The Emergence of the 'Government's perspective on the Kurdish issue

The AK Party's chronic 'political insecurity' may have passed a threshold as the ruling party resurfaces as an actor taking advantage of its pro- European Union sentiments to begin a 'grand negotiation' with Turkey's thus-far publicly shunned Kurdish leaders after decades of bloodshed. This new window of opportunity could not have emerged without the explosion of the Ergenekon incident, which has offered a persuasive critique of the closed, dark, intolerant and secret communities friendly with the military bureaucracy and state officials but insidiously devoted to destroying the government. In the post-Ergenekon era, the new democratic opening represents a significant departure from a military solution to the Kurdish issue which has blocked civilian imaginations by declaring the Kurdish identity demands as a security threat to the officially proscribed Turkish identity. The real issue at stake now for the AK Party government is a redefinition of the locus and space where the phenomenon of real political power takes place in Turkey

Problems of democratic governance of civil-military relations in Turkey and the European Union enlargement zone

In the light of the pre-eminent role of the military in Turkish public affairs, this article seeks to assess critically the suitability of the entry criteria that Turkey must fulfil if it is to accede into the European fold. With that in mind, the article takes the idea of the 'democratic control of the armed forces' (Decaf), as conceived of by Western agencies such as NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) and the EU (European Union), and unravels its relevance and implications for the Turkish case. The key features of Central and Eastern European systems of civil-military relations, which are targeted by the Decaf measures are contrasted with the Turkish case in order to show that a single-model approach to Decaf is untenable. It is then argued that the way that the strategy that has been used for implementing Decaf is impoverished because it fails to capture the 'real politics' in which militaries are embedded. Based on that, the article reaches the conclusion that one of the central factors preventing Turkey's potential accession into the European fold is the prevailing civil-military relationship. However, the approach being employed by Western agencies fails to adequately recognize and respond to the nature of that relationship

Conceiving the new Turkey after Ergenekon

[No abstract available

Politics, society and financial liberalization: Turkey in the 1990s

This article focuses on the political economy of Turkey in the 1990s to illustrate the importance of analysing economic variables that intersect with the quality of political democracy. In 1989, the debt-ridden state moved to systematically and completely deregulate Turkey's financial markets. Together with the ongoing processes of liberalizing commodity markets and integrating with global capital markets, financial liberalization was expected to achieve fiscal and monetary stability, stimulate business confidence to invest in productive sectors, produce stable growth, encourage privatization and control inflation. However, the new hegemony of the capital markets has gone hand-in-hand with deteriorating macroeconomic performance, a worsening income distribution, the discrediting of politics and its isolation from society. The authors examine several key dynamics which are helping to legitimate the neoliberal agenda of the 1990s. These include the distribution of state largesse to manipulate electoral capitalism; the rise of an informal sector in the 'Anatolian Tigers'; promotion of the seductive attractions of the market; and an antipolitical reform populism adopted by political actors to exploit popular disillusionment with the political system

The State’s Changing Role Regarding the Kurdish Question of Turkey: From Consistent Tutelage to Volatile Securitization

Disappearance of the established security paradigm of Kemalist state has not helped to create strong institutions and legal-bureaucratic structures that are supposed to prevent a certain political elite to dominate the political system and criminalize its adversaries by security reasons. Instead, survival concerns and political will of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has become replacement of the established paradigm. This has created a systemic crisis. On the one hand, the AKP has played the role of a regular political party, which is supposed to have equal rights and privileges with other players in the game. On the other hand, the AKP has been the tutelary actor that determines what national security is and who threatens national security. As a result of this picture, the AKP has exploited its monopoly over securitization to eliminate the criticisms of the opposition groups. Therefore, any political party or political group has not been viewed as a national security threat only if it has not threatened the political survival of the AKP. Such a crisis has also affected the AKP’s approach toward the Kurdish question. Unlike the established paradigm’s allergy toward the political demands of Kurds due to its commitment to nation-state principle, the AKP’s fluctuated policy toward the Kurds resembles to a political party’s survival strategy rather than a policy stemming from a consistent national security paradigm