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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how infrastructural access discourse and nationalist sentiment have shaped Turkey’s “national credit access” policies. Drawing on Turkey’s long history of debt, it shows how authoritarian rule is sustained through digital financial infrastructure building projects.

Paper long abstract

This paper traces how nationalist sentiment and a discourse of infrastructural access have shaped financial policy in Turkey over the last two decades, producing a politics of “easy credit access.” I argue that contemporary promises of empowerment through easy, widely distributed, and digitalized bank loans for the “needy working male citizen” are rooted in longer histories of indebtedness and protectionism in Turkey, particularly in a collective memory of Ottoman debt servicing that continues to animate anxieties about fiscal sovereignty. In recent decades, these anxieties have been reframed through a national imagination of “humiliation,” strategically mobilized to legitimize a developmental ethos that links national independence to domestic credit expansion amid global financial volatility. Within this ethos, expanding household access to credit is not simply an economic policy; it has been promoted as a moral and political project of reclaiming sovereignty and protecting the nation from another episode of dependency. By situating financial inclusion programs and the building of digital financial infrastructures within these historical and affective formations, this paper shows how globally circulating IMF and World Bank frameworks of “inclusive growth” are localized in Turkey through nationalist attachments to credit and state-led projects of financial infrastructure building. Together, these processes produce policies that promise protection and national belonging while deepening everyday indebtedness among working-class households and enabling authoritarian policymaking through digital and legal infrastructures.