Weiker, Walter (1981). The Modernization of Turkey: From Ataturk to the Present Day. Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc.
 
Kemalism was outlined in 1920s, with its 1930s “Six Arrows”: Republicanism, Nationalism, Populism, Secularism, Etatism, and Revolutionism.
Etatism (1931) was the doctrine that the state should play an active role in economic development, and stressed the primacy of the public sector in industrialization, though it also stressed that there was to be encouragement of private enterprise. Etatism soon became the primary government policy. The civil bureaucracy became dominant in Turkish industry, and the State Economic Enterprises received the bulk of public investment.. Etatism had never been made into normative doctrine, but had been kept, rather, on the pragmatic level as the most effective way to rapid economic development, which indeed it was during the 1930s when the Turkish private sector was still quite weak (6). 
Prior to World War I most of the industry and commerce was in the hands of the non-Muslim minorities, in part because these activities have long had low status in Islam. “The Turk still preferred the three professions of religion, government and war, and left commerce, with its degrading infidel associations, to the Christians and Jews” (35, Bernard Lewis, 1961). 
The status of the military, like that of the bureaucracy, declined during the 1950s concomitantly with the increased status of other elites under the rule of the Democrat party.
The political role of the military in Turkish society dates almost from the beginning of the Ottoman Empire, with the “Gazi” tradition and Sultans who were both military and political leaders.
In the Republic’s first quarter-century the chief object of government policy was nationalism and general self-sufficiency. These objectives led to coolness toward foreign capital, stringent pay-as-you-go discipline in government budgets, emphasis on state-run industry, and stress on infrastructure (182).
The Five-Year Plans were comprehensive, covering social as well as economic matters.. with overall thrust toward rapid growth in all sectors of finance, income, and production and toward both freedom and social justice, and thus toward a mixed economy (183).
 
The Izmir Economic Congress of 1923 stressed that the “principal aim” of Turkish economic policy was “the industrialization of the country” (186).
Although with the help of the 1927 Law for the Encouragement of Industry the number of industrial firms rose from 470 in 1927 to 1,255 in 1930 and 1,473 in 1932, the effect on production was not very great because most of the firms were small, used little technology, were concentrated in a few areas, such as food processing, textiles and mining, and were not supported by proper infrastructure or entrepreneurial and labor skills (187, Hershlag, Turkey, an Economy in Transition, 1958).
 
Under the aegis of two five-year plans, over a hundred State Economic Enterprises (SEEs) were established by 1950, eventually employing some 76,000 workers. About a third were in food, beverages and tobacco, a third in textiles, wood and paper, and a third in heavier industry, chemicals, mining equipment, machinery, transport, including the Karabuk Iron and Steel facility which was established in 1926. Also important was that the SEEs were geographically dispersed, almost all being outside the Aegean and Marmara regions, in which private plants were heavily concentrated. What may be called a negative aspect of all this was that although the doctrine of etatism insisted that the SEEs would only be a supplement to the growth of the private sector, the development of the latter, in fact, was inhibited.
On balance, however, the results of the etatist period were favorable, and few if any observers disagree with the conclusion that using the large public sector to assure quick growth was both economically and politically the only realistic option (187).
 
The more dramatic growth which later characterized Turkish industry did not begin until the 1960s, stimulated by factors such as the 1958 stabilization program, the beginning of planning and other measures which restores investor certainty, and, probably, simply the fact that the economy had begun to mature, that enough time had elapsed since the beginning of large-scale investments for them to start to bear fruit. Also, entrepreneurs had gotten more on-the-job experience. Industrial production had roughly doubled during the 1950s, it more tripled between 1962 and 1973, and increased by half again by 1977 (188).
 
Government encouragement began in the 1920s through many measures, such as the establishment of the privately owned but government-stimulated Business Bank (Is Bankasi) in 1924, the Bank for Industry and Mining in 1925, and the Law for the Encouragement of Industry in 1927. In the 1950s the measures ranged from establishment of the Industrial Development Bank in 1950 to a large array of tax incentives, customs provisions, favorable terms for purchase of land, etc (275).
 
..there were frequent charges during the single-party period.. of using the SEEs to enhance the power of the bureaucracy, and of catering to the ideological biases against private enterprise held by policymakers who were attracted to the Soviet economic model. Some of these charges were undoubtedly true, and there is little disagreement that some errors in economic judgment were made. But for the most part, the SEEs contributed positively to the later development of the economy (194).
 
The advent of economic planning after 1961 settled some issues regarding the SEEs, but left others unresolved. Of those which have been settled, the most important is the firm acceptance of the principle that a mixed economy is economically desirable, and for the first time direct attention was given to the matter of the public and private sectors as complementary elements of the economy. As a result, since the mid-1960s there has been considerable adherence to the often-stated criterion that public enterprise should only tread where the private sector will not or cannot; i.e., that public investment should be concentrated in intermediate goods, and that the private sector’s greatest expansion should be in consumer and investment goods. Public investment should be in areas “in which great fixed capital investments are necessary, including petroleum and chemicals, iron and steel, paper, and nitrogen soil fertilizers” (194, Manisali).