definitions of good governance, the prevention of corruption and having transparent institutions are the two most prevalent recurring themes. Due to the difficulty of defining the boundaries of corruption because of its profane, slippery, and controversial meanings, the global coalition against corruption founded Transparency International (TI) in 1993. TI has played a crucial role in establishing a global formula that would become one of the key standards governing the international arena. It has published the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) that ranks countries according to perceptions of their corruption.40 Corruption is converted into “scores” in international scales41 by which states can be compared with one other. The analytical concepts work as globally governing devices, making the political measurable, and leading the way for the disciplining and governing of nation-states in certain ways. For example, adherence to standards of TI is required from countries seeking membership to the European Union, as in the case of Turkey, or it is used as a criterion for foreign investment. In the discourse of international financial institutions, corruption is mostly attributed to non-Western countries. As Anders and Nuijten argue, “there is a tendency to treat corruption in the modern developed parts of the world as incidental, as at worst a few rotten apples—not like the structural and widespread corruption in less developed parts of the world.”42 The Orientalist tone of the anti-corruption discourse of global institutions is undeniable: they see corruption as being endemic to “non-Western,” “transitional,” or “developing” societies.43 According to international institutions, corruption is responsible for the poverty and underdevelopment of non-Western societies engendering uncertainty and lack of trust in the economic sector that leads to the fleeing of foreign investment. However, Ferguson, extrapolating from his comparison between Zambia and Angola, argues that foreign capital prefers to go to places without “the rule of law” since it can benefit from the “untidiness” in these economies.44 He argues that these countries provide greater economic opportunities to foreign capital than states with good governance, as the political disorder does not provide a barrier, but on the contrary, new opportunities.



Travel of Experts, Policies, and Institutions

27

Another problem with the global corruption discourse arises from its distinction between public and private spheres. The World Bank defines corruption as “the abuse of public office for private gain.”45 Anders and Nuijten suggest that this distinction “identifies bloated and inefficient state bureaucracy riddled by widespread corruption as the main cause for underdevelopment since it impedes the expansion of the private sector, which is rooted in society.”46 To put it differently, corruption is inherently seen in the state, preventing the development of a free market economy, as well as shaking the legitimate basis of economic transactions. In a similar vein, during the Derviş era the causes of the 2001 Turkish economic crisis were plainly explained with reference to corruption. The need to establish strong institutions to prevent and combat corruption has become the pillar of the strong economic program. Derviş stated that “corruption is a global problem. I am defending the idea that, without the presence of a good government and [good] governance, there must not be any international financial aid.”47 Derviş created an urgent situation around the idea of the corrupt state structure and hastily passed neoliberal reforms under the premises of constructing a robust institutional framework for the well-functioning of the market. Bedirhanoğlu rightly argues that he strategically utilized the corruption discourse to enable and accelerate neoliberal policies.48 The idea of corruption as well as the weak state was deliberately employed to underline the need to urgently resurrect globally recognized institutions in Turkey.

Framing the economy Derviş insisted upon the idea that a certain institutional arrangement must be immediately set up to solve the problems possibly encountered in the market. This reasoning that the proper functioning of markets was based upon a strong institutional and legal structure diverged from Özal’s assessment that markets functioned better without any intervention.49 Now the challenge for Derviş and his team was to coordinate economic activities with a strong institutional infrastructure. In a talk organized by the Foreign Policy Association in 2006, Derviş stated that: [W]hen you look at the development of Western democracy, we really realize that the development of competitive markets went hand in hand with the development of strong democratic institutions. In the words of McRobbie or also

28

Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey Polanyi, markets were embedded in human and political institutions. They were not functioning without these political institutions […] [E]very successful free market system has been embedded in good governance.50

In spite of the substantivist tone of this quotation, Derviş was not truly following Polanyi’s argument that markets are embedded within the political and cultural institutions from which they emerge because the idea of embeddedness has “rendered the boundary between economy and society obsolete.”51 Derviş’s assumption, however, relies upon the argument that the economy and politics are two different spheres, which operate with their own rationalities, as I will show below. While Özal’s emphasis upon the perfect functioning of the unregulated market was not shared by Derviş who believed in the necessity of the legitimization of market practices, they both relied on the same idea—i.e. the secondary role of the political. Özal considered the political as an insignificant element, which could be bypassed for the sake of markets, whereas Derviş supported the establishment of political institutions for the creation of a legal environment for markets. Though registering the significance of the political dimension, Derviş bestowed the priority on the economic realm in the last instance: The stronger the economy of Turkey, the more European investment and production come to Turkey, the more trade there is, the more financial links there are, the stronger will be the European interest in integrating Turkey. I do believe that the economy deserves priority.52

According to Derviş, the mingling of the two realms would lead to bad governance, and the “uninvited” presence of the political in the economic sphere would blur transparency, slow down the functioning of the economy, and disrupt the working of markets. This sort of account deems the political domain as a supplement, whose responsibility is solely limited to facilitate and legitimize the workings of markets.53 The political realm is an inessential that must be “added” to the economy to complete itself. This implies that the economy has a lack to be filled by the political structures in order to work flawlessly. Although without the presence of the supplement, the economy would not be a whole (or legitimate), the supplement always should be outside of the whole. It is an extra, addendum, surplus that needs to remain on the outside. Thus, the borders of the economy and the political must be drawn to make it clear that they must remain separate. The critical economist circle, the Independent Social Scientists, in Turkey instantaneously criticized Derviş with an argument that “the separation between



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market activity and political activity is itself a political project.”54 The policy of separating two realms would “disconnect the economic stabilization program from any wider democratization discourse,” and, furthermore: reduce politics to the role of administration and the issuing of technical decrees, and society to a conservative and obedient, and therefore a malleable mass. Politics is characterized as merely an instrument at the service of markets, efficiency, and profitability. The momentum of the stabilization project is enhanced by subordinating politics to the so-called imperatives of a global agenda.55

According to the Independent Social Scientists, what lies behind Derviş’s discourse was a set of structural transformations to satisfy the needs and demands of international financial centers, not the requirements of national economy. They put forward a very valid criticism that politics is reduced to the role of administration in the service of the economy, which means that its political dimension has been carved out. However, in contrast from the Independent Social Scientists discussing the entire issue within the interests of international capital, I am more interested in exploring the technicalization process of politics in general. This new institutional format separating the two realms has introduced a novel dimension in the application of the politics. What is embraced in this emerging organization is politics as a technical matter, rather than political discussions. Barry’s distinction between politics and political is very helpful to understand the issue here. Barry defines “politics, as a set of technical practices, forms of knowledge and institutions, and the political as an index of the space of disagreement,”56 and concludes that the political is not reducible to politics: “[…] what is commonly termed politics is not necessarily—or generally— political in its consequences. Politics can often be profoundly anti-political in its effects; suppressing potential spaces of contestation; placing limits on the possibilities for debate and confrontation.”57 With this explanation, it is easier to understand the Derviş administration, which was less concerned with the issues of political debates and arguments, but more interested in questions of regulation, monitoring, and measurement, the issues which he delegated to experts in regulatory bodies or boards. On the one hand, politics, as a set of technical practices with its institutions and experts, is necessary to establish the conducive legitimate environment for markets. On the other hand, the political debates and confrontations must be limited in these institutions. In short, while politics is required, the political must be excluded

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from the borders of the economy. This anti-political environment would make it certain that the separation between the world of the political and the world of the economy is clear and secure. To create such a politically free setting is only plausible with the establishment of autonomous, neutral, and robust regulatory agencies.

Emerging institutions The first regulatory agency, the Capital Market Board, was established in 1982, which was followed by other agencies regulating markets in the following two decades.58 Especially after each economic crisis, Turkish governments, almost in every Letter of Intent submitted to the IMF as well as in loan agreements concluded with the World Bank, promised to establish regulatory agencies. However, the crises of November 2000 and February 2001 stand as a benchmark in the establishment of the regulatory agencies in Turkey, since in less than a year four new ones were founded under the commitments made to the IMF and the World Bank. International financial institutions have imposed the foundation of regulatory agencies as antidotes for the political instabilities emerging from successive coalition governments, and thus for the populist decisions favored by the politicians seeking to be elected. The agencies would be remedies to corrupt, inefficient, irrational, and incompetent decisions and the slow processing of bureaucratic structures. The OECD report about regulatory agencies in Turkey stated that:59 The deep economic crisis in Turkey is exposing the substantial weaknesses of Turkey’s current public administration structures. The need for urgent implementation of comprehensive reforms are confronted with regulatory institutions and practices that are outdated, incoherent, ineffectively managed, and partially undermined by a very low trust in government, wide-spread non-compliance and in some cases corruption. The implementation and enforcement capacities of the public sector are lagging far behind policy decisions. If basic regulatory capacities are not in place, the likelihood that new reforms will succeed is limited, and the erosion of public support and rule of law will continue.

The anti-corruption discourse about the necessity of establishing transparent and efficient institutions was coupled with the sustainability of new economic reforms.60 Regulatory agencies would guarantee the stabilization of the legislation process, especially in countries like Turkey where governments frequently



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change, and would sustain the trust on the side of the domestic and international circles. Since the cadres of these agencies do not change as the governments are replaced, sustainability of reform policies can be carried out without intervention. The goal is to create long-standing institutions, which would not be influenced by the changes in the political fluctuations. According to Derviş, the trust in the markets can only be sustainable with the deep structural reforms implemented by the autonomous regulatory agencies: In order to sustain the macro balances, it was highly important to gain the trust of the domestic and international public. The trust issue is of utmost importance in the settlement of crises. [Trust] is extensively subjective and not easily calculable. In 2001 of Turkey, the most missing component was the trust. […] How could we build the trust? We could not build it by simply saying that “we will employ austere finance and monetary policies.” Beyond the finance, monetary and exchange policies, we should give the message to the public that the profound structural reforms that were deferred for years should be realized from now on and the public should believe in that.61

Derviş maintained that the financial outcomes are only sustainable and successful as long as there is an institutional structure supporting and legitimizing them. The institutions would be established to guarantee that a population would trust the market and see it as legitimate. Trustworthiness is associated with the well-defined, established and standardized norms and global principles within institutions, not through the words and promises of politicians. Bypassing the political realm altogether and delegating the political duties to these emerging institutions seemed a safer way than simply enhancing the accountability and credibility of politicians. Self-assurance of the security of the market was no longer registered in the political realm, but within the globally standardized institutions, committees, and boards. Ironically, the attempts to create trust in the market through regulatory agencies have fallen into contradiction with the legal ambiguity surrounding these institutions and, hence, has engendered a legitimacy problem.62 The establishment of regulatory agencies and the delegation of power from politicians to bureaucrats in these institutions has produced remarkable criticisms in academic circles.63 The agencies are granted autonomous power and their members are neither directly elected, nor do they work under the supervision of elected officials. The decision-making process in certain sectors is transferred from legislative offices to regulatory agencies, which means that the policies of agencies are not accountable to the people, though they can impose heavy costs

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on them. The absence of any substantial control mechanism over them has led to criticisms of their being unaccountable and illegitimate. Politicians in the government, even the ones who voted for the establishment of the agencies, have eventually criticized their way of functioning. They occasionally announced their approval of the formation of these bodies because of the pressures coming from international financial institutions. For example, the prime minister of Turkey, Bülent Ecevit, who played an important role in establishing the agencies during his tenure, would complain about the exceedingly independent and autonomous rule of regulatory bodies: I must confess that we overstepped our boundaries in giving too much autonomy. It is said that this is essential for a market economy, for democracy and a demand emanating from the IMF. Many public institutions have become the unamenable institutions that are totally free from the influence and supervision of the state and the government. The businessmen, who come to Ankara, know that much of our authority has slipped through our fingers. They want to see the government and the state in front of them. We have to reconsider the issue of autonomy, and make it work in a balanced and healthy way. I have given an order to prepare for legal changes about this matter.64

The prime minister’s speech received an immediate reaction from the economists in the government. Derviş rapidly offered an explanation that the prime minister had been told that there would be no stepping backwards from the policies being pursued and also that the IMF was convinced that the program concerning the regulatory agencies would continue without any interruption. A possible discussion about the regulatory agencies was impeded on the grounds that the IMF was barely persuaded that there would be no change in the reform program. To the questions of journalists about the relationship between politicians and the functioning of the economy, Derviş replied that “the politicians would steer the society and the economy. Otherwise, there would not be any meaning of politics. Politicians are going to set the main targets and the autonomous agencies are going to implement them. Politicians should not involve themselves in daily matters.”65 It is not clear what Derviş meant by “daily matters,” but given the fact that the agencies are autonomous and independent, they do not work on the policies set by the politicians. Years later, when Derviş became the head of the United Nations Human Development Programme, he would bluntly put his argument thusly: When I was Turkey’s minister of economic affairs we faced objections when I introduced a new law making our central bank autonomous in the fashion



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typical of most advanced economies. Why should the central bank not be directly managed by an elected government? I could understand the reaction, for even such a technocratic institution is the creature of a democratic polity and must somehow answer to democratic considerations and electoral politics. A fully articulated democracy must have some means of holding ‘independent’ economic agencies and regulatory bodies to account without curtailing the autonomy that they need in order to do their jobs. […] So there is need for a balance between regulatory agencies and democratically elected bodies. We need these regulatory agencies because we need a degree of stability in the overall framework of monetary and exchange-rate policy and banking rules, such that sudden political shifts cannot disturb them.66

Being aware of the criticisms against regulatory agencies, what Derviş proposes is to set the balance between technocratic institutions and democratic accountability. These bodies must be democratically legitimate and their decisions must be accountable. Then, with the absence of partisan controversies, the economic reforms would firmly be accomplished. What is at stake here, however, is not whether these bodies have democratic foundations or accountabilities. As I mentioned earlier, several scholars in opposition to what Derviş suggests see these organs as unconstitutional and undemocratic. However, the issue is more complicated than this. Regardless of their illegitimate and unjust foundations, it is pertinent to see that these agencies, as standard global institutions, are structured to prevent any possible political argument within their organizational structure. Their institutional format, in effect, impedes any sort of political discussion. Compared to red-tape bound, slow, and rigid state bureaucracy, they are considered flexible, efficient, transparent, and impartial entities. Their ability to speed up the policy-making process is made possible by simply avoiding any sort of political controversy and debate. Their personnel, mostly constituted of experts having technical knowledge, have supposedly created a scientific atmosphere serving as a foundation to suppress any kind of political discussion. Within this structure, the policy-making process appears as a technical issue devoid of any political arguments. The messy and time-consuming debates of the political realm are dismissed given that the issues they deal with require technical knowledge. Policy-making is converted into a daily mundane process, a matter of fixing the deficiencies in the market. The effects of the resulting policies are never brought into a public sphere where they can be negotiated as events redistributing established positions. The decisions have political repercussions on people, but this new framing does not allow new arrangements to be proposed. As Callon states:

34

Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey Politics is the area of framing, repetition, closure, of the “lock-in” and pre-coding issues (of overflows) and conflicts. “The political”, by contrast, is the area of openness of new sites and new sights, of difference, of “lock-out”, of new objects of protest, of the production of events, or, alternatively, of overflows and their demonstration.67

Therefore, in the new institutional restructuring, while politics is promoted, with its all repetitive functions and fixed structures, the political is impeded. Politics is regarded as a technical issue, which facilitates the functioning of the free market economy, and the decisions and their limited negotiations are locked-in within the boundaries of institutions, boards, committees, and agencies. This policy-making process is not political in its consequences: it is in fact an anti-political politics.

2

Opening the Black Box of Law The IMF and the World Bank have tirelessly enforced the implementation of legal and economic reforms in Turkey. These reform policies have been oriented toward harmonizing regulatory practices in Turkey with global standards. According to international financial institutions, one of the areas that required a radical restructuring was the tobacco sector. The tobacco law was first mentioned in the World Bank Report, “Turkish Economic Reform Loan and Development Policy,” in March 2000. Thereafter, in six different Letters of Intent submitted to the IMF in 2000 and 2001, the Turkish government pledged to pass laws to phase out the support price mechanism for tobacco, enable the privatization of TEKEL’s production facilities, adopt a decree restructuring the monopoly, and reform the tobacco sector.1 The tobacco law used to be dismissed over the years by Turkish politicians in fear of losing the political support from farmers. Political parties were targeting the votes of farmers, especially tobacco cultivators, who, including their families, numbered about 3 million people in the 1990s.2 The February 2001 economic crisis, however, brought about a rupture in the continuation of the old populist policies. The government, having been reluctant to take steps toward the legislation of the reform laws, had no choice but to enact them one by one, which was publicly called “15 laws in 15 days,” in order to receive the loans from the Fund and the Bank necessary to fix the collapsed economy. The tobacco law was one of them. At the beginning of my fieldwork, I was desperately asking questions about the origins of the tobacco law: Who drafted the law? Why was such a law needed? What kind of legal practices took place and shaped the legislation process? But all my inquiries were met with the same succinct response: “The IMF wanted the law.” This answer was obviously correct, but interestingly, it assumed that no further explanation was necessary. The supposedly self-evident description was also accompanied by the argument that the law and its making process were not remarkable at all. Neither the social consequences nor the deviations from the law were considered as points of interest worthy of study.

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Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey

My interest, instead, was to analyze the law-making process by going beyond the static studies of the legal system which are merely concentrated on either “the law in the books” or “the law in the action.”3 However, my informants considered the law as just a tool, and nothing more than that. It was merely considered as the instrument “connecting political means to political ends.”4 I was lucky to know that other anthropologists in the field have had similar experiences. For example, Riles expresses a parallel incident when she was told that “law is just a tool, nothing more exciting than that.”5 I was in the same situation. The more I asked questions about the law, the more I was criticized by my informants that I should focus on the consequences and application of the law, rather than the law itself, which is simply a technicality. Nonetheless, the technicality of law must be taken seriously, as we have learned from Riles’ studies6 or Latour’s recent work grounded on the ethnography of the French Conseil d’État.7 In a detailed description of the texts, people, architecture, concepts, and everyday office objects, Latour opens the “blackbox” of law. For him, law is not a field to be studied independent of networks of people and things. It is largely a documentary network through which the social is arranged and assembled.8 What if the network of law-making processes transcends the borders of the country? What if the origins of the law lay somewhere else? This was the case with the tobacco law enacted in Turkey. I was told many times by my informants that the preliminary formation of the law was actually embedded in Western institutions. The background information of the law was almost nonexistent and, furthermore, the entire legislation process was already over when I started my fieldwork. These ethnographic obstacles led me to follow two paths of research. First, I analyzed the minutes of the parliamentary debates concerning the tobacco law as documents, which “are artifacts of modern knowledge practices.”9 These minutes illustrate how the tobacco law was discussed within the trajectory of political discussions, but entirely stripped of any sort of technical knowledge and details about the law. My second ethnographic account is based on a meeting that I attended in the Assembly in 2006, which was organized to make a slight modification in the tobacco law. This time, I sought to capture “the present” of the legislative process and illustrate how political discourse was dismissed in favor of technicalities about the law. The separation made between the political and technical aspects of the law resulted in not only premature and superficial discussions in the parliament, but also in the exclusion of vulnerable populations from the debates, deliberations, and decision-making processes.



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The Tobacco Law On January 3, 2002, the Turkish Parliament ratified the Tobacco Law, No. 4733. The new law was relatively brief with 12 articles compared to its predecessor law, No. 1177, which provided a very detailed explanation about the legal procedures of tobacco production and exchange in 120 articles.10 What is interesting and novel about the law of 4733 is its reference to the regulations and by-laws rather than the provision of information on the issues. In other words, the law seems different to conventional Turkish laws in its format, being like a manual rather than an explanatory legal text. The law basically brought about five major changes: the elimination of bulk tobacco purchases by the state; the reorganization of the manufacturing of tobacco products and trading; privatization of the state tobacco monopoly, TEKEL; substitution of contract farming; and the establishment of the tobacco regulatory agency, TAPDK. First, the new law aimed to open up the market to competition by ensuring that tobacco prices would be established in a free market setting. Until then, the government supported tobacco farmers by buying the entire crop they produced every year. Over the years, the state-subsidized system encouraged overproduction and created tobacco surplus in the depots of the state-run monopoly, which would be left to rot or literally be burned up.11 Second, the legal permission for cigarette manufacturing and trading was reorganized, and only companies possessing an annual production capacity of manufacturing 2 billion units of cigarettes, or not less than 15 tons of tobacco products in one shift, were allowed to invest with a “complete and new technology” in the country. The companies meeting the stated capacity are allowed to sell their brands, set the prices, distribute the products, and import tobacco. Third, the law also introduced a contract farming system under which growers agreed to deliver specific commodities in predetermined quantities and quality standards, while contractors agreed to accept products at predetermined prices. By thwarting the overproduction of tobacco, contract farming aimed to adjust and stabilize the supply and demand curves of the yield. Fourth, the law also mandated the incremental privatization of the state tobacco monopoly, and British American Tobacco (BAT) won the tender and bought the monopoly in March 2008.12 And last, the tobacco regulatory agency (TAPDK) was established and took over the tobacco monopoly’s (TEKEL) functions, such as providing and enforcing regulations, and the monitoring and surveillance of tobacco production and sales. In contrast to the monopoly, the agency did not hold the responsibility for purchasing the yield. It was neither the buyer of tobacco nor the manufacturer

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Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey

of cigarettes, but designed as an independent agency to regulate the sector. This sort of regulation aimed to diminish the intervention of the state and establish competitive market economy conditions in the tobacco sector. In the following pages, based on my research on the parliamentary minutes, I will illustrate how the new tobacco law was debated in the Turkish General Assembly. This will be followed by a further analysis grounded in my fieldwork at the EU meeting held in 2006 to discuss a change in the tobacco law.

A gift to the IMF The parliamentary discussions mostly revolved around criticisms of the government’s unconditional acceptance of the tobacco law and its imposition by the IMF. The debates basically deliberated upon Turkey’s relationship with the IMF and inveighed the tobacco law as a direct outcome of the IMF’s conditionality principle. After the February 2001 crisis, the IMF was holding a financial rescue package for Turkey, an amount that the government desperately needed to fix the economy. The immediate cure was to receive the loans from international financial institutions and in return to enact a number of reform laws. While the IMF managing director Horst Köhler made it explicit that financial support for Turkey would continue, it was “‘tied to conditions”; the director of the World Bank, Ajay Chhibber, stated that “[a]ny possible delays in the economic program would result in high costs for Turkey.”13 During the 1980s, the Bretton Woods institutions introduced conditionality as a new global approach. The IMF and the World Bank agreed to provide aid in return for countries’ commitments to certain policy reforms. They believed that promised aid could be used as an incentive for undertaking necessary political changes. Thus, international support for damaged economies has become a tool forcing countries to accept global policy reforms. This approach has been criticized on the grounds that “[p]olicy change was the price which governments would have to pay for aid; or equivalently, policy change would be what donors bought with their aid.”14 The imposed reforms have been interpreted as interventions to the national sovereignties of countries. Having been aware of the criticisms, both the IMF and the World Bank have defended their stance with the argument that the receiving governments are responsible for the implementation of these programs. They suggest that the Letters of both



Opening the Black Box of Law

39

Development Policy (the World Bank) and Intent (the IMF) are the documents in which governments propose what they plan to do with the requested financial assistance. Thus, the conditions of a particular loan are not determined by the international financial institutions per se, but by the representatives of borrowing governments. For the IMF and the World Bank, the economic aid promised under the policy of conditionality in fact aims to respond to the requests of countries in need of financial and technical assistance. The support provided for these countries aims to deal with management problems without interfering in the political affairs of governments. Yet, as Anders illustrates in the case of Malawi, international financial institutions do not perceive their early negotiation and planning phase of reforms as political interference.15 The policies might be implemented by governments in the last instance, but the policies themselves are in practice shaped, planned, and introduced by the IMF and the World Bank. In order to receive the necessary loans, the Turkish government had to swiftly implement the promised reforms, including the tobacco law. This attempt, however, was not received well by the deputies of the opposition parties, nor some members of the coalition parties. Even the minister in charge of privatization, Yüksel Yalova, contested Turkey’s agreement with the IMF regarding the tobacco law. In response to the questions posed to him by journalists about the proposed tobacco law that was to be enacted in May, Yalova responded that “[w]e can’t prepare a hasty scribble of a law on an issue that concerns 600,000 people just by sitting down and saying, ‘We promised it in May.’ Whoever made that pledge [to the IMF] is responsible of a delay. I have not made such a pledge.”16 These remarks were interpreted as a sign of discord in the coalition government about the economic recovery program, and caused shares on Istanbul’s stock market to drop by 5 percent. Turkey teetered on the edge of another economic crisis because of these comments. In the end, the minister was forced to resign. About a month after the resignation of the minister, the draft law was brought before parliament.17 Interestingly, opposition and ruling coalition parties’ representatives from the tobacco growing regions of eastern Anatolia, without exception, vehemently opposed the proposed law. Predominantly, all these deputies mentioned that the law would endanger the living conditions of the 600,000 cultivators and their families, approximately 5 million (and they sometimes stated 3 million) people. With a few exceptions, however, the deputies who addressed parliament hardly discussed the most drastic features of the proposed law, such as the introduction of contract farming. Even the

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Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey

most pronounced issues, such as cutting off state subsidies and the privatization of the tobacco monopoly, were not debated in depth. Most deputies seemed to be making empty speeches rather than raising real questions about the law. The common denominator of all the opposing speeches was based on the argument that the law would be enacted solely because of pressure exerted by the IMF. In spite of such criticism, the law was passed in parliament in June 2001. However, the Turkish president vetoed it the next month on the grounds that the implementation of the law would seriously harm tobacco farmers’ interests. The president maintained that national tobacco production would deteriorate since the unprotected domestic tobacco sector was not strong enough to compete with international cigarette companies. The president’s explanation of why the tobacco law should not be ratified in its current form was one of the most informative analyzes of the law so far.18 Immediately after the president’s veto, Prime Minister Ecevit stated that: The President’s rejection of the tobacco law was political and not legal in nature. […] If the President continues to veto the laws according to his political stand, then he will be operating as if he himself were a political party over other parties (emphases are mine).19

After stating the necessity of the president’s noninvolvement in political decisions, the coalition partners organized a briefing in which they informed the president about the economic facts.20 The coalition partners made it clear that the tobacco law was all about economics and should not be discussed within the context of the social welfare of citizens. As expected, the coalition government brought the tobacco law again to parliament five months later and the law was ratified without having gone through a single change, despite the initial veto of the president. The opposition parties criticized the government for making a decision that ignored the will of the entire nation. They announced that the government “was working for the interests of the IMF and international capital,”21 and that the proposed tobacco law was “blood money given to the IMF”22 and “a gift to the IMF.”23 A deputy from the Justice and Development Party, while holding tobacco leaves in his hand, claimed that he took them from the farmers in eastern Turkey who told him that: Give these [leaves] to the Prime Minister, who is going to the U.S. Tell him to put the leaves in his gift basket. Tell him to give one leaf to the chief of the World Bank, and another leaf to the chief of the IMF.24



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The tobacco law was not only a gift for the IMF, but also for the US. Another deputy from the opposition Justice and Development Party stated that: Look, what the newspapers say? “What will the Prime Minister give to Bush as a gift when he goes to the U.S?!” What else can the Prime Minister give?! He is handing the Turkish economy over to the U.S and putting the Turkish nation under U.S. control. What could be a better gift for Bush than this?25

“The gift” (given to the IMF) was in fact compulsory and interested, as Mauss brilliantly discussed in The Gift.26 Deputies in the parliament, probably unfamiliar with Mauss and his work, were all aware of the fact that the gift was given to receive another gift, the crucial loan from the IMF. But they also knew that this gift would come “with a burden attached to it,”27 as is the case in every gift-exchange. Another deputy also criticized the government with these words: I would like to state something that is already well known. You are listening to outsiders, not us and not the people, and you don’t get lessons from experience. Let’s announce what is already well known, this law is ordered by the IMF. Let’s ignore the medicine, prescription, and treatment offered by your doctor Mr. IMF. As you see, the same diagnosis, same prescription, and same treatment did not work for Senior Argentine, who is in a coma now. You seem dazzled and there is no clue when you will wake up and come to yourself. It seems there is no hope.28

The law was enacted at the end of the day. During the legislation process, a series of political events happened in the country: the IMF’s persistence on the enactment of the tobacco law for the release of the loan; the resignation of a minister followed by a possible economic downturn; and the president’s vetoing of the law. The law became the ground on which debates about international financial institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, were being staged in the country. All the abstract concepts, national sovereignty, independency, and autonomy were embodied within the discussions of the tobacco law. This controversy, however, was not necessarily about the law per se but about the direction that Turkey should be following. As one deputy in the majority clearly put it, it was about being the “proponents of the free market economy or the state-controlled economy.”29 It was about embracing the requirements of the IMF and the World Bank or not, or in other words, to fully integrate into the neoliberal economy under the conditions of the Bretton Woods institutions. Only a few days before the enactment of the law, during the discussions of the tobacco law in parliament, the minister in charge of privatization diagnosed the situation as follows:

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Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey It should not be forgotten that [the Turkish government] has given promises to the International Monetary Fund considering the tobacco issue. […] Now government has two options: Either this promise would be disavowed, or it would be kept. The correct option is to uphold the promise. […] According to the statements of the deputies of the opposition parties, [we enact this law] because of the IMF. It is true that the IMF asked us to enact this law. But if you are sincere about the free market economy, you need to do this. In other words, if you have both free market economy and monopolies, it means that you are not playing the game according to its rules. What would emerge is totally a different entity, neither a free market, nor a mixed economy but a sui generis system. Within this system, nothing can be achieved as we tried it before, and could not get anywhere.30

What is both striking and interesting about this quotation is the minister’s incredibly direct and clear explanations. The minister is unequivocal about the fact that the law would be passed because of Turkey’s “promises” to the IMF. The entire emphasis was on the requirements of the global economic order and the smooth passage into the free market economy. Even the discourse of the opposition parties was surprisingly similar to the coalition parties’ stance. The majority of criticisms tackled neither the questions of the rights of cultivators, nor the changes in the mode of tobacco production, but concentrated on the themes of Turkey’s sovereignty, national will, independence, and interests. The national independence war in the early twentieth century, the nationalization of the Régie, and protecting natural resources from foreign forces in the early Republican era were examples frequently uttered to demonstrate why the tobacco law should be rejected. The tobacco law represented the abandonment of national sovereignty and the passing of it over to international financial institutions and foreign capital in the form of concessions, which was resisted a hundred years ago. Overall, the heated discussions on national sovereignty and independence thwarted the formation of a substantial dispute about the content of the law.

A meeting in the Turkish Assembly More than four years after the legislation of the tobacco law, I attended the meeting of the Committee for the Adjustment to the European Union in another building of the General Assembly. In the meeting, a change in the tobacco law would be discussed. The Justice and Development Party, the opposition party



Opening the Black Box of Law

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in 2002 when the tobacco law was being discussed in parliament, was now the ruling party and held almost two-thirds of the assembly seats, with the support of 34 percent of the population. It would be interesting to see how the majority and opposition parties, as two opposite sides in the parliament now, would respond to the tobacco law four years after its ratification. In the room everybody was quietly listening to the minister, who was monotonously reading the reasons to issue a new bill that would slightly change the tobacco law. The proposed bill aimed to grant certain rights to the employees working in the tobacco regulatory agency (TAPDK). But according to rumors, the real goal was to open the way for possible alterations in the structure of the regulatory board rather than to issue new employee rights. With this change in the law, the current government would be able to recruit its own cadres to the institution that had been filled with members of the previous coalition government. The board members’ positions in regulatory agencies were secured for five years and could not be terminated. The cadres of regulatory agencies had already become the battlegrounds of political parties that compete to dominate these institutions. With about 25 deputies from both majority and opposition parties, the committee for the Adjustment to the European Union holds regular meetings to investigate the proposed legislation’s accordance to EU criteria. Bureaucrats whose institutions are subject to the proposed changes also attend these meetings. In this particular meeting, several members of the tobacco regulatory agency (TAPDK) were present in order to inform the deputies about possible questions surrounding the law and the institution. I was able to get into the meeting together with several tobacco experts after receiving a special pass with the help of a young deputy in the ruling Justice and Development Party who was pursuing his PhD in political science at the time. Just before the committee meeting, tobacco experts and I visited his office to inform him about the tobacco law enacted in 2002. The first question he asked was where the tobacco law had originated. One of the tobacco experts quickly replied: “The IMF wanted it,” as I had heard several times during the course of my fieldwork. In the EU meeting, when the minister finished his dull reading, the deputies appeared clueless as to what the proposed change was really about. The members of the committee are required to discuss a wide range of issues in day-long meetings, but they are not well-informed about them. As one of the deputies frankly confessed in the meeting, the members usually did not have an in-depth knowledge about the proposed laws. This explanation was actually in accordance with my observation. Nobody seemed to have any ideas or questions

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for discussion, and the change in the tobacco law seemed be ratified exactly as it was proposed. Surprisingly, the silence that dominated the room vanished when the young deputy whom we had contacted before the EU meeting started to ask questions of the head of the tobacco regulatory agency. I realized that this was an unexpected move. First, as a junior deputy of the majority party, his intervention might not be well-received. It would be risky for him to question his party’s decisions, especially in a meeting directed by a politically powerful minister who was known for his stern attitude. And second, the committee had to go through a bunch of other adjustment matters, and at this point, a long discussion about a nonprioritized matter like tobacco (not human rights or the banking sector) seemed to be a waste of time. His incessant questions, however, inspired the deputies, and the quiet meeting all of a sudden erupted into a boisterous discussion. I was very much surprised to hear the young deputy’s to-the-point questions and appropriate explanations given that he barely had any idea about the tobacco law before our visit to his office two hours ago. He was repeating one by one the criticisms raised by the tobacco experts, and using the report that I had provided for him (basically a fact sheet) to support his arguments. It was a turning point in the meeting. At this moment, the discussion shifted from a technical matter (change of a clause in the law), to a political one (social and economic impacts of the tobacco law). I could not help but keep thinking what the meeting would be like if the tobacco experts and I had not chased the young deputy for a month (our requests to meet with several deputies were either politely turned down, or those we contacted did not seem to be interested in the issue), traveled from İzmir to Ankara just to meet him, and found the opportunity to inform him of the issues on the same day of the meeting. Obviously, the legal network was now extended to the tobacco experts, whether or not their intervention would make a change in the legislation process. The discussion in the meeting was heated, and the draft proposal was sidestepped and the questions focused on the origins of the tobacco law, i.e. why a tobacco law was needed and a tobacco regulatory agency was established in Turkey? In the end, a deputy from the opposition party asked the crucial question: Did the European Union countries have equivalent laws and regulatory bodies in their countries? The question was fundamental since this committee was established to examine the adjustment of Turkish laws to meet EU criteria. The answers of the members of the regulatory agency were ambiguous and confusing. While one of the civil servants claimed that, “in Sweden and Finland, there are equivalent institutions,” another officer wanted to correct her, “no, in fact, the tobacco regulatory board only exists in Switzerland and Canada;” but



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the argument was get clarified as a third officer insisted that “the EU countries do not have tobacco regulatory agencies.” The board members’ ignorance of which countries were EU members, as well as of the institutional origins of the agency, put them on the spot for criticism in the meeting. The official document written after the meeting also describes the issue in a very ambiguous tone: The [regulatory] entities would not constitute problems since their numbers are absolutely increasing; an equivalent institution [of the one in Turkey] does not exist in the EU with an exception of one or two countries; it is observed that there are a variety of different applications in the World and the EU to regulate the [tobacco] market; since the taxation constitutes a significant issue in the EU [countries], the responsible institutions are the Ministries of Finance but in any case in order to regulate the market, a new legal regulation is needed [in Turkey]; even though the [regulatory] institution does not have an equivalent in the EU countries, the [regulatory agency] is commensurable with the Acquis Communitarie.31

In a single paragraph, there are several premises that contradict one another. Moreover, the ambivalent tone of the document does not bring any clarifications about how the tobacco regulatory agency’s status would be adjusted in accordance with the criteria of the EU, where the equivalent institutions do not actually exist. The entire document seems to be purposefully written in an uncertain and ambiguous way to open space for possible bureaucratic maneuvers and thus exercise control over the destiny of the agency. What struck me in the EU meeting was, in spite of the well-known fact that the law was the outcome of IMF policies, the committee members, both from the majority and opposition parties, skipped this detail and tried to legitimize the law within the context of the EU criteria. Interestingly, while the parliamentary discussions which occurred more than four years earlier centered on criticisms of the IMF’s imposition of the law, in the EU meeting there was no mention of the international financial institutions at all. Some of the deputies, who had been in parliament then, and maybe even participated in the heated debates about the IMF and national sovereignty, were now trying to find the origins of the law in the EU’s criteria. This “forgetting” might be related to the switched positions of the political parties. The opposition party (the Justice and Development Party) was now the majority party, and had no intention to abolish the law that it severely criticized previously. The current opposition parties on the other hand, which had ratified the law, now preferred to talk about anything other than the IMF connection. The history of the law was erased from memory and reborn within a new agenda.

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When the law was enacted in 2002 in line with the requirements of the IMF, it was not necessarily in accordance with the EU’s tobacco policies. Different policies imposed by the international institutions illustrate the absence of coherent and monolithic global consensus on reform policies. In such situations, countries like Turkey have to make their decisions through a reconciliation of the prerequisites of international institutions. It seems that the Turkish government, stuck between a number of competing and contradictory requirements, had to adjust a variety of its own policies to meet the demands of powerful international actors. The Turkish government prepared a national program to adopt its administrative, political, economic, and social structures to Acquis Communitarie of the EU in a report on the “National Program for the Adoption of the Acquis” dated March 19, 2001. In this report, Turkey made significant reform commitments to the EU on regulatory agencies, of which tobacco regulation was one of them. However, as I was told many times by several bureaucrats, the conditions of the tobacco law implemented in Turkey were far more radical than the requirements of the EU. In a one-day workshop organized to discuss the legal framework of tobacco agriculture in EU countries, a high-ranking bureaucrat at the tobacco regulatory agency explained that the basic characteristics of the Turkish and the EU tobacco sectors and regulations differed considerably from one other. The EU law has been supporting tobacco growers, unlike the case in Turkey where the subsidies were abolished as of 2003.32 In Turkey, the new tobacco law suddenly cut off all subsidies provided to tobacco growers on the basis that this was the case in European countries. However, the phasing out of subsidies was a decision imposed by the IMF due to the huge deficit in the Turkish national budget and it had nothing to do with the EU. The EU Common Agriculture Policy has regulated the tobacco sector by keeping the demanded kind of tobacco amount at a certain level while subsidizing alternative crops, which would replace unmarketable types of tobacco. The EU’s approach was a long-term process, while Turkey’s agricultural program remained as an abrupt policy rather than a real solution, with the government removing agriculture subsidies in a year. Moreover, the EU policies, such as the implementation of contracts, control agencies, and quotas diverge significantly from those of Turkey.33 Over the course of my fieldwork, I repeatedly witnessed that the EU has served as a cover for the enforcement of radical reforms in Turkey. The most striking reaction came from a deputy in the majority party whom I interviewed. He criticized several politicians for deliberately manipulating EU regulations with the purpose of shifting the blame for severe policies, the so-called



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“bitter-medicine,” to the EU. When the legitimacy of certain reforms cannot be based on the national will and politicians refrain from taking responsibility, the reforms are legitimized under the pretext of the “requirements of the Union” of which the EU officials are not even aware. The discourse about the EU has gained an instrumental role in the functioning of Turkish political culture. In the EU meeting, the tone of the discussion escalated when one of the deputies from the opposition party accused the government of trying to adopt “laws on the basis that they were merely required by the EU.” Upon those criticisms, the minister of State directing the meeting defended the government by suggesting that all sorts of technical decisions concerning the tobacco sector fell under the authority of the tobacco regulatory agency, comprised of experts. The minister brusquely ended the lingering discussion with a succinct explanation: “[regulatory agencies] become prevalent in the world. A lot of institutions must keep their distance with politics […] These regulatory bodies make policies proceed technically.” The technicalization of administrations means the delegation of the responsibilities of politicians to regulatory bodies constituted of experts, and the presence of experts, simply, is supposed to make these institutions trustworthy. Technicalization is treated as a phenomenon that cannot be reduced to political and social forces. It is represented merely as a neutral means to do things. However, the technical practices, contrary to how they are represented, are by no means apolitical, acultural, or even instrumental.34 These practices grant experts immense powers, such as holding an unquestioned ability to decide critical issues behind closed doors and remove their discussion from the realm of public contestations. The minister’s emphasis on the technicalization of decision-making in the regulatory agencies reflected itself even at the meeting. His reply did not answer the questions concerning the regulatory agencies and their responsibilities, but on the contrary, simply locked all possible political debate into a black box named technicality. The possibilities for debate and confrontation were dismissed on the grounds that regulatory agencies would better handle the issue with their expertise and technical knowledge. The circumstances of having political arguments on this issue were simply circumvented. Since policymaking in the agencies would be a technical assessment under the guidance of experts, the discussion of the delegation of power to these organs also remained irrelevant. The fact that experts would make decisions on particular areas in which they have specialized indicated the noninvolvement of politicians in their decisions.

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In the first part of this chapter, I have argued that the parliamentary discussions of the legislation of the tobacco law were not very productive in revealing the possible changes in tobacco production and marketing. The technical details of the law, which have become so vital for tobacco cultivators, were rendered external to the political process. The political arguments were not articulated with technical concerns, and they simply remained abstract concepts. In the second meeting, on the other hand, we see that the political discussion was dismissed on the grounds that the issues the deputies were tackling required technical knowledge, and thus had to be examined under the authority of the tobacco regulatory agency. By suppressing a potential debate and confrontation, the political was impeded. Without the technical explanations, the various political issues related to tobacco production and marketing remained invisible, and without the political debate, the expert knowledge locked the decisions within the boundaries of the regulatory agency and silenced all sorts of criticisms. This is a case of a “double delegation,” a term coined by Callon: the delegation of political discussion and decision to elected representatives, and of technical and scientific issues to experts.35 This divide between the two realms of experts and politicians leads to dead-end discussions and unproductive decision-making processes. As Barry rightly says, both “legislation and technical regulation have the effects of placing actions and objects (provisionally) outside the realm of public contestation.”36 Ignoring the needs of vulnerable populations, this division of labor effectively excludes citizens from debates, deliberation, and decision-making, and forces them to rely on the actions of elected officials and experts. This was the case concerning the tobacco law, which would change the lives of thousands of tobacco cultivators in Turkey.

