Middle class implies stability. Not in the sense of creating it, but registering it.

I think there are two types of persons: those who have bank accounts and those who don’t. In Turkey, 42 percent of the population at or above 15 years of age are do not have bank accounts. If banks are easy targets in a given country, one reason is that not many people are engaged with banks. The rate in Turkey is on the rise, however. Those who take a swipe at banks without thinking had better be more cautious. By the way, Islamic instruments of banking are not involved in the calculation.

In South Korea, 98 percent of the population at or above 15 have gone to a bank at least once in their lives. The rates are 10 percent in Egypt and 4 percent on Yemen. Can you imagine what underbanking means? Since the 2008 crisis, people’s hatred of the gangs of evil organized under the name of banks has been growing, as was the case in Turkey after the 2001 crisis. Can you imagine what the world would be like without banks? Let’s imagine what sort of exclusion it means not to have gone to a bank even once.

To have a bank account means to be a part of the country’s economic system. It represents the registration of a person’s presence in the economic system. People who have bank accounts are able to allocate funds between the present and the future. Having a bank account means having a deposit account. Why do people have deposit accounts? To make payments, to save, or to get bank loans. If you want a bank loan, the bank opens a deposit account in your name and transfers the loan amount to the account. Hence, the deposit volume increases as the loan volume increases.

To not have a bank account means to be trapped in the present, to have to wait until tomorrow to enjoy the benefits of tomorrow. Credit cards and other financial services also can be put within this framework. Having a bank account means to be included. I am not claiming that economic exclusion ends if people get banked. Neither do I imply that being banked is a substitute for social assistance. I am not that careless. It’s not that I have forgotten the importance of social assistance, infrastructure investments or education, either. For instance, to have a bank account, there has to be a bank where you live. If physical access is expensive and difficult, you cannot benefit from the banking services. This is why payment by mobile phone is most commonly used in Sub-Saharan Africa, with 16 percent of the population in the working age. The rates in other developing countries float around 3 percent.

What I am trying to say is that banks register the middle class if not create it. From this perspective, becoming banked can be considered a sign that with a middle class with bank accounts, the higher the chances for democratization. Reading the Arab transformations from this perspective, 10 percent of Egyptians have bank accounts compared to 58 percent in Turkey. The latter has completed its economic transformation while the former is on the bottom rung of the ladder. The rates of the 15-plus population with bank accounts are 15 percent in Syria, 37 percent in Lebanon, and 25 percent in Jordan.

Middle class implies stability. Not in the sense of creating it, but registering it. Just like banks. Whether they can fulfill their functions or not depends on the overall circumstances. I have kept in my mind what my Palestinian driver said the other day: “Amman is a desert flower,” he said. “But so was Damascus two years ago.”

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 28.05.2013