If we are proud of the stability Turkey achieved, we have to take a look back. Are we contended or not?

Today let me begin with a question that I am obsessed about recently: is securing stability sufficient? The day before, the lower-screen sidebar, the classic of economic news channels, said that Portugal and Italy have accomplished to sell some amount of bonds: Thank God, they have survived 'successfully' the auctions that have been waited with anxiety.  The countries have taken a big step to finance their budget deficits. What is more, financial investors did not even charge extra interest fees. Interest on bonds stood below the 'threshold limit'. How perfect.

Turkey also went through similar times. In fact, this was the case over the last decade of the twentieth century. The anxiety of "we have 'survived' this auction, but what about the next one" was always on the agenda. Fortunately, we have not been hearing such news for Turkey for long. This is enabled by the economic program which was implemented right after the 2001 crisis and was in essence maintained by the proceeding governments.

Circumstances might change

Let us revisit the question above. Let us define stability as the situation where the current state is preserved. First the extreme: The situation is stable and unchanging. If you live in Switzerlend, you would most probably not complain that nothing changes. If you are among the lucky minority that had the chance to migrate from Afghanistan however, such probability would startle you. Or if you live in Mexico in the face of the drug cartels, preservation of the current state (or the stability) would not be the best for you.

Therefore, what is of importance should be not protecting the current state, i.e. maintaining the stability, but to identify the stability of which is protected. Of course stability does not strictly mean that the current state is protected and kept stable. The current state might also be a situation which changes regularly at the same degree.

We made no progress

Take economic development, for instance. If Turkey achieves 4.5 percent average growth rate over the next years, this would imply a stable growth performance. The 'current state' would not change since the growth rate achieved over the last six decades was no different.

If you dig in the current state issue, you would come across one of the main themes of my commentaries: Compared to the per capita income level in developed countries, Turkey had made no significant progress about per capita income over the last six decades. We made no headway. There exists a significant stability in this regard.

The moral of the story is if we are proud of the stability Turkey achieved, we have to take a look back. Those we are contended with the current state might argue that Turkey 'shines like a star'. What is more, in that case there will be no need to make effort to change the current state. So are we contended or not? This is the main question to precede any attempt for change.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 18.01.2011