The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank governors have left İstanbul, the sirens accompanying the black VIP limos no longer wail and the city's traffic has geared up from a total standstill to its more accustomed slow crawl. It has been an instructive week and a crash course for those of us wondering whither the global economy will wander. Yet let me confess that throughout the meetings, I couldn't help but peer through half-shut eyes and try to reconstruct in my imagination where the economy had been. More to the point, I tried to imagine what İstanbul would have been like in September 1955, when the governors first convened in İstanbul, celebrating the 10th anniversary of their establishment.İstanbul was a city then at the very edge of the Cold War -- a frontier city rather than the financial hub it proudly declared itself this week. There would have been hardly any traffic then. I first came to the city as a young'un in 1967, and most of the traffic consisted of stretched Chevrolets and Fords, doubling as dolmuşes or shared taxis. Ten years before that, I am told, the most common vehicle in the unglobalized city were 1938 Fords. The Hilton Hotel was newly opened, commissioned, it seems, virtually for the occasion. It is still an extraordinary building, the embodiment of pure modernism, but nowadays it is on a hillside surrounded by glass-boxed clutter and would have seemed more extraordinary 54 years ago. There was even a special 60 kuruş commemorative stamp in purple showing the brand-spanking-new hotel, not to mention a 20 kuruş in crimson rose showing İstanbul University, where many of the meetings were held. There wasn't enough room in the Hilton for everyone, and the overflow stayed on the SS Samsun, a Turkish maritime cruiser which was moored specially for the occasion.
The economy was in a mess, largely because of massive crop failures which began in 1954 (there was an 11 percent contraction that year) and partly because Prime Minister Adnan Menderes had a "seeming phobia about any aspect of economic planning which led to a lack of any clearly formulated overall economic policy, even for government expenditures,” according to Walter Weiker, a historian of the 1960-61 military coup in Turkey. “The years 1954 to 1958 were ones of increasing inflation, continued balance-of-payments difficulties and other economic problems,” Anne Kreuger wrote in her 1974 economic history of Turkey. Transparency was not the rule, and the government was not receptive to outside interference. A report on the causes of inflation and the need for better coordination of government expenditure, prepared by a US team, was suppressed. Copies were rounded up and the Turkish economist who helped in its preparation was “frowned upon” -- whatever that means.
However, the most bizarre aspect of the 1955 IMF meeting, and the one I find hard to reconcile was that it took place just a week after the city of İstanbul had erupted into violence. Sept. 6 and 7, 1955, are remembered grimly as the days of a virtual “pogrom” against Greeks and other minorities living in the city. The shops of Beyoğlu were systematically looted, and there are haunting photographs of an avenue littered with broken glass and carpeted with unraveled bolts of looted cloth. We now know those riots were incited by the authorities themselves, who spread an exaggerated tale of Atatürk's home in Thessalonica being bombed. They did so, it seems, in part because the British were concerned that the Turkish public opinion did not appear to be backing its government over Cyprus. A hasty call from London to the İstanbul governor resulted in a situation which got wildly out of hand.
This week's IMF meeting was also punctuated by violent protests (some of them actually taking place on Ergenekon Street in the Şişli neighborhood, not far from the Hilton and the brand new convention center). The theme was anti-globalization. İstanbul is no longer anti-Greek. But it seems they are part of a strange tradition.
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