Population and managing its problems

What exactly is the relationship between economic development or underdevelopment and population? The simple answer in the social sciences to this question points to a linear relationship between population size and power. Since ancient times, one of the most important measures of power for states has been the size of the population they govern.

Yet, strangely, from the sixties onward, Eastern-Islamic societies were told that one of the most important reasons for their underdevelopment was their excess population. It was in fact clear even then that this suggestion was simply based on a West-centered risk assessment. It was clear that Western societies, which in their condition at the time were completing their urbanization, would at a stage afterward lose all the advantages they had obtained in this period because of the population factor alone.

Sociology, demography and economics, and even psychiatry and theology, turned the suggestions on this subject into scientific campaigns. They kept explaining how great the problems were that having many children caused for a country, a society, an economy, a family, a woman, even a child.

Under the combined effect of all these campaigns, a family with one or two children became a complete norm, and great pressures began to form on those who exceeded this norm, first of all from their own close circle.

These pressures also confirmed the model of power operating from the bottom up proposed by the famous French thinker Michel Foucault, but this model still did not work in one direction only; so as not to leave things to chance, it continued to be operated from the top down as well.

Returning to our initial question, that is, the relationship between development and population: this relationship in fact did not exist at all, or if it did, it was always the opposite relationship. If there is a growing population, there will also be problems it creates, and these problems should not be hard for those who aspire to govern.

Yet in our case, it seems that cutting off problems, trying to eliminate the places where problems arise, was always adopted as a model, as a method of problem-solving. If urbanization produces a need for housing and gives rise to a need for health and other services, then rather than focusing on meeting these needs and establishing institutions for that purpose, keeping people in the village must have seemed a much cheaper, shorter, trouble-free, radical solution.

If young people who graduate from high schools demand university places and the number of universities at hand does not suffice to meet everyone's demand, you try to prevent entry to universities by imposing thresholds and coefficients. There, you have a solution.

For some reason, an approach of opening somewhat more schools when existing ones are insufficient, and, if possible, not depriving anyone who demands it of the opportunity for education, was not adopted.

To explain this approach as incompetent administration still requires assuming good faith. Yet the part of the problem concerning the excessive ambition and hostile attitude displayed in maintaining a certain elitist power has been far more decisive. However, the excuse put forward was the difficulty of managing problems.

If we keep looking from this level, we can underline a difference that has become somewhat more pronounced today in the style of approaching problems. Society by its nature is a living being, and as it develops it produces problems, foreseen or unforeseen... Skill in governing distinguishes itself by the capacity to cope with these new problems. When a problem emerges, sweeping it under the rug is also one of the ways of coping with it, as are ignoring it or belittling it...

Süleyman Demirel's following words, seeing the headscarf as a problem, were also a way of coping with a problem: "we did not have such things in my country." In these words, setting aside the proprietary arrogance in the way a ruler claims his own country, there stuck out either that he did not know that country, or, at best, a lack of awareness that some problems in a society may well arise later.

Yet one of the most important differences in the understanding of governance that stands out in many fields today lies in seeing the problems a society produces as an opportunity rather than as a disadvantage. Urbanization is not a problem but an opportunity; for example, it offers the ruler the opportunity to manage it well. Indeed, we can say that from the hour the AK Parti came to power, it has approached all problem areas as a matter of making the most of an opportunity. Migration is an unavoidable phenomenon; arrivals in the city will of course produce a need for housing, will produce unemployment, but the construction sector, set in motion by appropriate regulations made to meet the need for housing, will both raise the standard of housing quality and bring about a structural transformation in employment. Thus many problems can plainly be evaluated as an opportunity, provided only that one aspires to govern with courage.

Likewise, close to 2 million people apply to university each year to study. Today there is an approach that, instead of seeing this as a problem that would reduce one to helplessness, again evaluates it as an opportunity. Thanks to this approach, the universities opened today in every part of the country both form the dynamic of the economy and turn our country's human resources into a reserve that can be put to use.

In fact the country is the same country and the problems are the same, but today the problems do not crush; on the contrary, they are evaluated as an area of opportunity that mobilizes the country's resources.