3

Policy in the Making1 Regulatory agencies are the institutions that are empowered by the state’s delegation of controlling, monitoring, and organizing authorities to a number of experts. Through these institutions, the exercise of control, surveillance, and ruling over people spatially and temporally has become possible. They simply combine a diverse range of actors varying from government institutions and local bureaucrats to international financial institutions and multinational companies in global networks. They travel the world as “standardized” institutions, which govern economic and social life in the places they settle. Relying crucially on “professional expertise,” they attain power with their claims of neutrality and authority, as well as the ability to remove themselves from the disputed terrain of politics. Originating in the US financial sector, regulatory agencies have spread to Europe and then to the rest of the world. Since the mid-1980s, the number of regulatory agencies has sharply increased around the world.2 The properties of the “regulatory state” have been universalized through diffusion,3 but regulation after diffusion remains a complex process requiring further examination. Despite the global pervasiveness of regulatory models, it is not possible to talk about the creation of global institutional homogeneity. Global standards may lead to the creation of institutions sharing common features beyond national borders,4 but not necessarily to the emergence of identical regulatory processes and institutions at the national level. After they are imported to the national setting, regulatory agencies may be in conflict with the existing institutional structure as well as international institutions.5 When a global institutional model is adopted, it actually undergoes a process of translation, and gains different meanings from those inherent in the original model. Translation means the transformation of models as they move into new settings, but what is equally important is the dynamic process of translation itself, which produces something new, regardless of preexisting choices of individuals or the dominating social structure. Callon and Latour challenge

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the definite certainty in the translation process by dismissing the preexisting categories and their domination of social and political realms.6 The process of translation constitutes a fluid network, in which the final policy is the outcome of interrelationships among the actors involved in the process. The coherence attributed to a successful project is never a priori, but is created in retrospect as the outcome of the translation process, which is essentially composed of dissent and conflict.7 The proliferation of regulatory agencies gained considerable pace in Turkey during the 1990s and 2000s.8 Especially after the February 2001 crisis, a number of regulatory agencies were established in a very short period of time. The regulatory bodies in Turkey were evaluated either as global entities that faithfully perform the standardized international policies, or as local institutions that stick to national bureaucratic culture. Though these explanations can be identified with two opposing arguments, such as with globalization or localization perspectives, they do share a common denominator: they both start from a preexisting order in which the actors pursue their self-interests. In other words, in either case, policy-making practices are explained by overarching fixed structures. However, when I was doing my fieldwork, I started to wonder if the policies of the regulatory agencies are solely a reflection of either global or local interests. Or is it possible to see a different story if we do not first start from the “social,” but concentrate on the policy-making process? How can we explain the uncertainties and ambiguities in these institutions? Moreover, what sort of ethnographic method can we apply to expose the various decisionmaking policies being constituted through a myriad of relations between multiple actors? This chapter analyzes the policy-making practices of the Turkish tobacco regulatory agency, which was established in 2002 in return for a loan provided by the IMF and the World Bank. Specifically, I ethnographically investigate the policy-making process through an analysis of two controversies. I argue that the complex functioning of the regulatory process can be best understood by examining times of conflict. Tracking conflicts has become one of the established methods used in anthropology of law9 and science studies.10 According to Latour, the cartography of controversies is today a full research method which exposes discussions surrounding a technique or scientific fact that has not yet been determined.11 They indicate uncertain situations, which are not yet stabilized or closed. In a sense, the analysis of controversies makes it possible to observe “what is happening inside” before the final decisions are made, and before disagreements are “black boxed.” Moreover, they include not only human



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actors, but also “natural and biological elements, industrial and artistic products, institutional and economic institutions, scientific and technical artifacts” by which “the most heterogeneous relationships are formed.”12 The two controversies discussed in this chapter aim to provide ethnographic insights demonstrating how agencies transform and travel into new settings with an analysis of the differences between global policy and their generated practices on the ground. The first case discusses the conflict basically taking place between the agency and the monopoly, and the second discusses the controversy between the agency and multinational cigarette companies. The agency’s double controversy with both the state (the monopoly) and the market actors (the multinationals) simply illustrates the absence of a predetermined agenda within the agency, working to enhance the capacity of either the public or private interest. This study thus examines the way these controversies evolved, how they were settled, and how decisions were being made within a fluid heterogeneous network. I argue that an analysis of a controversy makes it possible to unfold the involvement and interaction of a variety of actors, and their negotiations, conflicts, and resistance with each other, and lucidly illustrates that the regulatory process is highly complicated and multidimensional, and cannot be simply comprehended within the framework of the predetermined duties and responsibilities of the agency.

Regulating under uncertainty With the ratification of the tobacco law in January 2002, the tobacco regulatory agency was established and it took over the state-run tobacco monopoly’s previous role in regulating the market. The agency, in contrast to the monopoly, is neither the buyer of tobacco nor the manufacturer of cigarettes, but was established as an independent institution to regulate the sector.13 This sort of regulation in the tobacco sector, imposed by international financial institutions, has been regarded as the prerequisite of a competitive market economy, which aimed at diminishing the role of the state and its intervention into the market. During the course of fieldwork, I was surprised to learn that even those working at the agency did not understand the reasons for the foundation of such an institution.14 The buzzwords of the neoliberal era, such as “efficiency,” “competition,” and “liberalization,” which were widely used in reports, speeches, and interviews, turned out to be abstract, empty concepts in colloquial conversations. Although neoliberal economics is implicitly regarded as a model

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through which liberalization policies are constructed, in reality there was no real consensus about which particular policies the agency had to undertake. In her discussion of the pension reform in Mexico, Schwegler points out bureaucrats’ different accounts of policy processes and demonstrates the incoherence in their explanations.15 In a similar vein, in spite of an assumed consensus about the functioning of the tobacco regulatory agency, the reality seems to be that its functioning is based on very ambiguous processes and ad hoc practices. The bureaucrats at the agency create decentralized improvizations beyond the rationales of state centric or so-called global standardized policies. The deployment of these practices is constituted through ambiguity and speculation while blurring the boundaries between public and private, state and market, and regulation and deregulation.16 One of the reasons for this ambiguity is arguably the brevity of the tobacco law, which consists of only 12 articles. As one of the chief experts in the agency frankly confessed, the agency could have unlimited power or no power at all, depending on how the law was interpreted.17 Therefore, it was hard to envisage the possible policies of the agency. As Türem suggests in the case of another regulatory agency in Turkey, “the question as to why the agency is doing what it is doing has not been clearly answered.”18 The practices of the agencies are undertaken in an environment of uncertainty. Decision-making, at least in the case of the tobacco agency, is often executed in response to the expectations of other actors in the sector, which makes it difficult to predict the policies beforehand. In spite of the erratic nature of the policy-making process, there is a tendency to describe regulatory agencies working with a designated agenda for the benefits of either the state or the private sector. This does not of course mean that the practices of these institutions can be placed outside of the political domain or devoid of power relations. On the contrary, as many studies19 rightly argue, the common characteristics attributed to the regulatory agencies, such as autonomy, neutrality, transparency, or objectivity are all disputable. It is certainly true that we cannot expect regulatory agencies, or any sort of institution, to undertake their policies in an apolitical setting. This argument, however, should not be extended to a point that these bodies are merely pursuing the interests of a certain party. Such a deterministic approach oversimplifies the decision-making process through attributing all the power to the human actors working with predetermined agendas and possessing full control to generate the desired policies. Drawing from the works of Latour, I argue that the policy-making practices



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of the agency are not determined by any overarching structures or by actors holding interests. The occurrence of controversies illustrates the fact that any preordering attempt is doomed to fail, and the decision-making process is endlessly going on through a myriad of interactions among various actors. Latour’s anthropology abandons all a priori social explanations that are used to explain society. All the well-known social categories (such as class, ethnicity, and gender) are rejected on the grounds that such distinctions may be the result of analysis but not its departure. In other words, Latour is “against ‘the social’ as a sui generis kind and as a prior explanatory resource rather than an achievement to be explained.”20 Latour replaces a “sociology of the social” with a “sociology of associations”’ by switching from meta-theoretical explanations to empirical case studies.21 In the “sociology of associations,” the focus is being shifted from the groups of mere humans to assemblages of humans and nonhumans. Agency is extended to nonhuman actors: to bacteria,22 automatic door closers,23 and public transport systems.24 “The missing masses” which have been ignored so far in social sciences are included in the study of networks. This democratization of actors reasonably brings about criticism of the idea that human beings are granted full power over nonhumans. Here what Latour proposes is the exploration of the inextricable interweaving of different actants. According to him, the actions can neither be reduced to “what ‘intentional’, ‘meaningful’ humans do,”25 nor to social structures, but they emerge from a variety of interactions and reciprocal transformations of human and nonhuman actors. Action, in short, is “not a property of humans but of an association of actants.”26 Therefore, as a method, Latour attempts to track multiple associations and investigate their interactions within a network. In a similar vein, the first example also illustrates how the regulatory decisions are being made within a heterogeneous network of both human and nonhuman actors. Hard-box cigarette packing machines gathered around themselves “a different assembly of relevant parties” and these “trigger new occasions to passionately differ and dispute.”’27 These machines are not the perfect examples of Latour’s actants, which work, break, or stop against the will and control of human beings. They hold, however, an extremely important role in terms of creating an assembly of heterogeneous actors: the related parties are not only limited by the institutions and companies, but also by bureaucrats and private sector stakeholders, experts, tobacco blends, official reports, and different brands of cigarettes. The regulation process has evolved through struggle and conflict through the formation of coalitions and counter-movements among these actors.

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Conflict I: Machines and reports The first case concerns the monopoly’s purchase of hard-box packing machines for its biggest factory in Tokat to strengthen its position vis-à-vis the stateof-the-art technology of multinational cigarette manufacturers. The conflict, which started between the tobacco monopoly and the regulatory agency after the involvement of the Ministry of Finance, demonstrates how the agency made its decisions about the sector in an environment of uncertainty and ambivalence. The fault lines between the state offices, the Ministry of Finance, and the monopoly about the purchase of hard-box machines illustrate not only the nonmonolithic structure of the state, but also how their struggle over the tobacco sector shaped the entire regulation process. During my fieldwork, I accompanied tobacco experts on their trips to several villages, towns, and cities. Sometimes our visits were undertaken for technical purposes, such as to the tobacco fields to report on the condition of the current year’s crop, and sometimes to the offices of the tobacco monopoly in various cities to inform other experts about developments in the sector. One of our longest trips lasted more than ten days and included towns and cities from central Anatolia to the Black Sea region, and concluded with a visit to the biggest cigarette factory of the tobacco monopoly. After meeting with other experts and visiting the factory, the long day ended with a dinner party thrown in honor of the experts in a big nightclub/restaurant. As the only female at the table with about ten tobacco experts, I was fairly uncomfortable with the atmosphere, including the high volume of the music, the tobacco experts’ conversations with one another, which entirely ignored my presence, and worst of all, the inebriated officer on the other side of the table, who was the general director of the factory. When he asked the chief engineer to come and sit next to him, the tension at the table intensified. Anxious heads turned to them as everybody at the table knew that they do not get along with each other. In addition to the conflict of interests over certain promotions as well as a divergence in political stances, their crucial disagreement happened to be over a recent scandal about the machines that were bought for the monopoly’s factories. After ten minutes, the two men’s inaudible conversation turned into a loud disagreement followed by yelling, screaming, and cursing each other. When other experts left their chairs and tried to calm them down, the general director of the factory unexpectedly turned to me and started to inform me about the “realities of the scandal.” My status surprisingly shifted from that of a nonexistent woman to an outsider who



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could impartially judge who was right and wrong. As I was unable to understand what he was saying and was unaware of the details of the scandal at the time, I decided to research this incident in the following days. My investigation would now rely on gossip, speculation, newspaper clippings, and informal talks (as the most “objective knowledge”), since formal interviews on this issue were either prohibited or sidestepped. The experts’ argument was about the tobacco monopoly’s purchase of hard-box cigarette packing machines. In the 1990s, the tobacco monopoly had a very established place in both the Turkish and world market as the fifth largest cigarette producer.28 Having been the only tobacco company in the country for years, the monopoly did not develop any market strategies. As a Philip Morris officer explained to me, the monopoly’s market strategy was “a joke.” Turkish smokers had developed a preference for hard-box cigarettes after the ban on the imports of American blend cigarettes was lifted in mid-1980s. Hard-box cigarettes, along with their functionality of protecting the shape of the cigarettes, became very fashionable among smokers. With investments of multinational cigarette manufacturers in Turkey, the tobacco market had become more competitive and the monopoly administration felt the need to update its current technology. To compete with the multinationals, the monopoly administration signed an agreement with a Spanish company to buy eight hard-box cigarette packing machines in June 2004 for its largest factory in Tokat. The total cost of the machines, €13.8 million, was scheduled to be paid off in four years. The arrangement seemed perfect until a deputy, from the True Path Party, brought the issue to parliament and raised questions about the purchase of hard-box packing machines.29 The deputy questioned the legality of the hard-box machine agreement with an interpellation submitted to the minister of Finance, whose son was implicated in being involved in the sale.30 Regarding the newness of machines, the minister replied: Either bought or leased machines must be “new and unused” as a requirement of legislation in effect. This condition is explicitly cited in the specifications and the contracts. The exporting company will hold the entire responsibility and be subjected to serious and significant sanctions if these conditions are breached. The inspection of the subscribed conditions during the import process is done by the Tobacco, Tobacco Products and Alcoholic Beverages Market Regulatory Agency (all emphases are in the original).31

The minister placed the tobacco regulatory agency in charge. After being interpellated 32 by the minister, the agency sent its experts to the factory. Upon

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the experts’ inspection, the regulatory board asserted that the conditions of the machines did not comply with the tobacco law, which required that the purchased equipment of the tobacco factories must be new, and these machines were old and, as a result, had to be dismantled and returned to the exporting country within the following 60 days. The monopoly officials were shocked by the report and stated that the machines were brand new. Besides, even if they had not been new, it would not have created a problem since the referredto law was applicable only for prospective cigarette companies intending to establish new factories in the country. The law was ambiguous about whether or not existing cigarette companies, including the monopoly, could invest in old machinery.33 The monopoly and the agency, the two sides of the controversy, tried to support their claims by resorting to technical reports written about the condition of the machines. The first report written by the tobacco agency experts in November 2004 stated that “the chassis and skeleton of the machines are old and used; the machines were overhauled and repaired” and it also added that the machine parts were all derived from other machines. The second report, requested by the monopoly from the engineers of the Istanbul Chamber of Industry, was written in December 2004 and it declared that “no evidence is found that the machines were used.” And, finally, Istanbul Technical University wrote the third report upon the request of the customs office in July 2005. This last report was perplexing: “some experts determined that the machines were produced before the date of their announced date of production” but “the machines are new and unused.” In other words, machines might have been manufactured before the indicated date, but were not used.34 These three reports composed by three separate groups of experts contradict each other. The machines became a hub for both the technical as well as political debates. The political aspect of the incident was there from the beginning, but turned into a technical matter through which the two institutions could argue their claims. The monopoly applied to the courts for the suspension of execution, i.e. returning the machines to Spain, using the second report as evidence that they were new. Their request was rejected, prompting them to apply to a superior court. In the end, the continuing legal proceedings in the courts were taken to parliament. In order to keep the machines, the majority party, the Justice and Development Party, intended to add an article to the tobacco law stating that only newly established cigarette factories were required to buy new equipment. However, already alarmed by accusations of corruption in the press, as well as



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by the criticisms of the opposition parties, they had to drop the proposal for the new regulation. The legal process was still ongoing as clarification of the case took time due to ambiguities in the law, the interpretation of the law, the contract, and the interpretation of the contract. Thus, the alternative way to expose the truth was by invoking the technical realm, where the evidence would supposedly be easily found. This is reiterated by Latour’s concept that “when controversies flare up the literature becomes technical:” When we approach the places where facts and machines are made, we get into the midst of controversies. The closer we are the more controversial they become. When we go from “daily life” to scientific activity, from the man in the street to the men in the laboratory, from politics to expert opinion, we do not go from noise to quiet, from passion to reason, from heat to cold. We go from controversies to fiercer controversies.35

This is exactly what happened in the machine conflict. The contenders in the dispute invoked technical reports but they did not yield what was expected. Pictures of the machines were taken by different experts, the reports were written, and different data and interpretations were circulated, but the goal of exposing the facts was not achieved. The evidence in the reports and pictures of the machines were as ambiguous as the discussions, and could not transform what was opaque and unclear into a plain, transparent, and absolute fact. In the end, the machines were shipped back to Spain as several officials of the monopoly were called before the courts for questioning. The high-ranking officials of the monopoly as well as the ruling party vehemently criticized the verdict on the grounds that it would leave the monopoly behind its competitors and open the way for multinational cigarette companies to dominate the market. The general director of the monopoly, who signed the agreement to buy the machines, blamed the multinational companies for playing a major role in the verdict: “Philip Morris and JTI are playing a big game here” and “trying to destroy [the monopoly],” he reported to the newspapers.36 The monopoly included the multinational cigarette companies in the overall picture to support its case against the agency. Having already been skeptical about the establishment of a regulatory agency under commitments made to the IMF and the World Bank, the bureaucrats of the monopoly were alarmed by the idea that the agency would pursue policies in favor of multinationals. For them, the hard-box packing machine case simply showed that the regulatory agency was controlled by the interests of multinationals. This argument was followed

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by a series of accusations that the regulatory agency was in alliance with, and even bribed by, the multinational cigarette manufacturers. Several journalists claimed in their columns that this verdict would not only scare away foreign investment, but also damage state earnings.37 Having already been critical about the establishment of a regulatory agency under commitments made to the IMF and the World Bank, this perspective assumed that the agency was basically established to facilitate the interests of the private sector. Several tobacco experts I have interviewed also stated that misconduct and corruption might have taken place, but the involvement of the regulatory agency in this case was wrong since the actions of the monopoly, corrupt or not, had a nationalistic purpose—i.e. strengthening the position of the tobacco monopoly vis-à-vis the multinational cigarette companies. According to this argument, the regulatory agency, as an institution of the Turkish state, should have been on the side of the monopoly. The pretext of the incident was that what the bureaucrats and politicians had done might have been wrong, but the end result of the “corrupt action” would have been for the benefit of the entire nation. The regulatory agency was blamed for not loving the country enough.38 The critical discourse of the monopoly presumes the existence of a predetermined regulatory policy working for the promotion of the interests of a certain group. However, as the case illustrates, the agency did not have any prefixed policies about the purchase of machines. The regulation process first started with the interrogation of the Ministry of Finance, followed by the creation of several expert reports upon request, and continued with the tobacco monopoly’s resistance to the decision to return the machines. The regulatory agency in the end made a conclusive decision produced within the complex interrelations of actors in the real time of the controversy.

Conflict II: Tax and blends The second crisis broke out six months after the “machine” scandal. This time the controversy was between the regulatory agency and multinational cigarette manufacturers. While in the first case, the agency was in conflict with the monopoly, in the second one, it was involved in a controversy with the multinational cigarette companies about the determination of cigarette taxes. The case, which started with an inquiry of the Ministry of Finance and continued with the accusation of the agency (this time) for siding with the monopoly, demonstrates that the agency did not hold a predetermined agenda favoring either public or



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private interest, and its duties and responsibilities have kept changing according to the maneuvers of other actors in the sector. In three years (2002–5), the taxes on cigarettes changed seven times,39 and one of them seriously transformed the market structure. The cigarette manufacturers starkly criticized the irregular modifications in taxation policy. They argued that the arbitrary decisions of politicians were based on the interests at the time, leading to an unpredictable and unstable market and thus blocking the way for investments in the country. However, despite their harsh criticisms, the multinationals coped with and even took advantage of the new modifications. Frequent policy changes in cigarette taxation resulted from the changing market strategies of cigarette multinationals and the Ministry of Finance’s responses to these changes. The British American Tobacco (BAT) company reduced the sale prices of two medium-priced cigarettes by about 20 percent in mid-2004, requiring the Ministry of Finance to modify its taxation policy. As a relatively new multinational cigarette company in Turkey, BAT implemented an aggressive marketing policy to attain a greater share in the market, along with looking for ways to pay less tax, which had climbed up to 71 percent.40 Other cigarette companies had to reduce their prices to compete with BAT, which led to a radical drop in the total amount of taxes paid to the government. Tax policies on cigarettes are set through the struggle between the government and multinational cigarette manufacturers. As soon as the multinationals adjusted their marketing strategies, the government modified the tax policies. The flexibility of the multinationals has become the biggest challenge for the government, which has been following the changes in the market, although always one step behind. The next policy modification was significant in revealing how the multinationals could adjust their market policies, as well as technicalities to adapt to the emerging taxation system. After calculating that the price reductions of American blend cigarettes would cost US$1 billion per year to the government,41 the Ministry of Finance introduced new taxation policies by increasing ad valorem duty with a decrease in proportional tax to secure government revenues. It reduced the proportional excise tax from 55.3 percent to 28 percent, and adjusted the lump sum tax according to the amount of Oriental tobacco in the cigarettes.42 The new policy did not influence the price of premium American blend cigarettes, as the excise tax was reduced, but it hit the mediumpriced American blends, which would end up with a 30–80 percent price increase. The Oriental brand cigarettes produced by the monopoly were the sole beneficiaries of the new taxation policy; as the proportion of Oriental tobacco

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increased in the blends, the tax would be reduced. This system brought serious advantages to cigarettes containing high proportions of Oriental tobacco and was reported in the media as a taxation policy that encouraged national tobacco production in the country. Furthermore, the policy aimed to increase revenues from the American blend cigarettes while also increasing the market share of the monopoly. The new taxation policy was a tough setback for the cigarette multinationals. They were aware of the fact that if they increased the prices of medium-priced cigarettes, Turkish smokers would switch to the similar and cheaper monopoly brand cigarettes. The multinational cigarette companies, however, were able to overcome this and, moreover, take advantage of the emerging constraint. American brand cigarettes consist of different percentages of tobacco blends. Though the exact proportions are kept secret, a standard American cigarette has approximately 10–15 percent Oriental tobacco and the rest consists of Virginia and Burley tobacco. Although most multinationals use a standardized blend for the most well-known brands (such as Marlboro and Camel), they might adjust the blend percentages of medium-priced or local cigarettes according to the economic or cultural settings of a country. The standardization of cigarettes is a myth when it comes to reducing the cost of the cigarettes. In response to the modified tax policy, the multinational cigarette companies struck back. JTI openly announced that it increased the Oriental tobacco amount in its brands of Winston to 34 percent, and of Monte Carlo, More, Anadolu and Winchester to 67 percent, whereas BAT stated that in Viceroy, its most popular brand among Turkish consumers, the amount of Oriental tobacco had increased to 67 percent. Philip Morris stated that they raised the Oriental tobacco percentage in certain brands from 24 percent to 34 percent.43 In fact, the precise increase of Oriental tobacco to 34 and 67 percent was neither coincidental nor derived from a special recipe that the Turkish smokers might like. According to the new regulation, cigarettes containing Oriental tobacco between 0–33 percent would be taxed 1 million Turkish lira for a pack, whereas those containing 34–66 percent Oriental tobacco would be taxed 535,000 Turkish lira. Finally, cigarettes containing more than 67 percent Oriental tobacco would be taxed 350,000 Turkish lira.44 While at first the taxes were determined according to the proportion of tobacco leaves in the cigarettes, in the end the tax policy determined the blend proportion of the cigarettes. The taste of the cigarette and the cigarette taxation policy was tightly connected in a manner that continuously influenced and shaped each other. The flexibility of the multinationals does not just lie in their ways of production, but also in



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their ways of managing and adapting to the fluctuations and irregularities of the political and economic settings of the target country. The first round of the taxation conflict was between the Ministry of Finance and the multinationals, and the second round started when the regulatory agency was called to perform its “duties” as a third party. When the multinationals reaped benefits from the new taxation policy by crafting new blends out of the old brands, they not only raised their profit margin for medium-priced cigarettes, but they also started to compete with the monopoly’s inexpensive Oriental blends, which still had a huge market in Turkey. However, there was no scientific evidence, other than their word, that the companies really made modifications to their blends. All of a sudden the attention turned to the regulatory agency after a journalist questioned them: For several days, I have been writing the speculations about the multinational cigarette manufacturers. These companies reported [to the tobacco regulatory agency] that they had made changes in the proportions of their blends, though they had not, in order to pay less tax according to the new lump sum tax system announced by the Ministry of Finance. The only responsible institution in this matter is the Tobacco Regulatory Agency, and it keeps its silence. I am afraid that the silence of the agency confirms the allegations that the state has been losing $1 billion dollars every year [from the taxation of cigarettes] (the emphasis is in the original).45

In response to these criticisms, the tobacco regulatory agency published a press release on its website,46 and criticized the accusations as aiming to fabricate “‘a negative image about the regulatory board by using distorted and contradictory arguments.” The responsibility for determining the blend percentages in manufactured cigarettes was placed on the agency under a directive from the Ministry of Finance only after the introduction of the new tax policy. This newly created responsibility, however, as the regulatory agency argued, was impossible to achieve. The verification of the blends, such as a precise determination of the increase in the amount of Oriental tobacco in manufactured cigarettes, was “mathematically and scientifically impossible in [our] country or in the world.”47 The only way to reveal the changes in blend proportion was to monitor and investigate production at the cigarette factories during production. As a result, the agency started to send experts to cigarette factories for inspection. After the observations of 18 different cigarette brands, companies’ declarations about the changes were found to be correct, and results of the investigation were reported to the Ministry of Finance.48

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While before the implementation of the new taxation policy in August 2004 the regulatory agency’s monitoring was limited to smoke and chemical analyzes of cigarettes, the agency was now required to obtain detailed information about blends in the factories. This new role imposed on the regulatory agency by the Ministry was not well-received by the cigarette multinationals. As one of the multinational representatives expressed it to me: The state said that “I want to know [the blends] because you cannot keep a secret from the state. I want to know not only the proportions of Burley, Virginia, and Oriental tobacco, but also how much of the blend is constituted of Virginia, reconstituted, and expanded tobacco in the cigarettes.” Therefore, what was asked from us was to provide the entire blend recipe. […] We objected, and told them then we would stop our production [in Turkey]. It was the last straw for us. Such a thing can happen only in Turkey. […] This is a trade secret. At the same time, according to the 2001/37/EC,49 we also have to tell them the additives and aromas that we are using in the cigarettes. They want to have the blend recipe as well as the list of additives used in the cigarettes. This is a wrong policy.

Supervising the blend proportions of the cigarettes became the newly assigned responsibility of the agency after the controversy between the Ministry of Finance and the multinationals. The multinationals dismissed the new regulation on the grounds that the agency was not carrying out its premise of being a neutral and objective institution. Like the monopoly officials, they criticized the agency for taking sides in the sector but with a substantial difference: for them, the ally of the agency was the state. They argued that the agency was undertaking its responsibilities with a state-centric vision and working against the multinationals under political pressures driven from the government. According to the multinationals, the impartial global institutional structure was translated into the Turkish setting with a covert agenda of enhancing state influence in the market. This case, however, illustrates that the regulatory policies were decided and implemented as a consequence of the controversy. Like the first case, the second example shows that the decision-making of the agency was concluded only after the manifold interactions among different actors. In other words, the regulatory policy was established after the agency took action. It was not the preexisting policies that generated the regulatory practices, but it was the practices that created the policies.



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Assessment When I visited the Ankara office of one of the biggest multinational cigarette manufacturers on a crisp winter day, a surprise was awaiting me. I had grown used to the half-hearted and hasty interviews with the companies’ representatives providing me with nothing more than I could have learned from newspapers. On this particular occasion, though, I was amazed to see two company representatives for Turkey as well as the company’s Middle East regional director ready to conduct a two-hour interview. Though they were fairly timid about their policies, standards, blends, and market strategies—in short, anything about their company—they were brave in their statements about the government, other cigarette companies, and particularly about the tobacco regulatory agency. The company representatives reiterated several times that the tobacco sector must be regulated “for the predictability and stability of the market.” However, what people understood by regulation, they continued, was different from one to another. Their approach toward regulation was more like tailoring the laws in a way that would make “everybody in the sector play according to rules.” It was basically a technical regulation that would facilitate the functioning of the free market. In this respect, the agency did not know how to regulate the market, as their operations were concentrated more on the policies of banning50 rather than of regulating. The representatives stated that the agency’s personnel was not competent enough and their market vision was restricted to traditional bureaucratic administration: They are trying to regulate a sector that they don’t know anything about. The board is very incompetent. On the other side, the employees of multinationals know the sector very well but they are not represented on the board. If there were a few people from the multinationals on the board, the sector would not be like this.

I have heard the same comments whenever I interviewed anyone from the cigarette multinationals. As being the subjects of regulations, multinational cigarette manufacturers would like to be the regulators too. Adamantly supporting the argument that their presence on the board would sustain a truly effective regulation, they seemed to be unaware of how this idea might be problematical.51 All of the officials I interviewed without exception legitimized their argument on the basis of the ineffectiveness of the regulatory agency: “Every year, the European Union directorate informs the regulatory agency about certain issues but the people at the institution don’t know what to do with

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this [information].” According to the multinationals, the strong bureaucratic tradition with its uncreative and monotonous way of functioning—such as doing paperwork, running daily errands, working in a hierarchical order—has overshadowed the effective performance of the regulatory agency. The major obstruction stemmed from the old bureaucratic understanding of the personnel who were accustomed to work in an uncreative, risk adverse, and passive environment. Fraught with the bureaucratic culture from their earlier experiences, they were unable to catch up with the speed and spirit of the free market economy. This was the approach of the multinationals. However, even several employees working in the agency kept complaining about the lethargic and submissive attitude of members on the regulatory board. The tobacco law might be short, but for them it was flexible enough to dynamically work in the sector if desired. The board could have been more actively engaged in the sector if the members of the board were different. They considered the agency as an institution that lacked a genuine vision of the free market economy and was still devoted to the state-controlled economy. In other words, the state tradition was infused in the agency. On the other hand, government officials, especially the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Finance, have treated the regulatory agency with skepticism since the institution was established under commitments made to the IMF and the World Bank. They have taken for granted that the agency would favor and facilitate the multinationals’ policies. They argued that the agency simply helped the multinationals to dominate the market by weakening the monopoly’s competitive power, as happened in the incident of abrogation of the sales of hard-box cigarette packing machines. Both perspectives have explained the agency within a predefined structure. They both assume essentialized national and global frameworks. Yet, rather than explaining the operation of the agency with the interactions of pre-made structures at national and global levels, what we encounter is the realization that policy-making is an assemblage that involves different actors, spaces, and temporalities. Once more let us think about the two conflicts with which the tobacco agency had to deal. In the first incident, there was no rule that required the agency to check the machines bought for the monopoly’s cigarette factories. The agency was called into action only after the spread of speculation about the so-called corrupt purchase of the hard-box packing machines. In the end, a new responsibility (checking the status of machines) was added to the duty



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list of the agency. This role emerged after the lingering dispute that included several actors: the monopoly, the Ministry of Finance, the experts, the hard-box cigarette machines, and the expert reports. The second incident was similar to the first one in terms of the variety of actors involved in the process: the Ministry of Finance, the cigarette multinationals, the experts, and different types of tobacco blends. The fluid network was not confined to merely social relationships of people but also involved other materials (such as machines, tobacco blends, and expert reports). This controversy also started with speculation that the multinationals had changed the percentage of Oriental tobacco used in the cigarettes, but not to the same proportions as announced. In the end, similar to the first incident, checking the cigarette blends of the multinationals became the new responsibility of the agency. In both cases, the regulatory agency was interpellated by the Ministry of Finance to fulfill a new set of duties attached to the agency structure. After each case, the structure of the agency has changed considerably along the translation process, and it has taken on new obligations and responsibilities that did not exist in the original model. Both the IMF and the World Bank have been insistent about the implementation of legal and economic reforms oriented toward harmonizing regulatory practices in Turkey with global standards. The pressure put on the shoulders of the Turkish government to bring the political and economic structures into line with so-called global standards was very powerful. After the economic crisis of 2001, when the Turkish government had no choice but to enact laws imposed by international financial institutions, new global institutions, with their accompanying laws and policies, were being imported, justified, and put into practice. The importation of standardized institutions as well as their policies, however, has not yielded to the emergence of their replicas. The global institutional models were transformed as they moved into new settings. As mentioned earlier, what is significant here was the dynamic process of translation itself, which produced something new, regardless of preexisting choices and categories. The translation process has occurred through the formation of new alliances, contestations, resistance, and negotiations among the actors. Ultimately, the regulation was brought about through a complex set of improvizations. This is a process which I call, inspired by Latour, “Policy in the Making.”52 It embodies a type of policy being made in the translation process at the moment, rather than “all made policy” or “ready-made policy” which was shaped and directed by the predetermined strategies. The perpetual struggles among the actors, their conflicts, resistance, negotiations, etc., shaped the entire process and created an ambivalent and amorphous regulatory space. It was neither a legal text, such as a law

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or regulation, nor a global standard policy imposed by international financial institutions, but rather the multilayered interrelations among the actors that engendered the creation of a new regulatory practice. The functioning of the agency was more complicated than it was presented within the framework of conscious choices of individuals or the dominating social and political structure that work for enhancing and promoting the interests of either the state or the multinationals. Instead, the regulatory process, as shown in these two cases, was changing according to the slippery relationships among the actors in the sector. The agency was carrying on its “duties” on the basis of the expectations, resistance, and negotiations of the actors. In other words, the agency did not have ready-made policies but, on the contrary, the regulatory process was embedded in an assemblage53 that involved a multiplicity of actors. As Mosse shows in the case of development agencies, such institutional practices are not always driven by policies, but instead practices are generating policies.54 Simply put, the policy is not initiated according to a predesigned model but it is an outcome of the practices, and the coherence attributed to the policy is established through political acts of composition.55 Similarly, in both controversies, the Turkish tobacco agency followed the interactions among the actors in the market first, and then made decisions to regulate the sector, which were turned into regulatory policies afterwards. In both cases, the agency took action after the fact in the market was already constituted. This is exactly what the director of research at the Atlanta District branch of the FED stated for the regulation of markets: “systems, instruments, and markets are evolving faster than the political entities can bring their various rules and regulators into harmony.”56 The technocrats in the agency decided on the policies after the market had created its new rules and strategies. This “temporal incongruity”57 between the regulatory agency’s knowledge of the market and transformations taking place within the market result in an improvized version of policy hinging upon expectations, speculations, or predictions, produced through the actions of a multitude of actors. The inevitable belatedness of the regulatory practice arose from the fact that its object, the market, was always in a process of change, and there were no ready-made policies that could handle all of these changes. The fact that the regulative policies were tailored according to changes in the market and shaped through a set of negotiations among the involved actors demonstrates the absence of coherent policies beforehand. Documents, such as laws, regulations, expert reports, and pictures, do not necessarily correspond with the reality of the market. While, on paper, a system can seem to operate in abstract time, in



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practice, it operates through the temporal negotiations of actors in real time. In an environment of enormous uncertainty, in which policy choice cannot be derived from the laws and regulations, anticipations, speculations, and intuitions play a significant role in decision-making.58 The tobacco regulatory board was weaving its technocratic practice in real time. Rather than following ready-made policies, the policies were being made through a series of interactions of actors in this process, which resulted in the ossification of action at one point in the form of laws and regulations.

Part II

Markets

4

Remaking the Tobacco Market It was the end of March 2006, when on a rainy day I visited the headquarters of the tobacco monopoly, TEKEL, in Istanbul. As I got out of the cab and raised my head, I saw the run-down building through the rain, a black rectangular block with huge dark windows, built as an example of the supposedly modernist architecture from the late 1950s. With its depressing cement floors and clunky old furniture, it reminded me of Kafka’s The Castle, in which serious-looking bureaucrats walk among hundreds of piles of dusty folders that are stacked on top of each other and scattered everywhere. The thought that the building itself represented the gradual death of a giant company was ever-present, as I forced myself to imagine the “‘good old days,” sometime not more than ten years ago, when the furniture was not entirely worn-out, the civil servants were cheerful, and more importantly, the monopoly was still holding 75 percent of the tobacco market. I asked myself what drastic change had occurred in the tobacco sector that caused the state-owned monopoly to lose 50 percent of its market share in such a short period of time. What had gone wrong with TEKEL’s calculations and marketing policies such that it failed to adjust itself to the rules of the competitive market? Was it simply another example of the failure of a state enterprise incapable of keeping pace with the free market system? The middle-aged civil servant, Kerim Bey, working at TEKEL’s Research and Development department, liked talking about everything—the education status of his children, his family’s vacation to the US, etc.—except tobacco. Finally, after more family stories and the standard chat about the superiority of Oriental cigarettes over American blends, my informant all of a sudden declared: “I wish TEKEL would burn all the tobacco in its depots.” While trying to conceal the surprised expression on my face, I asked: “But why burn and not sell it at a cheaper price?” He replied immediately: There are about 450,000 tons of oversupply tobacco in the stocks of TEKEL. In the last years, to decrease the overstock, the crop was sold for 15, 20, 30 cents, that is far below its value. However, this cheap tobacco that was sold to

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This was the first but not the last time that I would hear similar comments over the course of my fieldwork. The argument was simple: the oversupply must be eliminated to sustain stability in the market, otherwise it could continue to cause the price of tobacco sales to plummet. In other words, in order to make the invisible hand maintain the balance in the market, a very visible hand, the state, has to intervene and burn the crop that it has bought. In the end, TEKEL had to regularly destroy overstock tobacco, a product that has a market value for up to six years.2 Ironically, surplus tobacco literally went up in smoke before it was even consumed; the crop that started its journey as a commodity had to complete its life as waste. With the introduction of Tobacco Law 4733, enacted in 2002, the government (under the supervision of international financial institutions) initiated an all-encompassing agricultural project that aimed to restructure tobacco production and marketing. This law aimed at balancing the supply and demand by means of prompting competitiveness in the tobacco sector. Until then, the existence of the support purchase system offered by the government and the minimum purchase price set by the tobacco monopoly were considered serious barriers to the formation of a free market in the tobacco sector.3 This state subsidized system encouraged overproduction and eventually raised tobacco surplus in the depots of the monopoly. As a solution, the new tobacco law introduced the contract farming4 system, which was supposed to open the market to competition, ensure that tobacco prices were set in a free market setting, and naturally eliminate the oversupply of tobacco. Prior to the new law, the government’s attempts to restrict tobacco production, such as burning tobacco oversupplies and/or putting quotas on the amount cultivated, had come to no avail. It was contract farming that would bring about the absolute elimination of the overproduction of tobacco. This shift from the support purchase system to a competitive tobacco market, however, did not lead to the formation of a self-regulating tobacco sector. What has emerged instead is a highly controlled market, certainly less “liberal” than the previous support purchase system. In the end, the reregulation of the production and exchange of tobacco through contract farming has engendered a market in which the prices are strictly set and the trading partners are firmly



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matched with each other. Moreover, this highly controlled market has unintentionally led to the formation of an unregulated market5 and created hierarchies among tobacco farmers: on the one hand, it has marginalized some cultivators, and on the other, it has generated new wealth opportunities for some others. Inspired by Science and Technology Studies, this chapter examines the reconstitution of a new market through an analysis of a nonhuman actor—i.e. the contract. Drawing particularly from the theory of performativity as discussed by Michel Callon,6 I scrutinize the ways in which the contract works as a market device, defined as “the material and discursive assemblages that intervene in the construction of markets.”7 The contract decontextualizes tobacco production and exchange, transforms the entire yield into a calculable and exchangeable entity, and reconstitutes the market by calling upon a multitude of actors, such as experts, farmers, the tobacco regulatory agency, leaf merchants, and multinational cigarette companies. Before the implementation of contract farming, except for the years when the production was limited by quota policies, the farmers used to have the freedom to cultivate tobacco with issued identification cards. Today only the farmers who had signed contracts are able to produce tobacco. Tobacco cultivation has been transformed from an ordinary farming activity to a legally defined practice, and within this new arrangement, the contracts have been turned into tradable objects. The implementation of contract farming has more dramatic impacts on the tobacco market in southeastern Turkey, where the sole tobacco buyer used to be the state-run monopoly. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the consequences of contract farming on tobacco production and marketing in Adıyaman, one of the poorest regions of the country, where this new mode of production has created an unregulated market behind the regulated one: while the contract, by taking the place of tobacco, has been transformed from a legal entitlement into a commodity, some legally sanctioned farmers have been turned into entrepreneurs. This new market constituted through contract farming has transformed the social structure in the region by replacing old hierarchies with new ones.

Counting tobacco bales as votes In the political culture of Turkey, there is a solid correlation between the general elections and the rise in the price and thus amount of tobacco.8 The 1991 general election is a landmark in this respect. Süleyman Demirel,9 the head of the True

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Path Party, was rallying against another right-wing party, the Motherland Party, whose chairman was Mesut Yılmaz. Both parties were targeting the votes of farmers, especially tobacco cultivators, who including their families numbered about 3 million people at the time.10 Demirel and Yılmaz were tirelessly making speeches in tobacco growing villages assuring farmers that they would make the monopoly pay the best tobacco price if they won the elections. In one of the biggest of these villages, located in the Aegean region, Demirel uttered his most memorable statement: “Whatever the Motherland Party offers you, I will give you 5,000 more.”11 Demirel kept his promise after winning the elections, and TEKEL bought tobacco at a 134 percent increase from the previous year’s price.12 When I visited the same town almost 15 years after the 1991 elections, Demirel’s words were still vivid in the collective memory of farmers. One tobacco expert working at TEKEL depicted the situation in those days thusly: [After the elections], tobacco production boomed. In the years of 1993 and 1994, tobacco production reached its peak. Tobacco was all over the place. We could not find where to put tobacco. We rented depots but then we could not even find depots for rent. And what happened in the end? They started to build prefabricated depots. The depots mushroomed everywhere. In the following year, we needed to buy the new harvest, but we could not sell the tobacco in the depots.

