Europäische Ernährungsräume.: Die ländliche Türkei in der Deutung westlicher Agrarexperten und die Nachkriegsordnung Europas

Abstract

Turkey’s place in an economic network of European nations underwent dramatic changes over the 20th century. This reached from semi-colonial experiences in the late Ottoman times to a very extensive integration into a European political and economic system. In the very early days of the Cold War, Turkey was an essential cornerstone of an American geostrategic vision of “Western Europe”. Also, the expected increase of productivity made Turkey’s agriculture an important element in a scheme for feeding Europe, which severely lacked provisions in the first years after the war. Looking at agricultural and economic experts’ perspectives on Turkey’s place in Europe, this article links this post-war way of defining economic spaces to broader, semicolonial discourses about Turkish resources that go back to the 1930s and before. It further analyses how agricultural experts also shaped economic structures through the Marshall Plan, designed to integrate Turkey into a Western European economic space. By doing so, the article sheds light on Europe’s fragile spatial concepts in the Cold War period that relied more often on temporary political arrangements than on a real attempt to define a constant Southern European space.