By Can Öztaş
At Istanbul Airport, one can sometimes see the new Turkish economy walking past in surgical bands. Men arrive with thinning hair and leave with careful instructions, swollen foreheads and a cautious sense of restoration. Elsewhere, less visibly, delegations depart with memoranda of understanding for drones, armored vehicles and defense systems. Around it all stretches the older empire of concrete, terminals, roads, logistics zones and gated residences advancing over land that once grew something more edible than prestige.
Turkey has become remarkably good at exporting reassurance. It reassures the anxious body through health tourism. It reassures the anxious state through defense technology. It reassures the anxious investor and politician through construction, the most photogenic form of economic activity, preferably involving cranes, ceremonies and a view.
FROM HAIR TRANSPLANTATION TO DEFENSE AND CONCRETE
Hair transplantation is the easiest of these industries to mock, which is precisely why it requires some restraint. There is nothing ridiculous about wanting to feel better in one’s own body. Nor is the industry merely a matter of cheap prices and clever marketing. Its growth reflects logistics, medical practice, surgical standardization, hospitality networks and a rather Turkish talent for turning improvisation into service. Clinics, hotels, translators, airport transfers and online advertising combine into an ecosystem. The result is similar to the Spanish movie Por los Pelos or “Turkish Hairlines,” a route on which insecurity travels business class and returns with a new hairline.
The defense industry offers a more serious version of the same question. Turkey’s investment in drones, armored platforms and missiles has created genuine technology, significant exports and measurable strategic leverage. These systems carry a language of strategic autonomy. They also reflect real experiences: arms embargoes, conditional alliances, and the recurring discovery that partners tend to be most generous when sending lectures rather than equipment. The decision to build was rational. What remains less certain is whether industrial capacity, however impressive, can substitute for the deeper architecture of security, stable institutions, predictable law and the trust of neighboring societies.
Then there is concrete, the old faithful beast of the Turkish economy. Whatever else changes, construction remains. It produces the clearest visual grammar of progress, airports, bridges, towers, tunnels, highways, residences, shopping centers and enormous projects announced with the solemnity of constitutional reform. It rises and measures confidence in floors, spans and square meters. The tall, strong and apparently never-ending building has become one of the favored symbols of national vitality. The fact that this activity has also generated seismic vulnerability, ecological pressure and the steady erosion of agricultural land is rarely the subject of comparable ceremony.
This is where the masculine script becomes difficult to miss. The vocabulary is one of restoration, hardness, height and control. Thicker hair. Stronger drones. Taller buildings. Longer bridges. Larger airports. The individual body must not appear to decline. The sovereign body must not appear dependent. The national body must not appear small. Success becomes visibility.
THE MINDS
Yet reassurance is not the same thing as strength. Hair transplantation promises to reverse a visible sign of aging. Defense technology promises protection against vulnerability and dependence. Construction promises permanence in a world of uncertainty. Each responds to the fear of decline. But beneath every restored hairline there remains, inconveniently, a brain. Beneath defense lies the promise of peace. Beneath concrete lies the soil.
Turkey does not need to sneer at competence. These sectors bring money, capacity, employment, visibility and influence. Turkey’s economic confidence is therefore neither false nor trivial. It is real. That is precisely what makes it revealing. It shows what the country can organize brilliantly when anxiety is marketable.
The problem begins when surface starts to eclipse substance. Hair can be transplanted. Security can be manufactured. Concrete can be poured. But minds must be educated, institutions must be trusted, and land must remain capable of sustaining life.
The real question for Turkey is not how high it can build, how much it can export or how effectively it can market reassurance. It is whether the country can invest with equal determination in the less visible foundations of prosperity: knowledge, trust, freedom, ecological resilience and social cohesion. These are slower achievements. They require patience rather than spectacle, and continuity rather than ceremony. They generate fewer promotional videos. Yet they are the conditions that make every other success durable. A nation can live for a while from the management of insecurity. It can live much longer from the cultivation of genuine confidence.
