ABSTRACT
Turkey's new entrepreneurial successes in banking, textiles, and the manufacture of everything from cars to refrigerators was becoming threatened by the dead hand of an unimaginative government unable to settle a long war. Only a state as slavishly faithful to the ossified letter of its founding dogma could have backed itself into a corner as totally as Turkey did in this final decade of the twentieth century. Doomsday disillusionment with the electoral process was such that an establishment journalist concluded, "In Turkey it is not the elected government which governs but the state, a state controlled by occult forces who for its own salvation and that of the official ideological system' bestow crumbs on sham governments." Big business, the part of modern Turkey determined to break out of the bureaucratic Kemalist straitjacket and propel the country to less rigid governance, for the first time said straight out that the war against the Kurds should end.