This is how the amount of tobacco gradually increased in TEKEL’s stocks. The support purchase system first started in 1927, but the systematic program began in 1947 and continued until 2001.13 Over the years, the purchasing of entire crops across the country created enormous surplus reaching excessive levels in 1994. That year, the amount of tobacco in the stocks reached 507,000 tons— almost ten times more than what TEKEL could use in its factories.14 The state policy intended to prevent the stockpiling of tobacco through quota restrictions consistently failed as the quota mechanism was usually suspended just before elections.15 A state-sponsored rural development system was implemented in accord with the prolonged Turkish populist policies. According to Eder, the history of Turkish economic transformation can be divided into four periods:16 Etatism (1930–50) when the state was very much involved in the economic affairs; rural modernization (1950–9) when the redistributive practices were put into operation for rapid agricultural development; the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) regime (1960–79) when the transformation from a strictly agrarian to an increasingly industrial economy



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was planned; and the liberalization period (post-1980) when an open, competitive, liberal economic model was implemented. I argue that each era crudely corresponds with a different populist policy for farmers. In the Etatism period, the elitist Kemalist state aimed to mobilize the masses within the republic building project. Peasants were considered “pure,” “honorable,” “wise,” and “open to change,” and villages were seen as places where the national culture and identity was well-preserved.17 This was, however, a contradictory discourse as the peasants were glorified as the representatives of “new values” on the one hand, and described as “uneducated masses” hindering national development on the other.18 During the modernization process of the new republic, the peasant emerged as a prospective citizen that needs to be educated by the Kemalist elite. The second era encompasses the Democrat Party (DP) government period when the government used “‘extensive state resources for agriculture price subsidies.”19 The DP’s strong emphasis on peasants, who had played a minor role in national politics by then, would change the entire political agenda. Menderes, the head of the DP, put “rural interests above the urban, the first to respond to the peasants’ material needs, the first to give them a rudimentary sense of citizenship,” as Rostow states.20 However, during the 1960s and 1970s, the role of the state increased with a strong emphasis on development and industrialization, and the political patronage shifted from agriculture to state economic enterprises (SEEs), like TEKEL, through which the rents were distributed to party loyalists. In the last era, the government that came to power after the coup d’état under the leadership of Turgut Özal ended the classical populist regime with its full-fledged enforcement of economic liberalization policies.21 And yet, a new populism emerged with its emphasis on de-institutionalization and patronage politics. In the 1980s and 1990s, side payments such as subsidies for agriculture and industrial incentives for business groups became crucial for the establishment of electoral coalitions.22 Hence, in this era economic reforms did not entirely destroy the agricultural support regime.23 I would like to add another stage to these four economic transformation processes that Eder puts forth. This period is usually referred to as the secondgeneration marketization reform stage,24 which came after the 2000 and 2001 crises with swiftly unleashed, drastic economic reforms. Kemal Derviş, who was the former World Bank vice president, was invited to Turkey to take charge of the economy. As the newly appointed State Minister for the Economy,

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Derviş announced a very ambitious economic program, and made clear that external financial aid would be available if the Turkish government was able to undertake serious steps not only in the economy, but also in the political realm. The government, which had been reluctant to take steps toward enacting neoliberal reform laws since then, had no choice but to accept them one by one. Eventually, with the ratification of these laws, all the old support systems were dismantled without the existence of any security networks, thus leaving the farmers to have direct encounters with market actualities. Nevertheless, the Justice and Development Party’s triumph in the November 2002 elections slowed down the course of agricultural reforms. The party, holding a popular-conservative approach, partially reinstituted the old support mechanisms for agriculture within new institutional frameworks.25 Still, the harsh policies already instigated toward certain agricultural products, such as sugar and tobacco, were irreversible. For example, after the introduction of contract farming with the new tobacco law in 2002, the amount of tobacco grown in Turkey has been in steady decline in terms of the number of cultivators.26 The tobacco farmers were left to their own destinies. They were expected to act as rational economic actors who should no longer rely on the state. Thus, the farmers are now recognized as responsible, rational, hardworking, and self-fulfilling individuals who take the risks and insecurities of the world individually. In this very brief and crude story of the agricultural transformation in Turkey, the farmers in general and tobacco cultivators in particular appear with different subjectivities in different periods of Turkish history, such as prospective citizens, farmers, and then responsible, rational, entrepreneurial individuals. Each period corresponds to the inculcation of new forms of subjectivity, the last era being neoliberalism, which is defined by Nikolas Rose as “a political rationality that seeks to govern not through command and control operations but through the calculative choice of formally free actors.”27 As will be discussed in the following pages, this neoliberal regime has not created one uniform subjectivity but rather established two different categories of tobacco farmers: the subordinate real cultivators constrained by the terms of the contract, and the entrepreneur “legal” farmers exploiting the opportunities created by the contract.



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The representation of the oversupply The tobacco leaf is required to obtain a set of approvals from different actors (the tobacco regulatory agency, tobacco experts, and tobacco leaf companies) before it is sold in the market. Standardization and grading are technical requirements that turn a crop into a commodity and necessitate the approval of the different actors. Tobacco is sold to the merchant after its value is determined according to these standards. As soon as the transaction is completed, the leaf is dissociated from its cultivator. The entire commodification activity is framed to disentangle the crop from its previous attachments, farmer and field, and its growing context. It is a process through which entities are transformed into things and then goods.28 As the commodity changes hands, new attachments and detachments are created, as are new values. What is the difference, then, between a bale of tobacco and oversupply tobacco? The socio-technical arrangements, which work for the sold tobacco, also apply to the oversupply, though in a different way. The oversupply tobacco goes through another sort of framing; it is not the quality standards but quantity requirements that format the crop. For example, when we are told that there is an oversupply of 1,000 tons of tobacco, we assume there is nothing wrong with its quality. The only—yet significant—problem is that we simply do not need the oversupply. Hence, the problem does not stem from the crop per se, but from the quantity of the crop. The only way to make sense of surplus tobacco is to represent it in the form of numbers. The statistics show us only representations, not the actual tobacco. They do not tell us about the quality or condition of tobacco, how or by whom the tobacco is grown, or why this particular tobacco has to stay in the depots while the other bales are sold. The statistics representing surplus tobacco, along with the numbers illustrating the debts of the monopoly, circulated in the media and were then used against politicians as proof of their populist policies. The numbers explicitly demonstrated the irrational marketing policies of TEKEL, which go against capitalist logic, to draw the conclusion that TEKEL could never compete with the multinationals. The entire argument against the monopoly, supported by these numbers, had been appropriated to open the way for the monopoly’s privatization. The statistics became self-evident explanations of the government’s mingling of politics with the economy. Though the political is always situated inside the economic realm, it is usually regarded as an element that must stay out of it. Otherwise, the uninvited involvement of the political would

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create problems disturbing the harmony of the market, such as corruption, populist policies, or worse, a state-controlled economy. This rationale was depicted by a tobacco expert in 1992 in the following manner: The local tobacco consumption is 80 million kilograms and exports are not more than 100 million kilos. According to this calculation, total consumption of tobacco is around 180 million kilos. However, the fact that there is 500 million kilograms overstock in the depots brings about the question of how we are going to decrease it. Such an inexhaustible accumulation of tobacco is not a result of economical but political reasons. As a matter of fact, the crops of 1991 were priced more than 100 per cent. This kind of approach is contrary to the science of economics and against the interests of the country (italics are mine).29

As Timothy Mitchell rightly argues, the science of economics converts “the market into a mathematical abstraction”30 and in this case, it has turned the “irrational politics” of the government into flat, objective, and transferable figures. These figures become performative in several different ways. The theoretical abstractions of economists, such as tables, statistics, figures, equations, formulas, and theories are part of the practical working of the economy. Financial models and theories not only describe and analyze financial markets, but also produce them.31 The figures are not simply the economists’ representations of unused tobacco, but the figures themselves actually constitute the category of oversupply. Put even more simply, surplus tobacco is created within the tables of economists, and each figure that represents the unused tobacco becomes an obstacle to keeping supply and demand curves in balance.

Framing tobacco After continuous pressure from the IMF and the World Bank, the 2002 law was implemented, introducing contract farming in an effort to sustain conditions amenable to a competitive and free tobacco market. The government’s interventions in tobacco production and marketing were entirely abolished. Under contract farming, farmers agreed to deliver specific commodities meeting predetermined quantity and quality standards, while buyers32 agreed to buy products at predetermined prices. In that sense, contracts bound both sides to certain provisions, and worked as market devices regulating production and marketing conditions. The policy behind contract farming was to solve many problems inherent in both open market sales and vertical integration. On paper, farmers



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benefit from a guaranteed market and buyers are able to become involved in direct production—ultimately providing a more regular and dependable supply.33 Nevertheless, according to Grossman, contract farming is fraught with problems, such as the deskilling of farm work, decline in food production, and overuse of pesticides, endangering both personal health and the environment. Watts also states that growers lose their independence under contract farming, and although growers may retain possession of land and nominally of domestic labor, contractors take control of the pace and rhythm of farmers’ work.34 Furthermore, Clapp shows that the contract represents an attempt to naturalize an unequal social relationship.35 According to these scholars, the contractual relationship legitimizes the reproduction of the farmers’ subordinate position. I agree with these insights criticizing contract farming on the grounds of creating hierarchies between sellers and buyers,36 but I go one step further and expose the contract as a device that contributes to the construction of markets much like pricing models, merchandizing tools, or trading protocols. Through abstraction, the contract removes the tobacco production from its previous context and transforms it into a calculable space. It simply frames the tobacco production and marketing. In “The Social Construction of a Perfect Market,” Garcia-Parpet discusses the strawberry auction market at Fontaines-en-Sologne as a “concrete realization of the pure model of perfect competition, a model that occupies pride of place in economic theory.”37 Everything about the new strawberry market was deliberately designed. Even the computerized auctioning system and the architectural design of the physical place were intended to create a market where relatively homogenous goods would be exchanged by competitive buyers and sellers. As Garcia-Parpet argues, the market was designed in a way that “social factors” could not enter to disturb it. The perfect functioning was “due not to market mechanisms or to an ‘invisible hand’ that has been restored by the application of noninterventionist principles of laissez faire,”38 but rather to the economic models according to which it was established. Likewise, the whole organization of the new tobacco market was conceived with the idea of adjusting the balance between supply and demand. The contract frames the market in such a way that multiple factors concerning the quality and quantity of tobacco are handled before the sale occurs. As in the case of the strawberry market, the contract becomes a barrier preventing the intervention of social factors in the economic realm. Similar to Riles’ discussion of collateral, the contract also “emerges as a way of setting limits on the messy complexities of a global market, a way of obviating the need for knowledge and

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trust, an alternative to developing shared private norms.”39 In other words, the contract creates the limits on social and political relations. The “trust in social relations” is replaced by the “trust in the contract.” Under contract farming all possible disputes are planned to dissolve before they come to existence. Yet this does not mean that no disputes occur. Rather the disputes are shifted to a different terrain, from the social norms of people to an expert board, the tobacco regulatory agency, which makes the final decisions as the sole authority in the sector. The disentanglement of the crop from its previous context is fully enforced at both micro and macro levels. At a macro level, contract farming aims at preventing the mingling of politics with economics. The abolishment of state regulation after contract farming is intended to sustain the proper functioning of a competitive market. Under the terms of contract farming, potential troubles in the sector (such as so-called populist policies increasing the amount and price of cultivated tobacco through support purchases) remain irrelevant. What matters is to sustain the balance of supply and demand by enclosing all the decisions about tobacco within the economic realm. At a micro level, however, with the disassociation of the crop from its previously embedded context, the controversial debates, such as the production conditions and the prices offered to farmers, remain out of date. The contract is signed between the farmer and merchant long before the actual tobacco seed is sown in the field. More precisely, the conditions of production, such as standards, grades, and prices, are already put into place before the plant comes into existence. The contract frames tobacco long before it is produced. As Çalışkan shows in the case of cotton, the crop undergoes formatting before it is fit for the market.40 Similarly, tobacco is disentangled from the context in which it is embedded in such a way that the desired market conditions become possible. The contract as a device makes the market model invented by the economists real. Prior to the enactment of the tobacco law, a farmer’s registration to TEKEL was the first and only requirement for growing tobacco. Farmers who wanted to cultivate tobacco had to obtain identification cards called koçan41 from TEKEL. Koçans are more like legal licenses required for the cultivation of tobacco. They include data about the grower and the crop, including basic information about the farmer, size, and location of the land, and the expected amount of yield.42 When contract farming was introduced in 2002, only the koçan holders were able to sign contracts with the tobacco leaf merchants. Cultivators were required to conclude legal transactions with companies before they began sowing seeds. In the old tobacco market, tobacco farmers used to have the flexibility of



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choosing their buyers. Farmers first would report to TEKEL the quantity of tobacco they would cultivate for that year and get it written on their koçans, but exchange negotiations with merchants started only after tobacco was produced. Tobacco experts from both private companies and TEKEL used to pay visits to the farms to grade crops. After grading tobacco bales, TEKEL would announce the maximum price offered for the best quality crop. Farmers, with the different gradings from a variety of merchants, were then able to calculate how much they would earn. They had the option of choosing their buyers, usually the highest bidder, and then autonomously conclude their agreements. In that sense, the old market was more competitive and “free” compared to the contract system, as one tobacco expert stated: The [new] liberalized market remains less liberal compared to the old system. Indeed, the old regulated system fit better to the conditions of free market. There was an unprompted auctioning in the old system. Because every cultivator was visiting merchants one by one and then choosing the one that was offering the best prices or serving best his interests. But this is not the case now. The farmer is subordinate to one merchant. So how can we say that this market is free?

With the new law, every tobacco cultivator has to sign a contract with a tobacco leaf company before the actual trade. The tobacco market, structured under contracts, strictly binds sellers to buyers. Farmers bound to their contracted buyers do not have the option to choose another buyer at any time during the growing process or after cultivation. The underlying logic of contract farming is to initiate a competitive market setting, but instead it has brought about a more strictly designed and controlled structure especially for the tobacco cultivators. As previously mentioned, the 2002 tobacco law has phased out the support purchases of TEKEL.43 Basically this means that the monopoly stopped purchasing tobacco above its needs. This policy change, which sought to transform TEKEL into a rational and profit-seeking company, has engendered a major decline in tobacco production as well as in the number of producers. Immediately following the 2002 law, and after calculating the actual required amount of tobacco, TEKEL decided to sign contracts with cultivators around the country up to 200 kilograms.44 This policy resulted in different consequences in two different regions of Turkey. The farmers in western Turkey started to either produce other crops or sell their tobacco to private tobacco companies. In eastern Turkey a different story has taken place. There had been no tobacco buyer other than TEKEL in the region for decades. The tobacco

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sector in the east had been a truly state-controlled market, while in the west it had been shaped by the interaction of both the private sector and the monopoly. The fact that TEKEL had been the sole tobacco buyer in the east has amplified the impact of contract farming in the region.

200 kilograms of tobacco In 2006 I visited Adıyaman for the first time, a city predominantly inhabited by Kurdish people in southeastern Turkey. The trip coincided with a period during which the state-run tobacco monopoly was concluding transactions with farmers. In the middle of thousands of tobacco bales under a wildly hot sun, being unable to speak Kurdish, and moreover, being the sole woman there, I was a hopeless ethnographer. Yet, my speechless experience was strangely shared by the farmers standing still there for hours. I was struck by the fact of how “this tobacco market” was so different from the one in western Turkey, which was perpetually crowded, loud, and fervent. The Adıyaman market, on the other hand, seemed to be quiet and almost depressing. In Adıyaman, farmers grew tobacco and TEKEL bought the yield. This was the market with no competition, no other buyers, and no surprises. When contract farming was initiated in 2002, it did not bring in new players to the market, nor did it make it competitive, but it changed the structure of economic transactions by creating new opportunities for certain people, while marginalizing some others. Farmers in Adıyaman were very poor, much poorer than tobacco growers in the west. They continuously complained about their exclusion from the socioeconomic welfare policies of the Turkish government.45 Overall the southeast of Turkey is the most underdeveloped region in the country and Adıyaman is not an exception.46 Adıyaman is located in the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP), which was originally planned in the 1970s as a project for irrigation and hydraulic energy production on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. The project covers 9 administrative provinces (Adıyaman, Batman, Diyarbakır, Gaziantep, Kilis, Mardin, Siirt, Şanlıurfa, and Şırnak) and envisages the construction of 22 dams and 19 hydraulic power plants, as well as the irrigation of 1.7 million hectares of land. However, the construction of the biggest dam in Turkey in the region just worsened the situation in Adıyaman given that more than 80 villages fell under the water level of the dam. Furthermore, the farmers in Adıyaman,



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having lands with higher elevation, were not able to use the dam water without utilizing pumps, which actually resulted in an overwhelming additional expense to the budgets of small farmers. The lack of an efficient irrigation system has led the farmers to concentrate mostly on the production of arid climate crops, such as grains and tobacco. 63 percent of the cultivable areas are used for grain production, in which wheat and barley take the first two ranks. The production of grains is profitable only on large lands with the usage of tractors. On the other hand, tobacco, although requiring an extremely labor intensive process, offers relatively higher revenues per decare. Furthermore, the input costs in tobacco production are very low since there is no need for any fertilizers, pesticides, or artificial irrigation. The massive rural transformation in Adıyaman started with the contract farming system. By disregarding land size, economic situation, and the previous amounts of tobacco produced over the past years, contracts signed with the growers allowed them to produce up to 200 kilograms. The number of tobacco growers, which was around 40,000 in 2000, dropped to 30,000 in 2005, while 22,000 tons of tobacco produced in 2000 declined to 6,000 tons in 2005. As clearly seen, the decline in the number of tobacco growers and the amount of tobacco is not proportional. The reduction in the numbers of tobacco growers is 26 percent, whereas the decline in production remains at 73 percent. I will explain the reasons for such a disproportionate change. Under a system whereby the tobacco supply was being restricted to 200 kilograms per cultivator, the only solution left for farmers was to purchase contracts. Only the tobacco growers, who used to have koçans in the previous system, were entitled to sign contracts with the state monopoly. So, the new agreement could only be made with the legal cultivators of the previous system. In alignment with the policies to curb overproduction, the old state regulatory system (koçan) was merged with the emerging free market economy device (contract): the information about the identification of cultivators is coupled with the amount to be produced for a certain leaf company. The prevailing state system was combined and supported with the new market rules ensuring the rigorous regulation of the tobacco market. After the introduction of the tobacco law, all koçans are replaced with contracts but the number of koçans still played a significant role in determining who could grow how much tobacco. Under the new system, the Adıyaman tobacco cultivators working with TEKEL struggled to keep their previous earnings. As the tobacco supply was restricted to 200 kilograms per cultivator, the only solution left for these farmers

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was to use others’ contracts to produce more tobacco. In the previous years, each farmer was entitled to possess only one koçan. Yet, after the irregular quota applications of previous years that restricted the amount of tobacco to be grown, farmers started to multiply the number of their koçans under the names of different family members—wives, sons, uncles, etc.47 This was illegal, yet there was no control mechanism in place. The number of koçans outnumbered the actual tobacco cultivators, but accurately represented all the members registered to TEKEL as legal tobacco growers. The restriction put on the supply side has eventually resulted in an unregulated market.48 Several legal cultivators having the right to sign contracts with TEKEL under different names have started to rent their contracts. Though such kind of an exchange was illegal, everybody, including the TEKEL officials, was aware of these transactions and tolerated the functioning of the new unregulated market. The previous koçan holders who had stopped producing tobacco years ago started to rent their rights to sign contracts. The “real” farmers were in a fury, as this system created contract entrepreneurs, who were the legal cultivators but not the actual tobacco farmers: The guy [who has a koçan49] is a civil officer. He has no idea about how to produce tobacco. […] On the other hand, I pay 350 million Turkish Lira to buy the koçan from him. It is an unjust profit. I hope this system will be over and the real tobacco growers will be singled out. Whoever really grows tobacco must have the certificate.

A tobacco grower who used to produce one ton of tobacco with one koçan in the past now needs to sign four more contracts in order to grow the same amount. Therefore, cultivating the same amount of tobacco in this new system simply increased the cost of production. From year to year the price of contract rental could vary from 50 to 350 million Turkish lira (US$33–231) based on market value. The end result of the new contract farming system has been the formation of an unregulated market. The farmers found a way to circumvent the restrictions of the regulated market and created their own market in which the contract per se has become a property. The contract, which used to be a paper illustrating the legal transaction between producer and buyer, has turned into a commodity circulating among producers. Its value has changed from a legal paper to a means of exchange. Holm and Nielsen examine the emergence of a similar kind of market for quotas in Norwegian fisheries.50 The authors analyze the historical trajectory



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in which fish has become private property and fishermen have become quota owners and property managers. Fish quotas become tradable objects in spite of the absence of formal recognition: Something has happened to the fish and the fishermen. Twenty years ago, there was open access and fish were common property. The fisherman was a kind of hunter. Today, access has been closed. Fish, at least fish quotas have become property. The fishermen have turned into quota owners and property managers […] How is it possible for un-caught fish to become a private property in a socially binding way? What kind of framing is capable of producing fish quotas as tradable objects?

The un-grown tobacco, like the un-caught fish, becomes private property in a socially binding way, thanks to the contracts. Like fish quotas in Norway, contracts in Turkey become tradable objects which happen to shape not only the structure of the tobacco market, but also the life of cultivators. They have rearranged the social structure by replacing old hierarchies with new ones.

Dispossessed citizens In Adıyaman villages, sharecropping is very common. According to a recently conducted survey, 59 percent of farmers do not have their own lands in southeastern Turkey.51 The concentration of huge lands in the hands of a small group and the existence of a high number of sharecroppers make the survival of independent small farming in the region unviable. In several places of Adıyaman, the vast areas belong to one or two families that employ sharecroppers to cultivate their lands. The profit is usually shared on an equal basis between landlords and sharecroppers. Yet, the necessity of renting additional tobacco contracts and thus, the rise in the cost of production have led some large landowners to switch from tobacco to other agricultural crops, as one farmer stated: Large landowners have to buy koçans too. So what is left to them [as profit] is nothing. But when they grow wheat, they make more money. Say, if they have produced 200 kilograms of tobacco, then the landowner is going to give 100 kilograms to the sharecropper. On the top of it, the landowner is going to pay for the koçan. In the end, what is left for him is about 25 per cent of the entire tobacco profit.

With the use of machinery on large-scale plots, landowners can earn more from the production of grains than they would earn from tobacco. Just as impactful as

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the large landowners’ switch from labor intensive crops to machinery-intensive crops, sharecroppers’ reluctance to cultivate tobacco has also brought about a dramatic change in tobacco cultivation. A politically powerful landowner, having 3,000 decares of land, had to stop cultivating tobacco when he was unable to find any further sharecroppers: Almost for 50 years, we have been growing tobacco in Adıyaman. We have inherited it from our father and grandfather. I had 50 sharecroppers. Now in my village there are only two [sharecroppers] and I am trying to maintain them in the village to take care of the houses by paying salaries. Out of 50 people, now I have two of them […] What happened to the 48 sharecroppers? They went to cities.

Landless sharecroppers were the most deprived among tobacco cultivators. According to the law, they were eligible for “Direct Income Subsidies,”52 but since the landowners did not sign rental contracts to avoid the wealth tax, sharecroppers could not prove that they grew tobacco as tenants and hence could not receive support from the government. One farmer expressed his situation under contract farming as such: I used to produce 4 tons of tobacco. Now they told me that I could produce only 200 kilograms. As a breadwinner of a family of six people, how am I supposed to earn that money? I am sending the kids to other cities as seasonal workers.

Sharecroppers found a way to survive by becoming seasonal workers. However, the definition of a seasonal worker has a flexible meaning in the region as the conditions of life get tougher. Landless cultivators go to other regions of the country not only for one season.53 Their travelling to several places extends to one year, which means that they have been working more like wage laborers. In April, they go to Çukurova for cotton hoeing; at the end of June they go to Malatya for apricot picking; in mid-July, they travel to the Black Sea region for hazelnut picking; at the beginning of September, they again go to Çukurova for cotton picking; and in September and November they go to central Anatolia for potato harvesting. The social rights of the farmers have also been jeopardized with the deterioration of tobacco production in Adıyaman. Though it is a very complicated and detailed transformation at the micro level, the practices of different government offices contradicting each other and preventing these farmers from enjoying their social and economic rights need to be explored. According to the legal regulations, people earning their living from agricultural activities were insured



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under the Social Security Organization for Artisans and the Self-Employed— namely Bağ-Kur.54 This social security scheme also included the tobacco cultivators in Adıyaman. However, out of 23,500 people in Adıyaman who were assigned, 14,886 could not pay their regular premiums to Bağ-Kur and thus could not benefit from the services of it, such as pension benefits or health services.55 When the situation in tobacco production worsened, most of the tobacco cultivators, especially sharecroppers, applied to obtain a Green Card—a social assistance scheme to provide basic health care coverage for those with low incomes and without any social security. However, their applications were turned down on the basis that they had already been registered with another social security program, Bağ-Kur. Though the cultivators were unable to benefit from the Bağ-Kur services, they were registered as the beneficiaries of this social security scheme, which prevented their utilization of another social welfare program. What is striking in the case of Adıyaman was the existence of so many marginalized tobacco growers who could neither pay their premiums for Bağ-Kur nor obtain a Green Card. However, the situation is more problematic than a condition in which farmers were simply being deprived of any social security benefits. As one tobacco grower expressed it, the cultivators were being forced to make choices ranking from bad to worse: The ones who cannot pay their premiums to Bağ-Kur, find themselves in a debt relationship with the Organization [Bağ-Kur]. However, they cannot cancel their assignment to Bağ-Kur. If they cancel that, they will have to terminate their right to produce tobacco, that is, they will have to give up their right to produce 200 kilograms [of tobacco]. If they don’t cancel it, then they will have to give up their right to obtain a Green Card […] Let’s say, the farmer gives up his right to produce tobacco, and then gets a Green Card, how is he going to live then?

To obtain a Green Card, tobacco growers had to surrender their rights to grow tobacco. However, if they pursued their membership in Bağ-Kur, it seems very unlikely that they would be able to make the entire payments required for retirement under the worsening conditions of tobacco production. This intricate and perplexing picture has emerged with contract farming, forcing farmers to make choices among the government’s crisscrossing policies. The unintended consequences of the so-called free market economy have produced dispossessed citizens, belonging to nowhere, not even to their lands. Caroline Humphrey describes a similar situation in Russia during the early 1990s.56 She argues that the dismantling of the Soviet economy created a

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pervasive condition of exclusion and deprivation of some people. Humphrey has called these people “dispossessed:” Dispossessed are people who have been deprived of property, work and entitlements, but we can also understand them as people who are themselves no longer possessed. That is, they are no longer inside the quasi-feudal corporations, the collective ‘domains’, which confer a social status on their members and which in practice are still the key units in disposing property and people in Russia.57

In a similar vein, the poor farmers in Adıyaman, who used to live under the hierarchical and unequal, but relatively secure social and economic shelters in their villages, have now been left on their own. The sharecroppers are not needed anymore. The government is not only unable to fill the emerging vacuum, but it also deprives the sharecroppers of their basic social rights with its mutually exclusive policies, resulting in the further marginalization of the tobacco cultivators. This new contract farming system has an immense impact on the structure of agricultural production in the east, where there is extensive sharecropping. An unintended consequence of the so-called free market in tobacco, therefore, is a throng of dispossessed citizens, belonging nowhere, and forced by economic exigency to leave the lands they cultivated for years. Two decades ago every farmer could grow as much tobacco as desired, but then everything dramatically changed. The depots of the monopoly filled with huge amounts of tobacco far beyond its needs, and this led to the emergence of a new set of economic and political policies aimed at controlling the tobacco supply. The surplus was transformed into damning statistics illustrating why the monopoly could not succeed at running as a profit-seeking company. The end result was the implementation of contract farming in 2002, which changed the tobacco market irreversibly. Contract farming has brought about a formal apparatus that defines and produces tobacco as a commodity. This mechanism, with its bundle of entitlements that frames tobacco over and over, has transformed every actor involved in this process. Today, in order to be a tobacco cultivator, an entity signs a contract with a tobacco company, and only afterwards is legal permission to grow tobacco granted. In other words, the farmer becomes a farmer as long as he can find someone to buy his crop. The definition of farmer has changed from one who grows tobacco to one who can find potential demand for his not-yetgrown crop. The status of farmer is framed even before tobacco is planted in the field. Now the individuals seek to “‘enterprise themselves’ to maximize



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their quality of life through acts of choice”.58 The cultivators are required to be active entrepreneurial self-fulfilling individuals either finding potential tobacco buyers or exploiting new revenue opportunities. The people who have koçans, and thus the right to sign contracts, are considered legal farmers, not necessarily the ones who are actually growing tobacco. More explicitly, the right to sign a contract makes one a farmer, not the activity of growing the crop. In fact, some koçan owners work as civil servants in a government office or have grocery stores, but as they possess certificates and reserve the right to sign contracts, they are the legal farmers. Under the contract farming system, tobacco as a crop has changed as well. Before the tobacco seeds are scattered in the fields, tobacco is already framed as a commodity to be bought and sold by certain actors under specific terms and conditions. The emerging criteria to determine the quality and quantity of tobacco have transformed the entire commodification process. The entire journey from seed to commodity has become a more intricate process with the involvement of the new actors and their categorizations. One of the most significant changes has arisen amidst the commodification process itself. The contract, as the representation of the crop by a piece of legal paper, has become transferable from person to person. The circulation of the contract, as a legal paper, has created its own unregulated tobacco market. What is exchanged in this new unregulated market is not tobacco anymore, but the contracts among farmers. The koçan holders, who have the entitlement to sign contracts, take advantage of the new contract farming system, and rent their rights to others. The contract itself has become a profitable commodity circulated in the unregulated market, of which value fluctuates according to the price of tobacco, time frame, location, and owner. Contract farming has created not only a new unregulated economy with the circulation of contract as property, but has also transformed the human actors involved in this process. While several contract holders, whether they be farmers or not, have emerged as entrepreneurs, several actual cultivators have been left out of farming practices and further marginalized.

5

Borders of the Market1 On the night of December 28, 2011, Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) bombed the Northern Iraqi border near the town of Roboski, resulting in the death of 34 Kurdish citizens most of whom were underage. Soon after the incident I learned from the news that contrary to the assumption, the murdered citizens were not terrorists but cigarette and diesel oil smugglers. While many newspapers condemned the incident they also highlighted the victims’ “smuggler” identity. Again on many social network websites the state’s murdering of smugglers was legitimized. However, it was perhaps the Nationalist Action Party leader Devlet Bahçeli who expressed the legitimacy of bombing smugglers with the greatest ease: “If the group of people detected at the border had been ignored as ‘smugglers’ and then a police station or any of our military assets had been attacked, […] who would then be held to account?”2 In this era when the definition of terrorism has been expanded and obscured as an extension of the idea of security built around a perpetual state of ambiguity and uncertainty, the bombing of smugglers can be legitimized based on their presumed likelihood of attacking police stations. This discourse, which is focused merely on the final link in the chain of smuggling, is inclined to view only the Kurds as terrorists/smugglers. It deliberately overlooks the fact that smuggling has been known and tolerated in this region for years, and it neglects to mention that there are actors other than the Kurdish children smugglers in this process. Instead, this perspective prefers to reveal only the very last and least profitable stage in a long story of smuggling and consciously ignores the complicit relationship between the state and multinational companies. Only certain actors become conspicuous and are punished in this network of complicity. The necessity to requestion the state and market dichotomy3 and to critically examine the fact that the state presently partakes in criminal networks or supports these groups4 has been asserted by numerous studies. My objective, as an extension of these studies, is to display how tobacco smuggling has been

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carried out through a collaborative network of relations among the state’s soldiers, civil servants, bureaucrats, and tobacco retailers and multinational cigarette companies. As Janet Roitman argues, “the state is at the very heart of the proliferation of unregulated economic exchanges as well as the pluralization of regulatory authority.”5 Amidst such intricate webs, dichotomies such as the public and private spheres, state monopoly and multinational companies, or common good and personal interests, are no longer meaningful. Economic activities described as legal and illegal are not only interconnected, but are also endeavors that constitute one another. What I observed almost every day throughout my ethnographic study was that the tobacco market is established through rules, regulations, and laws as much as corruption, illegality, and disarray, and that it is impossible to separate the activities in these two fields. For these two fields constitute the same world—that is, the markets. However, I seek to go beyond exposing the established complicity between the state, leaf companies and cigarette multinationals. The fundamental assertion of this chapter is that the making and remaking of the official, formal, and legal model of “the market” creates its “outside,” that is nonmarket activities. I argue that the idea of “what a market is supposed to be” has a constitutive power. The line drawn between “the market” and economic activities remaining outside of it is quite arbitrary and artificial, however, it also holds an effective and generative power. This distinction is so powerful that if so desired it can redefine an agricultural product as waste or commodity. Due to the constant redefinition of the market’s boundaries, a product formerly produced legally can easily be coded as an “illegal” commodity (or, on the contrary, that which was formerly “illegal” can later be legalized). Market transactions that have been long operating in the same manner can suddenly become illegal and this transformation that reidentifies the market boundaries may crack open the doors of new sources of wealth—but only for certain actors. In this respect, we can say that tobacco contract farming in Turkey functions as a tool that redefines and transforms the market and marginalizes certain actors while encouraging others. Through two different ethnographic cases and two separate tobacco markets, my goal is to show how the contract defines the boundaries of “the market”6 while excluding the producer and the commodity that were previously situated within these boundaries.



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Complicit state There were very few women on the Batman flight who were traveling with their husbands and children. Male stewards were serving food. On the plane where most of the passengers were Kurds, announcements were made in Turkish and English instead of Kurdish. Getting off the plane we were greeted by an empty building on a vast field—the Batman airport. Tobacco expert Selim, who I know from İzmir, was waiting at the exit to take me to the TEKEL building adjacent to the airport. As soon as I dropped off my luggage at the TEKEL building, we immediately set out for Kozluk to examine the tobacco acquisitions. Kozluk was one of the most derelict places I have seen during my two-year fieldwork. The TEKEL building was dilapidated, dark, dirty, and eerie. The tobacco farmers here were very poor. But there were those even more destitute, the ones who carried the tobacco bales whom they called “slaves.” The only job left for these people, who tried to survive in a complete nothingness without a farm or tobacco, was portage. With the transition to contract farming in tobacco production in 2002, sharecropping has almost died out in the region. Those producing tobacco in others’ farms for years were forced to take other jobs due to increasing expenses. After the tobacco experts classified and priced the bales in the yard of the building, we all went into the room where the experts stayed for six months. The decrepit atmosphere of the room that consisted of three mattresses, a big table, a few chairs, and a gas stove, seemed to affect everyone, and the tobacco experts started complaining one after another. After a while they began talking about the “old terror” days and the gloomy atmosphere was replaced with an almost cheerful conversation. Memories of the many years of struggles ranging from the tobacco fields to TEKEL buildings were now recounted cheerily: “having to lock up the TEKEL building and call the gendarmerie the day tobacco prices were announced;” “PKK supported tobacco dealers opening crossfire at the TEKEL building;” “hospitalization of tobacco expert friends.” Wherever I went in southeastern Anatolia—referred to as “exile” by the tobacco experts—I always heard more or less the same stories. When I was conducting my fieldwork the violence of the long-lasting conflicts of the 1990s had ebbed, though the atmosphere was still tense. The day following our Kozluk visit, on the way to Sason, when the driver pointed out the two large pits in the middle of the road caused by the mines that went off the previous year, everyone had taken it as a commonplace incident, given that this road with the Meleto

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mountain as its last stop had witnessed hundreds of armed clashes. For years tobacco was transported from Sason to other cities under the shadow of gendarmerie, accompanied by guns. It should be noted that this tobacco market engulfed in violence was very different from the one in the west. The accounts of Cemal, a young tobacco expert, perceptively captured the peculiarity of the eastern tobacco market. Cemal had worked as a tobacco expert in Kozluk in the early 1990s when corruption and terror were at their peak. Young and inexperienced at the time, he was aware of the rampant fraud in tobacco purchase and sales, but conceded that there was nothing he could do about it. Cemal, who said that high-level state bureaucrats were also involved in the tobacco purchase and sale frauds, stated that he was powerless against these groups and had no evidence indicating their involvement in these affairs. Every tobacco expert in the east was well aware that it was dangerous to pursue these dealings and, above all, that there was no “document of bribery.” Fraud in the tobacco market operated rather simply. In the 1990s several tobacco merchants sprang up in the region, and by bribing certain tobacco experts working in TEKEL these merchants saw to it that the cultivators were offered prices much lower than the value of their tobacco. Discontented with the offered prices, the producers turned to tobacco merchants who made higher offers than those of TEKEL, although these were also still much lower than the value of their tobacco. Having bought this tobacco cheaply, the tobacco merchants sold it again to TEKEL—this time at higher prices—and started to make profit. In a sense, by situating themselves as brokers between TEKEL and the producers, these merchants exchanged the commodity again and thus redetermined its value thereupon making profit from the ensuing difference. In time this situation was no longer an exception in southeastern Anatolia but almost the rule, and it became even worse: in order to raise the profit margin, tobacco merchants started to sell tobacco bales blended with mud and stones to TEKEL. The profit they made by these fraudulent means was enormous. The tobacco experts who resisted this practice were either threatened or beaten up. In 1992 a tobacco mafia called the “‘chain of bliss” was caught in southeastern Anatolia. Analysis of one purchase of tobacco bought by TEKEL revealed that 45 kilograms of the 61.5 kilograms of tobacco bales was mud and stones, and as the investigations deepened it was understood that the situation was similar to other bales sold to TEKEL. Tobacco merchants had sold the tobacco to the experts they bribed for almost five times its worth.7 Within this established order, the tobacco blended with mud and stones was brought to the Diyarbakır



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cigarette factory where it was labeled surplus production and destroyed. Along with certain tobacco experts who received bribes, a soldier, a national intelligence agency official, civil servants, and members of the PKK were also named as part of this network of corruption.8 This was neither the first nor the last corruption case involving tobacco. Similar charges and investigations would be covered by the media thereafter and new corruption cases would be added to the list. These frauds gradually became routine and a part of the ongoing system. Although it is possible to see very similar incidents of corruption across the globe as well, there are two entirely different points insinuated by these events which I believe may provide us with new theoretical insight to reevaluate markets. The first is the fact that we cannot talk about merely a single market model. As an extension of this notion, we can say that many markets operate in different ways. The second proposition is that among these different markets some operate under the cooperation established between the state and various criminal networks. Based on the premise that these two propositions are interrelated, I believe that in trying to understand how markets work, one must reinvestigate the dichotomous categories employed quite frequently in social sciences that are separated from one another with bold lines such as formal/informal, official/unofficial, and legal/illegal. Hereon I will offer a brief critique of the concept of informal economy, and will discuss how the studies on informal economy define the market in particular and the economy at large.

