Ideology, Utopia and Practice: Rural Development in Turkey Until the Late 1940s

Authors : Selami Mete Akbaba

Pages : 123-146

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Publication Date : 2024-06-30

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :This study evaluates the rural development policies of a country with a large proportion of its population living in rural areas, their ideological justifications, utopian designs, and practices that confront socio-economic reality. The period to be researched is defined as the end of the Second World War, which can be considered as the first stage of the nation-state from the end of the empire, in a sense, when industrialization efforts were still very weak and economic expectations were concentrated on rural production. As is known, while the rural population in Turkey constituted a large part of the population until the mid-1980s, it was the main element of the labor force, production and thus the economy, especially until the 1950s. In order to avoid reducing this period of time, which can be called the Early Republican period, to a narrative of top-down policies, the following three elements were taken into account in the background: Capitalism, progressivism, and the international conjuncture. Moreover, in the nation-building of the newly established state, peasants were sometimes coded as the community that needed to be civilized and sometimes as the pure ethnic essence that remained untouched. In other words, since it would not be correct to reduce the governments’ approach to the rural to economic data alone, the countryside was both the production center of consent as it constituted the majority of the population and the human resource that needed to be ideologically shaped. For this reason, this study first examines the ideology of statism, which can be considered as the ideology of the period, and then its manifestation in the countryside, peasantism. For this purpose, on the one hand, the organic intellectuals and leaders of the period were referenced, and on the other hand, the rural-oriented activities of the so-called Halkevleri (People’s Houses) were discussed. The concretization of this discourse was discussed through the model villages, a kind of visual modernization project, and the village institutes, which aimed to radically transform the countryside through education. In this way, the developmentalist initiatives from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the 1940s, which attributed a special importance to the countryside, were evaluated from ideological, utopian, and practical perspectives.
Keywords : Kırsal Kalkınma, Devletçilik, Köycülük, Numune Köyler, Köy Enstitüleri