Negotiating modernization through United States foreign assistance: Turkey's Marshall Plan (1948--1952) re-interpreted.

Abstract

Why do Western societies, despite their overpowering financial and political influence, fail to dictate the course of non-Western modernization? Engaging this question, I critically review the epistemological role of the West/non-West divide in the sociology of modernity and present an alternative framework for the evaluation of foreign assistance programs. I contend that particular configuration of local and global dynamics may sometimes overturn the power inequalities between donor and recipient societies, providing less powerful elites crucial opportunities to extensively revise the superimposed modernization projects. In making this argument, I examine the donor and the recipient societies both on their own terms and in relation to each other. Pursuing such an approach, I delineate both the conflicting perspectives of modernization within each society as well as their negotiation through the disparate local and global issues confronting them. I apply this framework to the case of U.S.-sponsored Marshall Plan in Turkey (1948-1952). I contend that disparate histories of social development as dictated by the distinct patterns of state formation and capitalist development led to different visions of economic modernization among Turkish and North American elites. These views were further articulated through the contemporaneous domestic struggles and the political threats posed by the Soviet Union. The ensuing coalitions and discontent provided crucial opportunities to the Turkish governments to outmaneuver the Marshall Plan authority's modernization objectives in the country. Focusing on the U.S.-imposed modernization projects concerning bureaucratic centralization, agricultural mechanization and economic planning, I reach to two major conclusions: First, U.S. and Turkish elites formed their views about Turkey's modernization through disparate factors. Whereas U.S. elites approached Turkey's Marshall Plan through the lenses of U.S. overseas expansionism, scientific management, liberal corporatism and the impending global struggle with the Soviet Union, Turkish elites viewed it through the Turkey's Westernization process, transition to competitive politics, etatist corporatism and the Soviet territorial demands. Second, these factors sometimes brought certain political elites together within and across the two societies; yet at other times, they caused various conflicts among them. Such conjunctural consensus and dissent restricted the degree to which the U.S. officials could impose their vision of modernization upon the Turkish governments and led to major revisions in the initial U.S. modernization efforts in Turkey.