Outside the market The concept of informal economy coined in 1973 by the anthropologist Keith Hart became widely acclaimed in social sciences. Hart introduced the concept of informal economy to explain the position of migrants in the labor market of Ghana and proposed this concept to describe the economic activities of self-employed migrants situated on the peripheries of the market.9 In the years following, the concept of informal economy became a sort of slogan for many academics. The concept became a catchword for scholars who came to realize that the representations of economics differed from those they came across in their fieldwork. Hart explained it best by suggesting that the informal economy is a way of giving expression to “the gap between my experience there and anything my English education had taught me before.”10 In other words, the gap

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between economics and the economic activities on the ground is filled by the concept of the “informal.” In his book titled The Other Path, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto reformulates the concept introduced by Hart.11 De Soto propounds that Latin American countries are exceedingly pro-regulation and therefore cannot fully achieve economic development. According to him, too much state regulation is the main cause of informality. While criticizing the state’s interference in the economy, de Soto argues that informal economy harbors a transformative potential of entrepreneurial spirit which should be utilized. Informal economic activities are much more dynamic, efficient, and cost-effective than the regulated formal economy. Later in his book titled The Mystery of Capital, de Soto advocates that the wealth produced within informal economy should be drawn into formal economy in order to be used to generate further wealth.12 According to this formula, countries outside the West that have not been able to utilize the assets amassed outside the formal economy will be able to achieve development by reviving the “dead capital” in these fields. Over the years, as the concept of informal economy went into wide circulation in academia, it became an established concept frequently used in social sciences. The concept first entered economics textbooks and then, through the collaboration of governments and international organizations, it began to play an important role in the restructuring of the economies of developing countries. Timothy Mitchell employs a critical perspective to explain how the concept of informal economy is recruited from the academic realm and turned into policy. In his article titled “The Properties of Markets,” through an examination of projects carried out in Peru and Egypt, Mitchell explains how de Soto’s ideas gained prominence in the field of economics and were turned into tools shaping the economy.13 Mitchell argues that informal economy is not a neutral concept that exists beyond political influences. Informal economy has turned into a socio-technological device according to which the projects of nongovernmental organizations, the fiscal plans of governments, and reports of international financial organizations are prepared and applied in the economy; it is now a concept that transforms markets and has significant influence on the structuring of decisions pertaining to the economy. In other words, informal economy turns into a device that draws the boundaries of “the market.” It emerges as the category of a series of exceptions that social scientists utilize to make sense of the “unusual” market activities they encounter in their fieldwork. The war economy, shadow economy, parallel markets, secondary economy, and the black market are manifested as concepts referring to a field



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that strictly speaking does not belong to “‘the market.” The boundaries of “the market” are redrawn with each exceptional case. As the number of cases regarded as exceptional rise, there is no place left for the nonexceptional. Assuming that it functions in a space outside of wars, corruption, smuggling, embezzlement, swindling, forgery, and social interactions, “the market” is ascribed a normative state. The more exceptional economic activities are discovered, the more the notion of “the market” is idealized; yet at the same time it equally transforms into economic activities that are performed in a sterile sphere detached from reality. In this respect, we could argue that the normative narrative of “the market” bears a resemblance to the discussions of neoliberal economists: unless it is disrupted by an outside force, the market functions perfectly. However, in this respect, it is almost impossible to find an economic sphere that does not involve wars, fraud, or smuggling, which are all defined as external factors. Rather than talking about a single, primary, and sterile market, if we accept the existence of markets that are constituted by the participation of various actors, shaped by power relations, and constructed as much through irregularities as regulations, unlawful practices as the law, it becomes impossible to ascribe the market with a self-proclaimed power and there is room for an investigation of various markets functioning with different actors, mechanisms, and networks. Roitman states that the “informal economy” is often signaled as a residual category.14 The concept implies that state and market remain central to economic activities, whereas unregulated activities summarized under the category of “informal” are sorted out as residual. However, as Roitman also argues, these activities are quite far from being exceptional, marginal, and hidden. Although the “informal economy” is reserved for the economic activities of the dismissed, dispossessed, and unemployed people in marginal spaces, peripheries, or simply non-Western countries, unregulated economic activities happen everywhere in the world. What is in question here is not “periphery economy,” but, on the contrary, economic activities that constitute a substantial part of the global economy.15 In other words, these activities do not necessarily occur in places where free market economies do not seem to function efficiently. Cities such as New York, London, and Hong Kong that are the cradle of capitalism are also centers of unregulated economic activities. It would be rather misleading to assume that the economic activity deemed to be outside “the market” contradicts or challenges the formal institutions of the state. For example, according to Hart, informal economy emerges as a result of people’s reaction to bureaucracy. Hart situates the antagonism

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between the state and the market at the core of his work, and argues that in the face of zealous efforts of the bureaucracy to control life in a top-down manner, people create informal economy as a market-oriented reaction.16 Hart’s concept of informal economy refers to the sphere constituted by the dichotomies between binary categories such as market/state, public/private sphere. However, numerous academic studies17 clearly show that state institutions take part in illegal economic activities. As Roitman also claims, the relationship between these economic activities and the state are not oppositional, but rather “highly ambiguous: they are often reciprocal and complicitous as much as they are competitive and antagonistic.”18 While sometimes these economic activities are conducted outside the regulatory authority of the state, they sometimes function with the state’s support. They emerge as both sources of income for the national economy, and as a means of insertion in the world economy.19 Activities outside the sphere defined as “the market” are not restricted to states; sometimes international financial networks are also part of this group. For instance, Elyachar focuses on the structural adjustment policies in Egypt and describes how the cultural practices and social networks of the poor are integrated into “the market” through the collaborations established between the state, civil society organizations, and international organizations.20 According to Elyachar, “[n]etworks and practices that used to be seen as lying outside the market (or perhaps as a necessary environment for the market) became a key ingredient of market success.”21 Elyachar states that the concept of informal economy is laden with various meanings—both positive and negative—by different institutions at different times. Yet this ambiguity does not imply that the concept is ineffectual. On the contrary, it has become a category through which new policies are established to govern populations. In the study she conducted on Egypt, Elyachar argues that the concept of informal economy has been defined and redefined by civil society organizations in order to gain power and generate wealth. As the fieldwork demonstrates, civil society organizations create new entrepreneurial subjects in the sphere called informal economy and proceed to regulate their economic activities. As a result of this entire process, informal economy is situated within “the formal economy.” In short, we can claim that the existent unregulated economic activities are defined as informal economy and transformed into a socio-technological tool in the hands of governments, NGOs, and international organizations. Along a similar line, Mitchell’s study reveals how the integration of the poor into the formal economy of housing projects, as inspired by de Soto’s ideas, in



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fact functions to exclude them.22 De Soto states that many of the poor in Peru do not hold deeds to the land and houses they live in and that this situation poses an obstacle to selling or using them as collateral for loans. The performative effects of de Soto’s ideas become perceptible immediately: the assets of the poor that have not found their worth in “the market” are revalued in international projects and drawn into the formal economy to constitute new resources. This process results in a flow of wealth from the poor to the rich at the cost of depriving the poor even further.23 As Mitchell claims, markets do not have boundaries. Taking Michel Callon’s work as a basis, we can say that attempting to define the market through certain criteria and to delineate its boundaries holds a performative power in itself.24 In other words, outlining the borders of “the market” enables the redistribution of the already existent resources among different actors. In this respect, resources are not reproduced; they are merely reallocated among new subjects with the movement of the long existent assets to “the market.” As Mitchell’s study demonstrates quite clearly, housing projects in Peru do not lead to the generation of wealth, but rather to the movement of the resources of the poor to other realms. The integration of the poor into “the market” is only rendered possible through “‘accumulation by dispossession” as conceptualized by Harvey; that is to say, the appropriation of the poor’s assets. Harvey states that the success of neoliberalism lies not in generating new fortunes, but in redistributing the existing wealth among the upper classes.25 In the subsequent sections of this chapter, I will focus on contract farming through two different case studies and explore the practices of establishing a new tobacco market through this mode of production and the redistribution of sources of wealth among new actors.

Western tobacco market As he was just hanging up the phone, he turned around and said, “Yes, again the same black Toyota” to the man pouring the tea. I was in a too smoky and loud internet cafe filled with kids playing pirated computer games on old bulky computers and adults video chatting with their potential partners in cyberspace. Salih Bey, the head of the tobacco cooperative, had opened this internet cafe in a small Aegean town with the money he saved up over many years. Salih Bey, whose phone kept ringing while I was there, assumed a solemn expression as he received the most recent update regarding an incident he had been following

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for months. The news had traveled through tobacco fields, stopped by coffee houses, and finally found its way to this internet cafe. The protagonist of this story, the black Toyota, was regarded as a symbol of greed, exploitation, and opportunism by the cultivators as it traveled from one village to the next to buy the oversupply tobacco from last year. Those who traveled in the Toyota bought the unsold contract tobacco for under half of the market value.26 According to the villagers, the tobacco brokers were hired by tobacco leaf companies, although they would deny any sort of connection if they were caught. And the fact that there was no one who wanted to catch or punish them for these illegal activities made their job easier. When I went to the TEKEL building in another town in the afternoon, I found the tobacco experts talking about the same Toyota. The tobacco experts, who knew the names of the tobacco brokers and even the companies who hired them to do this job, were unhappy with these sales, and yet in a self-contradictory manner, they were not keen to do anything about this either. When I said, “You know, this is not legal, you can report this to the tobacco agency,” the lead expert responded, “Yes, we could do that. But if we do that what will happen to the cultivators who sell their tobacco? Anyway, everybody knows all about what’s going on.” Indeed, the following days proved that everyone from the cultivators to the police and gendarmerie were in fact aware of these illegal tobacco sales. However, the illegality could be legitimized when the tobacco that could not be sold was taken into consideration: at the end of the day, this tobacco was regarded as waste. The tobacco that was turned into waste in the regulated market was drawn to the unregulated sphere to assume value. In the regulated tobacco market, the price of tobacco is determined according to the prices of previous years, whereas in the unregulated setting, the value of tobacco was very low, yet much higher than the value waste would secure. The illegality of the sale of oversupply tobacco had created another market. This market was established through a complicit network made up of petty smugglers, cultivators, and merchants, but one that also included tobacco and cigarette companies. And the security forces and bureaucracy of the state who were aware of this network were complicit in this collaboration by keeping silent. Now, to return to the black Toyota. In 2006, leaf tobacco companies realized that even if they bought the entire crop from the producers they could not meet the amount demanded by cigarette companies. The fact that the weather was very hot that year worked against the hopes of cultivators and predictions of tobacco experts. Furthermore, the year before, there had been various conflicts



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between the farmers and the buyers in regards to what would happen to the surplus tobacco, whereupon, while many producers in the Aegean stopped producing tobacco, some were excluded from the contracts by leaf tobacco companies on the grounds that their tobacco was not high quality, their villages were too far, and the crop was inadequately produced. With the retreat of certain farmers from production, there was a decrease in tobacco production. Leaf companies, having realized that the next year’s crop would be low, set their eyes on the “waste” tobacco of the previous year before the market opened. Last year’s unsold and thus valueless crop became a lucrative commodity. Even though the farmers, the companies, and even the tobacco were the same, under the new tobacco law these sales were no longer legal. While contract farming drew the boundaries of the tobacco market on the one hand, on the other, by marking the sphere left outside of it, it also made the surplus tobacco illegal. This tobacco was pushed outside the market after the inception of contract farming and turned from commodity to waste. But actually the oversupply tobacco that was demoted to waste status was no different from the tobacco produced and sold in this market. The difference did not pertain to the quality or type of the tobacco, but to the fact that it became an “unnecessary” product based on the assumption that it would no longer find a medium for consumption. The existence of this tobacco (that was the same as the tobacco sold on the market) gave rise to a new market from within. This new sphere, constituted by the delineation of the boundaries of “the market” and the reformatting of tobacco production and sales, also led to the emergence of a new economy with a high profit margin. While a portion of the tobacco produced in the same field by the same cultivator, seed, and method was sold on the market, a portion of it was marked as waste and put on sale in a different market.27 Here it would not suffice to simply talk about the transformation of a commodity; what is more important is that, within this transformation, some actors are deprived of their existent rights while new opportunities for revenue arose for others. Contract farming led to a shift in the old boundaries drawn between legality and illegality. What was formerly legal began to correspond to the illegal sphere through the changes in the market structure. However, as I tried to explain earlier, the most significant issue was the sharing of this “oversupply” product among new entrepreneurs. Not only marginalized and unemployed individuals, but also companies that dominate the tobacco market have benefitted from this emerging market.

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Eastern tobacco market It is possible to see people selling loose tobacco at every corner in southeastern Anatolia. Especially in Adıyaman, while sellers sitting on stools with a sack full of tobacco before them occupy the streets, those of better economic status can market their tobacco to Urfa or even Syria from their stores. The shelves in the stores are full of tobacco of varying quality, yet all bearing the same name, Çelikhan, where they are produced. Neither the sellers on the street nor the shop owners have any trouble selling this tobacco. First and foremost, it is sold at a higher price than the tobacco produced in the west, demand is always there, and production conditions are much easier. However, there is a major problem regarding Çelikhan tobacco: while it is available everywhere, it is considered illegal. The illegality of Çelikhan tobacco has absolutely nothing to do with its ingredients. As already mentioned, with the issuing of the new law, tobacco is only allowed to be produced under contract. In other words, to be able to produce tobacco each cultivator has been forced to find a legal buyer who can sign a contract. Those from Çelikhan, who could not find buyers to make a contractual agreement to purchase their products in the restructured market, were pushed to the illegal sphere in a single stroke. Holding a unique place among tobacco produced in the east, Çelikhan tobacco is assessed on the standards of Oriental tobacco, which is grown in the highest volume worldwide in Turkey, and is thus categorized as a low-grade tobacco.28 As opposed to small leaved Oriental tobacco that does not need irrigation, grows on arid land and requires intensive labor, the broad leaved Çelikhan tobacco grows on fertile land that requires irrigation. Çelikhan tobacco, which is sold as loose rolling tobacco, is not used in American blend cigarettes and thus is not in high demand in the cigarette industry.29 In short, Çelikhan tobacco, which is in high demand in the local market, has almost no value in the new market that is regulated through contract farming.30 Unlike American blend cigarettes, since Çelikhan tobacco does not require flavoring, blending and filtering, it can reach the market in a short period of time through simple cutting. However, according to a clause in Article 6 of the tobacco law, it has become “mandatory to establish complete and new technology facilities including tobacco preparation facilities of no less than 15 ton capacity for tobacco products.” In order to legalize loose tobacco, it is now necessary for tobacco growers to sign a contract with a company that has such



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a facility prior to production. Otherwise, as per Article 8 outlining penal provisions,31 criminal charges will apply for those who undertake production without establishment and operation permission. In other words, the contract imposes certain standards on the leaf tobacco buyers, thereby allowing only those who have a certain amount of capital to establish such a factory. As for those cultivators from Çelikhan who previously processed their tobacco themselves, it is impossible for them to secure the necessary financing to open such a factory given their economic condition. Another problem is that the same high tax applied to cigarettes is also applied to rolling tobacco. The former president of the tobacco regulatory agency has issued the following press statement: Some establishments have applied to us for production as well as founding facilities, but they could not start production. Because what happens is that a 50 gram pack is sold at the same price as filtered cigarettes sold at 3.5–4 liras. There is no attraction left for the consumer. The 0.07 lira per gram tax on loose tobacco has to be decreased. Unless it is reduced, it can’t be produced.32

Çelikhan tobacco, the plantation and sale of which has been deemed illegal through an entirely arbitrary amendment, becomes a product that needs to be eliminated in the eyes of the state. Rather than legalizing this tobacco that has a market, the government’s plan is to produce alternative products in this region instead of tobacco. Yet these projects are not fruitful, since the lots are parcelled and small, the cultivators are unwilling and the income from tobacco cannot be generated from another product. Thus a dispute ensues between the cultivators and the state, and both sides begin to devise different strategies. Upon selling the required minimum contract amount (200 kilograms) to TEKEL, practically the only buyer in the region, producers begin to sell the remaining tobacco under the counter in their own markets. As such they both legalize production, and are also able to sell the tobacco at a high price to those of their choosing. Since there is no control mechanism to compare the tobacco produced and the tobacco sold, the Çelikhan tobacco growers are able to create another market beyond “the market” by devising new strategies. However, this system was disrupted in 2005, when TEKEL, who was aware of these sales in Çelikhan, disqualified this tobacco due to low quality and low production. 923 out of 1,141 contracts with TEKEL were canceled. Twenty-five percent low quality tobacco per bale now serve as the legal bases upon which TEKEL has the right to cancel contracts. Çelikhan tobacco assessed according to Oriental tobacco standards is easily disqualified as “low quality tobacco.”

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The meeting I had with the Çelikhan mayor focused precisely on this arbitrary line drawn between legal and illegal tobacco. The mayor, who emphasized that founding a cooperative would be a solution to this problem, proceeded to state the following: Our law says, if you build several industrial units and sell this many packages, then I will provide you this opportunity. But even if we sell the entire Çelikhan village, we cannot open such a factory. […] And I am asking the state to register me. I don’t want anything from the state. I say, let it not stand in my way […] Register me, tax me. I have the market. What we are doing is not illegal. If we describe what is illegal, [our tobacco] doesn’t fit the illegal at all.

The words of the mayor led to a sudden heated discussion among the cultivators who had been listening to him in silence. A tobacco producer told us the following story: There used to be these tobacco rangers. They cornered one of the old guys at the entrance of the field. You know, they issued him a ticket. Said it’s illegal. And the guy is so poor, he couldn’t find any rolling paper or nothing either, he made a pipe out of a walnut tree. And the tobacco is his, he puts it into the pipe, smokes it. When he is arrested, the old man asks: “tobacco is grown in my field and my pipe is made of my walnut tree, so tell me why is it illicit?” Our situation is the same. The reason why they think that our tobacco is illegal is because it is not regulated. And we are saying, make it registered. They say meet these conditions so we can register you. But we don’t have the means to do that.

It was not easy for growers to legalize the production and sales of their own tobacco. The local market, which functioned in this way for many years, was disrupted by the transition to contract farming and, with the redefinition of “the market” under the contract system, Çelikhan tobacco was expelled from this sphere. In this chapter I attempted to show that there is not a single market and that different markets function in different ways through two separate examples. The first case has depicted how, with the transition to contract farming, tobacco companies bought the oversupply tobacco from the growers and this tobacco turned from waste to commodity, and was drawn from the legal sphere to the illegal, from the regulated market to the unregulated market. The second case has demonstrated how a shift in the boundaries of the market made possible through contract devalued the tobacco in question. The emphasis of both stories was on how different actors (government officials, TEKEL staff, tobacco experts, tobacco and cigarette companies) acted in collaboration at different



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times, and with the transformation of the market, the already existent yet inaccessible wealth was redistributed among new actors. One of the primary arguments was the idea that we cannot understand the market through binary oppositions such as public/private, formal/informal, and legal/illegal. Rather than simply being a flawed policy, establishing and redefining the boundaries of the market functions as a constitutive apparatus. The line drawn between “the market” and what is said to be lying outside of it is extremely superficial and arbitrary, yet at the same time, just as performative. In other words, the boundaries of the market are much more ambiguous than economics books tell us. And precisely through this obscurity the power of the market is established. With the arbitrary shifts in the boundaries of the market, the actors can be included in or excluded from the market. Commodities become waste, people are marginalized. Previous boundaries are pushed, new tactics are devised to reenter the market. Old alliances are sometimes severed, partners are left in the lurch, and citizens are declared terrorists. The very uncertainty of the market transforms people and commodities. It regulates some of them, favors others, and bombs some others.

Part III

Citizens

6

Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and Resistance On December 15, 2009, over a hundred buses filled with TEKEL workers converged on Ankara, Turkey’s capital city, for what was supposed to be a day or two of protests against the implementation of recent planned changes that would affect thousands of workers’ wages and job benefits. Thousands of demonstrators that entered the capital that morning were diverted by the police from arriving at the Justice and Development Party (JDP) headquarters in Ankara. Many of those demonstrators were detained in enclosed sporting facilities that night. The next day, the crowd that had finally assembled in a park was estimated to have numbered about 10,000. After a relatively uneventful sit-in protest in the park, on December 17 the crowds found themselves under assault by hundreds of police in full riot gear and all too willing to exercise violent means in order to disperse them. The aggressive response of the riot police, acting on orders from the government, served to fan the flames of discontent among the demonstrators. As a result, a few days of planned protests ultimately stretched into a total of 78 days with crowds of demonstrators numbering in the tens of thousands and extending to most of Turkey’s major urban centers. In addition, the violence of the police response brought the protestors’ concerns to the forefront of public awareness. With the ensuing surge of support from local businesses and citizens alike, the TEKEL workers occupied a major part of the downtown area of the capital, established a “tent city” and started living in their “resistance commune” through unseen acts of solidarity for more than two and a half months during the harsh Ankara winter. The above-mentioned demonstrations began as a result of the privatization of TEKEL, which used to employ 12,000 workers in 43 factories and workplaces in 21 cities across the country. The tobacco monopoly, which was previously a state-owned enterprise, was sold to British American Tobacco (BAT) in the beginning of 2008. In response to the government’s plan to close TEKEL factories, lay off workers, and transfer them to other temporary positions with

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accompanying decreases in salary of up to 40 percent and the loss of additional job benefits, the workers initiated demonstrations in many of Turkey’s major cities. The government ruled that the workers would be employed elsewhere in the public sector under a new employment status called 4/C, which is categorized as insecure, nonunionized, and temporary work. TEKEL workers refused to take these temporary jobs on the grounds of their “acquired rights” and rejected the government’s plan to assign them to temporary jobs under 4/C status, which was presented as a “favor” offered to them. Through an analysis of TEKEL’s privatization, this chapter aims to contribute to theories discussing the relationship between the state and the citizen in Turkey. There are several valuable books1 published in Turkish that examine the workers’ protests concentrating on interviews conducted during the time of these protests and which, therefore, reflect the workers’ perspectives on the government, class struggle, trade unions, and politics in general. This chapter, however, diverges from these studies by focusing on how the incumbent government responds to these protests and operates different citizenship regimes. Briefly, there are two basic goals that I seek to attain in this chapter. First, I seek to contribute to the considerable amount of literature that seeks to understand to what extent the JDP, a party with Islamic roots, could be counted as a political entity truly following neoliberal policies. Against the backdrop of arguments that consider the JDP as a party undertaking a “third-way” between communitarian and neoliberal policies, I argue that the party’s seemingly contradictory policies derive exactly from the neoliberal regime, which it follows devotedly. As an extension of the first thread, I then illustrate the ways in which different citizenship regimes are being constructed. Rather than employing one fixed, uniform, and equally calibrated relationship with every citizen, the government implements a multitude of governing policies for different groups of people. As different cases illustrate, the government applies varying citizenship regimes to different communities as a component of its neoliberal practices. While the next section will review privatization projects along with economic liberalization policies particularly during the JDP era, the following part will illustrate the ways in which different regimes of citizenship are being employed as a governing policy. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ways in which TEKEL workers, as citizens of Turkey, are addressed and managed by the government.



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Privatization of TEKEL Privatization has been on Turkey’s agenda as a serious economic issue since 1986, when the Privatization Administration was established as a formal institution to adjust the country’s privatization policies in accordance with global standards. From the mid-1980s to the crisis in February 2001, privatization progressed at a slower pace than expected. Anti-privatization forces effectively kept finding ambiguities in the legal system and applied to the Constitutional Court to prevent major deals.2 Not only was there local resistance, but also the weakness of the legal and institutional structure along with the presence of discouraged foreign investors in an environment of macroeconomic instability decelerated the privatization process. With the financial downturn in 2001, however, the picture totally changed. International financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank became central figures in imposing large-scale privatization projects, and this international pressure ultimately helped to undercut national resistance to privatization forces.3 Turkey, tied to the conditionalities in return for financial aid after the deep crisis, was forced to take quick steps toward economic reform policies. When the coalition government was replaced by the JDP in 2002, there were doubts about the new government’s attitude toward privatization policies. Interestingly, the JDP turned out to be the government that made the most progress toward privatization in the history of the country: the revenue earned from privatization between 1986 and 2002 was US$8 billion, while the amount reached almost US$28.5 billion during the period 2002–09.4 In 2003, the government announced the Emergency Action Plan, which was a declaration of its commitment to privatization and its acknowledgment of the limitation of the state’s role in the economy. The words “efficiency,” “productivity,” and “competition” were underscored to guarantee the support of national and international financial communities. In the same year, the JDP adopted the Turkish Privatization Strategy Plan and proved its deep pledge to the privatization of state-owned enterprises and its policies aiming to reduce state interventionism in the economy. Moreover, the JDP took important legislative steps to protect the interests of foreign investors with the Foreign Investment Law of 2003, which removed many of the bureaucratic restrictions on foreign direct investment. Attempts to privatize the state-run tobacco monopoly, TEKEL, date back to the 1950s. It was argued that the state’s interference in the cigarette and tobacco sector hampered efficiency and hindered competition that would otherwise

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naturally emerge in a free market setting.5 Serious steps toward privatization were taken in the following years to the extent that several laws were drafted, but these attempts all came to nothing.6 In the late 1980s and 1990s, the government’s destruction of surplus tobacco (discussed in Chapter 4) was often brought to the public’s attention by the media. Not only TEKEL in particular, but also all state-owned enterprises7 in general were heavily criticized by both anti- and pro-privatization groups. While anti-privatization circles called attention to the need to initiate reforms revitalizing these abandoned institutions, the latter held a more pessimistic view, arguing that these institutions would suffer from economic inefficiency, lack of innovation, and political interference as long as they were owned by the state. In the end, the idea of privatization was favored as the final solution to the economic and social problems that these institutions were facing. After the military regime of the early 1980s, in alignment with the policies implemented toward a free market economy, the first step in the privatization of the tobacco monopoly was taken with the lifting of the ban on cigarette imports in 1984. When in 1991 a further law allowed foreign tobacco companies to invest and to establish their own production facilities in Turkey, Philip Morris entered into a joint venture with one of Turkey’s biggest conglomerates and began manufacturing cigarettes for domestic consumption. These developments were immediately reflected in the decline in the sales of TEKEL cigarettes as Philip Morris’ market share gradually increased, thereby putting the company in the leading position in Turkey’s cigarette market. After the enactment of the Tobacco Law in 2002, the pathway for the monopoly’s privatization was entirely unblocked. In the meantime, a new government came to power in November 2002 led by the JDP. In order to satisfy international financial institutions, which were underpinning the country’s economic recovery program, the new government was forced to speed up the privatization process. As Öniş argues, the JDP government was pragmatic and did not consider privatization of public enterprises an ideological issue.8 Accordingly, the minister of Finance, Kemal Unakıtan, publicly announced the privatization process would be accelerated and finalized regardless of anti-privatization critiques, and in the case of any resistance, the government would change the legal terms to enable the process.9 Hence, TEKEL’s cigarette division went up for auction in 2003, and the alcohol division of the monopoly was privatized in 2004. The Turkish government considered Japan Tobacco International’s bid of US$1.5 billion too low and rejected the offer. The second auction did not return any bids. Another attempt



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was made to no avail and the government withdrew the offer on the pretext that the monopoly needed restructuring in order to increase its value. TEKEL’s cigarette industry was finally privatized in March 2008. BAT was the highest bidder for TEKEL’s assets with a bid of US$1.72 billion.

Providing “hizmet” When the JDP came to power, it proved that it would be highly committed to the country’s ongoing neoliberal economic integration into the global order.10 By launching massive economic and political liberalization policies concurrently, the JDP became Turkey’s most ambitious government in swiftly adopting neoliberal policies. Clearly, the 2001 crisis as well as the pressure from international financial institutions played important roles in the implementation of these harsh economic policies. In regard to the JDP, several studies11 discuss the juxtaposition of Islamist principles with neoliberal economic policies. As these studies have elaborated, the merging of neoliberal economic policies with Islamic values had already been on the agenda for a while, even before the JDP era. Yet, it is pertinent to note that market-oriented economic policies had never been so forcefully and thoroughly applied before the JDP government. Also, the JDP’s market oriented discourse along with its conservative values raised several questions about the peculiarity of the policies that the government had been following. Several studies12 argue that the JDP has pursued its policies on a dual axis: on the one hand, the government seems to be following a social justice perspective; on the other hand, it has been a devoted follower and implementer of free market economy. While individual rights and liberties are promoted to create self-fulfilling, responsible, market-oriented individuals, the sense of being a community is also invoked to create and endorse conservative norms and values.13 By the “mutually reinforcing role of Islam and neoliberalism,” the government is able to overcome the problem of fulfilling social policies while at the same time adopting economic liberalization policies.14 The JDP policies, with seemingly strong emphases on communitarian values and distributive policies, it has been argued, diverge from the classical neoliberal paradigm. Several scholars have described the peculiar stand of the JDP as the “third way,”15 “social neoliberalism,”16 and “neoliberalism with a human face.”17 The noticeable increase in the government’s social expenditures during the JDP era supports the argument that the government has not entirely retreated from

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the provision of social services.18 Indeed, in spite of the harsh economic reforms, the share of public expenditure for social assistance has increased, especially in the areas of health and education. I argue that this so-called paradox in JDP policies, which has been described as a deviation from the neoliberal regime, in fact stems from the contradictory and split character of neoliberalism per se. Yet, before elaborating further on this matter, it is pertinent to shed light on how the social services provided to citizens have been interpreted by the JDP as well as several scholars. After coming to power in November 2002, the JDP made it very clear that it differed from its predecessor, the Islamic Wealth Party, in many respects. The previous party had been closed down by the Constitutional Court on the basis of accusations of carrying out anti-secular activities. Although secular Kemalists also raised doubts about the religious undercurrents of the JDP, the party leaders reiterated that the government would not be running the country as a religious party with secret aims to establish an Islamic political order. The party announced that it sought to pursue “a new understanding of politics, free from the politicization of religion and advocating secularism.”19 JDP politicians described the party as “conservative democratic” and asserted service-based rather than identity-based politics.20 As will be shown below, the party’s emphasis on service-based politics is very well-aligned with the requirements of the global economic order and facilitated the implementation of neoliberal economic policies. The idea of rendering service, hizmet, to citizens, is not a new concept in Turkish politics. The concept had been widely used by politicians throughout Turkish political history.21 However, in the JDP’s discourse, hizmet is introduced as a notion independent of any sort of ideology. By stripping away the political underpinnings of the concept, the electorate has been called to vote for the services and amenities provided by the government. One of the best examples of the notion of hizmet can be seen in Prime Minister Erdoğan’s nationally broadcast speech, which was made subsequent to the uprisings in Gezi Park in May 2013.22 In his speech, the prime minister apprised the nation of the initial steps for the construction of a new airport and a third bridge in Istanbul, and an agreement with Japanese companies to establish a nuclear power plant in Sinop. Criticizing the Gezi protestors as actors working for the interests of external powers, Erdoğan argued that artificially constructed debates and tensions had always been a barrier to economic development. Declaring that the next ten-year development policy for the country was already planned, Erdoğan provided the national economic growth figures and outlined several



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development projects in the pipeline as well as the foreign policies that would be implemented. In general, Erdoğan pragmatically put forth the services that had been provided by his government and asked the people to evaluate his party based on the efficacy of those services. This argument structured upon the concept of hizmet can be construed as a way of carving out the political through a reduction of “politics to delivery of goods only.”23 Through the hizmet discourse, Erdoğan portrays other political parties as being indifferent to the needs and demands of certain sectors of the population, while he is also covering up the most controversial aspects of his politics and making his government appear to be more attentive to the equal care of every citizen. This strategic maneuver of converting the political into a technical issue gives the impression that citizens are being embraced equally by the government. Steering away from a more overtly political stance, what the JDP government promotes is a politics of services devoid of any ideological connotations or other sources of identity. The economic rationality and pragmatism that diminish the political into a technical administrative issue not only makes citizens from different ethnicities, classes, and ideologies feel equally reached and cared for by the government, but also facilitates the government’s integration into global economic liberalization policies. The JDP’s representation of itself as an almost apolitical technical tool, responding to the problems of society through a pragmatic and calculative engineering institution,24 has been widely accepted by the Turkish population. The success of the JDP lies mostly in its seemingly nonideological stance distributing hizmet and rights on an equal basis to every citizen. Nonetheless, I argue that this presumably egalitarian hizmet discourse and its nonideological stance, which increases the popularity of the government by satisfying the diverse interests of different communities, does not, in fact, truly represent what has recently been happening in the Turkish political arena. The JDP government is perfectly integrated into the neoliberal economic and political order and has been pursuing varying policies regarding Turkish citizenship. While hizmet becomes easily available to certain individuals, others are deprived of these rights and services because of the government’s supposed nonideological stance. In the next section, I will discuss the government’s different practices in developing a variety of citizenship regimes through an analysis of the social policies followed by the JDP.

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Different citizenships In spite of a seemingly dominant tendency to consider neoliberal policies as having a uniform and all-encompassing structure which governs the entire population in a standardized and flawless way, I argue that a detailed and more layered analysis is required to scrutinize this complicated process. Neoliberal policies are implemented through a process; they are not realized as full and complete packages because they never operate in a vacuum.25 Thus, neoliberalization unfolds differently in different places and produces a systematically uneven, variegated and path-dependent process in different geographies.26 In other words, neoliberal practices and policies are always translated into a new structure as they travel through different global settings, and moreover, inherently possess a fractured, fragmentary, incomplete, and inconsistent structure.27 Therefore, following market oriented policies on the one hand, and pursuing social distributive policies on the other, are not necessarily paradoxical activities within the neoliberal regime. These contradictions are already inherent in neoliberal policies. Employing a different definition and understanding of neoliberalism, one that is not peculiarly restricted to economic liberalization policies, would bring about a more intricate and multifaceted picture. Neoliberalism is more than an economic doctrine; it is the extension of market logic to the social realm. It works as a governing technology that can be adopted by different regimes and ideologies. According to Ong, neoliberalism produces a new mode of citizenship in which rights and benefits are not necessarily distributed through nation-state membership.28 Thus, it is not a coherent amalgam, but a fragmentary and contradictory structure through which different citizenship regimes are being performed. The denial or acceptance of certain citizenships to different groups of people is an extension of neoliberal logic. Following this thread of thought, I will summarize different social policies targeting a variety of citizens during the JDP era. Although there is a danger of oversimplification in the attempt to categorize a group of different citizenships here, I believe that such an approach will not only bring a new understanding to the interpretation of neoliberalism in Turkey, but also bears the potential to provide a more insightful explanation of the success of the current government which has appealed to different populations of society. Therefore, the perspective I provide diverges radically from the approaches situating JDP policies both within and outside of the neoliberal regime, and thus defining them as



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“third-way” policies. Rather, I see the JDP’s reform processes and policies firmly embedded within the neoliberal order. It can be argued that the JDP government has been using both formal and informal distributive mechanisms to implement social welfare policies.29 In terms of evaluating the rights-based approach in social policy, the government has presented both challenges and opportunities.30 On the one hand, significant steps have been taken to combat poverty and social exclusion through redistributive mechanisms in alignment with Turkey’s candidacy to full membership in the EU. On the other hand, the party has preferred to use more traditional forms of networking in the allocation of these resources. Formal redistribution is a state-based mechanism in which social assistance is recognized as a universal right granted to all citizens. Especially in the areas of health and education, the government has undertaken several comprehensive initiatives such as: the introduction of universal health care coverage; the expansion of the Green Card31 in the health care sector; providing conditional cash aid to poor families according to their children’s school attendance and vaccination records; and distributing free school books. These are just a few among several reforms. However, these rights-based social policies are generally being articulated within the JDP’s own conservative approach, and are transformed into something more like the party-specific social assistance offered only to certain citizens. For example, social services for disabled individuals are determined within the context of cultural values and norms.32 In another case, the party’s conservative outlook on gender relations is reinforced with a policy that shifts the social care from the state to familial care sources and implicitly to women as primary care givers.33 Another example is the government’s cash payment assistance to women whose husbands have died. Özar and Yakut Çakar argue that the government makes a distinction between two groups of economically vulnerable women: widows and divorcees.34 While divorcees are deprived of government assistance, widows are defined as being in need of the protection of the state. In the case of health, Yoltar illustrates how the Green Card scheme is arbitrarily and irregularly applied depending upon subjective evaluations of local civil servants fuelling patronage networks in their regions.35 All these examples demonstrate that even the so-called egalitarian rights-based approach of the government could be considered discriminatory since it has been organized in accordance with the conservative outlook of the party. Nevertheless, the JDP government has not restricted itself merely to formal distribution mechanisms, but provided social assistance to certain groups of

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people through nongovernmental networks. Moving away from the social state role, the government has been transferring certain services to specific actors. The number of NGOs, charity organizations, and philanthropic groups has skyrocketed during the JDP era, and these organizations are granted legal flexibilities for collecting donations to achieve their goals.36 Receiving access to the services offered has required certain conditions to be met: the individuals’ affiliation and loyalty to these organizations, for instance, are expected.37 Thus, inclusion of all citizens for these basic social services is not intrinsic in the functioning of these organizations. As several studies38 have argued, charity organizations are taking over various duties and responsibilities from the government. This transformation, however, does not mean the withdrawal of the JDP as a political party from the scene. On the contrary, the JDP has been continuously extending its power over different segments of society with the assistance of these nongovernmental networks. It has been argued that the redistribution of social assistance through third parties has created clientalist relationships with the JDP.39 Social assistance appears to be distributed according to the values and norms adopted by the party, rather than criteria adopted by a social state, such as assistance distributed regardless of the citizens’ ideological and religious beliefs. Therefore, social aid is not given to all citizens, but only to the ones who are singled out by the party as eligible individuals. In brief, rather than embracing a universal, egalitarian and rights-based approach, ensuring equal rights to every citizen, the JDP maintains a more selective and discriminatory citizenship regime, which I will subsequently try to demonstrate in the case of TEKEL workers.

Workers and the “people” What converted the TEKEL demonstrations into a long-term protest was the government’s coercing of the workers to accept 4/C status. This regulation was presented by the government as an alternative to the displaced workers who had to otherwise resign or look for a job elsewhere. This was, however, an interim solution, which introduced a contractual employment situation for the workers. The 4/C Clause of Law 657 was enacted in 1994, and originally applied to professionals who worked in the public sector on a contractual basis. Yet, in 2004, the JDP government approved an amendment to this article



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including public employees who had been laid-off due to privatization. The JDP government has been implementing these contractual employment conditions mostly in the education and health care sectors. Under 4/C status, the workers’ salaries are tied to legal minimum wages;40 the jobs offered are not necessarily related to the ability of the workers; no social benefits are provided; and no overtime pay is granted. Moreover, 4/C personnel can neither participate in labor unions nor benefit from collective agreement rights. When TEKEL workers and the unions rejected the 4/C status proposed by the government, Prime Minister Erdoğan criticized the protests as having been based on ideological motives: In the last two years, we have been tolerating [TEKEL workers]. What are they doing? Are they doing business? No. They are simply sitting in the tobacco warehouses and this costs us 40 trillion [Turkish lira] monthly. Almost 10 thousand people. […]We use people’s money to pay them […] I am sorry, but I am not going to let anyone infringe on my orphans’ rights. I do not have such a right. Whatever it takes, I won’t let them.41

The distinction the prime minister made between TEKEL workers and the “people” demonstrates the ways in which the government has been employing a variety of citizenship regimes for different groups of people. While the former group is represented as an obstacle, burden, and overload, the latter group is regarded as “formal citizens” that have to be protected by the state and whose rights would otherwise be violated. The workers are defined not only as the ideologically deceived ones, but also irresponsible, lazy and, greedy individuals working against the interests of the state and the well-being of the “people.” As Bora rightly argues, TEKEL workers were depicted as “unneeded people” within the criminalizing discourse of the government.42 Similarly, Bauman discusses how the industrial worker, expelled from the labor market is not only unemployed, but also seen as redundant and superfluous.43 Bauman states that:44 To be “redundant” means to be supernumerary, unneeded, of no use—whatever the needs and uses are that set the standard of usefulness and indispensability. The others do not need you; they can do as well, and better, without you. There is no self-evident reason for your being around and no obvious justification for your claim to the right to stay around.

The global flows of capital and power determine who is going to be disposable or simply become waste in this system.45 The creation of the “the disposable

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worker” is not specific to Erdoğan’s Turkey; rather it is prototypical of today’s world.46 By creating a feeling of insecurity and vulnerability around permanent wage earners, the neoliberal regime redefines employment conditions in a way that full time, year-round jobs are now recognized as exceptional and privileged positions. Precarious employment is favored in opposition to organized labor as it brings more flexible and controllable working conditions. The victims of precariousness are not restricted to women, foreigners, or low-skilled workers anymore, but include groups previously thought to have been safely employed, a process that leads to what Castel calls “the destabilization of the stable.”47 On many occasions, Prime Minister Erdoğan has drawn a contrast between the fully employed workers and the unemployed masses. During the TEKEL strike, he made it very clear that his sympathy “lies with those unemployed masses that are ready to work harder without complaining over a far smaller income,” but not with the “public sector workers, who are organized in strong unions and are still complaining about their deteriorating working conditions and eroding job security.”48 The abolishment of the rights of formal employed groups has been justified by the existence of the unemployed labor force. In other words, by setting the two groups in opposition, the government has not only tried to weaken the conditions of the formally employed,49 but also aimed to gather the support of the underprivileged groups. In response to the TEKEL workers’ protests, the minister of Finance Mehmet Şimşek rejected criticisms targeting the government on the grounds that the situation before the JDP’s term was worse, as displaced workers were only paid their severance pay and left to fend for themselves. The government, according to Şimşek, fixed this problem and introduced 4/C status as an alternative for the workers after privatization. According to the minister, personnel with 4/C status would be paid an amount higher than the sum earned by roughly 3 million people working for the minimum wage in a country where there were at least 3–3.5 million unemployed people. Declaring that the state bears the responsibility of managing limited resources, Şimşek continued that the workers’ protests had nothing to do with their “rights,” but keeping their previous “high pay checks.”50 This explanation, shifting the issue from the realm of social rights to greediness, hints at the government’s persistence in discussing the protests within the context of desires of individuals rather than the rights of citizens. 4/C status was presented as a “concession” granted to workers. The minister stated that “if the government made a mistake, it was its feeling pity (merhamet) for the workers who were displaced after the privatization.”51 What was expected from the workers was a show of gratitude to the government for bestowing such



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an alternative solution. The rights of citizens that are supposed to be granted to everyone regardless of status has turned into concessions and favors offered by the government to the workers for which they should have been grateful. The move from the legal definition of the social rights of citizens to specific concessions and favors granted to a group of people was assisted by the creation of the feeling of insecurity and uncertainty in employment conditions. In this chapter I have attempted to decipher the ways in which citizenship regimes are being redefined under neoliberalism. The JDP case clearly illustrates that the rights-based approach is neither universally defined nor equally distributed among wide populations, but specifically granted to certain communities and individuals. Rather than discussing the issue within the framework of the vested rights of the workers, the JDP’s attempt to situate it within the discourse of concessions granted to certain communities fits very well with the neoliberal discourse, which unsettles citizenship as a legal status granted to everyone. The rights and entitlements that create citizenship are not universal and definite anymore, as they are being modified within the fragmented and contradictory neoliberal regime. Even though social policy expenditures have risen during the JDP’s time in office, a rights-based approach is not universally enjoyed by every individual in society. The government’s discourse of rendering service (hizmet) to each citizen of the nation does not have a basis in actual fact. The nature of the new bond connecting the government to its citizens is in no way similar to the traditional role of the government, which is equally distanced from every citizen. The redistribution of rights and benefits to the society are selectively processed by the government as well as certain NGOs and civil organizations, and are presented as concessions and favors, which has brought about the emergence of a “gratitude economy”52 through which economic and social aid delivered to certain individuals is then converted into the government’s political interests.

7

Making Healthy Good Citizens On television, we see Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan sitting on a couch in a modestly decorated lower-middle-class apartment in Ankara, surrounded by several men, a child, and an old woman. The prime minister speaks to the oldest male in the group: “I want something from you,” and the man immediately responds: “Your order is my command.” With surprised looks all around, the prime minister reaches into the man’s shirt pocket, takes a cigarette package out, and says, “Please quit smoking.” Amidst everyone’s laughter, the prime minister asks one of his assistants to take the package from the smoker, adding that he will keep it in his “museum” with the others. Now, almost everyone in Turkey is aware of the prime minister’s “special collection,” an assortment of different cigarette packages that he has collected from people living in different towns. The prime minister never lets his fellow citizens keep the packages for themselves, even though those quitting assure him that they will never smoke again. The cigarettes are taken from them and on the top of the package, the person’s name, telephone number, and the date are written and the person signs the package as a proof of his promise. In a half-joking manner, the prime minister warns the smoker that the security forces will track him down if he continues smoking. This familiar scene of Erdoğan pulling different brands of cigarette packages out of smokers’ pockets has taken place several times in different cities and towns around the country including Urfa, Kayseri, Istanbul, Malatya, and Mardin. Interestingly, his ardent anti-smoking attitude has become an attraction for people who cannot quit smoking. On the news, we see people, who want to stop smoking, come to the prime minister’s mass meetings and ask his help in quitting. In another instance, we learn that a mayor is reported to be a chain smoker, so Erdoğan calls him personally to make him stop smoking.1 Although Erdoğan’s way of convincing smokers partially derives from well-known explanations based on economic reasons (smoking is expensive) and health issues (smoking kills), the fundamental persuasive force in these

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interactions stems from his personal contact with the smoker citizens. Erdoğan explains his method as such: I don’t force [the smokers]; I negotiate with them. I ask them if they love me. They respond that they love me a lot. Then I say, “in order to persuade me that you love me, you should give me these cigarettes.” I want them to keep their promises, and state that “I hereby quit smoking.”2

The prime minister, in other words, has an anti-smoking campaign strategy that functions because of the smokers’ fondness for him: “as proof of their love for the people who love them, I ask my citizens to quit smoking.”3 This sort of antismoking campaign definitely departs from more conventional ways of fighting against smoking. In Turkey, the war against tobacco started in the late 1950s. This battle, however, was not against smoking in general, but it particularly targeted Virginia tobacco used in American cigarettes. Thus, the dangers of smoking were reserved for American blend cigarettes, whereas the consumption of Turkish cigarettes was promoted. The anti-smoking health discourse of the time was purposefully employed against American cigarettes with nationalist zeal. As one of the biggest revenue sources of the country, Oriental tobacco produced in Turkey was declared healthy and the smokers of this type of tobacco were considered to be responsible and good citizens. The late 1950s and 1960s exemplified a period when the global health discourse about tobacco consumption was integrated with a nationalist perspective and turned into an open war directed exclusively against American cigarettes. In the 2000s, the construction of smoking, which is represented as a socialmoral problem in the global health discourse, was fully adopted within the Turkish context. The global public health approach, which asserts that it is the individual’s responsibility to manage the risks of possible disease that might stem from pursuing an unhealthy lifestyle, has resonated powerfully with Islamic moralism. Thus, construction of self-regulating healthy nonsmoking bodies is a product of the global health discourse as well as the paternalistic and conservative approach of the current government. The kinds of language, images, and knowledge used in the anti-smoking campaigns (both in the 1950s against American blend cigarettes, and in the 2000s against any kind of tobacco) not only constitute a medical dichotomy between healthy and unhealthy individuals, but also create a distinction between responsible and irresponsible citizens. In any case, the health discourse has never functioned from a neutral perspective, a mere extension of medical–scientific



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language. It has always been combined with other perspectives, and transformed into something new and unique. In this chapter I aim to decode how citizens have been envisioned and disciplined through anti-tobacco campaigns under the pretext of complying with global health standards. In investigating health discourses targeting smokers in the 1950s and 2000s, the governance of “healthy,” “responsible” and “good” citizens in Turkey will be examined.

