In Türkiye, discussions of innovation, development, and prosperity almost always return to the example of South Korea. South Korea, once at a level of development comparable to ours, has become an easily packaged economic miracle in retrospective accounts, not just in Türkiye but around the world. In the process, the conditions and context of its transformation fade from view. South Korea’s starting point was neither stable nor democratic. It was under Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945. The Korean War of 1950–1953 left the country in ruins. By the late 1950s, South Korea was still poor, dependent on foreign aid, and politically fragile. According to NBER data, exports accounted for only about 1 percent of GDP in 1960, while its capacity to import depended heavily on US assistance.

Park Chung-hee did not come to power through an election. On May 16, 1961, the military seized power, dissolved the National Assembly, banned political activities, and placed the state under the control of a military junta. There had been no well-established democratic order before that either. Syngman Rhee’s regime, marked by electoral fraud and repression, had been shaken by student protests in 1960, leading to Rhee’s resignation. The Second Republic established afterward survived for only a few months. Park’s regime emerged not from a functioning democracy but from the collapse of a political order.

Still, reducing the story to ‘there was a coup, and then development followed’ explains very little. The state Park took over was not an empty shell. Japanese colonial rule had produced domination and inequality, but it had also left elements of modern bureaucracy, infrastructure, and some—albeit limited—productive capacity. Land reforms after 1945 weakened the old landed aristocracy and created a more egalitarian structure in the countryside. Later industrialization became possible not simply because of investments in factories but also because of these earlier institutional and social changes.

What distinguished the Park era was that centralized power was used not only for political control but also to discipline economic behavior. From the mid-1960s onward, exchange-rate policy, foreign-currency allocations, import permits, cheap credit, and incentives were tied to export and performance targets. Exports rose rapidly following changes to the trade and foreign-exchange regime. The decisive element here was not abstract development rhetoric, but the state’s material power to reward and sanction. Long-term investors were not rewarded unconditionally, and firms that failed to meet targets were not automatically protected. The signal was conveyed through the allocation of credit, foreign currency, import permissions, and incentives, not merely through speeches. The state used these instruments to determine which firms would grow and which would face pressure.

It would therefore be misleading to portray Park, who set South Korea’s economic transformation in motion, as an enlightened, miraculous technocrat whose sole priority was development. Regime security, national power, rivalry with North Korea, and the desire to escape dependence on US aid all converged in the same project. The turn toward heavy and chemical industries in the 1970s cannot be explained solely by a desire for growth. Building defense capabilities and a more autonomous industrial base were also part of the calculation. In the Korean experience, developmentalism and authoritarianism became intertwined elements of the same project.

The costs of this approach were bound up with the regime’s lack of democracy. In 1972, the Yushin system transformed the constitutional framework, marginalized the legislature, and established a more closed regime that entrenched Park’s power. The opposition was suppressed, while the press and universities came under tight control. This repressive regime ended in 1979 amid rising unrest.

Looking at Türkiye, the problem is not an absence of centralized power capable of implementing a comprehensive and consistent economic program to transform the rent-seeking economy. Centralization has already increased substantially over the past two decades. Yet that power has not been used to establish an industrial discipline that upgrades production, enforces performance, and disrupts the equilibrium of low productivity. The economy has grown over the last twenty years, alongside persistent problems of income distribution. But that growth has not produced a structural transformation that dismantles the rent-seeking economy and replaces it with an integrated order oriented toward innovation. Rather, it has strengthened the existing rent-seeking economy.

Of course, the lesson from Korea cannot be the crude claim that ‘a coup is necessary’ to move from rent-seeking to a knowledge-based economy. What we can learn is that a state unable to change its incentive regime and apply reward-and-sanction mechanisms consistently will struggle to transform patterns of economic behavior. In Türkiye, the era of military interventions is behind us, not least because the most recent attempt was resisted in the streets. In any case, economic transformation directed toward the country’s prosperity must be built through civilian politics. Türkiye has repeatedly experienced extended periods of government that could have implemented ambitious, long-term programs. The crucial question is whether state power is used for short-term stimulus and distributing rents, or for transforming and ultimately dismantling the rent-seeking economy in favor of an order based on production, engineering, design, and high added value.

Such a wholesale change of direction is too extensive to fit within the program of a single political party. The necessary transformation spans many interdependent fields: law, bureaucracy, income distribution, systems of representation, media, unions, employers’ organizations, local development capacity, and traditions of negotiation. A blockage in one field constrains the others. The issue, then, is not merely a government’s preference or the arrival of a leader who will carry out the transformation. It requires a broader political recognition and understanding across society. We do not all have to agree on one solution and implement it in lockstep. But we can collectively recognize the existence of the same problem. Each group can then propose its own remedies, and—even if it is difficult—a negotiating table oriented toward a shared objective may become possible.