'Leyla'

Came across an interview with Feridun Zaimoglu reading a paper on the flight to Vienna recently. I like books by Turkish authors, especially when they are about Germany, too and straddling two cultures. Turns out that 'Leyla' has only marginal involvement with Germany, but never mind. It's fascinating! It's also not translated into English, which is a shame - most of his books aren't, but this one would lend itself well.

Leyla is the youngest daughter of a family with 5 children living somewhere in East Anatolia. The father is an extremely violent drunkard and the family cringes and cowers every time he comes home. He has few friends and anyone who looks at him wrongly gets a broken nose, to say the least. Needless to say, they live extremely chastely.

The book covers the whole lifetime, from Leyla's early days to after the father dies (given that Leyla is the narrator you ask yourself, who actually is the book about). Leyla has her protectors in her teacher, and her friends, and somehow she gets married off as the first of the 3 daughters, marrying a generally kinder kind of person, though the marriage is also not easy.

Alongside all this there are fascinating details about how things are done in very conservative Anatolia, how women dress and how they should behave, how laundry should be washed, and later how girls should interact with boys or not, how already then some girls are liberated, how the family moves to Istanbul and lodges with richer relatives (not entirely to their delight), what they think of the Istanbullus, how the father's business affairs keep pulling the family to ruin, repeatedly, and how the family, and Turkish society changes.

There are a few glitches - for example at the start of the book reference is made to sons being lost to the Korean war (in the 1950s), and later something is mentioned which must have happened after 1981, which makes me think our Leyla got married unusually late in life.

Zaimoglu in fact spent only the first year of his life in Turkey, but no doubt grew up in a Turkish community in Germany, and so has been able to research the cultures he describes. The book is much more readable than Orhan Pamuk's books; it's more outgoing and lively, but it also operates at a different level. (Zaimoglu looks rather more outgoing and lively than Pamuk, too...)

Well worth a read if you want to know more about rural Turkish culture (of 40 years ago, or is it?), and you speak German.

Picture from Wikipedia.

Whither Georgian social policy?

An article in 'Social Policy and Society' (October 2007) on the connection between Turkey's EU ambitions and its social policy developments makes me wonder where Georgia's social policy thinks it is heading?

The article by Nick Manning, of the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham, uses fairly old data to make his points - eg in the case of Eastern Europe he uses GDP data up to 2000, or he quotes from papers which see the 2004 accession as still in the future. Things move too fast out East to use such old data credibly.

But anyway. We lucky European citizens have, under EU law, entitlement to education, healthcare and insurance against life-time risks, mostly free (in the case of pre-university education) or covered by insurances one way or another (health care and lifetime risks like old age, unemployment etc), more or less generously. Countries like Spain have used the accession to the EU to push through increasingly generous welfare entitlements (though it has had to rein back its expenditure a little). In Eastern Europe where welfare entitlements were good under the Soviets, the pressure of the World Bank, who got at them first, lead to a severe dismantling of the welfare state, though the countries are now recovering (I'm told that in Lithuania women giving birth now get their full salary for the first year of the baby's life, and 80% for the second year). In Turkey such systems did not exist.

Manning quotes from another paper by Öniç that suggests that while within Turkey there is half-hearted support by the elite for EU membership, this applies less to the European elite outside Turkey nor to the mass society either within or outside Turkey. This fractional support then clearly makes it hard for anyone to push through changes relating to social protection, or other EU required changes. Since the article was researched I think that social protection has developed in leaps and bounds in Turkey, judging by what I have read in the media.

Georgia, a Christian country (I don't think that matters, but other people do), has huge ambitions to join the EU, with an EU flag outside every public building. This ambition was a bit shaken up by the events of November 7 last year, though now it seems to be motoring in the right direction, maybe? (Though my friend Wu Wei's report links to a paper that suggests that all was not well with the election process, despite what OSCE may have said publicly. And if you think that Saakashvili did not win in the large cities - which perhaps were more accessible to observers, but won in the snowbound and partly inaccessible countryside .....).

The problem with Georgia is that all those young blades who are in Government these days studied in the US. Hence they have the US approach to social policy, whereby everyone should take care of their own health and wealth. Hospitals are being privatised, they are talking of deregulating doctors...ok, they have promised to increase pensions, but that's due to the election. Social solidarity probably exists with the older people, but no-one has time to do something about this because they are all scrambling to survive.

Now, call me picky, but I don't think Georgia (republic of) could become the 51st state, especially if the others already contain a state called Georgia. But joining Europe, with this social policy outlook? It's time the EU put the boot in!