Oriental tobacco cigarettes Toward the end of the 1950s, in parallel with the proliferation of pro-American sentiments, a number of smokers became fond of Virginia blend cigarettes. The admiration for American cigarettes (especially by women) was ardently criticized:4 The interest in foreign cigarettes should not exceed the limits of curiosity, but it has been growing more and more. Especially several distinguished ladies’ overindulgence [in those cigarettes] emphasizes the importance of the problem. We think that having the habit of [smoking foreign cigarettes] is not only a betrayal of the country, but also the consequence of [people’s] ignorance and incomprehension of Turkish tobacco.5

According to the Tütün Dünyası, a journal published by tobacco experts, Oriental leaf was far and away the best tobacco, and this was proven by the fact that American cigarettes needed to be blended with Oriental tobacco to level their strong and bitter taste. Although Turkish tobacco garnered considerable interest and admiration in America as well as Europe, the interest in the “awful and bad quality foreign cigarettes” in Turkey was nothing but “pomposity and ostentation.”6 Today, while our tobacco is everywhere and its further expansion is desired, and even the cheapest and worst quality of our tobacco is much more exquisite than the best of foreign cigarettes, why are foreign cigarettes still in demand?7

Another criticism of American blend cigarettes was the issue of health from a chemical perspective. Turkish tobacco journals had several times cited documents confirming that Oriental tobacco had fewer harmful ingredients than those of Virginia tobacco: Oriental tobacco not only had less nicotine and nitrogen, but also grew naturally without the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers.8 For Turkish tobacco experts, low-quality Virginia tobacco, with its

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unhealthy composition, was manufactured into cigarettes after adding several chemical supplements in modern factories, whereas high-quality Oriental tobacco grew naturally and then was manufactured with almost no additives. In order to compete with technologically manufactured Virginia tobacco, cigarette factories in Turkey had to be modernized, and tobacco experts had to be sent to foreign countries for training.9 Yet, the intention to produce cigarettes in state-of-the-art factories must not be confused with making changes in the traditional Turkish blends.10 On June 23, 1959, the state monopoly TEKEL manufactured the first filtered cigarette, Samsun,11 in the Cibali cigarette factory in Istanbul. Tobacco experts unexpectedly showed up at the celebration as uninvited guests. They were upset. They thought that Samsun was a good quality cigarette but that the motivation behind the production of a filtered cigarette was a big mistake: Every smoker has to know that filters are used in cigarettes with unhealthy, low quality tobacco, which is rich in nicotine and tar. Turkish tobacco has none of these [poor] qualifications; it contains nothing that needs to be filtered. Therefore, by imitating the Americans, manufacturing filtered cigarettes is a big mistake and a contradiction. Moreover, from the perspective of our national tobacco [sector], it is a crime to name these fake products (Samsun) where the world’s best tobacco is grown.12

According to the experts, the manufacturing of Samsun cigarettes, a “fake product” and the “disgrace” of Turkish cigarettes, had to be halted.13 The problem actually stemmed from the recent interest in filtered American blend cigarettes in the Turkish market. Throughout the 1950s, US cigarette companies decided to alter their products in response to the rising concerns about the health effects of tobacco. The most popular and durable of these changes was the introduction of new filtered cigarettes. Filters became “a new marketing tool” by projecting an image of safety.14 The US cigarette industry claimed that the tar and nicotine levels of cigarettes were diminished through filters.15 Even though the companies aggressively marketed filtered cigarettes, they refused to acknowledge that cigarettes were harmful. In this paradoxical way, they insistently claimed that there was no scientific evidence that anything in the cigarettes needed to be filtered. The tobacco experts in Turkey also became spokesmen using this approach—but for the purpose of promoting Oriental tobacco. For tobacco experts in Turkey, the Americans were using poor quality tobacco in their filtered cigarettes. Only bad quality tobacco leaves required filters, not Turkish tobacco. Oriental tobacco was so high in quality that its



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usage in American blend cigarettes made the latter smokable. Virginia tobacco, if not blended with Oriental tobacco, was “heavy and tiresome like a greasy food,” “tasteless,” and, moreover, had an “excessive smell.”16 These unappetizing and unhealthy qualities of American cigarettes could only be overcome if mixed with Turkish tobacco. When filtered cigarettes swamped the Turkish tobacco market, the share for unfiltered cigarettes started to shrink. Over the years, filtered American cigarettes became more popular. Because of the prohibition on imports, American blends were smuggled into the country until the mid-1980s, when the ban on the import of foreign brand cigarettes was lifted in accordance with liberalization policies. Afterwards, the legislation allowing multinational cigarette companies to invest in the country incited growth in the consumption of Virginia tobacco cigarettes. Even TEKEL, which was once the crown jewel of Oriental tobacco, started to manufacture American blend cigarettes. The first American blend Turkish cigarette was manufactured with the brand name TEKEL 2000 in 1988 with a substantially high proportion of Virginia tobacco, which even exceeded the amount in a traditional American blend cigarette.17 Consequently, TEKEL’s tobacco imports increased more than ten times over a period of ten years (1989–99) with a substantial decrease in volume for the Oriental tobacco in its brands.18 After the multinational cigarette companies were allowed to open factories in the early 1990s, their market share rapidly rose to almost 70 percent in 2007, while TEKEL’s share remained about 30 percent.19 With the hegemony of American blend cigarettes in the market, the criticism of Virginia tobacco faded over the years. The dichotomy once made between the so-called high-quality, healthy, unfiltered Turkish cigarettes and low-quality, unhealthy, filtered American cigarettes perished. However, nationalist discourse about Turkish cigarettes, which had been articulated with health concerns, would now be replaced with a new tobacco control campaign, this time combined with conservative intervention.

New public health In the beginning of the 1940s, the public health discourse shifted its focus from infectious diseases to noninfectious ones (such as cancer and cardiovascular disease) and it focused on developing ideas of how to prevent these illnesses.20 Social factors, especially people’s lifestyles, became the major area of focus. Along with coercive legislative measures, the new public health discourse

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has engendered campaigns to voluntarily fight against unhealthy choices and lifestyles. The policies and practices have emphasized the individuals’ responsibilities to preserve not only their own health, but also that of others. In other words, the incidence of diseases would be reduced if individuals could be persuaded to exercise control over their own bodies and lifestyles.21 In this discourse, individuals are regarded as rational human subjects who can voluntarily govern themselves, take care of their own bodies, and stop harming others. They are not coded as passive recipients of health care, but selfgoverning subjects who actively engage with their health by observing their own diets, lifestyle, consumption, and habits.22 The global spread of this perspective has increasingly marginalized smoking as well as smokers. Cigarette smoking is perceived as an irresponsible, but consciously pursued action that inevitably impairs the health of smokers and nonsmokers. Moreover, it also causes socioeconomic problems such as high medical expenses and loss of national income. With the employment of neoliberal rhetoric regarding efficiency and effectiveness, smokers are considered burdens to the state and represented as citizens who are costly in terms of their medical and social burden. Operating on the presumption of voluntary individual participation, the new public health discourse aims to constitute responsible citizens who will ensure the economic well-being and physical health of the entire community. In this approach, cigarette consumption is individualized as a problem of smokers, who are regarded as irrational and self-indulgent citizens. What is interesting is that this approach implicitly reduces smoking to an adult choice and skips the broader socio-cultural context.23 Similar to debates about obesity, the risk and harm that are related to tobacco consumption are entirely shifted on to consumers themselves by ignoring the responsibility of multinational companies for the consumption of cigarettes.24 This promotes the idea of “responsible” citizens as rational subjects who can calculate the costs and benefits of their actions. Osborne describes this process of “responsibilization” through which individuals are called on to be “entrepreneurs of their own health.”25 Therefore, no coercive power is required, as they will “freely” govern themselves in ways consistent with expert knowledge.26 The global anti-smoking discourse reinforced by neoliberal thought passively persuades individuals into making “healthy” choices. The neoliberal health discourse then seeks to deprive the state’s paternalistic concerns by “shifting the responsibility for social risks such as illness, unemployment, poverty, etc., and for life in society into the domain for which the individual is responsible and transforming it  into a problem of



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‘self-care.’”27 In other words, it “does not seek to govern through ‘society,’ but through the regulated choices of individual citizens.”28 In brief, anti-smoking campaigns allow individuals to be governed into selfregulating their own health without the need for direct external intervention. The promotion of good health is evoked in an individualized manner. Yet, the case of Turkey reveals that smoking ban discourse, comprised of a multiplicity of interlocking neoliberal and conservative health techniques and strategies, emerges as an outcome of both individualized and communitarian ways of governance.

Purification of bodies The first legal measures to reduce tobacco consumption were initiated in Turkey in the mid-1990s. The government implemented Law 4207 in 1996, which initially included provisions banning advertising tobacco products, the sale of tobacco products to minors, and smoking in public places. But a stronger blow came to the smoking industry after Turkey’s membership in the World Health Organization (WHO). As a pioneering organization in the fight against tobacco consumption, the WHO initiated “The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control” (FCTC) with 195 partner countries as an international project, which was also signed by Turkey in 2004. Following the ratification of the Convention by the Turkish government, the National Tobacco Control Program (2008–12) was launched in 2007. The main objective of this program was to ensure that by 2012 the nonsmoking population 15 years old and above would be increased to 80 percent, and the smoking group aged 15 years and under would be reduced to zero.29 In accordance with this plan, Turkey passed Law 5727, which substantially amended Law 4207. The new law was implemented in two steps. First, in May 2008 Turkey expanded the smoking ban to public service buildings as well as the indoor areas of education, health, manufacturing, commerce, and entertainment venues. In July 2009, the government further expanded the ban to include restaurants, coffee houses, cafeterias, and beer houses.30 When the law was enforced in July, restaurant and bar customers favored seating at outdoor tables and did not feel the effects of the law. However, with the onset of winter the atmosphere changed and complaints about the law were raised. Moreover, in 2011 the Beyoğlu municipality, which administers the

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most touristic area of Istanbul filled with restaurants and bars, started a formal regulation which required the removal of outdoor seating on the grounds that these businesses were occupying public spaces. The unification of these two regulations, namely, the indoors smoking ban and outdoor seating prohibition, dealt a strong blow to both cigarette consumption and alcohol consumption,31 and turned the Beyoğlu streets packed with bars and restaurants into a ghost town. Thus, the intersection of both these regulations targeted not only the purification of bodies, but also the purification of public space. The global health discourse coupled with a conservative rationale has turned into a repressive moralist intervention into the lifestyles of Turkish citizens. Especially since the beginning of his second term, the prime minister’s patronizing rules have extended to every realm of life. He has given many speeches about not only alcohol and cigarette consumption, but also the number of children that citizens should have; the inappropriateness of giving birth by C-section; the sins of having an abortion; and the “immoral ideas” being spread more liberally through social media. Accordingly, the government has undertaken various legal and covert measures to reorganize the public and private spheres. Interestingly, this authoritarian and paternalistic involvement in the lives of individuals bears the familiar features of the Kemalist ideology that the JDP government has been criticizing for years.32 Holding a paternalistic attitude toward the people, the Kemalist elite prompted reforms not only in the legal and political structure, but also in the daily lives of citizens. The pillar of Kemalism was a top-down state that led to the implementation of Western modernization and social engineering. The JDP government has adopted a similar mentality, but with a religious conservative approach.

Healthy non-smoking Muslims Passing the smoking ban legislation was one thing, but enforcing it was another issue. The government’s strong aversion to tobacco was seen as the motivating force behind the fast and strict implementation of the anti-smoking law. In addition to restrictions regarding where people can smoke, the JDP government also raised the tax on cigarettes almost 30 percent, which was directly reflected in their price. Advertisements about the health risks of smoking have been broadcasted widely and intimidating warnings have been placed on cigarette packs. In short, high taxes, high retail prices, health warnings, stringent smoking bans, and the complete ban of advertising have been forcefully applied by the



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JDP government in a very short period of time. The rapid progress toward creating a nationwide smoke-free environment was connected to the political commitment of the government, and specifically, to the personal endeavors of Prime Minister Erdoğan.33 In one of his speeches, the prime minister claimed that the fight against smoking was as important as the fight against terrorism: Struggling against the use of tobacco products has become as important as our counterterrorism struggle, which is ever on our agenda, because tobacco products are literally murdering our future generations. […] This danger is sneakier, more hidden and more prevalent than terrorism. Terrorism is much more visible, but this is totally covert. It unobtrusively takes our people from us. Most dangerously, it is slowly killing our youth, our country and our posterity. And it is doing so remorselessly and cruelly.34

Equating smoking with a national security threat, the prime minister called active smokers “as risky as people who hang around with a weapon in their hands.” In response to people who consider anti-smoking laws a limitation on the freedom of smokers, Erdoğan also stated that “there is no freedom for suicide.”35 In this analogy between smoking and suicide, Erdoğan was referring to Islamic law, which prohibits inflicting harm upon their own bodies.36 In a book published by the Directorate of Religious Affairs in Turkey, the section explaining whether smoking is religiously permissible or not points to three different approaches. The first approach reflects Muslim jurists who consider smoking a neutral activity because they are not aware of the scientific facts that smoking has any adverse effects on health. The second group of Muslim scholars invariably classifies smoking as an activity that is lawful, but must be discouraged. In this view, smoking is designated as mekruh, which means strictly abominable. The third approach identifies smoking as haram, or forbidden, because smoking threatens the health of the smokers as well as nonsmokers; it is considered to be the squandering of money; and it wastes the sustenance required for the family.37 All these different interpretations arise from the fact that neither the Qur’an nor the hadith mention tobacco use, which will become an issue only hundreds of years later. However, the book enlightens readers through an analysis of the harm, waste, and sustenance clauses in the Qur’an, and proposes a rather ambivalent conclusion that smoking can be considered “mekruh close to haram” (harama yakın mekruh).38 This vague explanation stipulated by the official religious office of the Turkish government has acquired a conclusive inference after the new smoking

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ban: several religious authorities all over the country started to unequivocally define smoking as haram, not mekruh anymore. For example, when the consequences of the newly enacted law were discussed in the media, one theologian claimed that not only smoking, but also the selling of cigarettes is considered haram.39 The fourth pillar of Islam, the duty to fast during Ramadan, is also considered an ideal time for Muslims to quit smoking. The vice chairman of Yeşilay40 expressed in a press release that Ramadan bears an ultimate significance for saving “the Muslims of the world” from bad habits such as tobacco and alcohol consumption.41 Since during the fast, eating, drinking, and smoking are not allowed, it provides a good opportunity to quit smoking altogether. Ramadan is always much more than fasting with its involvement of “a general sense of increased social, moral, pious commitment.”42 As a time of worship, it creates a strong bond among the Muslims and aims to create a moral personhood through a communitarian practice. Its emphasis on pious discipline that seeks to create moral subjectivity also resonates very well with the neoliberal health model. The Islamic promotion of health, such as in “self-care” and “self-discipline,” evokes the new public health care discourse, which aims to create self-regulating individuals taking responsibility for their own lives. Both discourses utilize the same neoliberal health care rationale to constitute the subjectivities of individuals. However, there is a disparity in their resulting outcomes. The difference lies in the fact that responsible healthy subjects are constituted either through an individualistic or communitarian setting. The spread of the Western health ideology creates self-management through the idea of individualization. The idea of a responsible but isolated individual is produced by this form of neoliberal reasoning. The supporting social ideas, such as being a good Muslim, being a part of a religious community, giving up smoking with other fellow Muslims during Ramadan, hardly exist in the abstract discourse of global public health practices. Even the sense of being “loved” by the prime minister, knowing that their leftover cigarettes with their names and addresses written on the package are collected in Erdoğan’s apartment, creates a feeling of belonging— the group of smokers being interpellated not only as healthy, but also good Muslim citizens. This sensation of unifying smokers together in a community diverges from the Western health discourse in which social support disappears, and people are left to their own devices. Although the promotion of health in an Islamic context utilizes neoliberal rationality with its emphasis on self-care and self-discipline, it stays within



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the limits of a collective setting in the construction of a pious and healthy individual. The conservative discourse not only incites autonomous, responsible, and self-regulating subjects, but it also advocates a feeling of belonging to a community. In other words, the Western health discourse inculcates an individualistic approach, which is replaced by the socially inclusionary practices of Islamic morality. The global health discourse around tobacco consumption, both in the late 1950s and 2000s, was transformed in the Turkish setting where it acquired distinctive meanings after being articulated with two different thoughts. Thus, what is seen as a standard medical and scientific discourse fighting against smoking was turned into a nationalistic and conservative project in the hands of the locals. Anti-smoking campaigns, in which medical-scientific knowledge has been used predominantly, created a dichotomy between citizens: healthy, responsible, and rational as opposed to unhealthy, irresponsible, and irrational. In the mid-1990s, the Turkish government started to take serious steps to enact a range of legislative measures in order to restrict smoking. Anti-smoking campaigns were a combination of both restrictive and persuasive approaches to regulate the conduct of individual citizens. The indirect regulatory strategies set in place by the global public health model called upon individuals to take action voluntarily. Neoliberal health techniques and procedures for directing smoking behavior, such as creating self-regulating and self-disciplined individuals, have not only been adopted, but also transformed into a moral issue by the conservative Turkish government, which has already demonstrated a deep distaste for tobacco. The 2000s exemplify an especially interesting case in showing how the neoliberal discourse converges with conservatism in Turkey. As Wendy Brown suggests, the two rationalities, with their prevailing focus on the self-regulating individual, mutually reinforce each other rather than clashing or being dissolved by one another.43 While neoliberalism privileges the self-regulating individual, conservatism aims to create a moral individual as defined by the community. These two individual models do not combat each other all the time; sometimes, as in the case of global health discourse, they collude to create a new subjectivity, such as the archetype of the self-caring, disciplined, responsible, healthy, good Muslim citizen.

8

Smoking Tobacco, Speaking Nationalism In 1913, the American cigarette company R. J. Reynolds introduced a new brand called Camel. The packaging of Camel cigarettes was adorned with a picture of a camel surrounded by pyramids and palm trees and was accompanied by the words “Turkish & Domestic Blend.” At that time, a key formula for cigarettes did not exist, and Reynolds launched a new blend with Camel by mixing three different types of tobacco: Piedmont bright, a flavored Burley from Kentucky, and 10 percent Oriental leaf. The novel formula, which was known as “American blend,” gained instant success and became the first brand to be sold nationwide. By 1919, Camel cigarettes accounted for 38.7 percent of all cigarettes manufactured in the United States.1 The success of Camel was followed by other American brands. Although the amount of Oriental tobacco was not large in blended cigarettes, advertisements highlighted Oriental tobacco as an exquisite ingredient that added better aroma and flavor to cigarettes. Since then, Oriental tobacco has become a vital component of American blend cigarettes. In the years that followed, the success of American blend cigarettes led to continuous imports of Oriental tobacco into the United States, enhancing its market share. Paradoxically, increase in the US imports of Oriental tobacco led to a subsequent decline in Oriental leaf exports to Europe. The escalating worldwide demand for American blend cigarettes gradually resulted in decreasing the demand of cigarettes produced entirely from Oriental tobacco. For example, German smokers, who were in the habit of smoking cigarettes composed entirely of Oriental tobacco, eventually switched to American blends. This shift in the tobacco choice of smokers turned out to be irreversible, making the global tobacco sector dependent on cigarette companies in the United States. Turkey, as the world’s largest producer of Oriental tobacco, was the country most profoundly affected by changes occurring in the global tobacco market. As it relied heavily on revenues gained from tobacco exports, the national

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tobacco business in Turkey developed immediate responses to fluctuations in the Oriental tobacco market. These reactions to the changes in the market were not restricted to the economic realm. In many cases, restrictions on export-oriented tobacco commerce resulted in a series of nationalist attacks against minorities who ran the tobacco business in Turkey. Economic hardships resulting from the constraints on the export of Oriental tobacco in the global market engendered the emergence of nationalist sentiments in the local tobacco sector, such as the Turkification of the economy, anti-Semitism, and opposition to communism. In this sense, in this chapter2 I attempt to introduce an unusual approach to the emergence and rise of nationalism in Turkey. By focusing on the story of a commodity, that is, Oriental tobacco, this study sheds light on certain events surrounding tobacco and brings a different perspective to Turkish nationalism. Debates, controversies, and policies regarding Oriental tobacco, from the late nineteenth century up until early 1960, will be explored in this revisiting of Turkish nationalism. The examination of the role of Oriental tobacco as the central character that provoked an increase in Turkish nationalism in the early Republic might be considered an eccentric and pointless effort given the rich literature that already exists. However, the placement of a commodity at the hub of the nationalism debate will reveal not only how the language of nationalism was embedded in Turkish daily life, but also how this discourse was enforced by profit-seeking Turkish tobacco companies. The implicit relationship between tobacco commerce and Turkish nationalism will be analyzed through a discussion of a series of “tobacco stories” selected from different periods of the Turkish Republic.

Régie The Muharrem Decree of 1881 constitutes a turning point in Ottoman history. It led to the formation of the Public Debt Administration, which was an institution of European bondholders who had the right to levy and collect taxes from leading revenue sources within the Empire and direct the taxes toward debt payments. These sources included taxes from tobacco, salt, stamps, silk, spirits, and fisheries. French bondholders persuaded the Public Debt Administration to establish a separate institution to regulate and tax tobacco. Upon the conclusion of an agreement between the Debt Administration, the government, and three bank groups,3 the Régie 4 was founded in April 1884.



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The Régie was established as a foreign-controlled tobacco monopoly agency to raise revenue from tobacco in order to settle Ottoman foreign debt, and it became responsible for controlling and regulating tobacco production in the Ottoman Empire. The cultivators who intended to grow tobacco were required to apply to the Régie for permission. However, the restriction of tobacco fields, the difficulty of getting advance credit, and disappointingly low prices5 created numerous problems for tobacco cultivators.6 In general, tobacco farmers were resentful of being controlled by a foreign company.7 Many growers sold their crop to smugglers; this provided a way for farmers to grow and immediately sell unrestricted quantities.8 Measures to prevent tobacco smuggling proved unsuccessful given that the Ottoman administration, which considered the Régie as a foreign power that was using the country’s revenues, was reluctant to take effective action against tobacco smugglers. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the profits of the Régie were drastically reduced because of social disorder, economic crises, and most importantly, low level of sales caused by organized smuggling. The Régie recruited surveillance troops (called kolcu) in large numbers to combat smuggling, a strategy that inevitably raised the company’s expenses.9 However, the wide acceptance of smuggling among farmers, coupled with the government’s passive attitude in dealing with it, rendered the attempts of the Régie futile. The government reported that within a span of 14 years, no fewer than 2,000 people were killed annually in clashes between the company and smugglers.10 Consequently, in late 1895, the government decided to disarm the surveillance forces of the Régie and delegated the duty of controlling smuggling to the army. During the First World War, the Ottoman Empire’s agricultural labor force dropped by 20 percent. Surprisingly, the production of crops, particularly tobacco, recovered quickly after the war. The tobacco output between 1924 and 1928 reached a level higher than the pre-war levels of production.11 The use of a fixed amount of Oriental tobacco in American blend cigarettes made it an export crop; while one-quarter of Oriental tobacco output was used for domestic consumption, the rest was exported.12 The export-oriented tobacco business was controlled by Greek merchants working as middlemen between foreign tobacco companies and domestic producers. According to Kuran, at the end of the First World War, Turks in Istanbul constituted just 4 percent of the merchants specializing in exports and imports.13 The minorities ran international commerce. In İzmir, where basic exportable agricultural goods such as tobacco, sultanas, cotton, dried figs,

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and hazelnuts were produced, ethnic Greeks dominated commercial life at all levels. They accounted for 40–60 percent of the city’s merchants and largely dominated international trade in cooperation with Greek communities in Western Europe.14 Because of the war, however, a large number of Greeks either had to leave the country or died, leaving an international trade vacuum. In 1923, under the provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne, the populations of the Muslims of Greece and the Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion were exchanged.15 90 percent of Muslim immigrants from Greece were skilled farmers, mostly tobacco cultivators.16 They filled the void of tobacco labor in the fields. However, the Greeks who departed Turkey were “skilled professionals, from shippers to bankers, from hazelnut, tobacco, and raisin traders to railway engineers and hotel and restaurant owners.”17 The commercial positions they left behind were taken over by the newly emerging Muslim bourgeoisie who had a close relationship with the government.18 According to a report written in May 1925 by the president of the İzmir Chamber of Commerce, after the Greeks’ departure, many Turkish businessmen settled in İzmir and specialized in the export of agricultural products.19 Long before the establishment of the Turkish Republic, attempts to develop the foundations of a national economy (Milli Ekonomi) were launched during the Young Turks era. The growth of a strong national bourgeoisie resulted in the marginalization of Greek and Armenian traders as policies favoring Muslim entrepreneurs were introduced.20 Encouraged by government policies, the Muslims occupied lucrative positions abandoned by the non-Muslim bourgeoisie.21 The first crucial step in the Turkification of the economy started with the layoffs of non-Muslim employees working in foreign companies, a policy aimed at creating jobs for the Muslim Turks returning from the Turkish War of Independence.22 Only a small number of employees of foreign nationality were allowed to work at foreign companies, and consequently, many non-Muslim Turkish citizens became unemployed, because non-Muslims of Turkish nationality and those of foreign nationality were not distinguished.23 Moreover, the “Compulsory Use of Turkish Language in Economic Enterprises” decreed in 1926 obliged all companies to conduct all documentation and correspondence in Turkish. In most of the economic enterprises owned by either foreigners or non-Muslims, the native language of the owner was used in books. To meet this new requirement, the owners had to change their records and prepare their financial statements in Turkish. This constituted a real barrier for non-Muslim officials who until then used their native language for communication, both written and verbal.24



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The Turkification process made its presence felt in the tobacco sector as well. After the establishment of the new Turkish Republic, the Régie, symbolizing Western dominance over the country’s economy, became nationalized in 192525 and was then transformed into Turkish State Monopolies (TEKEL) in 1932. The nationalization of the company had a dramatic impact on the tobacco sector, particularly on people who worked as tobacco experts. Tobacco experts26 were self-trained people who appraised yields. In general, the responsibility of tobacco experts was to evaluate and determine the quality of crops during the entire process from production to consumption. They also used their expertise to solve possible conflicts between farmers and merchants. The first schooled experts were 25 graduates of a six-month training class offered by the government in 1928.27 In subsequent years, the duration of the training was extended to two years and comprised of theoretical and practical instructions. Upon completing their schooling, the candidates were sent to provinces for practical training for two more years. Those who were able to complete their training were required to pass a final test and were then registered as tobacco experts. In 1936, the government issued the “Tobacco Experts Regulation.” According to Article 2 of the regulation, “being a Turk” was a precondition for being a tobacco expert. This qualification, signifying a status based on ethnic identity, not nationality, discriminated against the non-Muslims who had been doing this job for years.28 The exclusion of the non-Muslims opened the doors for the Turks to work in expert positions at private tobacco companies as well as the Turkish tobacco monopoly. A tobacco journal from 1941 stated that the Turks, during the time of the Régie, held undesirable, low-ranking positions, such as office boy or surveillance personnel, whereas non-Muslim minorities held 95 percent of the administrative positions of the company.29 The nationalization of the company, however, opened the way for “the Turkish youth who would like to fulfil their perpetual ideals of being tobacco experts.”30 As it accounted for 25–35 percent of all export earnings of Turkey in the mid-1920s,31 tobacco acquired a special meaning among other agricultural crops and symbolized the country’s means of accumulation of wealth.32 In an issue of a tobacco industry journal, the experts were extolled for serving the country’s progress by supervising the production and marketing of tobacco, a crop that was the “equivalent of gold and the resource of foreign earnings.” Experts stated that, with the wealth earned through tobacco, factories were established and people were employed. Consequently, serving the production of

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a simple tobacco leaf meant “serving the country”’ and the tobacco experts were “honoured and proud of themselves for fulfilling such a duty.”33 A number of tobacco experts were sent to foreign countries for professional training in subsequent years. The educated experts were consistently compared with the ones who had learned the job through self-training. The local knowledge of the self-trained tobacco experts was thus undermined and their exclusion from the tobacco sector was a matter of time.

Germans In the beginning of the 1930s, conforming with the German government’s policy to expand its international commerce to countries in the Middle East and the Balkans, Turkey became a significant trading partner of Germany. Between 1935 and 1938, the value of goods exported to Germany accounted for 44 percent of all export income of Turkey.34 Tobacco sales to Germany in the 1930s accounted for 35.43 percent of Turkey’s entire tobacco exports.35 In brief, Germany became the most significant country in determining the fate of Oriental tobacco grown in Turkey. In this period, the Turkish government’s international trade with Germany encountered three basic problems: a troublesome clearing agreement, an anti-smoking campaign under the Nazi regime, and the Second World War. Economic, political, and social transformations in Germany altered the export sales of Oriental tobacco; this, in turn, triggered enduring controversies that led to a profound nationalist movement in the Turkish tobacco sector. The economics of Oriental tobacco and anti-Semitism became inexorably linked to each other, combining entrepreneurial endeavors with nationalist discourse in the Turkish tobacco sector. In the early years of the Republic, the Germans had a significant impact on the Turkish economy. Not only did the new Turkish Republic receive its first loan from Germany, but it also consulted German economists, who recommended a centralized power to administer Turkish economic policies.36 In accordance with establishing a highly regulated economy, the two countries concluded a “clearing agreement,” a system in which commodities, not currency, were exchanged through a bilateral agreement. According to the agreement, Turkey would supply Germany with food, raw materials, and agricultural products (including tobacco), and, in return, Germany would export manufactured goods to Turkey.37



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However, Turkey eventually became more dependent on Germany, which held the upper hand with its industrial exports.38 Economic dependency on Germany became a serious concern for Turkish policymakers when the German government froze the balances it owed to Turkey. As a result, the Turkish government had to suspend economic transactions, which led to fluctuations in the amount of exports to Germany.39 This ambiguity created chaos in the Turkish tobacco sector. Concerned about the rising tobacco output in the absence of a stable tobacco importer, the local tobacco traders in Turkey began to pursue a more aggressive strategy to market their goods. The second problem regarding the tobacco trade with Germany was that the Nazis introduced new restrictive policies on smokers in Germany. Hitler, who was once a heavy smoker, became an ardent opponent of smoking in his later years.40 Constantly preaching the dangers of tobacco, Hitler argued that smoking was a waste of money. As a means to reduce the dangers resulting from tobacco use, the weight and size of cigars were reduced in Germany.41 In 1942, Hitler, regretting that his soldiers were allowed to smoke, vowed to put an end to military tobacco rations when peace was achieved.42 The economic aspects of the anti-smoking campaign were also fortified with a racist discourse. Smoking was spoken of with loathing as a habit that was equated with “racial and sexual degeneracy.”43 It was associated with Jews, Africans, communists, homosexuals, and women with low moral values. The Nazi regime called upon the German people to stop smoking in order to protect their racial and bodily purity. However, Hitler’s personal hatred of smoking was only one reason for the anti-tobacco campaign. Health concerns related to smoking also played a major role. Contrary to the popular belief that American and British scientists discovered the link between lung cancer and tobacco, it was in fact first proved in Nazi Germany.44 Scientific evidence on the damaging health effects of smoking paved the way for anti-smoking legislation that banned smoking in public places by those under 18 and prohibited both tobacco advertising and smoking in public buildings.45 The Turkish tobacco sector seemed puzzled by the extensive anti-smoking campaign undertaken in Germany. Having a hard time determining the “real reason” behind the Nazi campaign, tobacco experts came to believe that the exported Oriental tobacco was intentionally blended with other types of tobacco and materials in Germany, which reduced the quality of the product and hence brought down tobacco sales in Germany.46 The third and probably the biggest problem concerning the export of Oriental tobacco was the War, which had a detrimental effect on international

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trade in general. When the Second World War broke out, Turkey found itself in a peculiar situation. Although it maintained its neutrality through most of the war, Turkey expanded its army from a peacetime strength of 120,000 troops to 1.5 million troops, imposing enormous constraints on the economy.47 A large amount of its imports and exports were cut off when the government suffered severe economic hardship. Similarly, its tobacco trade with Germany (and also with the occupied countries) was halted for some time. The instability of tobacco sales, owing to the clearing agreement, the Nazi anti-smoking campaign, and the war distressed the actors in the tobacco sector and led them to search for scapegoats within Turkey.

Jews When the Nazis came to power, Jewish bureaucrats, businessmen, and civil servants were discharged from their jobs in Germany. This anti-Semitic policy also found its place in the Turkish tobacco sector. The first hint of insidious acts was the layoff of 18 Jewish employees in one of the biggest foreign tobacco leaf companies, the Ostro-Turk (Austria-Turk) company, with the layoff order given by Germany, which at the time occupied Austria.48 In 1938, an article titled “The Acts that We Cannot Tolerate” was published in a Turkish tobacco journal. It argued that while the Jews in Europe suffered from anti-Semitism, those in Turkey enjoyed the same rights as the Turks. Jews had retained a “significant position in the Turkish economy” for centuries. Now it was time for the Jewish community to reciprocate. According to the article, Jews had to pay back their rights to “work and live” through their assimilation. They had to become entirely “Turkified” and serve the welfare of the country.49 The same article also cited an incident concerning tobacco commerce with the German cigarette company Reemtsma.50 After the Nazis assumed power, the organizational structure of the company was changed. The previous purchasing director of the company, a Jew, was fired. The new purchasing director, after visiting Turkey a couple of times, announced that the company would continue its regular tobacco business in Turkey. This news had a consoling influence on the Turkish tobacco sector. However, when Reemtsma representatives stated that they had contracted to buy more than half of the company’s supplies (6.5 million kilos of tobacco) from Jewish tobacco brokers in Turkey, the Turkish tobacco traders openly voiced their discontent. They suggested that Reemtsma’s business with Jewish brokers was in conflict with Germany’s “national interests:”



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We had heard of the purchase details of the trust account, but we did not want to believe it, because we could not deem it feasible that a huge and nationwide famous company in Germany, a country where national and racist policies are evident toward the Jews in particular, could have obtained a significant share of tobacco purchases from companies working with Jewish capital and thus fulfilled the interests of several Jewish brokers. […] Germans’ general boycott of the Jews in their country, moreover, their sensitivity and hatred to live and even walk with the Jews, their Aryanization policies in the tobacco sector […] and their transactions with local [tobacco] companies in Greece and Bulgaria, not with Jewish companies, demonstrate that they fulfil their national ideal everywhere forcefully. However, when it comes to our country [the fulfilment of this national ideal] does not seem necessary.51

The article then suggested that the company’s trade with the Jews proved a major mistake. This fault was not related to the decision of the “considerable and honourable” German buyers who had run their businesses in collaboration with “Turkish peasants for years,” but it was the fault of the Jewish brokers who tried too hard to conclude deals with Germans behind the backs of Turkish merchants. The article concluded in a didactic and intimidating tone: Everybody has to know that these dealings, which are against the national interest and damaging to the well being of people and especially that of peasants who are the masters of the country, would be severely punished in Turkey. Everybody has to know that in Turkey capitulations were ended in 1929. Everybody has to know that Turkish goods cannot be exploited like the goods of colonial countries. Everybody, and especially the ones who are leading the surreptitious dealings in the Aegean region, has to know that we would not let them fish in troubled waters.52

The next issue of the journal started with a defensive response,53 after the editors received criticism from readers for being anti-Semitic. The editors, however, defended the earlier article by referring to other newspapers, which had handled the deal with a similar attitude. The nationalist tone in the article was a precursor to forthcoming events in Turkey. The half-heartedly expressed racist attitude against minorities was soon manifested in the national policies of the Turkish government. When the Second World War broke out, Turkey was struggling with the challenges of establishing a robust economy. In order to guide Turkish citizens to cope with the economic constraints of the war, the minister of Trade, Nazmi Topçuoğlu, made a speech on the radio and urged farmers to increase their produce. Following the minister’s statement, in a tobacco journal, farmers were

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called to fulfil “their national obligation for the agricultural mobilization of the country” by increasing the production of tobacco.54 The article also reported that France and England had become new importers of Oriental tobacco. With the inclusion of these two countries, the Turkish tobacco sector, which until then was exceedingly dependent on the Germans, gained more flexibility in marketing tobacco exports. However, the tobacco sector soon realized that the imports of France and England were negligible, as both countries’ goal behind their trade promises was to isolate Germany by cutting off its economic relations with other countries. After long negotiations, British companies imported only a very small amount of tobacco that was far below the expectations of Turkish merchants.55 During the war, Turkish tobacco journals constantly published articles warning citizens to be economical as well as self-sufficient. For example, the article “Dissipation is Betrayal of the National Cause”56 criticized people’s seeking assistance from the government on any occasion: We are like kids asking for help from their dad and wanting to be sheltered by their mother. This is not a good habit for big nations. As a matter of fact, the state is the father. Government is a big compassionate wing protecting the interests of people. However, especially in times of war and emergency, it is best if we take care of our own affairs by ourselves and let the government work on critical issues such as extricating the nation [from these difficult times].

According to the author, the state always sided with the people, taking care of them, generously fulfilling their demands, and working hard for their interests. In return, the people were expected to offer “their money, life, and love” to the state. Two months later, in another article, “Discipline for Being Economical,”57 the readers of the tobacco journal were warned to not waste national resources. An anecdote about a German woman recycling eggshells and used papers was presented as a good example to follow. Toward the war’s end, in another issue, tobacco farmers were warned about the consequences of squandering money. The money that farmers earned for their living not only “belong[ed] to [them] but to [their] kids, household, village, and homeland.”58 Saving money, economizing, and increasing production were recurrent themes of the wartime period. Distribution of existing wealth, however, was still a big concern. During the war, when the majority of the population lived under dire conditions, people who made a fortune through hoarding were loathed in the press. Most often, the new rich were associated with minorities that had been involved in commerce for centuries. Minorities were loathed for earning profits



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instead of working for their homeland. The Capital Tax Law was passed in 1942 to levy taxes on excessive profits earned by people who had taken advantage of the difficult wartime conditions through black market dealings, price speculation, and hoarding. This was a practice similar to that implemented in other countries during the war, but the practice in Turkey was extreme. There was no fixed rate, and the tax was almost entirely paid by people in big cities (notably Istanbul). Moreover, 55 percent of the total tax revenue was paid by the small non-Muslim community, “who were subjected to rates ten times higher than those of Muslims.”59 As stipulated by the law, non-Muslims who could not pay the tax were bound to repay their outstanding debt by performing labor at work camps located in the harsh climatic conditions of eastern Anatolia. It is notable that not a single Muslim Turk was sent to these camps.60 The goal of the Capital Tax Law was not only to increase government revenue, but also, more importantly, to replace the minority merchants with Turkish Muslims. This law fortified the formation process of a “Muslim Turkish bourgeoisie.”61 During discussions in the party group meeting, Prime Minister Saracoğlu stated that this law would open the way for the economic independence by eliminating the foreigners who dominated the Turkish market, while simultaneously placing it solely in the hands of the Turks.62 The “foreigners” referred to here were non-Muslim Turkish citizens who had been living in the country for centuries. A large number of minorities left the country after they realized that the Capital Tax Law63 was not the last arbitrary and discriminatory measure directed toward them.64

Americans In the second half of the 1940s, tobacco production almost doubled in less than a decade, raising concerns about marketing the entire yield. Increase in tobacco cultivation, however, was not accompanied by an increase in the amount of tobacco exports. While England imposed high import duties on tobacco, the United States pursued an aggressive strategy by blocking Turkish tobacco exports to Germany. In July 1948, newspapers reported that Turkish tobacco merchants, who visited Germany to sign a business contract, returned home largely frustrated.65 The expected price as well as the quantity of Oriental tobacco exports dropped drastically owing to the Americans’ involvement in the transaction. Germany, the nation defeated in the war, was economically and politically vulnerable

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and highly dependent on the decisions of the United States at that moment. The United States was reluctant to release the dollars that Germany needed to import tobacco from Turkey. According to the article, this decision was a result of American tobacco companies’ desire to introduce Virginia tobacco to Germany by curbing Oriental tobacco consumption. “Strictly speaking, this is competition,”’ stated the article in a tobacco journal, “a kind of competition that rests upon the power [of the United States] as well as the rights derived from its victory [in the war].”66 The policies to promote capitalist development in Turkey came to an end with the worsening economic conditions during wartime, which led the government to take control of the economy. Working under the state-controlled economy, tobacco experts were unfamiliar with the aggressive marketing policies pursued by American cigarette companies. Unable to speak a language they did not know, the Turkish experts chose to challenge American companies by resorting to ideological explanations. They suggested that the aggressive marketing policies of the United States might cause the burgeoning of dangerous ideas, such as the spread of communist ideology in Turkey. The “political and psychological” mistakes of the United States could create an environment conducive for communists, engendering the rise of anti-American sentiment in the country. These discussions took place immediately after the introduction of the Marshall Plan (1947), which financially supported European countries in rebuilding their war-damaged economies. With the Marshall Plan, the goal of the United States was not only to restore the collapsed economies of Europe and create strong trading partners, but also to contain communism in these countries. Turkey was also included in the plan, as an extension of the Truman Doctrine.67 In Turkey, aid was mostly channeled into efforts to achieve mechanization and irrigation. The mechanization project in agriculture called for the government to purchase a minimum of 5,500 tractors. With the arrival of new tractors, the availability of lands under cultivation dramatically increased by more than 50 percent within a decade.68 The use of new inputs, irrigation systems, agricultural machinery, and fertilizers increased yields and productivity. Although aid was generally well-received in Turkey, tobacco experts were not particularly pleased. The general growth in agricultural production resulting from aid did not result in any positive difference in the cultivation of tobacco, a crop that does not require tractors, irrigation, or fertilizers. However, this was not the real reason why the tobacco experts were disgruntled. They believed



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that by offering aid, the United States was attempting to establish its global hegemony under the guise of being a benevolent Western country. Referring to the Americans’ involvement in the tobacco trade between Germany and Turkey, the tobacco experts stated their discontent: The United States is getting ready for world domination. On the one hand, it helps [nations] through the channel of the Marshall Plan, but on the other hand, it collects what it distributes by making all nations economically dependent and by preventing the marketing and production of crops of other nations.69

Indeed, the Marshall Plan deeply harmed the interests of growers of Oriental tobacco in an unforeseen manner. After the war, tobacco shortages in Germany grew so high that American authorities decided to send tobacco free of charge to this country under the Marshall Plan. The United States first shipped 24,000 tons of tobacco in 1948, followed by 69,000 tons in 1949.70 Although the net cost to the United States was approximately US$70 million, American cigarette companies greatly benefited from the arrangement.71 This strategy triggered an irrevocable shift in German tobacco tastes from the traditionally favored Oriental tobacco to the milder American blend cigarettes that contained a high proportion of Virginia tobacco.72 The tobacco aid to Germany under the Plan wrecked the tobacco industry not only in Turkey, but also in Greece, Rhodesia, and Algeria, the countries that had exported tobacco to Germany for years. In response to such attacks on Oriental tobacco cigarettes, the tobacco experts in Turkey officially waged a war against the Virginia tobacco used in American blend cigarettes. Tobacco experts’ fervent struggle against Virginia tobacco emerged in the late 1940s and has continued until today. Foreseeing that the Virginia blend cigarettes would have an inexorable global growth, the tobacco experts became ardent opponents of American blend cigarettes. Their animosity toward Virginia tobacco was so strong that even arguments regarding the possibility of its cultivation in Turkey were fervently dismissed. Despite such criticism, a couple of projects aimed at growing Virginia tobacco in the Marmara region were initiated in the late 1930s, but they remained unsuccessful.73 As discussed in the previous chapter, Turkish smokers’ interest in filtered cigarettes was dismissed on the grounds that the Turkish people were being Americanized by a simple association between Oriental tobacco and Turkishness.

