For the past six years, Turkey’s leadership has trumpeted a “crazy project” — Canal Istanbul, a man-made waterway — to ease congested traffic in the Bosporus. Announced ahead of the July 2011 elections, which handed Recep Tayyip Erdogan a third consecutive premiership, the project was touted as a major feat of engineering and a symbol of Erdogan’s “master” period in politics. The government has kept the hype alive, but Canal Istanbul is yet to transcend the realm of dreams, lacking both a feasibility study and construction plans on paper.

Canal Istanbul does not appear in official investment plans, but transport ministers have routinely referenced it in budgetary presentations in parliament, complete with illustrations of Ankara's vision of it. Most recently, it was listed among the infrastructure projects that the government plans to finance through the newly created and highly controversial sovereign wealth fund. Although the project remains a dream at present, mere talk of it has already sparked a flurry of land selling and buying in areas north of Istanbul.

The hype is being ratcheted up in the run-up to the April 16 referendum on constitutional changes to install the presidential regime of Erdogan's dreams. Erdogan is expected to actively campaign for the amendments, and in a hint of how he plans to justify his quest for extraordinary powers, he said he needs them to realize big investments — like the Canal Istanbul project.

The idea of development, investment and big projects has always been exciting to Turks. In the 1930s, when modern Turkey was still a fledgling republic, its founders galvanized the nation with a state-sponsored development drive that served as a strong social adhesive during the nation-building process. Such infrastructure investments remained popular under the center-right Democratic Party and its successor, the Justice Party, which ruled Turkey during much of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Highways, dams, power plants and communication infrastructures, built mostly with World Bank loans, translated into election victories for the two parties. While the center-left Republican People’s Party championed the social state and social justice, the center-right stuck with a development and investment theme. Turgut Ozal, who served both as prime minister and president in the 1980s and 1990s, sustained this legacy while taking credit as the man who cleared the way for Turkey’s integration into the global capitalist economy.