Dividing By Uniting ‘Southern Europe’. the Marshall-Plan and the Vision for a European Anatolia, 1947 to 1960

The first country to receive aid from the US-Marshall Fund in 1947 was not one of the belligerent nations of Western Europe but Turkey that had consciously attempted to stay out of the global conflict after its traumatic experiences in World War I. The rationale leading American politicians and economic experts to consider the country eligible for the plan was a common strategy for Southern Europe and for Europe as a whole. Two years after the war, reliable food supply for Europe still was an unsolved question that had potential to foil all efforts of post war recovery. In this sense, the American plan tried to establish a stable grid of agricultural food production in Southern Europe alongside efforts to encourage re-industrialization in central and Western Europe. Mechanizing agricultural production in Anatolia was thus part of a European economic policy and Turkey was assigned a key role in the creation of an economic network. In the following years, however, Turkey’s agricultural production sector was struck by successive crises on the markets for agricultural commodities, with particularly heavy repercussions for the country’s economy. Growing social and political unrest led not only to the coup d’Etat of 1960, but also to a shift in attitudes towards the ‘remote’ countryside. Analyzing this evolution, the paper aims to understand the perceptions of Turkey – ranging from a member of a common European market to one of the developing world – as the result of economic interests in the early post war years.