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Communists Blue mold can be one of the most destructive diseases affecting tobacco. Depending on weather conditions, growth stage, and other factors, losses from blue mold can range between slight to complete destruction of the crop in a field. It is a disease that lends itself to region-wide management. When the disease occurs in Turkey or Greece, it becomes the concern of France and Germany as well, and vice versa. Blue mold, which had earlier inflicted serious damage on tobacco in the Balkans, reached Turkey in 1962, whereupon tobacco output dropped to 89,793 tons from 101,407 tons. To compensate the growers for the income loss, the government raised the top prices of Aegean and Marmara tobacco by 70 percent and 46 percent, respectively.74 The emergence of tobacco mold in Turkey became a controversial issue. An agricultural engineer stated his concerns about the “travel” of the disease. It had first been seen in Australia in 1891 and then in the United States in 1931, and was now in Europe. So the question was how the disease had found its way from the United States to Europe: The distance does not make a difference for this disease. The emergence of the disease in Europe is very recent. But where are Australia and America, and where is Europe? It means that in spite of agricultural quarantine precautions, tobacco mould can travel across not only countries, but also continents and overseas. And without using any planes or vehicles. How does [this] disease spread around?75

Indeed, tobacco mold had traveled from somewhere to Turkey, without taking a plane or a vehicle in 1961, and was first seen in a town on the border with Greece. After first being diagnosed in Edirne, tobacco plants in fields were exterminated. But the following year, the disease would spread to Balıkesir, Trabzon, İzmir, Manisa, Muğla, Adıyaman, and Diyarbakır—regions located at a considerable distance from each other. In the same year, the prime minister explained that 90 percent of tobacco in Turkey might have been infected by the disease. In another article,76 the transfer of the disease to Europe was explained as being the result of British scientists who had brought moldy tobacco from Australia with the aim of doing research on it in 1957. In a recriminatory tone, the article blamed the scientists for the spread of the mold all over the continent.



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When in August 1962 blue mold widely infected the crops in Trabzon (a city by the Black Sea) and its surrounding villages, the Trabzon deputy from the Justice Party (who used to be a general before the 1960 coup d’état) wrote an article about the disease in a tobacco journal. Pointing out that Oriental tobacco was one of the highest export revenues of the country, the deputy openly accused communist countries of spreading the disease to non-communist ones: There is a belief that this disease, produced by the communist countries, is being transmitted to the non-communist ones. Namely, this disease, which was first seen in Canada, Italy, and Greece, has now emerged in Turkey and is rapidly spreading. Our conviction is confirmed by the fact that this disease has not been seen in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, the two communist countries which produce the highest amount of tobacco.77

The deputy went on to suggest that under normal conditions, the disease would have appeared in these two communist countries, where the humidity was higher than normal levels. At the end of the article, he called it the Turkish government’s duty to save tobacco production. This disease was “just like contagious cholera, which has caused the decline of many nations and civilizations”.78 The blaming of communist countries for spreading the blue mold disease was also echoed in a controversy between tobacco experts and agricultural engineers about how to combat the disease. While the former recommended the benefits of using lime on tobacco, the latter seemed dissatisfied with the “scientific” support of these claims. Engineers claimed that the suggestion to use lime dust to cope with the blue mold was misleading farmers inadvertently and creating distrust against government offices. To them, “outside influences” were playing a significant role in this idea.79 The scenarios about mold disease travelling to Turkey were all based upon human-centered explanations. The intentionalities of human beings were at the center of their arguments. It was either the British scientists doing their research or outside influences, like communists, who wanted to destroy the economy of Turkey by spreading the disease. Yet, it occurred to nobody that the mold might have its own agency. The human-centered ideas not only give credit to the rationalities and programming of human beings, but also create their own “human enemies.” Oriental tobacco has always played a significant role in Turkey. It has become a source of wealth for the country with its continuous high export revenues. However, fluctuations in the global tobacco market due to a gradual change in worldwide cigarette choices created anxieties in the national tobacco sector. The

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possibility that Oriental tobacco might have lost its global status in the world market led to the marginalization of non-Muslim communities in the Turkish tobacco sector. Government policies that favored Turkish ethnicity and language in bureaucracy and business also manifested themselves in the tobacco sector. The Turkification of the bureaucracy as well as of the economy was a big blow to the non-Muslim communities in the tobacco sector. Turks filled the positions left by the minorities who had once worked at the Régie and also took over the tobacco business after the Greeks’ departure under the Lausanne Treaty. This notwithstanding, the attacks against the minorities in the tobacco sector did not stop, but instead accelerated, whenever there was an imbalance in Turkey’s trade with the two biggest exporters, Germany and the United States. The stalemate in global tobacco commerce made non-Muslim tobacco dealers in Turkey open targets. In brief, troublesome tobacco commerce in the global arena emerged in the form of nationalism in the daily practices of the Turkish tobacco sector; this nationalism was strongly articulated in not only discriminatory government policies, but also sometimes even other countries’ racist policies. From production and marketing to consumption, the tobacco sector was undergoing the process of Turkification. Throughout this chapter, I have sought to illustrate the emergence and rise of Turkish nationalism through the perspective of tobacco. In almost every case that I have discussed, when there was a decline either in the export revenues or the amount of cultivated tobacco because of wars, economic downturns, and diseases, there was always someone to blame in or outside of the country. Nationalism, which was on rise after the establishment of the Republic, proliferated and fortified itself further when human calculations and rationalizations did not hold true. In these circumstances, speaking under the guise of supporting Oriental tobacco production was equivalent to speaking the language of nationalism.

Conclusion When I first became interested in studying the production and marketing of tobacco in Turkey, it was my third year in the anthropology doctoral program at Rice University. At the time, I was closely following Turkish politics from the United States, and very much intrigued with the idea of conducting research on the consequences of neoliberal reform policies in developing countries. As soon as I realized that the tobacco crop has the potential to cover a wide-range of issues that cut across economic, political, and legal realms of neoliberal restructuring in Turkey, I decided to study this commodity for my dissertation. By following tobacco from seed to smoke, I was able to answer broader questions related to the current reform policies in Turkey, such as: How is Western economic knowledge being circulated, recognized, and transformed into policies in developing countries? How are people, institutions, laws, policies, and standards being transferred from the West to developing countries? And how do these reforms reformat, reconstruct, and regulate politics, markets, and citizens? Which actors, other than states, are involved in this process, and how do they relate to each other? Tobacco production and marketing in Turkey has provided an exemplary case for understanding the contemporary impacts and unintended consequences of neoliberal policies. The crop has recently become the basis of controversial economic and political debates in Turkey, such as: the enactment of the tobacco law; the foundation of the tobacco regulatory agency; the introduction of contract farming; the privatization of the tobacco monopoly; the resistance of monopoly workers; and the strict smoking ban in public spaces. In this book, I have examined these comprehensive issues under three basic theoretical arguments: I. The Transformation of the Political: The first section of this book is an attempt to understand the economic and political reforms in Turkey after the financial crisis of 2001. I have examined the policies imposed in order to bring the political and economic structures of Turkey in line with so-called global standards. I have looked at how neoliberal reform policies, with their accompanying laws and institutions, are being imported, justified, and put into

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practice, and explored global policymakers as the transmitters of these reforms. The transfer of technocrats (Chapter 1), of the legal models (Chapter 2), and the agencies (Chapter 3) from the West has been discussed with the goal of understanding whether these experts, laws, and institutions have been able to accommodate the desired international standards in national contexts. In the end, while politics has been reframed as a set of technical administrative practices to establish a favorable environment for the functioning of markets, the political realm with all its debates, negotiations, and contestations has been dismissed on the grounds that the issues they deal with require technical knowledge. The expert knowledge to prevent the interference of the political has locked the decisions and their negotiations within the borders of institutions, boards, committees, and agencies. By creating its own black box, technicality has shifted all the discussions about itself into a limited circle of experts, and blocked any political intervention that might come from outside of this circle. II. The Reformatting of Markets: The second section attempts to understand the ways in which markets work. I have illustrated that there is no one single market but rather multiple kinds of markets that operate in different modes, and which constitute each other in unforeseen ways. Both Chapter 4 and 5 have analyzed how the economic restructurings that are introduced to regulate the markets resulted in the emergence of unregulated markets as an unintended consequence of neoliberal policies. The reformatting of the tobacco market with a new market device (that is, contracts) has created an alternative market through a process which has constantly transformed the status of tobacco from waste to commodity and vice versa. The policies to create “the market” in the sense of the Western capitalist market have become a powerful apparatus for controlling the assets of some actors while generating new sources of wealth for several others. In that sense, the state and unregulated market activities do not stand in opposition to each other; on the contrary, they are often reciprocal and complicitous. The apparent conflict between the two frequently turns into a collaboration in the form of corruption and clientelism. III. The Remaking of Different Citizenships: The last three chapters have all scrutinized the transforming relationship between state and citizen in Turkey. The first two chapters have elucidated how neoliberal policies create different citizenship regimes in contemporary Turkey, and how these policies and the Islamic stance of the recent government mutually articulate and reinforce one another. While Chapter 6 dissects the TEKEL resistance as an example to

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show that the social rights approach is neither universally defined, nor equally distributed among wide populations, Chapter 7 illustrates that the global public health discourse has been transformed into a nationalistic and conservative project in the national setting. The subtle argument running throughout the text connecting Turkish nationalism to the Oriental tobacco industry in Turkey, culminates in the last chapter of this book. By situating tobacco as the central character in this analysis, I was able to unravel Turkish nationalism from the late Ottoman Empire to the early Republic—all of which involved systemic maneuvers to create a uniform and homogenous nation-state through the exclusion of several groups of people. Overall, these components set the backdrop for the three basic arguments discussed in the book. The stitches that connect three different realms—namely politics, markets, and citizenship—to each other are primarily comprised of experts and the devices they use to reformat this world. In other words, how experts make their decisions and how their policies transform the world we live in remain the basic issue here. In that sense, this book shifts the attention from the study of cultures and “Other” people to the study of knowledge-making processes in emergent networks. The governing devices of the political realm, of the market, and of the citizens function as the basic actors of this book, i.e. how these devices produced and deployed by different experts turn the political arena into a set of technical management policies within the margins of committees (regulatory agencies); transform the crop into a calculable and exchangeable commodity in the market (contract); and govern individuals into obedient, responsible, and self-regulating citizens of the nation-state (global health discourse).

Ethnographic questions The goal of the book is a simple one: to dissect the newly emerging neoliberal restructuring in Turkey through an analysis of the elements and actors of the tobacco network, as well as to expose the unknown connections and relations among them. Over the course of my fieldwork, I realized that the state is often assumed to be the primary actor holding full agency and responsibility in controlling, regulating, and shaping the reform policies. In this book, however, the state is shown to be only one among several actors involved in the process of formatting economic and political structures. In order to understand how markets work, the inclusion of the other human and institutional actors, such

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as farmers, technocrats, multinationals, leaf companies, and experts, as well as nonhuman actors, such as tobacco, contracts, machines, and blend formulas, is required. The messiness of this emerging economic and political realm unfolded through the investigation of the network of ever-changing relations among these actors. Only in this manner, I contend, do we unveil the previously hidden networks. In the introduction of Agricultural Markets from Theory to Practice, Barbara Harriss-White makes a brilliant comment about the studies done on markets: In the twentieth century, exchange has triumphed over other forms of circulation. One form of exchange, market exchange, has been allowed to encircle the globe and penetrate deeply into societies. It is therefore a matter of no mean irony that so little is known about how markets work in developing countries. Discourse on markets generally proceeds on two tacks: backwards—making interferences from indicators of outcomes; or forwards—making deductions from theory. In between there is a rather small space filled by empirical research, relating with discomfort both to theoretical preoccupations and to performance outcomes, which too often have been reduced by economists to prices.1

Following the criticism of Harriss-White, this book aims to fill the gap between the theoretical preoccupations and performance outcomes with an ethnographical approach. The impacts of economic liberalization policies in developing countries are either abstracted in the numbers of economic analyzes or formulated as reflections of theoretical arguments. In the quantitative theories of economists, statisticians, and political scientists, not only is the micro-process lodged in every moment of transition entirely undermined, but also the macropicture of transition is abstracted. The theoretical studies, on the other hand, which draw all their strength from the a priori existence of social and institutional realms, crumble down when it comes to the analysis of the experiences on the ground. Thus, the invisible connections and unintended consequences of emerging forms and transitions can only be grasped ethnographically. I designed and conducted my methodological approach based on multi-sited ethnography and Actor Network Theory (ANT), which has enabled me to go beyond the difficulties noted above. Grounded in empirical case studies, ANT aims at describing “many local places where the global, the structural, and the total [are] assembled.”2 A good number of anthropological issues are nowadays seen as being formed in “global assemblages.”3 Studying global interconnectedness copresent with local situations requires multi-sited research designs that reinforce the importance of relationality and fluidity involving a multitude

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of actors. Rather than comparing readily definable entities with recognizable boundaries, a multi-sited ethnography creates juxtapositions among a “variety of seemingly incommensurate sites” and examines their connections.4 Likewise, my ethnographic study is no longer primarily concerned with “society” and “culture,” but rather the examination of the emergent forms of assemblages. Discarding the preexisting discourses about naturalized categories, I tried to design a more complicated methodology for conducting my fieldwork, seeking to configure the analysis of manifold ties among diverse sites. Drawing from both ANT and multi-sited ethnography, I sought to offset natural categories or a priori assumptions about the field, and disclose the hidden connections among different sites previously considered to be unconnected and/or irrelevant. In brief, I pursued the argument that, in a world where boundaries are in flux, the involvement and interaction of a variety of actors, and their negotiations, conflicts, and resistance with each other, turn the transition into a more complicated and multidimensional process, which cannot be simply comprehended within the framework of predetermined structures. Anthropological studies, which grant full agency to the human or institutional actors, leave little room for surprises or unintended consequences in decision-making processes, as they propose the straightforward implementation of clearly defined policies. However, there are also a number of ethnographic works,5 which examine the transfer and implementation of global policies in developing countries with a focus on the translation process. The theoretical approach in these studies, mostly based on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, illustrates how a global order of policy operates as a productive power by the legitimization of action, and constitutes individuals as governable subjects. My study also hinges upon this framework; i.e. rather than seeing global policy as imposed from a top-down process, turning every local entity into a replica of its original, I see it as a complicated process through which not only different forms of institutions and self-regulating individuals are being produced, but also new techniques of policy are being introduced. It is pertinent to note here once more that what I am proposing is not simply the blending of global policies with the local culture, yielding to basically hybrid policies. Such an argument still bears the traces of essentalized assumptions about the global and local settings. To the contrary, I argue that those studies relied on certain presuppositions which inevitably fail to investigate the “present” as they focus on the functioning of institutions and humans merely in abstract time. However, in practice, actions take place through the temporal negotiations of actors in real time. Conventional anthropology’s use of

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a temporality that freezes “Other” cultures and people in abstract time cannot be applied anymore. What is needed in contemporary anthropology is to study the processes of interaction taking place in real time by concentrating on the processes. In that sense, the Latourian analysis of the “making” of decisions gains significant importance in exposing what is really happening on the ground in real time. As shown in this book, the actors involved in the policy-making process confront uncertainties at the legal and technical realms, and respond to them in various ways. Beyond the seemingly logical bureaucratic rationalization, there lies a messy world, which is governed by speculations, ambiguities, and uncertainties. If one of the most significant aspects of this research is to explain the economic and political neoliberal restructuring through the examination of human and nonhuman actors, the other is to fill the gap between theoretical and quantitative approaches through an investigation of the real time trajectories of markets. There have already been a number of very valuable anthropological studies that concentrate on the experiences and social lives of tobacco growers with a focus on the production and supply side of tobacco farming. These works elucidate cultural issues related to the farmers, such as racial stigmatization of growers,6 growers’ moral attachment to tobacco,7 or strategic alterity.8 However, this book diverges from these studies in the sense that the Turkish tobacco sector has exemplified a completely different historical and economic picture than the one in the US context. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, the major interest in the knowledge-making processes rather than the identity-dominated cultural analysis separates this book from these studies. Likewise, the majority of anthropological studies done in Turkey have so far focused mainly on the realms of kinship, gender, and identity, and ignored the realm of economic and political reforms and its connection with the global economy. Furthermore, with a few valuable exceptions9, the ethnographic studies done about markets in Turkey paid scant attention to the relation between individuals and commodities in general. In this respect, the book aims to fill this academic gap in the fields of anthropology, sociology, political economy, and Middle Eastern studies.

Notes Introduction 1 In order to guarantee the confidentiality of my informants, all the names used in this book are pseudonyms. 2 The full name of the acronym TEKEL is the General Directorate of Tobacco, Tobacco Products, Salt and Alcohol Enterprises. 3 The full name of the acronym TAPDK is the Tobacco, Alcohol Market Regulatory Authority. 4 The world’s largest cigarette manufacturers use this strain of tobacco to enrich the aroma and flavour of their cigarettes. Although the exact proportions are kept secret, a standard American blend cigarette has approximately 10–15 percent of Oriental tobacco and the rest is a blend of Virginia and Burley tobacco. 5 Ahmet H. Gümüş, Türkiye’de Tütün Politikaları, Pazarlama Sorunları ve Çözüm Önerileri (İzmir: Tütün Eksperleri Vakfı, 2009), 29. 6 Nazmi Bilir, Hilal Özcebe, Toker Ergüder, and Kristina Mauer-Stender, Tobacco Control in Turkey Story of Commitment and Leadership (WHO: Copenhagen, Denmark, 2012), 10. 7 Suein L. Hwang, “Sucked in: How Philip Morris got Turkey hooked on American tobacco,” The Wall Street Journal, September 11, 1998. As I will discuss in the last chapter, Turkish smokers came to know American blend cigarettes even in the late 1950s. However, the number of American cigarettes secretly brought to the country in those years was very low in number, compared to the ubiquitous smuggled American cigarettes in 1970s Turkey. 8 Mustafa Koç, “Two crises of tobacco production: Comparison of Turkish and Canadian cases,” The International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food, 1.1 (1991): 151–64, 159. 9 For the most significant critiques of these discussions, see: Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanities Press, 1973); Edward W. Said, “Representing the colonized: Anthropology’s interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry, 15. 2 (1989): 205–25; Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 10 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, W. D. Halls (trans.) (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2000).

158 Notes 11 Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: George Routledge, 1932). 12 Karen Tranberg Hansen, Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2000); Angelique Haugerud, Peter D. Little, and Priscilla Stone (eds), Commodities and Globalization (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000). 13 Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Boston: Penguin, 1985). 14 George Marcus, Ethnography through Thick and Thin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1998), 91. 15 Ibid. 16 Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, “Commodity chains in the worldeconomy prior to 1800,” Review, 10 (1986): 157–70. 17 Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz (eds), Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (Connecticut: Praeger, 1994). 18 Deborah Barndt, Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization on the Tomato Trail (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2002); Alessandro Bonanno (ed.), From Columbus to ConAgra: The Globalization of Agriculture and Food (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1994); Jane Collins, “Tracing social relations in commodity chains: The case of grapes in Brazil,” in Commodities and Globalization, Angelique Haugerud, M. Priscilla Stone and Peter Little (eds) (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); Catherine Dolan and John Humphrey, “Governance and trade in fresh vegetables: The impact of UK supermarkets on the African horticulture industry,” Journal of Development Studies, 37.2 (2000): 147–76; William Friedland, “Agrifood globalization and commodity systems,” International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food, 12 (2004): 5–16; Bill Pritchard and David Burch, Agri-Food Globalization in Perspective: International Restructuring in the Processing Tomato Industry (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2003); John Talbot, Grounds for Agreement: The Political Economy of the Coffee Commodity Chain (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004). 19 Arjun Appadurai, Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 20 Ibid., 30. 21 James Ferguson, “Cultural exchange: New developments in the anthropology of commodities,” Cultural Anthropology, 3 (1988): 488–513, 493. 22 Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 23 Daniel Miller (ed.), Materiality (Politics, History, and Culture) (London: Duke University Press, 2005); Fred Myers (ed.), The Empire of Things. Regimes of Values

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and Material Cultures (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2001); Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While Giving (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). 24 Appadurai, Social Life of Things, 5. 25 Michel Callon, “Actor-network theory: The market test,” in Actor Network Theory and After, John Law and John Hassard (eds) (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999); Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Bruno Latour, “On actor-network theory: A few clarifications,” Soziale Welt (1996a): 369–81; Bruno Latour, “On recalling ANT,” in Actor Network Theory and After, John Law and John Hassard (eds) (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999a); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005a); John Law, “After ANT: Complexity, naming and topology,” in Actor Network Theory and After, John Law and John Hassard (eds) (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). 26 Ron Levi and Mariana Valverde, “Studying law by association: Bruno Latour goes to the Conseil d’État,” Law & Social Inquiry, 33 (2008): 805–25, 811. 27 For example, Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002); Julia Elyachar, Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo (Politics, History, and Culture) (London: Duke University Press, 2005); and Janet Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) are exemplary of how to combine an ANT perspective with analyzes of power relations. 28 On “belatedness,” also see George Marcus, “On the unbearable slowness of being an anthropologist now: Notes on a contemporary anxiety in the making of ethnography,” XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, 12 (2003): 7–20, and “Ethnography between virtue of patience and the anxiety of belatedness once coevalness is embraced,” Social Analysis, 57.1 (2013): 143–55. 29 Hirokazu Miyazaki, “The temporalities of the market,” American Anthropologist, 105.2 (2003): 255–65. 30 George Marcus, “Ethnography two decades after writing culture: From the experimental to the baroque,” Anthropological Quarterly, 80.4 (2007): 1127–45, 1131. 31 Paul Rabinow, Marking Time: On the Anthropology of Contemporary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 32 However, it is important to state that the native point of view still matters for an anthropology of the contemporary, yet in a different way. Through eliciting the point of view of contemporary professional natives, our collaborators, it becomes possible to imagine the world of our subjects. A different kind of collaboration

160 Notes emerges between the informant and the ethnographer as epistemic partners. This is the essence of what Douglas R. Holmes and George Marcus call “paraethnography;” i.e. the epistemic partners are not simply informing each other but theoretically shape the research by providing reflexive insight valuable for both sides. Therefore, the goal is not to gather data from the “Other” anymore, but to have insights with the collaborator by sharing a common perspective. See Douglas R. Holmes and George Marcus, “Cultures of expertise and the management of globalization: Toward the re-functioning of ethnography,” in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier (eds) (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005); “Fast capitalism: Para-ethnography and the rise of the symbolic analyst,” in Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, Greg Downey and Melissa S. Fisher (eds) (London: Duke University Press, 2006); “Collaboration today and the re-imagination of the classic scene of fieldwork encounter,” Collaborative Anthropologies, 1 (2008): 81–101. 33 Marcus, Ethnography through Thick and Thin. 34 One of the recurring themes of the fieldwork in its most controversial moments was the Régie. The Régie was a foreign-controlled tobacco monopoly agency established to raise revenue from tobacco in order to settle the Ottoman foreign debt. Following the bankruptcy of the Ottoman government in 1875, the French bondholders persuaded the Debt Administration to establish a separate institution that was the Régie, to regulate and tax tobacco. For many people in the Turkish tobacco sector, the Régie symbolizes European imperialism. The Régie’s limitation of tobacco fields, the difficulty of getting tobacco licenses, its disappointing pricing, and, moreover, the strict measurements against smuggling lead to the killing of tobacco farmers, still survive in the collective memory of people in Turkey. I had already known what the Régie was even before the start of my fieldwork from stories and folk songs. But I would only be able to comprehend the reasons for the constant references made to the company after learning the full history of the Régie. 35 Foucault, M. (2001), “Governmentality,” in J. Faubion (ed.), Michael Foucault: Power the Essential Works. London: The Penguin Press. 36 Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) in Turkish.

Chapter 1 1 Thomas L. Friedman, “Foreign affairs: Turkey’s moment of truth,” The New York Times, June 5, 2001. 2 Ali Çarkoğlu and Ersin Kalaycıoğlu, Turkish Democracy Today: Elections, Protest and Stability in an Islamic Society (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007). 3 Friedman, “Foreign affairs.”

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4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Sefa Kaplan, Kemal Derviş: Bir ‘Kurtarıcı’ Öyküsü (Siyahbeyaz dizisi) (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2001); and Derviş’in Siyaseti Siyasetin Derviş’i (Siyahbeyaz dizisi) (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2002). 7 Serhan Asker and Yusuf Işık, Krizden Çıkış ve Çağdaş Sosyal Demokrasi (Istanbul: Doğan Kitapçılık, 2006); and Sefa Kaplan, Kemal Derviş: Bir ‘Kurtarıcı’ Öyküsü. 8 Ngaire Woods, The Globalizers: The IMF, the World Bank, and Their Borrowers, Cornell Studies in Money (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 75. 9 David Craig and Douglas Porter, Development Beyond Neoliberalism? Governance, Poverty Reduction and Political Economy (New York: Routledge, 2006), 120. 10 In a similar vein, Bakır and Öniş describe Derviş as a “policy entrepreneur” who had an important mediation role between domestic and transnational communities, see Caner Bakır and Ziya Öniş, “The regulatory state and Turkish banking sector reforms in the age of post-Washington consensus,” Development and Change, 41.1 (2010): 77–106, 86. 11 Devesh Kapur, John P. Lewis, and Richard Webb, The World Bank: Its First Half Century (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997); Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003). 12 Ziya Öniş, “Domestic politics versus global dynamics: Towards a political economy of the 2000 and 2001 financial crises in Turkey,” Turkish Studies, 3 (2003): 1–30, 9. 13 The strongest clashes of interests between the Nationalist Action Party and the Motherland Party occurred over the privatization issues of two strategic deals, Turkish communication systems and Turkish airlines, in which military interests were also concerned. 14 The president was clearly referring to the energy minister from the Motherland Party, who was connected to the “White Energy” scandal, in which senior energy ministry officials were accused of receiving bribes. Prime Minister Ecevit, whose own honesty had never been in question, was accused of protecting the Motherland Party in order to hold his coalition together. 15 Douglas Frantz, “Deepening political crisis rocks markets in Turkey,” The New York Times, February 22, 2001. 16 As cited in Zülküf Aydın, The Political Economy of Turkey (Third World in Global Politics) (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 124. 17 Tanıl Bora, Necmi Erdoğan, İlker Üstün, and Aksu Bora, Boşuna mı Okuduk? Türkiye’de Beyaz Yakalı İşsizliği (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2011). 18 The government’s mismanagement of the economy was regarded as the basic factor behind the emergence of the 2001 economic crisis, but interestingly, there was very little argument that the IMF and the World Bank policies might have played a significant role in the financial downturn.

162 Notes 19 Michel Callon, “What does it mean to say that economics is performative?,” in Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu (eds) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 20 Ibid. 21 As cited in Woods, The Globalizers, 76. 22 Derviş was chosen as the “Economy Minister of the Year” by the international economic journal The Banker in 2001. Also, the US ambassador to Turkey, Robert Pearson made a comparison between Derviş and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk to praise the former’s reformist policies. In the Turkish press Derviş was hailed as the savior of the economy. See Yücel Demirer and Özgür Orhangazi, “Kemal Derviş mit(leştirilmes)ini tersinden okumak,” Praksis, 9 (2003): 337–56, for a very interesting analysis of the media that turned Derviş into a “mythical figure” in Turkey. 23 The most serious academic criticisms of Derviş’s reform policies came from the Independent Social Scientists. As a critical economic circle, Independent Social Scientists was founded in 2000 to inform the people in Turkey about the impacts of neoliberal policies. Based on the writings of Joseph Stiglitz, who used to work as the ex-chief economist of the World Bank but became the opposing voice of international financial institutions after quitting his job, the Independent Social Scientists condemned the market liberalization policies imposed on Turkey for the outbreak of the economic crises. See their website, http://www. bagimsizsosyalbilimciler.org, for details. 24 Tobacco law was one of those laws known as the “15 laws in 15 days.” Others were the State Budget Bill; The Banking Bill; Bank Bankruptcies Bill; Central Bank Bill; Bill on the State Debt to State-owned Banks; Bill on Closing Down Budget and Extra-Budget Funds; Credits Bill; Credit Adequacy Bill; Sugar Bill; State Tenders Bill; Nationalization Bill; Turk Telecom Bill; Civil Aviation Bill; Petrol and Gas Market Bill. 25 Arınç was the group deputy chairman of the Virtue Party, and about four months after he delivered this speech, he would establish the Justice and Development Party with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Abdullah Gül after the banning of the Virtue Party by the Constitutional Court on the basis of the accusation of anti-secular activities. The following chapters will illustrate in detail how the Justice and Development Party has been involved in and further pursued neoliberal policies in line with the predecessor governments. 26 “FP’den, 15 günde 15 Yasa’ya destek,” Hürriyet, March 29, 2001. 27 Middle East News Online, April 22, 2002. 28 Ziya Öniş, “Turgut Özal and his economic legacy: Turkish neo-liberalism in critical perspective,” Middle Eastern Studies, 40.4 (2004): 113–34, 114.

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29 For example, key decisions on the privatization of state economic enterprises from 1986 onwards were achieved by government decrees. The Özal government extensively used the right of issuing decrees to increase the power of the executive vis-à-vis the legislative and the judiciary. Only 17 decrees were issued between 1972 and 1978, whereas 305 decrees were issued between 1982 and 1990. See Ümit Sönmez, Independent Regulatory Agencies: The World Experience and the Turkish Case (MA thesis: METU, 2004): 143. 30 Ümit Cizre and Erinç Yeldan, “The Turkish encounter with neo-liberalism: Economics and politics in the 2000/2001 crises,” Review of International Political Economy, 12.3 (2005): 387–408, 389. 31 Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom. Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 166. 32 Fifth Annual Turgut Özal Memorial Lecture, March 13, 2002, http://www. washintoninstitute.org 33 Cris Shore and Dieter Haller, “Introduction-sharp practice: Anthropology and the study of corruption,” in Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives (Anthropology, Culture and Society), Dieter Haller and Cris Shore (eds) (London: Pluto Press, 2005): 1–29, 4. 34 The “fictitious exports” scandal during the mid-1980s was one of the most well-known corruption cases of the Özal era. After the government’s decision to promote exports in the form of export tax rebates, rent-seeking enterprises took advantage of these subsidies through a variety of mechanisms, notably over-invoicing. A large number of firms claimed excessive amounts of export subsidies without actually undertaking the required level of exports. Yet no serious attempt was made to punish the crimes involved. 35 Pınar Bedirhanoğlu, “The neoliberal discourse on corruption as a means of consent-building: Reflections from post-crisis Turkey,” Third World Quarterly, 28.7 (2007): 1239–54, 1240. 36 However, as I will show in other chapters, certain kinds of corruption are not necessarily against the functioning of the free market economy. On the contrary, when the economy stumbles across the limitations of the rule of law, formal market procedures are replaced with so-called informal market activities. 37 The term “governance” was first used in the World Bank’s report, Sub-Saharan Africa from Crisis to Sustainable Growth (1989), within the context that bad governance in some African states led to financial and political problems in these countries. According to the report, the emergence of crises in Africa stemmed from inexperienced staff, politicized administration, and inefficient services. The role of state must be changed from a troublemaker to a facilitator, through the creation of a conducive environment for the market. The concept of “good governance” was first raised in the World Bank’s booklet Governance and Development (1992).

164 Notes The Bank defined the concept as such: “the manner in which power is exercised in the management of a country’s economic and social resources for development”. Thus, when the concept was first coined, it was identified more with the idea of development. 38 Gerhard Anders, “The normativity of numbers: World Bank and IMF conditionality,” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 31.2 (2008): 187–202. 39 According to the OECD report (1995), good governance has four pillars: the rule of law, public sector management, control of corruption, and reduction of military spending. The report of the IMF on Good Governance (1997), on the other hand, puts forward the transparency of government accounts, the effectiveness of public resource management, and the stability of the economic, and regulatory environment for private sector activity as the main principles. UNESCAP (United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and Pacific) defines eight pillars: good governance is participatory, consensus oriented, accountable, transparent, responsive, effective, efficient, equitable, inclusive, and follows the rule of law. See the website for “What is good governance,” http://www.unescap.org/pdd/ prs/ProjectActivities/Ongoing/gg/governance.asp 40 Peter Larmour, “Civilizing techniques: Transparency International and the spread of anti-corruption,” in Global Standards of Market Civilization, Brett Bowden and Leonard Seabrooke (eds) (New York: Routledge, 2007): 95–107, 99. 41 For measures of corruption that depend on perceived infractions, see Transparency International at http://www.transparency.org 42 Gerhard Anders and Monique Nuijten, “Corruption and the secret of law: An introduction,” in Corruption and the Secret of Law: A Legal Anthropological Perspective, Monique Nuijten and Gerhard Anders (eds) (Aldershot: Ashgate Pub Co., 2007): 1–26, 3. 43 Shore and Haller, “Introduction-sharp practice,” 3. 44 James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (London: Duke University Press, 2006), 41. 45 World Bank, Helping Countries Combat Corruption: The Role of the World Bank (Washington, DC, 1997), 102. 46 Anders and Nuijten, “Corruption and the secret of law,” 8. 47 “İyi yönetim kredi alır,” Radikal, April 24, 2001. 48 Bedirhanoğlu, “The neoliberal discourse on corruption.” 49 For Derviş’s criticism of Özal’s handling of the economy, see Asker and Işık, Krizden Çıkış, 71. 50 “New York Democracy Forum presents: Kemal Dervis,” May 22, 2006, http://www. fpa.org/events/index.cfm?act=show_event&event_id=263 51 Koray Çalışkan and Michel Callon, “Economization, part 1: Shifting attention from the economy towards processes of economization,” Economy and Society, 38.3 (2009): 369–98, 381.

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52 As cited in Cizre and Yeldan, “The Turkish encounter with neo-liberalism,” 392. 53 On the concept of “supplement,” see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 54 Cizre and Yeldan, “The Turkish encounter with neo-liberalism,” 393. 55 Ibid. 56 Andrew Barry, “The anti-political economy,” in The Technological Economy, Andrew Barry and Don Slater (eds) (London: Routledge, 2005), 86. 57 Ibid. 58 In the order of their date of establishment, these are the Capital Market Board (1982), the Higher Board for Radio and Television (1994), the Competition Agency (1994), the Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (1999), the Telecommunications Agency (2000), the Energy Markets Regulatory Agency (2001), the Sugar Agency (2001), the Tobacco, Tobacco Products, and Alcoholic Beverages Markets Regulation Agency (2002), and the Public Procurement Agency (2002). 59 OECD, Regulatory Reform in Turkey (Paris, 2002), 45. 60 An anti-corruption steering committee composed of senior civil servants from key ministries was set up in July 2001. Also another law passed in 2000 established a new procedure to facilitate the prosecution of civil servants on charges of corruption. 61 Asker and Işık, Krizden Çıkış, 71. 62 Tamer Çetin and Fuat Oğuz, “Introduction: Regulation and competition in Turkey,” in The Political Economy of Regulation in Turkey, Tamer Çetin and Fuat Oğuz (eds) (New York: Springer, 2011), 6. 63 Sonay Bayramoğlu, Yönetişim Zihniyeti. Türkiye’de Üst Kurullar ve Siyasal İktidarın Dönüşümü (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2005); Gökhan Günaydın, “Tarım yönetiminde kurullar devri,” Kamu Yönetimi Dünyası Dergisi, 1 (2000): 25–6; Huricihan İslamoğlu, “IMF kaynaklı kurumsal reformlar ve tütün yasası,” Birikim, 158 (2002): 20–7; Seriye Sezen, Türk Kamu Yönetiminde Kurullar, Geleneksel Yapılanmadan Kopuş (Ankara: TODAIE Yayınları, 2003); Seriye Sezen, “Independent regulatory agencies in Turkey: Are they really autonomous?” Public Administration and Development, 24.4 (2007): 319–32; Ümit Sönmez, Independent Regulatory Agencies: The World Experience and the Turkish Case (MA thesis, METU: 2004). 64 “Ecevit özerkliği sevmemiş,” Radikal, March 28, 2002. 65 “IMF zor ikna edildi,” Radikal, March 30, 2002. 66 Kemal Derviş, “Governance and development,” Journal of Democracy, 17 (2006): 156–7. 67 Michel Callon, “Europe wrestling with technology,” Economy and Society, 33.1 (2004): 121–34, 133.

166 Notes

Chapter 2 1 Sabrina Kayıkçı, “Bir kamu politikası süreci analizi: 1980 sonrası Türkiye’de tütün politikası,” Mülkiye Dergisi, 247 (2005): 43–70. 2 TEKEL, Annual Report 1998 (Istanbul: TEKEL, 1999). 3 Annelise Riles, Collateral Knowledge Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago, 2011): 17; Mariana Valverde, “Authorizing the production of urban moral order: Appellate Courts and their knowledge games,” Law & Society Review, 39.2 (2005): 419–56, 421. 4 Joan Comaroff and Jean L. Comaroff, “Introduction,” in Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, Jean L. Comaroff and Joan Comaroff (eds) (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2008), 28. 5 From a talk given by Annelise Riles, “Collateral knowledge: Instrumental reason, market sociality, legal subjectivity,” Workshop organised by NYU Anthropology, February 23, 2009. 6 Annelise Riles, “A new agenda for the cultural study of law: Taking on the technicalities,” Buffalo Law Review, 53 (2005): 973–1033. 7 Bruno Latour, The Making of Law. An Ethnography of the Conseil d’Etat (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010). 8 Ron Levi and Mariane Valverde, “Studying law by association: Bruno Latour goes to the Conseil d’Etat,” Law & Social Inquiry, 33 (2008): 805–25. 9 Annelise Riles, “Introduction: In response,” in Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge, Annelise Riles (ed.) (MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2006a), 7. 10 While in Law No. 1177, 23 articles were about tobacco production, 17 articles were about handling the marketing of tobacco and 32 articles were about regulating miscellaneous issues, in the new law, there is only a single article about the production and marketing of tobacco. See Ahmet. H. Gümüş, “Geçmişten geleceğe tütün mevzuatında değişimler ve uygulamalar,” in Tütün Sektörünün Dünü, Bugünü, Yarını ve Beklentileri Sempozyumu (İzmir: TAPDK, 2004), 28–9. 11 This point will be elaborated upon further in Chapter 4. 12 See Chapter 6 for the details of the privatization of the tobacco monopoly. 13 “Chhibber’dan uyarı,” Radikal, June 1, 2001. 14 Paul Collier, Consensus-Building, Knowledge and Conditionality, The World Bank Working Paper (2004), 9. 15 Gerhard Anders, Civil Servants in Malawi: Cultural Dualism, Moonlighting and Corruption in the Shadow of Good Governance (PhD Thesis, Erasmus Universiteit, 2005). 16 Kemal Balcı, “Resignation boots economic program success,” Turkish Daily News, June 2, 2001.

