You need a small team and independent action for destruction. For construction, however, these are not enough.

Paul Krugman’s new book End This Depression Now has been on the shelves for a week now. And the latest book of Osman Ulagay, Türkiye Kime Kalacak – To Whom will Turkey be left?, was released two weeks ago. I downloaded the first one on my Kindle, bought the second one, and read both of them last weekend. Both are interested not in how we came to this point, but how we can turn things around. Krugman focuses on the way out of the 2008 crisis while Ulagay seeks to find out how the transformation process that accelerated with the Justice and Development Party taking over power in 2002 can progress to the next phase. In short, both Krugman and Ulagay are interested not in today, but in the future. One analyzes the current developments from this perspective and the other makes policy recommendations. In fact, both do something similar. I think it is enlightening to read the two books one after another. Today, let me talk about the new horizons Ulagay’s book opened for me. Here are the questions the book raised in my mind: “How can we move from destruction to construction? Can one team make both destruction and construction? How do construction companies operate?”

Honestly, I especially wonder how Turkey will move from destruction to construction. I think this was the main question I had in my mind even when I did not know it. I believe that particularly since 2007, Turkey has been so busy with trying to set the platform for doing business and area cleaning that it has not had the time to start the construction per se. And seeing that all parts of Ankara are falling apart, I become even more pessimistic about the construction process. I think this was the main theme of Osman Ulagay’s forward-looking book. One reads a book to find a solution to one's own question, just as the tongue always touches the aching tooth. Such is life. Anyway, Turkey has always been a country of rapid change. In the 1960s, when I was born, only 30 percent of the population lived in urban areas. Now the share of urban population has reached 75 percent. Today, foreigners come to live in the urban Turkey.

We encounter new traumas before we can deal with the previous ones. We still don’t seem to have a strategy on how to deal with traumas. The world becomes flat, but Turks cannot speak Turkish. On the one hand, the globalization process intensifies and Turkey’s interest in the outside world supposedly grows. The picture is represented as if Turkey is growing into a world state again. But on the other hand, 87 percent of the population does not have a passport, the latest Ipsos survey says.

Now forget about all other reasons and let me present a very simple one: Turkey charges the highest passport fee among all other countries, even when it is considered that the fee was halved in June 2010. In this process of rapid transformation, however, Turkey has to strengthen the mutual relations among the people of the region. We must make use of the opportunity window that the “Arab Spring” has opened. What is the easiest way to strengthen mutual relations? To deal with the challenges obstructing mutual relations, right? Lately, I have been thinking that we are ignoring a whole bunch of micro problems regarding life as we are too busy with huge macro issues, like bringing order to the world. That being the case, we have not had the time to complete the transformation process. Without setting strategies and priorities, people’s lives cannot be changed and Turkey cannot move from destruction to construction. In rhetoric, we are jumping to the sky. But there is nothing in practice.

Black and white TV broadcasts started in Turkey when I was a child. The TV was something to watch occasionally, it had only audio and no video. I think this is exactly the case in Turkey nowadays: There is only audio, no video.

Destruction is easy, construction is difficult. You need a small team and a monophonic action for destruction. For construction, however, these are not enough. Construction cannot be accomplished and embraced by all unless the accumulations of the country are mobilized entirely. The method used for destruction does not work for construction. For a good process of construction, you first need a project, which is the constitution.

The construction process requires handicraft. All you need for destruction, however, is a sledgehammer. In the end, I liked Ulagay’s book.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 08.05.2012