This article investigates the demography politics in Turkey, beginning with the partition of the Ottoman Empire after WWI and spanning a period until the 1960s. The reorganization of the world into mutually exclusive states entailed new formations of populations as well as territories; it signified the making of the national spatialities. Drawing both social and physical boundaries in Asia Minor were mainly justified as an endeavour of separating different populations. With the establishment of the new Turkish Republic, demographic knowledge has continued to be a pivotal political venture. The boundaries between the homogeneously imagined geo-body of the nation and the “excessive populations” have become a repressive political domain. In other words, demographic knowledge, as a technique of nation formation, has been constituted by and through divisive practices. The last section of this essay points out how these divisions resulted in differential state policies in Turkey with respect to recognised minorities (e.g. Greeks) as well as unrecognised ones (Kurds).
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In this paper, I will focus on a particular debate, which was a hot topic in Turkish media in the summer of 2005. The debate was about the leisure time activities of lower class inhabitants of Istanbul, who were blamed to spoil the Istanbul panorama. Their leisure time habits, like swimming with underwear, were identified as a problem of “incivility” in accordance with the interchangeable use of “civilized” with “modern”, “Westernized” and/or “contemporary” in Turkey. Once cited as a problem to tackle, a variety of positions, propositions, classifications, and also solutions were put forward in media, through which I will interpret certain claims on the Turkish Nation, culture, poverty, and modernity. These claims, I will argue, are bound with disciplining of certain populations in line with the middle class aspirations. Throughout, certain practices, objects and bodies are considered to be a “problem”. They are put on view as to be corrected and fit the dominant representations of “proper citizen”. Hence, I will discuss that the problem about “non-modern” is a problem of governance. So, this paper is an attempt to bring objects and practices marked as “backward” and “non-civilized” back “‘into touch’ with the larger, less tangible and less coherent network of relationships” (Hebdidge, 1988).
My short discussion will not cover all the claims, and for that matter, all the parties involved. I have to exert from the beginning that the maneuvers, complicities, appropriations or rejections that lower class inhabitants of the city take on, are beyond the scope of this paper. My analysis is not about how power is assumed or subverted by lower classes; rather, I will focus on the desires and aspirations of middle classes in respect to their taste for leisure time. That is to say that although the subject matter of this paper seems as the practices of lower class people, it is actually about the normative framework of middle classes.
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Introduction

“I have enough of being too busy
and the stress is dreadful, too. I wish people would not rush…
If only we walked.”

Kayhan,
Complaining in Internet chat.

This is a study about busy professionals- or as I call them, golden collars. Golden collars are the manifested model workers of the last few decades with far greater control over the product, and the process of production; they are defined as more of entrepreneurs than proletarians, responsible for their own performance. Their value addition is mostly through innovation and information generation. They are relatively autonomous, responsible, highly skilled workers with upgraded abilities in interpersonal communication, leadership, and motivation. They have outstanding analytical capabilities; they make up the brain trust of global capitalism.

Global capitalism is about speed when viewed from the perspective of golden collars. They are forced to adapt to meticulously planned time schedules both in their leisure time and also in their working time. Indeed, the two domains often overlap, as will be discussed in this research and so, an optimum life is required in all realms and at all time.

I take up this question as a problem of “effectiveness” – one of the central significations, which assumes a central role in modern capitalist society, hence in bureaucratic organization. Striving for more effective technologies, more effective production chains and more effective lives are the inviolable, undeniable truth in contemporary discourses. “Everything is actually subordinated to effectiveness –but effective for whom, in view of what, and in order to do what?”
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