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17 See for the details Parliamentary Minutes, Term 21, Legislative Year 3, Session 67, June 20, 2001. 18 July 6, 2001, http://www.tccb.gov.tr/ahmet-necdet-sezer-basin-aciklamalari/494/ 58179/4685-sayili-tutun-kanunu.html 19 “Ecevit: IMF ile çok duyarlı bir dönemdeyiz,” Hürriyet, July 7, 2001. The president in Turkey is designed to have symbolic power, as opposed to true political power. The president can veto the law passed from the parliament only once. If parliament sends it back to the president without making any changes, the president has to ratify it. But, if parliament makes even a single change to the law, then the president will have the right to return it back to parliament once more. 20 “Hükümet, Sezer’e üç bakan gönderip, ekonomiyi anlatacak,” Hürriyet, July 12, 2001. 21 Ahmet Nurettin Aydın, from the Justice and Development Party, Parliamentary Minutes, Term 21, Legislative Year 4, Session 45, January 2, 2002. 22 Ramazan Toprak, from the Justice and Development Party, Parliamentary Minutes, Term 21, Legislative Year 4, Session 46, January 3, 2002. 23 See notes 24 (Göksu) and 25 (Aydın). 24 Mahmut Göksu, from the Justice and Development Party, Parliamentary Minutes, Term 21, Legislative Year 4, Session 46, January 3, 2002. 25 Alaattin Sever Aydın, from the Felicity Party, Parliamentary Minutes, Term 21, Legislative Year 4, Session 46, January 3, 2002. 26 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000). 27 In “Gift, gift,” in The Logic of the Gift, Alan Schrift (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 1997), Mauss explains the obligation to return gifts with reference to the ambivalent and ambiguous etymology of the word gift in Germanic languages. The word gift has a double meaning, those of present and poison. This uncertainty anticipates the conjoined pleasure and displeasure when we receive gifts. Moreover, Emile Benveniste goes one step further while discussing the undecidability of the gift (see “Gift and exchange in the Indo-European vocabulary,” in The Logic of the Gift, Alan Schrift (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 1997)). He shows that in Indo-European languages, the words derived from the root *do- both mean give and take. Another example of these words is pharmakon (medicine or poison), which is discussed by Derrida under the category of “undecidables” (Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)). 28 Deputy İlhan Aytekin from the Truth Path Party, Parliamentary Minutes, Term 21, Legislative Year 4, Session 43, December 27, 2001. 29 Ali Uzunırmak from the Nationalist Action Party, Parliamentary Minutes, Term 21, Legislative Year 4, Session 42, December 26, 2001. 30 Ekrem Pakdemirli from the Motherland Party, Parliamentary Minutes, Term 21, Legislative Year 4, Session 42, December 26, 2001.

168 Notes 31 Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Avrupa Birliği Uyum Komisyonu Raporu, Esas No: 1/1204, Karar No: 11, June 26, 2006. 32 In EU countries, the decoupling of direct aid to producers (cutting the link between support and production) and the introduction of the single payment scheme is incrementally put into operation. This new support system, independent of the crop, began in 2010 after an adjustment period of four years. In this period, the tobacco cultivators received 40 percent of single payment and 60 percent of production support from the EU. 33 For more on the comparison between the Turkish and the EU tobacco sectors, see Ahmet H. Gümüş and Sevtap Güler Gümüş, “Turkey and the European Union: Are their tobacco sectors compatible?,” Tobacco International (January–February, 2004): 22–9. 34 Kimberley A. Coles, “Election day: The construction of democracy through technique,” Cultural Anthropology, 19.4 (2004): 551–80, 555. 35 Michel Callon, “Europe wrestling with technology,” Economy and Society, 33.1 (2004): 121–34. 36 Andrew Barry, “The anti-political economy,” in The Technological Economy, Andrew Barry and Don Slater (eds) (London: Routledge, 2005), 87.

Chapter 3 1 A slightly different version of this chapter is originally published in Regulation and Governance, 6 (2): 225–41, with a different title, “Torn in translation: An ethnographic study of regulatory decision-making in Turkey.” 2 Jacint Jordana, David Levi-Faur, and Xavier Fernández i Marín, “The global diffusion of regulatory agencies: Channels of transfer and stages of diffusion,” Comparative Political Studies, 44.10 (2011): 1343–13. 3 David Levi-Faur, “The global diffusion of regulatory capitalism,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 598 (2005): 12–32; Giandomenico Majone, “The rise of regulatory state in Europe,” West European Politics, 17 (1994): 77–101; Giandomenico Majone, “From the positive to the regulatory state in Europe: Causes and consequences of changes in the mode of governance,” Journal of Public Policy, 17 (1997): 139–67. 4 Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields,” American Sociological Review, 48 (1983): 147–60; John W. Meyer, John Boli, George M. Thomas, and Francisco O. Ramirez, “World society and the nation-state,” American Journal of Society, 101 (1997): 144–81; David Strang and John W. Meyer, “Institutional conditions for diffusion,” Theory and Society, 22 (1993): 487–511.

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5 Ümit Sönmez, “The political economy of market and regulatory reforms in Turkey: The logic and unintended consequences of ad-hoc strategies,” New Political Economy, 16.1 (2011): 101–30. 6 Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, “Unscrewing the big leviathan: How actors macro-structure reality and how sociologists help them to do so,” in Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and MacroSociologies, Karin D. Knorr-Cetina and Aaron V. Cicourel (eds) (Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 279. 7 David Mosse, “Is good policy unimplementable? Reflections on the ethnography of aid policy and practice,” Development and Change, 35.4 (2004): 639–71. 8 E. Ünal Zenginobuz, “On regulatory agencies in Turkey and their independence,” Turkish Studies, 9 (2008): 475–505, 476. 9 George Marcus, Ethnography through Thick and Thin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 10 Steven Turner, “On telling regulatory tales: rBST comes to Canada,” Social Studies of Science, 31.4 (2001): 475–506. Several studies from different disciplines, such as communication, international relations, anthropology, and political science, have employed the “following the conflict” technique. See for several examples: Richard D. Besel, “Opening the ‘black box’ of climate change science: Actornetwork theory and rhetorical practice in scientific controversies,” Southern Communication Journal, 76.2 (2011): 120–36; Christian Bueger, “The clash of practice: Political controversy and the United Nations peacebuilding commission,” Evidence & Policy, 7.2 (2011): 171–91; Faye Ginsburg, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989); Anne Rademacher, “When is housing an environmental problem? Reforming informality in Kathmandu,” Current Anthropology, 50.4 (2009): 513–33. 11 For more on controversies in Science Studies, see the website http://www. mappingcontroversies.net. “Mapping controversies on science for politics” (MACOSPOL) is an EU and a joint research project that brings eight partner teams in science, technology, and society across Europe together. Following Latour’s studies, the project aims at mapping out and analyzing scientific and technical controversies. 12 Tommaso Venturini, “Diving in magma: How to explore controversies with actornetwork theory,” Public Understanding of Science, 19.3 (2010): 258–73, 261. 13 The agency’s president and board members are chosen by the Council of Ministers from candidates proposed by the Ministries of Finance, Health, and Agriculture, as well as the treasury, the external trade bureau, chambers of agriculture, and a related Ministry. In the first inaugural board, there were no farmers. 14 This was also the case with the tobacco law. See Chapter 2 for details.

170 Notes 15 Tara Schwegler, “Take it from the top (down)? Rethinking neoliberalism and political hierarchy in Mexico?,” American Ethnologist, 35 (4), 2008: 682—700. 16 Both Laura Bear (“Making river of gold: Speculative state planning, informality, and neoliberal governance on Hooghly,” Focaal-Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 61 (2011): 46–60) and Oskar Verkaaik (“The cachet dilemma: Ritual and agency in new Dutch nationalism,” American Ethnologist, 37.1 (2010): 69–82) analyze the practices of local bureaucrats under ambiguous conditions in different countries. Bear argues that in a political environment where the state policies are ambiguous and opaque, local bureaucrats depend on decentralized and speculative planning which leads to outcomes entirely different from the plans initially outlined. Similarly, through an analysis of Dutch naturalization rituals, Verkaaik states that local bureaucrats have no obvious models or experts to consult, and during this process, not only do they “remake the ritual, but the ritual also transforms them” (ibid., 70). 17 Jacqueline Best argues that international financial institutions are never perfectly precise about their policies, see “Ambiguity, uncertainty, and risk: Rethinking indeterminacy,” International Political Society, 2 (2008): 355–74; and “Bureaucratic ambiguity,” Economy and Society, 41.1 (2012): 84–106. Their ambivalent attitude to ambiguity cultivates multiple interpretations of policies. Therefore, uncertainty does not always appear as a problem to be tackled but, rather, is also sometimes a considered possibility. While bureaucracies seek to contain uncertainty, they might at the same time strategically retain and use it in institutional battles. Different forms of “strategic ignorance” (see Linsey McGoey, “On the will to ignorance in bureaucracy,” Economy and Society, 36.2 (2007): 212–35) help both to maintain and to disrupt social and political orders. 18 Umut Türem, “A clock-setting institute for the market age: The politics of importing ‘competition’ to Turkey,” Differences, 22.1 (2011): 111–45, 121. 19 Sonay Bayramoğlu, Yönetişim Zihniyeti. Türkiye’de Üst Kurullar ve Siyasal İktidarın Dönüşümü (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2005); Gökhan Günaydın, “Tarım yönetiminde kurullar devri,” Kamu Yönetimi Dünyası Dergisi, 1 (2000): 25–6; Huricihan İslamoğlu, “IMF kaynaklı kurumsal reformlar ve tütün yasası,” Birikim, 158 (2002): 20–7; Isik Ozel, “The politics of de-delegation: Regulatory (in)dependence in Turkey,” Regulation and Governance, 6.1 (2012): 119–29; Isik Ozel and Izak Atiyas, “Regulatory diffusion in Turkey: A cross-sectoral assessment,” in The Political Economy of Regulation in Turkey, Tamer Çetin and Fuat Oğuz (eds) (New York: Springer, 2011); Seriye Sezen, Türk Kamu Yönetiminde Kurullar, Geleneksel Yapılanmadan Kopuş (Ankara: TODAIE Yayınları, 2003); Seriye Sezen, “Independent regulatory agencies in Turkey: Are they really autonomous?,” Public Administration and Development, 24.4 (2007): 319–32; Ümit Sönmez, Independent Regulatory Agencies: The World Experience and the Turkish Case (MA thesis,

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METU: 2004); Ümit Sönmez, “The political economy and of market and regulatory reforms in Turkey.” 20 Robert Oppenheim, “Actor-network theory and anthropology after science, technology, and society,” Anthropological Theory, 7.4 (2007): 471–93, 474. 21 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 22 Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, Alan Sheridan and John Law (trans.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 23 Bruno Latour, “Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, Wiebe Bijker and John Law (eds) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 24 Bruno Latour, Aramis, or, the Love of Technology, Catherine Porter (trans.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 25 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 71. 26 Emphasis is original, Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 182. 27 Bruno Latour, “From realpolitik to dingpolitik,” in Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour (eds) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 15. 28 TEKEL, Annual Report 1998 (Istanbul: TEKEL, 1999). 29 See Interpellation number 7/3739, September 30, 2004. 30 Three years later, the corruption case would be detailed in newspapers revealing the connection between the son of the minister and the head of the exporting company. See Ahmet Kıvanç, “Yine Unakıtan ismi,” Radikal, November 11, 2007. 31 See the response of the minister of Finance, Kemal Unakıtan, on November 3, 2004 (document number 7/3739). 32 Drawing from Lacan’s work, Louis Althusser coins the concept of “interpellation” (see “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Louis Althusser (ed.) (New Left Books: London, 1970). He argues that individuals are interpellated, or “hailed”’ into subject positions. Thus, a policeman who calls to us is interpellating us into a position of subjugation by the state. In other words, we become what we have been identified as. 33 When the law was first enacted, the legislation required the production of at least 2 billion cigarettes a year and more than 15 tons of other tobacco products in a single shift by companies using “complete and new technology.” In August 2003, the clause “complete and new technology” was changed to “integrated establishment.” But in less than five months, it was switched back to “complete and new technology.” 34 For details, see Yalçın Bayer, “İlginç üç rapor,” Hürriyet, November 30, 2005.

172 Notes 35 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 30. 36 Yalçın Bayer, “Tekel nasıl kazıklandı?” Hürriyet, November 11, 2005. 37 Hıncal Uluç, “Yabancı sermayeyi ürkütmek,” Sabah, April 5, 2005; Aydın Ayaydın, “Bürokrasinin yetki kavgası devleti nasıl zarara sokuyor?” Sabah, January 11, 2005. 38 One of the most striking points about this row is the revelation of fault lines and struggles within the state bureaucracy. The state is not a homogenous, monolithic, and uniform apparatus in which all actors work in accordance with each other, see Michael Herzfeld, “Political optics and the occlusion of intimate knowledge,” American Anthropologist, 107.3 (2005): 369–76. 39 DPT, Tütün ve Tütün Ürünleri Sanayi. Dokuzuncu Beş Yıllık Kalkınma Planı (Ankara: Devlet Planlama Teşkilatı, 2006), 72–3. 40 Ayda Yürekli, Zeynep Önder, Murat Elibol, Nejat Erk, Altan Çabuk, and Mahir Fisunoğlu, Türkiye’de Tütün Ekonomisi ve Tütün Ürünlerinin Vergilendirilmesi (Paris: Uluslararası Tüberküloz ve Akciğer Hastalıkları ile Mücadele Derneği, 2010), 32. 41 Okan Müderrisoğlu, “Maliye, sabit vergi için çalışma başlattı,” Sabah, July 16, 2004. 42 Nilgün Karataş, “Sigaracılar vergi duvarını aşmak için formül arıyor,” Hürriyet, August 12, 2004. 43 Aydın Ayaydın, “Philsa: Uygulama yasalara uygun,” Sabah, February 8, 2005; “Sigara firmaları kuyruğa girdi,” Haber 7, August 26, 2005. 44 DPT, Tütün ve Tütün Ürünleri Sanayi, 72–3. 45 Aydın Ayaydın, “Tütün Üst Kurulu ne işe yarar?” Sabah, February 10, 2005. 46 TAPDK, “Sigara vergileri ve tütün harman oranları hakkında TAPDK basın açıklaması,” http://www.tapdk.gov.tr/basin_bildirisi.htm, February 14, 2005. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Directive 2001/37/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of June 5, 2001 on the approximation of the laws, regulations, and administrative provisions of the Member States concerning the manufacture, presentation, and sale of tobacco products. 50 The company representatives explained this with a specific example. The incessant changes in the taxation policy let several groceries make up “fake” price increases. The multinationals wanted to inform smokers about their prices through advertisements in newspapers so that consumers would not fall into the price traps set by several sellers. However, their attempts were prevented by the agency on grounds that any sort of advertisement on tobacco was illegal. 51 This might lead to “regulatory capture,” which means that the particular interests of regulated companies can capture the goals and interests of regulatory agencies. 52 Bruno Latour, Science in Action. 53 I use the concept “assemblages” as defined by Stephen Collier and Aihwa Ong:

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“An assemblage is the product of multiple determinations that are not reducible to a single logic” (“Global assemblages, anthropological problems,” in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Stephen Collier and Aihwa Ong (eds) (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 12). It denotes the multiplicity of interconnected techniques and actors (both human and nonhuman) in a heterogeneous, contingent, unstable, partial, and situated unstructured structure. 54 Mosse, “Is good policy unimplementable?” 55 Bruno Latour, “When things strike back: A possible contribution of science studies,” British Journal of Sociology, 5.1 (2000): 105–23. 56 Cited in Annelise Riles, “Real time: Unwinding technocratic and anthropological knowledge,” in Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, Greg Downey and Melissa S. Fisher (eds) (London: Duke University Press, 2006), 92. 57 Hirokazu Miyazaki, “The temporalities of the market,” American Anthropologist, 105.2 (2003): 255–65. 58 Douglas R. Holmes and George Marcus, “Cultures of expertise and the management of globalization: Toward the re-functioning of ethnography,” in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Stephen Collier and Aihwa Ong (eds) (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005); Douglas R. Holmes and George Marcus, “Fast capitalism: Para-ethnography and the rise of the symbolic analyst,” in Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, Greg Downey and Melissa S. Fisher (eds) (London: Duke University Press, 2006).

Chapter 4 1 Here my informant specifically refers to a corruption scandal concerning TEKEL’s sales of tobacco to the same leaf export company under different names and located in different locations (Bremen, Dubai, and the Virgin Islands) in various times. The issue was questioned in parliament by the True Path Party deputy Dursun Akdemir on May 11, 2004, as well as Republican People’s Party deputy Ali Kemal Kumkumoğlu on July 13, 2005. For further information, also see the TEKEL auditor’s articles who exposed the corruption case: İbrahim Halil Elmas, “2003/2004/2005 yılları mamül tütün satışları,” Tütün Eksperleri Derneği Bülteni, 76 (2006); and “TEKEL’i sahte yabancı çarptı,” Dünya, March 2, 2007. 2 The highest amount of tobacco destruction (about 76,000 tons) occurred in 1994. While in the years of 1998, 2000, and 2003, no tobacco leaf was burned, between 2005–8 about 41,000 tons of tobacco were burned, Ekonomist, February, 5 (2007).

174 Notes 3 Before the enactment of the tobacco law, the Turkish government supported tobacco farmers by setting a minimum purchase price for each grade of tobacco leaves and compelled the monopoly, TEKEL, to purchase the entire crop produced by cultivators every year. 4 Contract farming is an agreement signed between a farmer and a company about the responsibilities they should fulfil for the exchange of an agricultural commodity. According to this agreement, while the farmer is required to produce the yield at a certain quantity with specific qualifications, the company is committed to buying the commodity at a predetermined price. The basic goal is to construct a more regular and dependable market where supply is steady and price is stable. See David Glover and Ken Kusterer, Small Farmers, Big Business: Contract Farming and Rural Development (Macmillan: London, 1990). 5 By unregulated market, I mean that the market transactions are not concluded under state authority. This issue will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. 6 Michel Callon, “Introduction: The embeddedness of economic markets in economics,” in The Laws of the Markets, Michel Callon (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998a); and “What does it mean to say that economics is performative?,” in Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa and Lucia Siu (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 7 Fabian Muniesa, Yuval Millo, Michel Callon. “An introduction to market devices,” in Market Devices, Michel Callon, Yuval Millo and Fabian Muniesa (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 2. For further discussion, see the entire volume which explores markets as performed through the use of a diverse range of market devices—from analytical techniques to pricing models, purchase settings to merchandizing tools, trading protocols to aggregate economic indicators. 8 Ahmet H. Gümüş, Türkiye’de Tütün Politikaları, Pazarlama Sorunları ve Çözüm Önerileri (İzmir: Tütün Eksperleri Vakfı, 2009), 63. 9 Demirel, a politician of the center-right, was involved in the biggest development projects in the history of Turkey, and implemented several policies to upgrade the living standards of rural populations—partly due to his own rural upbringing. He was involved in 80 percent of 73 dams built after the establishment of the Republic, see Yeşim Arat, “Süleyman Demirel: National will and beyond,” in Political Leaders and Democracy in Turkey, Metin Heper and Sabri Sayarı (eds) (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2002), 98. His policy toward the rural populations, however, cannot be solely explained by his rural origins. Utilizing his “common man language,” Demirel deliberately pursued a populist policy to reach out and gather the votes from rural areas, Mine Eder, “Populism as a barrier to integration with the EU: Rethinking the Copenhagen criteria,” in Turkey’s Europe: An Internal Perspective on EU – Turkey Relations, Mehmet Uğur and Nergis Canefe (eds) (London: Routledge, 2004), 62.

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10 TEKEL, Annual Report 1998 (Istanbul: TEKEL, 1999) 11 In 1991, 5,000 Turkish lira was approximately the equivalent of US$1. This additional US$1 created a huge shift in the prices when added to the regular price. 12 Nurettin Sorman, “Türkiye’de tütün tarımının durumu, sözleşmeli tütün üretimi, açık artırmalı satış yöntemi tütün üreticilerinin örgütlenmesi üzerine değerlendirme,” in Tütün Sektörünün Dünü, Bugünü, Yarını ve Beklentileri Sempozyumu (İzmir: TAPDK, 2004). 13 Cangül Örnek, Tobacco Law: Transition from State Regulation to Market Regulation (MA Thesis: Bogazici University, 2004), 16. 14 Yener Ataseven, Avrupa Birliği ve Türkiye’de Tütüne Yönelik Politikalar Karşılaştırmalı Bir Analiz (Ankara: Tarımsal Ekonomi Araştırma Enstitüsü, 2005), 32; and Gümüş, Türkiye’de Tütün Politikaları, 49. The controversy over the overproduction of tobacco has mostly focused on the crop grown in southeastern Turkey. This kind of “eastern” tobacco has never been in high demand in the market. In spite of the lack of demand, TEKEL kept buying crops from the east to support the large number of farmers earning their livings only from tobacco. 15 Gümüş, Türkiye’de Tütün Politikaları, 64. 16 Eder, “Populism as a barrier,” 54. 17 Asım Karaömerlioğlu, “Türkiye’de köycülük,” Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce, Vol. II, Kemalizm, Tanıl Bora (ed.) (Istanbul : İletişim, 2001), 287, 294. 18 Arzu Öztürkmen, Türkiye’de Folklör ve Milliyetçilik (Istanbul: İletişim, 1998). 19 Eder, “Populism as a barrier,” 55. 20 Cited from Sabri Sayarı, “Adnan Menderes: Between democratic and authoritarian populism,” in Political Leaders and Democracy in Turkey, Metin Heper and Sabri Sayarı (eds) (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), 81. 21 Eder, “Populism as a barrier,” 57. 22 Ibid., 61. 23 Ali B. Güven, “Reforming sticky institutions: Persistence and change in Turkish agriculture,” Studies in Comparative International Development, 44.2 (2009): 162–87,173. 24 Ümit Cizre and Erinç Yeldan, “The Turkish encounter with neo-liberalism: Economics and politics in the 2000/2001 crises,” Review of International Political Economy, 12.3 (2005): 387–408, 388. 25 See Güven, “Reforming sticky institutions,” 180. It is pertinent to note that, in the following years, the Justice and Development Party would not hesitate to implement the most radical neoliberal agricultural policies, such as the Agrarian and Seeds Law enacted in 2006. 26 The number of tobacco growers dropped from 478,000 in 2001 to 318,000 in 2003, while the amount of tobacco production was 152,000 tons, it decreased to 112,000 tons respectively, see Gümüş, Türkiye’de Tütün Politikaları, 29. Eventually, both the number of farmers and the amount of tobacco produced radically dropped. In 2011

176 Notes the number of tobacco cultivators was 54,000 with a production of 67,000 tons of tobacco (www.tapdk.gov.tr). 27 Cited from Stephen Collier and Aihwa Ong, “Global assemblages, anthropological problems,” in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Stephen Collier and Aihwa Ong (eds) (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 13. 28 Michel Callon, Cécile Méadel, and Vololona Rabeharisoa, “The economy of qualities,” Economy and Society, 31.2 (2002): 194–217. 29 Sedat Yener, “Yakılan tütünler,” Tütün Eksperleri Derneği Bülteni, October, 7 (1992). 30 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002), 246. 31 Michel Callon, “Introduction;” Donald MacKenzie, “Is economics performative? Option theory and the construction of derivatives markets,” in Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa and Lucia Siu (eds) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 32 Buyers are the tobacco leaf companies working between tobacco growers and multinational cigarette manufacturers. After buying the yield from growers on contracted terms, they process it (such as cleaning, grading, resorting, and drying) and then sell it to cigarette companies. Recently, the number of local leaf companies shrunk due to the fact that they could not compete with the newly emerging international leaf companies in Turkey having organic ties with multinational cigarette companies. 33 Lawrence Grossman, The Political Ecology of Bananas: Contract Farming, Peasants, and Agrarian Change in the Eastern Caribbean (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 4–5. 34 Michael J. Watts, “Life under contract: Contract farming, agrarian restructuring, and flexible accumulation,” in Living Under Contract: Contract Farming and Agrarian Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa, Peter D. Little and Michael J. Watts (eds) (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). 35 Roger A. Clapp, “The moral economy of the contract,” in Living Under Contract: Contract Farming and Agrarian Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa, Peter D. Little and Michael J. Watts (eds) (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 92. 36 See Ebru Kayaalp, “New crops and new subjectivities: Virginia tobacco production and citizenship in Turkey,” in Studies on Istanbul and Beyond, Robert G. Ousterhout (ed.) (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications, 2007). 37 Marie-France Garcia-Parpet, “The social construction of a perfect market: The strawberry auction at Fontaines-en-Sologne,” in Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu (eds) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 20.

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38 Ibid., 45. 39 Annelise Riles, Collateral Knowledge Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago, 2011), 55. 40 Koray Çalışkan, “Price as a market device: Cotton trading in Izmir mercantile exchange,” in Market Devices, Michel Callon, Yuval Millo, and Fabian Muniesa (eds) (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007). 41 In some regions, farmers use koçan and cüzdan (which simply means “wallets”) interchangeably. 42 Since the Ottoman Empire period, the koçan system has been in use with the goal of avoiding illegal tobacco cultivation and trade, thereby protecting the tax revenues coming from tobacco, see Örnek, Tobacco Law, 93. 43 The fieldwork was conducted prior to TEKEL’s privatization and will not, therefore, analyze the repercussions of the monopoly’s privatization. 44 200 kilograms of tobacco is not enough to earn a living. In 2003, the average price of tobacco was 5 million Turkish lira (approximately US$3.3) per kilo. If a cultivator decided to sell his tobacco to TEKEL, he would earn 1 million Turkish lira (US$660) a year, which is far below the necessary minimum amount for the survival of a family. Though in the following years TEKEL increased its quota amount up to 1,000 kilograms, the number of tobacco cultivators working for TEKEL severely declined. 45 During my fieldwork, the Adıyaman locals often expressed their feeling of resentment toward the Turkish state. Similarly, Yoltar also mentions “a feeling of being abandoned by the state” in the city. People in Adıyaman tend to identify themselves more in terms of religion rather than ethnicity. However, both their ethnic and religious identities cause problems for the Adıyaman Kurds. As one of my informants stressed, they would always remain rebellious Kurds from the perspective of Turks, while they are regarded as assimilated Kurds by the political Kurds, see Çağrı Yoltar, “When the poor need health care: Ethnography of state and citizenship in Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies, 45.5 (2009): 769–82. 46 According to a survey done in 1998, the annual income of an individual is about US$1,198, see DPT, Tütün ve Tütün Ürünleri Sanayi. Dokuzuncu Beş Yıllık Kalkınma Planı (Ankara: Devlet Planlama Teşkilatı, 2001). Adıyaman had a population of 623,811 in 2000, of which 54 percent inhabit the city, whereas 46 percent live in rural areas. The fact that 74 percent of the employed population of Adıyaman works in the agricultural sector explains why the inhabitants are very poor. For further information, see GAP, Adıyaman İli, Ekosistemine Uygun Tarımsal Ürünler (Ankara: GAP, 2003). 47 Koçans were issued in huge numbers in the past. After the quota restriction in 1994, however, the issuing of koçans was put under strict regulation. They became valuable legal papers since then, and were kept by their owners even though they stopped farming.

178 Notes 48 It is pertinent to note here that before the introduction of contract farming, the circulation and exchange of koçans among cultivators was highly common during quota years when national tobacco production was restricted. Koçans on these specific years worked as tools not only to identify the farmers, but also to control the total quantity of the yield. However, with contract farming, the suppression of the supply side was utterly and incessantly set, and the exchange of koçans (coupled with contracts) has become a regular practice, especially in the east, starting with the introduction of contract farming. 49 The tobacco growers were still referring to contracts as koçans as they were basically both legal quotas put on the quantity to be produced. 50 Petter Holm and Kåre Nielsen, “Framing fish, making markets: The construction of Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs),” in Market Devices, Michel Callon, Yuval Millo, and Fabian Muniesa (eds) (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007). 51 Tarık Işık, “Ağalık aynen devam,” Radikal, August 8, 2006. 52 It is pertinent to note that the government phased out subsidies for several crops after implementing the Direct Income Subsidies in 2001. The Direct Income Subsidies are granted on a flat, per hectare rate to all farmers registered with the National Farmer Registration System. However, this new support system was harshly criticized as it did not seek any improvements in the quality and quantity of cultivated crops, and it basically channeled the biggest share of the support to the big landowners. 53 Seasonal working is mostly reserved for kids between the ages of 12–18. Kemal, who is 15, has been travelling to other cities as a seasonal worker for the last two years. In 2005, with his two siblings, he first went to central Anatolia for chickpea harvesting and afterwards to Malatya for apricot picking. He earned 390 million Turkish lira (approximately US$260) in 40 days. And the following year, he went to Malatya alone, and when he came back to his village, he helped his parents in tobacco cultivation. 54 A structural transformation of the existing social insurance schemes and the health care system was adopted in 2006 by unifying the formerly separate schemes (SSK, Emekli Sandığı and Bağ-Kur) under a single system. 55 “Genel sağlık sigortası üzerine düşünceler-II,” Radikal İki, January 9, 2005. In the newspaper, the referenced research is a study conducted by the Bogazici University Social Policy Forum. 56 Caroline Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies After Socialism (Culture and Society After Socialism) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 57 Ibid., 21. 58 Rose, 1996, 57.

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Chapter 5 1 This article was originally published in Turkish with the title, Ebru Kayaalp “Piyasanın sınırları: Yeni bir tütün piyasası nasıl kurulur?,” Toplum ve Bilim, 124 (2012): 165–84. 2 “Bahçeli: AK Parti, CHP, BDP ve PKK…,” Star, May 29, 2012. With this statement Bahçeli supported the minister of Internal Affairs İdris Naim Şahin, who had made a statement four days earlier legitimizing the killing of smugglers with a similar rationale. Şahin had defended the operation as follows: “If they were captured alive they would stand trial for trafficking. It is the PKK who provides the contraband. Our 34 people who died are merely collateral damages. It is not an incident of the essence that requires an apology.” “AK Parti’de sert tepki,” Milliyet, May 25, 2012. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the PKK, was founded in the late 1970s and led by Abdullah Öcalan. The group, which has Marxist-Leninist roots, launched an armed struggle against the Turkish government in 1984, calling for an independent Kurdish state within Turkey. Since then more than 37,000 people have died in the clashes between the PKK and Turkish armed forces. The clashes peaked during the mid-1990s, when thousands of villages dominated by Kurds were destroyed. Over time, the Kurdish claims for an independent state were replaced by the demands for cultural rights. In 1999, Abdullah Öcalan was arrested. 3 Ayşe Buğra, Devlet Piyasa Karşıtlığının Ötesinde: İhtiyaçlar ve Tüketim üzerine Yazılar (Istanbul: İletişim, 2000); Timothy Mitchell, “The limits of the state: Beyond statist approaches and their critics,” The American Political Science Review, 85.1 (1991): 77–96; Sibel Yardımcı and Zeynep Alemdar, “The privatization of security in Turkey: Reconsidering the state, the concept of ‘governmentality’ and neoliberalism,” New Perspectives on Turkey, 43 (2010): 33–61. 4 Mine Eder, “Moldovyalı yeni göçmenler üzerinden Türkiye’deki neo-liberal devleti yeniden düşünmek,” Toplum ve Bilim, 108 (2007): 129–42; Zeynep Gambetti, “Linç girişimleri, neoliberalizm ve güvenlik devleti,” Toplum ve Bilim, 109, (2007): 7–35; Janet Roitman, “New sovereigns? Regulatory authority in the Chad Basin,” in Intervention and Transnationalism in Africa: Global-Local Networks of Power, Thomas Callaghy, Ronald Kassimir, and Robert Latham (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Janet Roitman and Gérard Roso, “Equatorial Guinea in its regional and international contexts,” Politique Africaine, 80, (2001): 121–42; Kristof Titeca, “Les OPEC Boys en Ouganda, trafiquants de petrole et acteurs politiques (The OPEC boys: Fuel smugglers and political actors),” Politique Africaine, 103 (2006): 143–59. 5 Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience, 204.

180 Notes 6 By “the market,” I mean a normative definition of the market presumed to be established in a singular, smooth, and sterile fashion. I will try to expand on this in the following pages. 7 Tobacco merchants bought the tobacco for anywhere between 10,000 and 18,000 Turkish lira per kilo and sold the same tobacco to TEKEL for 55,000–60,000 Turkish lira per kilo. “Tütünde milyarlık vurgun,” Zaman, July 24, 1992; “Tekel’de 96 milyarlık vurgun,” Hürriyet, July 29, 1992, “Milyarlık vurgun,” Milliyet, July 29, 1992. 8 Republican People’s Party (CHP) deputy Mehmet Sevingen added this subject to the agenda of parliament. For the relevant news coverage see, “Doğu’da 500 milyarlık yolsuzluk,” Meydan, October 29, 1992. Two years later, Motherland Party (ANAP) deputy Faruk Saydam would direct a parliamentary question to the Çiller government regarding the same issue. “Tütün vurgunu meclise geliyor,” Zaman, September 30, 1994. 9 Keith Hart, “Informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana,” The Journal of Modern African Studies, 1 (1973): 61–89. 10 Cited in Alejandro Portes, “The informal economy and its paradoxes,” in Handbook of Economic Sociology, Neil Smelser and Richard Swedberg (eds) (New York: Russell Sage, 1994), 427. 11 Hernando de Soto, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (New York: Harper Collins, 1989). 12 Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 13 Timothy Mitchell, “The properties of markets,” in Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu (eds) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 14 Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience, 19. 15 For a similar discussion, see Ronen Palan, The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 16 Keith Hart, “Market and state after the Cold War: The informal economy reconsidered,” in Contesting Markets, Roy Dilley (ed.) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 233. 17 See Janet Roitman “New sovereigns?;” Fiscal Disobedience; Janet Roitman and Gérard Roso, “Equatorial Guinea”; Kristof Titeca, “Les OPEC Boys.” For example, Titeca discusses the fact that the smuggling of oil from Congo to Uganda by “OPEC boys” is happening with the knowledge of the state: the OPEC boys and the state are in a complicit relationship. Unregulated economic activities of the OPEC boys are at the heart of the fuel market, while the only three formal petrol stations of the town can be regarded as residual. 18 Roitman, “New sovereigns?,” 241. 19 Ibid., 242.

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20 Julia Elyachar, Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo (Politics, History, and Culture) (London: Duke University Press, 2005). 21 Ibid., 5. 22 Mitchell, “The properties of markets.” 23 Ibid., 267. 24 Michel Callon, “Introduction: The embeddedness of economic markets in economics,” in The Laws of the Markets, Michel Callon (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998a); “An essay on framing and overflowing: Economic externalities,” in The Laws of the Markets, Michel Callon (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998b); “What does it mean to say that economics is performative?,” in Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu (eds) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Michel Callon, Cécile Méadel, and Vololona Rabeharisoa, “The economy of qualities,” Economy and Society, 31.2 (2002): 194–217; Koray Çalışkan and Michel Callon, “Economization, part 1: Shifting attention from the economy towards processes of economization,” Economy and Society, 38. 3 (2009): 369–98; Koray Çalışkan and Michel Callon, “Economization, part 2: A research programme for the study of markets,” Economy and Society, 39.1 (2010): 1–32. 25 David Harvey, “Neo-liberalism and the restoration of class power,” in Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development, David Harvey (ed.) (New York: Verso, 2006), 32. 26 According to the tobacco law, it is possible to sell by auction the tobacco produced exceeding the contract. However, the difference between the auction prices set by the tobacco regulatory agency and the prices quoted in contract production may at times reach as high as 100 percent, see Ahmet H. Gümüş, Türkiye’de Tütün Politikaları, Pazarlama Sorunları ve Çözüm Önerileri (İzmir: Tütün Eksperleri Vakfı, 2009), 95. In addition to the low prices, due to the bureaucratic requirements for participation in the auction, as well as instances of not being able to secure buyers, tobacco growers almost never opt for this choice. Except for 2004 (1.4 percent) the amount of tobacco sold by auction does not even constitute 1 percent of the tobacco sold in total (ibid., 94). 27 Anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh, who investigates the one child policy in China, makes a very similar argument. In the course of her very interesting article, she explores how, while the first-born child is recognized as an official citizen, the second child both to the same parents is deemed “excess,” “above-quota” and pushed to an illegal status. See Susan Greenhalgh, “Planned births and unplanned persons: ‘Population’ in the making of Chinese modernity,” American Ethnologist 30. 2 (2003): 196–215. 28 According to the 2006 tobacco experts’ report, while 44.5 percent of the tobacco produced in Adıyaman is classified as A grade tobacco (best quality), only 2 percent

182 Notes of Çelikhan tobacco is categorized as A grade. In the same year, while only 11.5 percent of Adıyaman tobacco is classified as Kapa (low quality), in Çelikhan this rate is 63 percent. The main reason for this difference is the rating of Çelikhan tobacco according to Oriental tobacco standards. Here, expertise confronts us as seeking the qualities of the dominant product in other products and thus creating a more homogeneous and uniform product curtain. 29 As in all agricultural products, it is impossible to speak of only one type of tobacco in Turkey either. It is possible to find tobacco of different fragrances, aroma, and appearance. The value of tobacco is not determined only in direct proportion to its quality; the production volume of tobacco is also a factor determining its value. For instance, Bitlis tobacco, which is regarded by experts as the best tobacco produced in Turkey, is slowly becoming extinct, since it is not produced in a volume to meet the demands of cigarette companies. In this respect, “good” tobacco refers not to the best quality, but to medium-quality product that can meet the general demand. 30 Outside the market regulated through contract, Çelikhan tobacco is valued at least five times higher. For instance, during the period I conducted field research, while the average price of rolling tobacco per kilogram was 15 Turkish lira, TEKEL was appraising the best quality of the same tobacco at 4.650 Turkish lira and the lowest quality at 2 Turkish lira. 31 Through an amendment to Article 8 of Law No. 4733 in 2008, growers were allowed to produce up to 50 kilograms of loose rolling tobacco from their own crop “for noncommercial use.” 32 “TAPDK Başkanı Adalı: Sarma sigarada vergi yüzünden yatırım yapılamıyor,” July 11, 2007, http://www.haberx.com/tapdk_baskani_adali_sarma_sigarada_vergi_ yuzunden_yatirim_yapilamiyor(17,n,10144499,209).aspx

Chapter 6 1 Gökhan Bulut, Tekel Direnişi Işığında Gelenekselden Yeniye İşçi Sınıfı Hareketi (Ankara: Notabene, 2010); Nuray Türkmen, Eylemden Öğrenmek: Tekel Direnişi ve Sınıf Bilinci (Istanbul: İletişim, 2012); Gamze Yıkılmaz and Seray Kumlu, Tekel Eylemine Kenar Notları (Ankara: Phoenix, 2011); Sevgi Yılmaz, Bir Direniş Öyküsü: TEKEL (Istanbul: Evrensel, 2010). 2 Putting national interest at the forefront, anti-privatization circles have been against the privatization of highly profitable enterprises especially in strategic sectors of the economy. They were critical of the privatization efforts on the grounds that public enterprises could be employed efficiently after a thorough restructuring process (Ziya Öniş, “Power, interests and coalitions: The political economy of mass privatization in Turkey,” Third World Quarterly, 32.4 (2011): 707–24).

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3 Although the external actors’ influence in accelerating the privatization process is undeniable, as Sevgi Balkan-Şahin (“Privatization as a hegemonic process in Turkey,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 18.4 (2010): 483–98) rightly argues, the entire process cannot be reduced to the pressures of these forces. Instead, the process is more an outcome of the hegemonic struggles among a variety of actors, such as business organizations, trade unions, and the government. 4 Ibid., 490. Especially after 2004, with the privatization of a number of large enterprises, the process developed at a faster pace with huge returns (Mehmet C. Güran, “The political economy of privatization in Turkey: An evaluation,” in The Political Economy of Regulation in Turkey, Tamer Çetin and Fuat Oğuz (eds) (London: Springer, 2011), 23). 5 Suut Doğruel and Fatma Doğruel, Osmanlı’dan Günümüze TEKEL (Istanbul: Tekel Yayınları, 2000), 157. 6 Ibid. 7 State-owned enterprises were first founded after the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, and their number gradually increased after the 1929 crisis. Even under the more economically liberal-oriented governments, the policies regarding the enterprises did not change until the 1980s when the privatization issue was first put on the agenda, see Güran, “The political economy of privatization,” 45. 8 Öniş, “Power, interests and coalitions,” (2011): 718. 9 “Bakın görün Tekel’i babalar gibi satarım,” Hürriyet, April 13, 2003. 10 Öniş, “Power, interests and coalitions,” (2011): 715. 11 Yıldız Atasoy, Islam’s Marriage with Neoliberalism: State Transformation in Turkey (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Ayşe Buğra, “Poverty and citizenship: An overview of the social policy environment in Republican Turkey,” Middle East Studies, 39 (2007): 33–52; Simten Çoşar, “The AKP’s hold on power: Neoliberalism meets the Turkish-Islamic synthesis,” in Silent Violence: Neoliberalism, Islamist Politics and the AKP Years in Turkey, Simten Çoşar and Gamze YücesanÖzdemir (eds) (Ottawa: Red Quill Books, 2012); Cihan Tuğal, “Transforming everyday life: Islamism and social movement theory,” Theory and Society, 38 (2009): 423–58; Cihan Tuğal, “The Islamic making of a capitalist habitus: The Turkish sub-proletariat’s turn to the market,” Sociology of Work, 22 (2011): 85–112; Cihan Tuğal, “Fight or acquiesce? Religion and political process in Turkey’s and Egypt’s neoliberalizations,” Development and Change, 43.1 (2012): 23–51. 12 Coşar, “The AKP’s hold on power;” Marcie J. Patton, “The synergy between neoliberalism and communitarianism: Erdoğan’s third way,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 29.3 (2009): 438–49. 13 Coşar, “The AKP’s hold on power;” Sultan Tepe, “Politics between market and Islam: The electoral puzzles and changing prospects of pro-Islamic parties,” Mediterranean Quarterly, 18.2 (2007): 107–35.

