Seeing Turkey's lost years in South Korea

Until the late sixties, South Korea was a country that could not be compared with Turkey; today it is a country nearly three times the size of Turkey in terms of economic development and size and many other indicators. It has developed products that have become world brands in many fields and offered them to the world market, has moved to nuclear technology and has raised its per capita national income to the level of 28,000 dollars. This was the decisive reality that struck minds as a result of President Abdullah Gül's trip to South Korea.

A typical Max Weber question comes to mind here: the question is not how South Korea has made such great progress in such a short time, but rather how Turkey, which was comparatively more advantageous in this process, has failed to make that progress.

Today, after the passing of 40-50 years, Turkey is making efforts to import nuclear technology from South Korea. Because, in addition to South Korea's current twenty nuclear power plants, there is work on at least 10 more plants whose construction or projects are ongoing, to be completed in the coming years. Turkey, meanwhile, still continues to struggle for years with debates over whether to move to nuclear technology at all.

A nuclear power plant must not be evaluated only by the amount of electricity it will produce. A plant also represents the transition to nuclear technology, which is a development of a nature that would make the country leap at once to a new level of development. There are currently over 400 nuclear power plants in the world, and in the coming years this number must multiply geometrically, yet Turkey has for years been unable even to dream of moving to this technology.

Setting this subject aside, the technology of the Heron unmanned aerial vehicles we have been importing from Israel is not that complicated a technology. So much so that it is said even the tradesmen of OSTİM can make it. There are a number of countries in the world that make these vehicles, and Turkey's being made to feel dependent on Israel in order to buy these vehicles reveals a very meaningful situation. Today, for at least a few years, we have been seeing the rapid distances Turkey has covered in many fields and we feel proud. It can be observed that in the last few years Turkey has truly made dizzyingly fast progress in every field. But when one encounters such comparable countries or situations, the hanging question continues to gnaw at minds. Why was Turkey unable to make this progress in time? Why was it so late even in producing the simplest Heron? What held Turkey back, what blocked it?

South Korea is a country where, with its 49 million people, Protestant and Catholic, Confucian, Buddhist and atheist, forming the mortar of a national identity takes great skill. Moreover, it is a people that has seen occupations in every period of its history and has come out of none of its wars with great victories. It is a people that completed its state-building after the last war it fought with the North in 1953, a war in which people from 21 countries came to fight and die for it. From this people there has emerged a nation that works intensively for a purpose and has brought the country among the considerable nations of the world. Indeed, what kind of culture the motivation that drives this nation to such discipline and hard work rests on is a serious question worth dwelling on. It is worth dwelling on the values that nevertheless carried this culture, in which the components necessary for a nationalism are seen to be absent, to this success. But really, from whichever side we look, the question we come to is still the same: South Korea's development, despite the apparent absence of motivations that would feed its national culture, does not constitute a sociological problem, but Turkey's failure to achieve a corresponding development despite its so rich material and social capital must be regarded as a serious sociological problem.

The most important ground of economic development is law, and while we were grappling with these questions, the news coming one after another from the Court of Cassation and the Istanbul 13th Court was in fact practically shouting the address of Turkey's greatest loss.

Does a country in which legal procedures are so openly subject to the arbitrary practices of judges, legal texts are regarded as entirely formalities, and legal authority has essentially been appropriated by certain circles need to look elsewhere for an account of its lost years?

Since the sixties Turkey has become a country stuffed into the narrow-minded calculations of a coup-making mentality. Since that day, an outlook that has regarded blocking every advance for the country, whether out of its ignorance or its treachery, as a skill has confronted the country on every occasion. All the developments achieved in Turkey in exceptional times have been possible thanks to getting around this mentality.

That justice, instead of being the foundation of dominion, has become a property disposed of arbitrarily in its own right is not today's problem; unfortunately it is the most determining issue of all of these lost years of ours.

Law in South Korea? There is no doubt that it works much better than in Turkey.