How to Rescue Turkey.(political process evaluation)(Brief Article)

Turkey is already paying a very heavy price for a crisis that seemed, at first blush, a simple clash of personalities between two of our leaders. Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit and President Ahmet Necdet Sezer clashed at a stormy meeting of the National Security Council. Both are widely respected for their uprightness and their determination to improve the state of the nation. So what went wrong?

The immediate problem was, of course, that neither realized the spotlight under which international financial markets had placed Turkey--and them. The result of the row was three days of escalating market turmoil, which left the government's economic plan in ruins. A run on the Turkish lira cost the Treasury hundreds of millions of dollars. Interest rates soared to more than 5,000 percent. The IMF- backed anti-inflation program collapsed, and the lira was allowed to float, falling 30 percent. The long-term consequences are harder to estimate, at least until the dust settles. It is unlikely, though, that this will lead to the fall of the government in the weeks ahead.

Those of us who had hoped that Turkey was within months of seeing an end to its decades-old scourge of runaway inflation are bitterly disappointed. The short-term outlook could be grimmer if recession sets in. Turkey has known financial crises before, but the scale of the present crisis is without precedent in the eight decades of the republic. Turkey has much to be proud of. It has transformed itself in a generation into an urban-industrial country. It already has a functioning customs union with the European Union, something that virtually none of the other candidate countries for full EU membership has achieved.

Europeans often grumble that Turkey is too authoritarian. But inside Turkey the problem more often seems to be lack of discipline and effective cohesion. The present crisis is a case in point. The government did not have the power to implement its ambitious reform program without risking having its fragile coalition lose support in Parliament. That is why the lessons it points up for Turkey and other countries are not just economic and financial, important though those lessons are. At one level the crisis ...