Classifying the State: Fiscal Legibility and Institutional Bypass in Post-Imperial Turkey, 1923–1950

How do post-imperial states claim fiscal sovereignty while relying on borrowing practices that complicate the transparency of public finance? This article introduces the concept of classification-based accommodation to explain how early Republican Turkey managed the tension between a sovereignty discourse of fiscal self-reliance and the financial demands of state-building. Drawing on an original dataset of 46 borrowing operations reconstructed from budget laws, final accounts, and parliamentary records, it argues that the state did not conceal its borrowing but rendered its aggregate fiscal position institutionally illegible. Major borrowing proceeds were legally authorized yet frequently absorbed into broad accounting categories, especially ‘extraordinary revenues under special laws’, producing an institutional bypass rather than a concealed executive design. The article shifts the analytical focus from the legibility of populations to the legibility of the state’s own fiscal position. Examining the multi-party transition after 1946, it shows that political competition politicized this classification regime without dismantling it, turning it into a contested object of parliamentary scrutiny.