Negotiating Modernization through U.S. Foreign Assistance: Turkey’s Marshall Plan (1948-1952) Re-interpreted

Why do "Western" societies, despite their overpowering financial and political influence, fail to dictate the course of "non-Western" modernization? This dissertation engages the issue of foreign-assisted modernization by critically reviewing the epistemological role of the West/non-West divide in the sociology of modernity. Revising the theoretical and methodological premises of the modernities approach and eventful sociology, I develop an alternative framework, which I term the "asymmetric modernities approach". I contend that the particular configuration of local and global dynamics may sometimes overturn the power inequalities between donor and recipient societies, providing less powerful elites significant opportunities to revise the superimposed modernization projects. In locating such conjunctural possibilities, I examine the donor and the recipient societies both on their own terms and in relation to each other. This methodological strategy helps 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 the asymmetric modernities approach to the case of U.S.-sponsored Marshall Plan in Turkey (1948-1952). I argue 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 different groups of Turkish and U.S. elites. These visions were further articulated in both societies through the contemporaneous domestic struggles and the political threats posed by the Soviet Union. The ensuing forms of political consensus and dissent across the Atlantic presented the Turkish governments with various opportunities to manipulate the terms of the Marshall Plan projects and also forced the U.S. foreign assistance personnel to make significant concessions from their initial modernization objectives. I reach to these conclusions by evaluating a number of Marshall Plan projects concerning bureaucratic centralization, agricultural mechanization and economic planning in Turkey. My analysis is based on diplomatic and legislative documents, newspaper editorials, memoirs, published interviews, literary works and cartoons gathered through a multi-site archival research conducted in Turkey and the United States.

With its theoretical and methodological contributions, my dissertation cuts across the ongoing debates in political sociology, historical sociology, sociology of development, the Middle Eastern Studies and the Cold War Studies. It addresses the issues of modernity, state formation, politics of empire; the conditions and limits of power and resistance; and the methodological issues in evaluating cross-cultural encounters. It also contributes to the scholarly endeavors to internationalize the U.S. sociology by elucidating the influence of other societies on the U.S. politics as much as the political and economic consequences of the U.S. involvement overseas.