184 Notes 14 Buğra, “Poverty and citizenship,” 46. 15 Patton, “The synergy between neoliberalism and communitarianism;” Ziya Öniş, “The triumph of conservative globalism: The political economy of the AKP era,” Turkish Studies, 13.2 (2012): 135–52. 16 Öniş, “The triumph of conservative globalism.” 17 Umut Bozkurt, “Neoliberalism with a human face: Making sense of the justice and development party’s neoliberal populism in Turkey,” Science and Society, 77.3 (2013): 372–96. 18 Mine Eder, “Retreating state? Political economy of welfare regime change in Turkey,” Middle East Law and Governance, 2.2 (2010): 152–84; Öniş, “The triumph of conservative globalism.” 19 Menderes Çınar and Burhanettin Duran, “The specific evolution of contemporary political Islam in Turkey and its ‘difference’,” in Secular and Islamic Politics in Turkey: The Making of the Justice and Development Party, Ümit Cizre (ed.) (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 31. 20 Atasoy, Islam’s Marriage with Neoliberalism, 44; Menderes Çınar, “The electoral success of the AKP: Cause for hope and despair,” Insight Turkey, 13.4 (2011): 123; M. Hakan Yavuz, “The transformation of a Turkish Islamic movement: From identity politics to policy,” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 22.3 (2005): 107. 21 It should be noted that the Welfare Party seemed to have understood the idea of hizmet as an invaluable opportunity for national vote mobilization better than any other party. Especially with their assiduous work in connecting with people in the local elections in 1994 and general elections in 1995, the party gained a victory by receiving 19 and 21 percent of the votes respectively due to their strong emphasis on rendering hizmet to people. Moreover, the most well-known leader of the ‘Hizmet Movement’ is the controversial religious figure Fethullah Gülen, who has for many years underscored the importance of hizmet to God, nation and the world. Gülen’s concept of hizmet blends Islamic thought with Turkish nationalism. For more on hizmet, see Mücahit Bilici, “The Fethullah Gülen movement and its politics of representation in Turkey,” The Muslim World, 96.1 (2006): 1–20; Etienne Copeaux, “Hizmet: A keyword in the Turkish historical narrative,” New Perspectives on Turkey, 14 (1996): 97–114; M. Hakan Yavuz, “Societal search for a new contract: Fethullah Gulen, Virtue party and the Kurds,” SAIS Review, 19.1 (1999): 114–143. 22 In late May 2013, when a small group of environmentalists resisted the government’s plan to construct a shopping mall in Gezi Park in Taksim Square in Istanbul, they faced excessive police brutality. The police aggression and extensive use of tear gas turned the peaceful protests into wider resistance across the whole country against the Turkish government’s increasingly authoritarian policies. Seven people lost their lives in the nationwide protests.

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23 Çınar, “The electoral success of the AKP,” 123. 24 Murat Güney, “AKP ve Türkiye’de ‘yeni’ iktidar,” in Türkiye’de İktidarı Yeniden Düşünmek, Murat Güney (ed.) (Istanbul: Varlık, 2009), 348. 25 Catherine Kingfisher and Jeff Maskovsky, “Introduction: The limits of neoliberalism,” Critique of Anthropology, 28.2 (2008): 118. 26 Neil Brenner, Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore, “Variegated neoliberalization: Geographies, modalities, pathways,” Global Networks, 10.2 (2010): 1–41. 27 James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (London: Duke University Press, 2006); Kingfisher and Maskovsky, “Introduction;” Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 28 Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception. 29 Öniş, “The triumph of conservative globalism.” 30 Buğra, “Poverty and citizenship;” Ayşe Buğra and Ayşen Candaş, “Change and continuity under an eclectic social security regime: The case of Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies, 47.3 (2011): 515–28. 31 The Green Card, as a means-tested scheme, was introduced in 1992 to provide free health care services to low-income citizens who could not benefit from other social insurance schemes. The Green Card scheme was terminated with the start of the General Health Insurance Program in 2012. 32 Dikmen Bezmez and Sibel Yardımcı, “In search of disability rights: Citizenship and Turkish disability organizations,” Disability & Society, 25.5 (2010): 603–15. 33 Berna Yazıcı, “The return to the family: Welfare, state, and politics of the family in Turkey,” Anthropological Quarterly, 85.1 (2012): 103–40. 34 Şemsa Özar and Burcu Yakut Çakar, “Aile, devlet ve piyasa kıskacında boşanmış kadınlar,” in Sınır Bilgisi. Siyasal İktidar, Toplumsal Mekan ve Kadına Yönelik Şiddet, Elif Çelebi, Didem Havlioğlu, and Ebru Kayaalp (eds) (Ankara: Ayizi Yayınları, 2014). 35 Çağrı Yoltar, “When the poor need health care: Ethnography of state and citizenship in Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies, 45.5 (2009): 769–82. 36 Bozkurt, “Neoliberalism with a human face,” 390; Eder, “Retreating state?,” 156. 37 Bozkurt, “Neoliberalism with a human face,” 390. 38 Buğra, “Poverty and citizenship”; Behrooz Morvaridi, “The politics of philanthropy and welfare governance: The case of Turkey,” European Journal of Development Research, 25.2 (2013): 305–21; Zafer Yılmaz, “AKP ve devlet hayırseverliği: Minnet ekonomisi, borç toplumu ve siyasal sermaye birikimi,” Toplum ve Bilim, 128 (2013): 32–70. 39 Eder, “Retreating state?” 40 For TEKEL workers, this move would have meant a reduction of their average monthly wages from 1,200 Turkish lira (US$800) to 800 Turkish Lira (US$550) and a job contract of ten months with no further guarantee of renewal.

186 Notes 41 “Bu insanlar tütün depolarında duruyor, iş mi yapıyorlar? Hayır,” Radikal, December 28, 2009. 42 Tanıl Bora, “Tekel işçileri eylemi: Tekel’in sesi,” Birikim, 250 (2010): 6–9. 43 Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). Bauman refers to economic immigrants and asylum seekers who are considered superfluous. Furthermore, these people are being criminalized through an association with terrorism. 44 Ibid., 12. 45 See Melissa M. Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2006) for more on disposable bodies. Through an analysis of maquiladoras, Wright shows how the disposable, Third World female worker was created. 46 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 169. 47 Robert Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the Social Question, translated by Richard Boyd (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 387. 48 Barış Özden, “The transformation of social welfare and politics in Turkey: A successful convergence of neoliberalism and populism,” in Turkey Reframed: Constituting Neoliberal Hegemony, İsmet Akça, Ahmet Bekmen, and Barış Özden (eds) (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 167. 49 Görkem Doğan, “The deradicalisation of organized labor,” in Turkey Reframed: Constituting Neoliberal Hegemony, İsmet Akça, Ahmet Bekmen, and Barış Özden (eds) (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 197. 50 “Şimşek: TEKEL işçileri için alternatifler hazır,” Radikal, January 31, 2010. 51 “Şimşek’ten Tekel eylemi yorumu: Bizim hükümetin hatası merhameti,” Radikal, January 26, 2010. 52 Deniz Yükseker, “Türkiye toplumunu birarada tutan nedir? Toplumsal bir tutkal olarak borç ve borçluluk,” Toplum ve Bilim, 117 (2010): 6–18.

Chapter 7 1 “Erdoğan’dan AKP’li Başkana telefon: Sigarayı bırak,” Radikal, July 5, 2009. 2 “Israr eden olursa kapatırız,” Milliyet, May 31, 2013. 3 Ibid. 4 I find the criticism of Turkish women smoking American cigarettes particularly interesting. According to Turkish nationalist discourse, those women representing the “spirit” of Turkish values and culture should be isolated from the contaminated world of Western products. For a detailed analysis of the centrality of gender in the

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making of Turkish nationalism and modernization, see Ayşe Durakbaşa, Halide Edib: Türk Modernleşmesi ve Feminizm (Araştırma- İnceleme Dizisi) (Istanbul: İletişim, 2000); Nilüfer Göle, Modern Mahrem. Medeniyet ve Örtünme (Istanbul: Metis Yayınevi, 1991); Deniz Kandiyoti, “Some awkward questions on women and modernity in Turkey,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, in Lila Abu-Lughod (ed.) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 5 “Yabancı sigara hayranlığı,” Tütün Dünyası, 3 (1959): 1 and 23. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 According to a report prepared by Sadiye Enercan, “Tütün kanser münasebetleri hakkında rapor,” Tütün Dünyası, 8 (1959): 3–6, the amount of tar and nicotine in Turkish cigarettes are 71.8 mgr and 4.02 mgr respectively, whereas in American blend cigarettes they are 92.5 mgr and 6.93 mgr. In light of these results, Enercan suggests that a nonfiltered Turkish cigarette is healthier than a filtered American blend cigarette. Another article by Muzaffer Suben, “Dünya tütün sanayiindeki buhran karşısında tütünlerimizin değeri,” Tütün Dünyası, 7 (1959): 6–7, offered different figures for the amount of tar and nicotine in Turkish and American blend cigarettes. Yet, the conclusion was the same: Turkish cigarettes contain less harmful ingredients than those of American blends. For more about health concerns and Turkish tobacco, see Sedat Yener, “Türkiye asil menşeyli tütünlerin anavatanıdır,” Tütün Dünyası, 4 (1959): 14–16. 9 “Rekabete karşı alınacak tedbir,” Tütün Dünyası, 5 (1959): 1. 10 This idea is a very good representation of nationalist thought in non-Western countries. As Chatterjee argues, nationalism has an ambiguous and paradoxical nature. While the Western experience of technological and economic development is embraced, Western culture is seemingly negated (Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986)). Likewise, in Turkish nationalism, modern technology must wholeheartedly be adopted, while the spirit of Turkish identity and cultural values (in this case, Turkish cigarettes) must be protected. 11 It is the name of the city in the Black Sea region, which is famous for its aromatic Oriental tobacco. 12 “Samsun (filtreli sigara),” Tütün Dünyası, 7 (1959): 1. 13 In spite of tobacco experts’ “wishful thinking” that the consumption of Samsun was low and its production would soon cease, Samsun happened to become one of the most enduring cigarette brands in Turkey, and is still being produced today due to demand from its faithful consumers. 14 Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: the Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 244. 15 Ibid., 245.

188 Notes 16 Mazlum Işın, “Türk tütünlerinin Amerikan harmanlarındaki rolleri,” Türk Tütünü, 80 (1941): 4. 17 According to the news, TEKEL 2000 is comprised of 85 percent Virginia and Burley tobacco and only 15 percent Oriental. See Abdullah Aysu, “TEKEL’de gözyaşı döken timsahlar,” Bianet, January 28, 2010. 18 Nazmi Bilir, Banu Çakır, Elif Dağlı, Toker Ergüder, Zeynep Önder, Tobacco Control in Turkey (WHO: Copenhagen, 2009), 31–2. 19 Ibid., 39. 20 Alan Petersen and Deborah Lupton, The New Public Health. Health and Self in The Age of Risk (St Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1996), 2. 21 Deborah Lupton, Medicine as Culture: Illness, Disease and The Body in Western Societies (Thousand Oaks, and London: Sage Publications, 1994), 31. 22 Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, “Political power beyond the state: Problematics of government,” British Journal of Sociology, 43 (1992): 173–205, 195. 23 Allan M. Brandt, “Behaviour, disease and health in the twentieth-century United States: The moral valence of individual risk,” in Morality and Health, Allan M. Brandt and Paul Rozin (eds) (New York: Routledge, 1997). 24 Peter Benson, Tobacco Capitalism: Growers, Migrant Workers, and the Changing Face of a Global Industry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); “Biopolitical injustice and contemporary capitalism,” American Ethnologist, 39.3 (2012): 488–90. 25 Thomas Osborne “Of health and statecraft,” in Foucault: Health and Medicine, Alan Petersen, and Robin Bunton (eds) (New York: Routledge, 1997), 181. 26 Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom. Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 27 Thomas Lemke, “The birth of bio-politics: Michel Foucault’s lecture at the Collège de France on neo-liberal governmentality,” Economy and Society, 30.2 (2001): 190–207, 201. 28 Nikolas Rose, “Governing ‘advanced’ liberal democracies,” in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government, Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (eds) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 41. 29 “Framework Convention on Tobacco Control,” Turkish Ministry of Health, Publication no: 731, February 2008, Ankara. 30 Six months after the legislation was enacted, there was already a serious decrease in cigarette sales. According to a study, from July to December 2009 there was a 5.1 percent decline in sales. See Charles W. Warren, Toker Ergüder, Juliette Lee, Veronica Lea, Ann G. Sauer, Nathan R. Jones, and Nazmi Bilir, “Effect of policy changes on cigarette sales: The case of Turkey,” European Journal of Public Health, 22.5 (2012): 712–6, 713.

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31 Alcohol consumption has always been a controversial issue from the time the JDP government came to power. Consistently increased tax on alcoholic beverages, expanded control mechanisms over alcohol consumption that gave municipalities the right to issue liquor licenses and to determine the place for the consumption of alcohol, and lastly, the enactment of the most controversial legislation which both restricts alcohol sales after 10 p.m. and bans new liquor licenses for establishments near mosques and schools, have elicited reactions from secular groups who claim these measures are being taken because of the prohibition of alcohol in Islam. In response to this line of critique, the JDP government has drawn attention to the health problems related to tobacco and alcohol consumption. 32 Meyda Yeğenoğlu, “Smells like a Gezi spirit: Democratic sensibilities and carnivalesque politics in Turkey,” Radical Philosophy (2013 November–December): 2–4. 33 The prime minister’s war against smoking has been recognized worldwide and he was even awarded a special prize by the WHO in 2010. 34 “PM Erdoğan: Smoking more dangerous than terrorism,” Zaman, December 13, 2007. 35 “Turkish PM awarded WHO’s anti-smoking prize,” Hürriyet Daily News, July 17, 2010. 36 For example, the Qur’an says, “And spend of your substance in the cause of Allah, and make not your own hands contribute to (your) destruction.” (The Holy Qur’an, Abdullah Yusuf Ali (trans.), Al-Baqarah, verse: 195 (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2000), 24.) 37 İSAM, İlmihal (II): İslam ve Toplum (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi, 1999), 67. 38 Ibid., 68–9. In certain cases, if it is conclusively proven that smoking clearly damages the health, livelihood, and responsibilities of the people, then it can be considered haram, ibid., 68. 39 Professor Cevat Akşit made this claim on television. There are other influential Islamic opinion-makers (Hayrettin Karaman, Ali Rıza Demircan, Fetullah Gülen, and Mevlüt Özcan) who also declared that smoking must be considered haram. 40 Yeşilay is the Turkish Green Crescent, which works as a nonprofit NGO to enlighten people about different kinds of addictions, such as alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and gambling. 41 “Ramazan sigara ve alkolü bırakmak için fırsat,” Sabah, August 29, 2008. 42 Samuli Schielke “Being good in Ramadan: Ambivalence, fragmentation, and the moral self in the lives of young Egyptians,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15 (2009): 24–40, 26. 43 Wendy Brown, “American nightmare: Neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and dedemocratization,” Political Theory, 34.6 (2006): 690–714.

190 Notes

Chapter 8 1 John Slade, “The tobacco epidemic: Lessons from history,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 24.2 (1992): 99–109, 107–8. 2 This chapter grows out of my archival research in Istanbul Beyazıt Library as well as the library at the Tobacco Experts Association in İzmir. The tobacco journals I researched are Türk Tütünü (1938–52), Tütün Dünyası (1959–63), Tütün Mecmuası (1938), Türk Tütünleri Mecmuası (1928), and İnhisarlar (1937–38). All the journals were published by the tobacco experts. In the following pages, I will discuss the significance of tobacco experts in Turkey. 3 Members of the consortium were Le Credit Anstalt, M. S. Bleichroeder, and the Ottoman Bank. 4 Its official name is the Régie Cointeressée de Tabacs de l’Empire Ottoman. 5 The average price paid by the Régie to the growers was 20–50 percent below the average export prices. See Şevket Pamuk cited in Mustafa Koç, “The transformation of Oriental tobacco production in the Aegean Turkey,” New Perspectives on Turkey, 4. Fall (1990): 31–55, 35. 6 For an analysis of uprisings against the Régie, see Mehmet Akpınar, “Reji uygulamalarına bir tepki: Tütün kaçakçılığı,” in Türkler, Hasan Celal Güzel, Kemal Çicek, Salim Koca (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye, 2002); Koç, “Transformation of Oriental tobacco production”; Tiğinçe Oktar, “Osmanlı Devletinde Reji şirketinin kurulmasından sonraki gelişmeler,” in Tütün Kitabı, Emine Gürsoy Naskali (ed.) (Istanbul: Kitabevi Yaayıncılık, 2003); Donald Quataert, “Tobacco producers and the Régie” in Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881–1908. Reactions to European Economic Penetration, Donald Quataert (ed.) (New York: New York University Press, 1983). 7 In 1899, the Régie employed 8,814 administrative and surveillance personnel. While it was a source of employment and income for a number of people, it also destroyed the jobs of many. Three hundred tobacco factories were forced to close their doors permanently after the Régie was established. See Quataert, “Tobacco producers and the Régie,” 16–17. 8 According to a report from 1890 written by an Ottoman civil servant, tobacco sales to the Régie remained about 6 million kilograms, whereas 12–13 million kilograms were illegally sold. See Quataert, “Tobacco producers and the Régie,” 21. 9 The Régie employed 3,600 kolcus in 1887; 4,600 in 1890; 5,900 in 1895; 6,700 in 1897; and 6,500 in 1899. Surveillance personnel used an average of 50–60 percent of the total salaries paid by the Régie. See for details, Quataert, “Tobacco producers and the Régie,” 21. 10 Quataert, “Tobacco producers and the Régie,” 34.

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11 Çağlar Keyder, The Definition of Peripheral Economy: Turkey 1923–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 41. 12 Ibid. 13 Timur Kuran, “The economic ascent of the Middle East’s religious minorities: The role of Islamic legal pluralism,” Journal of Legal Studies 33 (2004): 475–515: 479. 14 Ibid. 15 For the details of the population exchange, see Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993), 171–172. 400,000 Muslims, many of whom mainly spoke Greek, and 900,000 Orthodox Christians, were exchanged. The Anatolia of 1923 was a radically different place than that of 1913. With the death and exchange of the two biggest Christian communities, Armenians, and Greeks, Anatolia, which had been 80 percent Muslim before the wars, increased to approximately 98 percent Muslim. This tremendous change in the structure of the community would clearly reflect its repercussions for the economy soon after. 16 Çağlar Keyder, State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development (London and New York: Verso, 1987), 92. 17 Erik Jan Zürcher, Greek and Turkish Refugees and Deportees 1912–1924 (Turkology Update Leiden Project Working Papers: Universiteit Leiden, 2003). This point was also discussed by parliament in a regretful tone. The minister of Exchange Celal [Bayar] Bey admitted that: “[T]hose departing are mostly tradesmen and merchants. However, those arriving are generally farmers. Gentlemen, the overwhelming majority of those arriving are peasants; the overwhelming majority of those departing are urban dwellers!,” cited in Aktar, “Homogenising the nation, Turkifying the economy: The Turkish experience of population exchange reconsidered,” in Crossing the Aegean: an Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, Renée Hirschon (ed.) (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 89. For example, Aristotle Onassis, one of the richest businessmen of the twentieth century, was born in İzmir. His father was running a tobacco export business in Turkey and they had to leave the country during the population exchange. 18 Aktar, “Homogenising the nation,” 90. 19 However, several foreign diplomats found Turkish merchants “incompetent” compared to the Greek and Armenian middlemen who were able to meet the demands and expectations of the foreign companies. For further details see, Aktar, “Homogenising the nation,” 91. 20 Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, 130. 21 Rıfat Bali discusses several other policies that were initiated to Turkify the economy. For example, the “National Turkish Commercial Union” established in 1922 aimed at replacing non-Muslim merchants and foreign representatives with Muslims. A year later, the First Economic Congress, the most significant meeting to decide the

192 Notes future economic plans of the country, was held in İzmir. However, in spite of their dominance in the economy, not a single non-Muslim was invited to this congress. See for details, Rıfat Bali, The “Varlık Vergisi” Affair: a Study of its Legacy-Selected Documents (Istanbul: The ISIS Press, 2005), 41. 22 Rıfat Bali, “Politics of Turkification during the Single Party period,” in Turkey Beyond Nationalism. Towards Post-Nationalist Identities, Hans-Lukas Kieser (ed.) (London and New York: I.B Tauris, 2006), 47. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 43. In a similar vein, the “Citizen Speak Turkish” campaign started in 1928, and gained momentum in the early 1930s. 25 For an analysis of the nationalization process of the Régie, see Ertuğrul Ökten, “Cumhuriyetin ilk yıllarında tütün,” in Tütün Kitabı, Emine Gürsoy Naskali (ed.) (Istanbul: Kitabevi Yayıncılık, 2003). Ökten suggests that the establishment of the monopoly was strongly opposed by the people in the tobacco sector favoring the free market economy. Their efforts, however, turned out to be futile when the government decided to be fully in charge of tobacco production and sales in order to collect the tobacco revenues. 26 Tobacco expertise is still an occupation in Turkey; however, the experts have to finish a four-year university education to be able to work. Gradually the education period of the tobacco school rose to two, three, and then four years. In 1983, the school was joined to a university and in 1987 the graduates started to be given the title of “Tobacco Industrial Engineer” but that title was later on replaced with “Tobacco Technology Engineer.” The students are trained in four different branches: tobacco industry management; tobacco policy; tobacco technology and chemistry; and tobacco cultivation and breeding. 27 Naşit Yılmaz, Türkiye’de Tütün Eksperleri Mesleği ve Tarihsel Gelişimi (İzmir Güney Ajans, 1995), 17. 28 Between 1936 and 1954, 664 people obtained the tobacco experts qualifying certificate, see Yılmaz, Türkiye’de Tütün Eksperleri Mesleği, 20. Although the list of the people does not provide the ethnic identities of experts, their names might provide a clue. Out of 664 certified experts, I counted the names of 42 people who might have been minorities. In subsequent years, the number of minorities seems to decrease even more. 29 “İnhisarlarda eksperliğin tarihçesi,” Türk Tütünü, 86 (1941): 9. For exactly the same account, see Faruk Gürpınar, “Türkiye’de tütün eksperliği mesleğinin tarihsel gelişimi,” in Tütün Kitabı, Emine Gürsoy Naskali (ed.) (Istanbul: Kitabevi Yayıncılık, 2003). Also Fahri İpekoğlu suggests that the majority of experts at the Régie were Greeks and Armenians, see “Tütün eksperlerinin mesleki görevleri ve yetiştirilme tarzları hakkında rapor,” Tütün Dünyası, 2 (1959): 5. 30 “İnhisarlarda eksperliğin tarihçesi,” Türk Tütünü, 86 (1941): 9.

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31 Çağlar Keyder, The Definition of Peripheral Economy: Turkey 1923–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 41. 32 It is pertinent to underscore the significance of tobacco revenues for the Turkish economy in the early Republic. Government took several steps to support the tobacco sector. In 1924, a bank called Tütünbank was established to deal with economic transactions concerning tobacco. See for the details, Şafak Erdal, 70 Yıllık Tütünbank (Istanbul: Tütüncüler Bankası, 1994). In 1927, the first Tobacco Congress was held in Akhisar. The government began to support tobacco cultivators in 1927. However, tobacco subsidies would be provided on a continuous basis only after 1947. In 1956, the National Tobacco Committee was founded to undertake the planning of national tobacco policies. 33 “Eksper namzetlerine,” Tütün Dünyası, 16 (1960): 1. 34 Yahya Tezel, Cumhuriyet Döneminin İktisadi Tarihi (1923–1950) (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1994), 177. 35 “Almanya ile tütün ticaretimiz,” Türk Tütünü, 79 (1941): 3. 36 Dilek Barlas, Etatism and Diplomacy in Turkey, 1929–1939: Economic and Foreign Policy Strategies in an Uncertain World (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 148. 37 Ibid.,152. 38 Barlas, Etatism and Diplomacy, 153; Cemil Koçak, Türk Alman İlişkileri (1923–39). İki Dünya Savaşı Arasındaki Dönemde Siyasal, Kültürel, Askeri ve Ekonomik İlişkiler (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1991), 242–3; Baskın Oran, Türk Dış Politikası. Kurtuluş Savaşından Bugüne Olgular, Belgeler, Yorumlar, Vol. I (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2001), 305. 39 The tobacco journals widely discussed the troublesome process of exports to Germany. Türk Tütünü, 2 (1938): 3; Türk Tütünü, 6 (1938): 3-4; Türk Tütünü, 33 (1939): 1; Türk Tütünü, 44 (1940): 3. 40 According to the article “Almanya’da tütün aleyhine cereyan,” Türk Tütünü, 25 (1939): 5–13, Hitler stated that “30 milligrams of nicotine is enough to kill a person. The nicotine in 7 cigarettes is 30 milligrams. Thus, a person who smokes 7 cigarettes in a row can die.” 41 “Almanya’da tütün aleyhine propoganda,” Tütün Dünyası, 27 (1939): 8. 42 Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 219. 43 Ibid., 220. 44 Ibid., 173 and 194. Müller’s dissertation written in 1939 was the world’s first medical study showing the relationship between tobacco and lung cancer. 45 Eleonore Bachinger, Martin McKee and Anna Gilmore, “Tobacco policies in Nazi Germany: Not as simple,” Public Health, 122 (2008): 497–505. 46 “Almanya’da tütünlerimize düşmanlık mı yapılıyor?’ Türk Tütünü, 28 (1939): 6. 47 Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, 207.

194 Notes 48 “Müsamaha edemeyeceğimiz hareketler,” Türk Tütünü, 14 (1938): 3–5. 49 The article also cited several rumors that a number of Jewish businessmen were involved in Zionist activities in Turkey. In the article, these Jews were criticized for pursuing individual interests that would eventually harm the Turkish tobacco sector. Moreover, a Jewish tobacco trader was also criticized for being adamant to conclude trade agreements with international tobacco companies in İzmir. The trader’s ambition to conclude deals with the Germans by circumventing local companies, before the official opening of the tobacco market, was denounced for being unethical. In the article, however, the trader’s misconduct was associated with his ethnic identity, his being Jewish, rather than with being an ambitious entrepreneur. 50 In 1930, a conglomerate made up of Reemtsma and Haus Neuerburg controlled 82.4 percent of the national cigarette market in Germany. See Beate Meyer, “‘Aryanized’ and financially ruined: The case of Garbáty Family,” in Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation, Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon, and Chana Schütz (eds) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 66. 51 “Müsamaha edemeyeceğimiz hareketler,” Türk Tütünü, 14 (1938): 3–5. According to the article, when the Reemtsma director paid a visit to Greece, he canceled all sorts of transactions with the Jewish tobacco companies there and supplied its need from 53 local Greek merchants instead. Likewise in Bulgaria, under the directives of the Nazi government, Reemtsma canceled its business with Jewish companies and bought 9 million kilos of tobacco from 14 Bulgarian companies. 52 Ibid. 53 “Biz ne istiyoruz? Ne söylüyoruz?” Türk Tütünü, 15 (1939): 3–4. 54 “Milli ziraat seferberliği: Çok istihsale doğru,” Türk Tütünü, 47 (1940): 3–4. 55 “İngiltere hesabına yapılacak mubayaat,” Türk Tütünü, 109–10 (1943): 3; “İngiliz mubayaatı münasebetile,” Türk Tütünü, 111–12 (1943): 3; “İngilterenin tütüncülüğümüze karşı durumu,” Türk Tütünü, 140 (1944): 3. 56 “İsraf, milli davalara ihanettir,” Türk Tütünü, 117–18 (1943): 3. 57 “Tasarruf terbiyesi,” Türk Tütünü, 122 (1943): 3. 58 “Mirasyedilik zamanı değil,” Türk Tütünü, 113–14 (1943): 4. 59 Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, 208. 60 Bali, The “Varlık Vergisi,” 36. 61 For further elaboration of the “Muslim Turkish bourgeoisie,” see Aktar “Homogenising the Nation.” 62 Cited in Bali, The “Varlık Vergisi,” 55. 63 The Capital Tax stayed in effect for sixteen months and was annulled in 1944. See for details, Bali, The “Varlık Vergisi.” 64 The September 6 and 7 events took place in 1955, resulting in the acceleration of the immigration of non-Muslims. Large-scale riots took place in Istanbul over

Notes

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rumors that Atatürk’s birthplace house had been bombed in Salonica. Thousands of people attacked non-Muslim property, including shops, houses, churches, synagogues, and even cemeteries. 65 “Tütün ihracatımız: Can damarımız,” Türk Tütünü, 205 (1948): 10. 66 “Tütüncülüğümüz ve Amerika,” Türk Tütünü, 205 (1948): 10. 67 In 1947, President Truman introduced military and economic aid for both Greece and Turkey to prevent their falling under Soviet control. 68 Şevket Pamuk, “Agriculture and economic development in Turkey, 1870–2000,” in Agriculture and Economic Development in Europe Since 1870, Pedro Lains and Vicente Pinilla (eds) (London and New York: Routledge), 382. 69 “Tütüncülüğümüz ve Amerika,” Türk Tütünü, 205 (1948): 10. 70 Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer, 245. 71 Ibid. 72 Germans, unlike American, British, and French smokers, used to consume cigarettes made up of Oriental tobacco, instead of blended cigarettes. This explains why Germany constituted one of the most significant tobacco customers of Turkey for years. 73 For studies considering the production of Virginia tobacco in Turkey, see Akkoyunlu (1939). 74 Hasan Olgun. “Turkey,” in The Political Economy of Agricultural Pricing Policy: Africa and the Mediterranean (World Bank). Vol. 3, Anne Krueger, Maurice Schiff, and Alberto Valdés (eds) (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 257. 75 “Mavi küften kurtulamayacak mıyız?” Tütün Dünyası, 6 (1963): 9. 76 “Mavi küf,” Tütün Dünyası, 9 (1963): 17. 77 “Mavi küf afeti,” Tütün Dünyası, 39 (1962): 14. 78 Ibid. 79 “Tütün mildiyosu (mavi küf),” Tütün Dünyası, 11 (1963): 14.

Conclusion 1 Barbara Harriss-White, “Introduction,” in Agricultural Markets From Theory To Practice: Field Experience in Developing Countries, Barbara Harriss-White (ed.) (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 1. 2 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005a), 191. 3 Stephen Collier and Aihwa Ong, “Global assemblages, anthropological problems,” in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier (eds) (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

196 Notes 4 George Marcus, Ethnography through Thick and Thin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 17. 5 Gerhard Anders, Civil Servants in Malawi: Cultural Dualism, Moonlighting and Corruption in the Shadow of Good Governance (PhD Thesis: Erasmus Universiteit, 2005); Elizabeth Dunn, “Standards and person-making in East Central Europe,” in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier (eds) (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005); Julia Elyachar, Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo (Politics, History, and Culture) (London: Duke University Press, 2005); James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (London: Duke University Press, 2006); Tania M. Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (London: Duke University Press, 2007); Tara Schwegler, Politics in Action: Negotiating Authority and Building Markets in Mexico (PhD Thesis: University of Chicago, 2004). 6 Peter Benson, Tobacco Capitalism: Growers, Migrant Workers, and the Changing Face of a Global Industry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 7 David Griffith, “The moral economy of tobacco,” American Anthropologist, 111.4 (2009): 432–42. 8 Ann E. Kingsolver, “Farmers and farmworkers: Two centuries of strategic alterity in Kentucky’s tobacco fields,” Critique of Anthropology, 27.1 (2007): 87–102. 9 Catherine Alexander, Personal States. Making Connections between People and Bureaucracy in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Ildiko Beller-Hann and Chris Hann, Turkish Region. State, Market and Social Identities on the East Black Sea Coast. (Oxford: SAR Press, 2001); Koray Çalışkan, Market Threads. How Cotton Farmers and Traders Create a Global Commodity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

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Index accountability 31–2 Acquis Communitaire 46 actants 7, 53 Actor Network Theory (ANT) 6, 7, 8, 154–5 ad valorem duty 59 advertising 141 bans 129, 130 alcohol consumption 130, 132 America, United States of (USA) 41, 135, 145–7, 150 blue mold 148 financial sector 49 imports 135 American blend 4, 5, 55, 59–60, 71, 102, 124–7, 135, 137, 147, Americanization 147 ANT see Actor Network Theory anti-Americanism 146 anti-privatization 111, 112 anti-Semitism 136, 140, 142, 143 anti-smoking campaigns 123, 125, 128, 129, 133, 140, 141, 142 anti-smoking laws see smoking ban Appadurai, Arjun 6–7 Regimes of Value 6 assemblage 9, 53, 64, 66, 73, 154–5 Assembly see General Assembly Barry, Andrew 29, 48 politics versus political 29 BAT see British American Tobacco Berlusconi, Silvio 24 black market 4, 96 blends 53, 58–67, 71, 102, 124, 125, 127, 135, 137, 141, 147 blue mold 148–9 brands 4, 53, 59–60, 61, 127, 135 Bretton Woods 38, 41 British American Tobacco (BAT) 4, 37, 59, 109 Brown, Wendy 133 Burley tobacco 60, 135

Callon, Michel 20, 33–4, 48, 49–50, 73, 99 performative/performativity 73, 78, 99, 105 Camel 60, 135 packaging 135 Capital Market Board 30 Capital Tax Law 145 Çelikhan 102–5 Chhibber, Ajay 38 Cibali factory 126 citizenship 110, 116–18, 119, 121, 152, 153 Committee for the Adjustment to the European Union 42, 43 Commodity Chain Analysis 6 communism 146, 148–50 opposition 136 “Compulsory Use of Turkish Language” 138 Constitutional Court 111, 114 contract farming 3, 12, 37, 39, 46, 72, 73, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 92, 99, 101, 102–4 controversy 51, 53, 56, 57, 58, 62, 65 corruption 8, 19, 25, 26, 27, 56, 64, 92, 94, 95, 97, 99, 100 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) 26 CPI see Corruption Perception Index criminal networks 13, 91, 95 de Soto, Hernando 96, 98–9 Mystery of Capital, The 96 Other Path, The 96 Demirel, Süleyman 73–4 Democrat Party (DP) 75 Derviş, Kemal 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 75–6 Direct Income Subsidies 86 Directorate of Religious Affairs 131 dispossessed citizens 85–9, 97, 99 see Humphrey Caroline I am not sure if this is the right format

214 Index double delegation 48 DP see Democrat Party Ecevit, Bülent 19, 32, 40 economic crisis of 2001 3, 8–9, 11, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 27, 35, 38, 50, 65, 111, 151 economics 78 economists German 140 ????? economy 18, 142, 146 informal 95–9 national 138 secondary economy 96 shadow economy 96 Turkification 136, 138 war economy 96 Elyachar, Julia 98 Emergency Action Plan 111 entrepreneurship 24, 25, 96, 98, 101, 140 Muslim 138 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 13, 114, 115, 119, 120, 123, 124, 131, 132 Etatism 74, 75 ethnography 5, 9, 51, 153–6 method 50 multi-sited 6, 9, 154–5 EU see European Union Eurocentrism 8 European Tobacco 4 European Union (EU) 26, 43–8, 63, 117 Acquis Communitaire 46 Common Agriculture Policy 46 tobacco policies 46 experts 1, 2, 5, 8, 10, 11, 17–34, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 52, 53–8, 61, 65, 73, 77, 81, 93–5, 100, 104, 125–6, 139–41, 146–7, 149, 152–4 FCTC see Framework Convention on Tobacco Control Federal Reserve System (FED) 66 FED see Federal Reserve System Ferguson, James 26 fertilizers 83, 125, 146 filters 102, 103, 126, 127, 147, 150 Foreign Investment Law 111 Foucault, Michel 8, 11, 155 4/C status 110, 118–20

Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) 129 free market economy 19, 25, 34, 37, 41, 63, 64, 72, 78, 83, 87, 112 Friedman, Thomas 17 Gallaher 4 GAP see Southeastern Anatolia Project Garcia-Parpet, Marie-France 79 gender relations 117 General Assembly 10, 36, 38, 42–8 Gereffi, Gary 6 Germany 135, 140–2, 145, 148, 150 anti-Semitism 140 anti-smoking campaigns 140, 141, 142 exports to 140, 141 imports 146 Nazi regime 140, 141, 142 trade 140, 141, 142, 143, 147 Turkish dependence on 141, 144 US tobacco aid 146, 147 Gezi Park uprisings 114 global commodity chain 6 global health 124, 125, 153 discourse 133 policies 13 global standards 49, 65 globalization 6, 50, 65, 79 good governance 22, 25–7, 28 governmentality 11, 155, Greek communities 138 Green Card 87, 117 Grossman, Lawrence 79 hadith 131 haram 131, 132 Harriss-White, Barbara 154 Hart, Keith 95–6, 97–8 Harvey, David 99 health 127–9, 130, 132 Western ideology 132 health care 117, 128 discourse 132 health warnings 130 Hitler, Adolf 141 hizmet 113–15, 121 Holm, Petter 84 Hong Kong 97

Index Hopkins, Terence 6 Humphrey, Caroline 88 dispossessed citizens 85–9, 97, 99 identification cards 73, 80 IMF see International Monetary Fund Imperial Tobacco 4 Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) 74 Independence, War of 138 Independent Social Scientists 28–9 informal economy 95–9 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 2, 3, 11, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 25, 30, 32, 35, 38–42, 43, 45, 50, 57, 58, 64, 65, 78, 111 conditionality principle 38 ISI see Import Substitution Industrialization Japanese Tobacco International (JTI) 4 JDP see Justice and Development Party Jews 142–5 JTI see Japanese Tobacco International Justice and Development Party (JDP) 13, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 56, 76, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 131 Kemalism 130 Kemalist state 75 Keynes, John Maynard 19 koçans 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 89 Köhler, Horst 38 kolcu 137 Korzeniewicz, Miguel 6 landowners 85–6 Latour, Bruno 7, 36, 49, 50, 52, 53, 57, 65, 156 actants 7, 53 anthropology 53 cartography of controversies 50 nonhumans 5, 7, 8, 9, 14, 53, 73, 154, 156 “sociology of associations” 53 Lausanne Treaty 138, 150 Letter of Intent 30, 35, 38–9 lung cancer 141

215

Malinowski, Bronisław 5 Marcus, George 6 multi-sited ethnography 6, 9 Marlboro 60 Marshall Plan 146, 147 Mauss, Marcel 5, 41 mekruh 131, 132 Menderes, Adnan 75 Milli Ekonomi 138 Ministry of Finance 5, 54, 58–9, 61, 62, 64, 65 Mitchell, Timothy 78, 96, 98–9 monopoly see also TEKEL 3, 10, 37, 40, 51, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 62, 64, 72, 73, 74, 77, 81, 82, 83, 88, 92, 109, 111, 112, 126, 137, 139, 151 Monte Carlo 60 More 60 Mosse, David 66 Motherland Party 19, 74 Muharrem Decree 136 multinational companies 4, 49, 55, 57, 58–9, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 73, 77, 91–2, 127, 128 multi-sited ethnography 6, 9, 154–5 Mystery of Capital, The 96 National Tobacco Control Program 129 nationalism 14, 135–50, 153 Nationalist Action Party 19, 91 Nazi regime 140, 141, 142 neoliberalism 76, 110, 113, 114, 116, 121, 132, 133, 151, 152 new public health 137–9 nicotine 125, 126 Nielsen, Kåre 84 nonhumans 5, 7, 8, 9, 14, 53, 73, 154, 156 non-Muslims 139, 145 obesity 128 OECD 30 Ong, Aihwa 116 Oriental tobacco 4–5, 14, 59–62, 65, 71, 102, 103, 124, 125–7, 135–7, 140–1, 144–7, 149–50, 153 Osborne, Thomas 128 Other Path, The 96 Ottoman Empire 136, 137, 153 oversupply 77–8, 100, 101, 104

216 Index Özal, Turgut 22–3, 24, 25, 27, 28, 75 packing machines, hard-box 53, 54–8, 64, 65 parallel markets 96 performative/performativity 73, 78, 99, 105 pesticides 79, 83, 125 Philip Morris 4, 55, 60, 112 Philsa 4 Polanyi, Karl 28 policy in the making 49–67 privatization 3, 19, 22, 37, 39, 40, 109–13, 119 Privatization Administration 111 Public Debt Administration 136 public health 127–9, 153 discourse 124, 127, 128, 130 quotas 72, 73, 74, 84 Qur’an 131 R. J. Reynolds 4, 135 Reemtsma 142 Régie 136–40, 150 nationalization 42 Regimes of Value 6 Appadurai, Arjun 6–7 regulatory agencies 49, 51–3, 58, 63, 64, 66, 103, 151 proliferation 50 regulatory board 2, 12, 29, 43, 44–5, 56, 61, 64, 67 Religious Affairs, Directorate of 131 Riles, Annelise 36, 79 Roboski 91 Roitman, Janet 92, 97–8 Rose, Nikolas 76 Samsun 126 Saracoğlu, Şükrü 145 Science and Technology Studies 11, 73 SEEs see state economic enterprises self-fulfilling individuals 76, 89 shadow economy 96 sharecropping/sharecroppers 85–6, 87, 88, 93 landless 86 smoking/smokers 123–5, 128–33, 135–50

smoking ban 2, 4, 13, 129–32, 141 smuggling/smugglers 10, 91, 97, 100, 137 social policy 50, 117, 121 social welfare 19, 117 “sociology of associations” 53 see Latour, Bruno (I am not sure if this is the right format) socio-technical/socio-technological devices 20, 77, 96, 98 Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) 82 state economic enterprises (SEEs) 75 Structural Adjustment Programs 19 subsidies 37, 40, 46, 75 surplus 37, 72, 74, 77, 78, 88, 95, 101, 112 TAPDK see Tobacco and Alcohol Market Regulatory Authority tar 126 tax 58–67, 130, 136, 145 wealth 86 technicalization 2, 11, 20, 29, 44, 47–8, 56–7, 63, 77, 115, 152–3 technocrats 5, 23, 66, 152, 154 TEKEL see also monopoly 3, 4, 5, 12, 13, 35, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83–4, 93, 94, 100, 1 03, 104, 109–10, 118, 126, 127, 139, 152 demonstrations 118 privatization 37, 109–13 Research and Development 71 resistance 58, 112, 151, 152–3 strike 120 workers 118–21 TEKEL 2000 127 TI see Transparency International Tobacco and Alcohol Market Regulatory Authority (TAPDK) 5, 12, 37, 43 Tobacco Experts Association 1, 10 Tobacco Law 11–12, 13, 37–8, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 48, 56, 72, 76, 78, 81, 83, 101, 102, 112, 129, 151 Transparency International (TI) 26 Treaty of Lausanne 138, 150 True Path Party 55, 73–4 Truman Doctrine 146 Türem, Umut 52 Turkification of economy 136, 138, 139, 142, 150

Index Unakıtan, Kemal 112 unregulated market 12, 28, 73, 84, 89, 92, 97–8, 100, 104, 152, USA see America, United States of Virginia tobacco 5, 60, 124, 125, 126, 127, 146, 147 Wallerstein, Immanuel 6 war 97 war economy 96 War of Independence 138 waste 101, 104 Watts, Michael J. 79

217

wealth tax 86 WHO see World Health Organization Winchester 60 Winston 60 World Bank 2, 3, 11, 17, 18, 20, 22, 25, 27, 30, 38, 39, 50, 57, 58, 64, 65, 75, 78, 111 World Health Organization (WHO) 129 Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) 129 World War I 137 World War II 140, 141, 142, 143 Yeşilay 132