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

Introduction: The Justice and Development Party: Making choices, revisions and reversals interactively

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State and religion in a secular setting: The Turkish experience

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Kemalism, hyper-nationalism and Islam in Turkey

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The Turkish encounter with neo-liberalism: Economics and politics in the 2000/2001 crises

Turkey initiated an extensive dis-inflation program in December 1999 backed and supervised by The International Monetary Fund (IMF). The program aimed at decreasing the inflation rate to a single digit by the end of 2002. It exclusively relied on a nominally pegged (anchored) exchange rate system for dis-inflation and on fiscal prudence. In February 2001, however, Turkey experienced a very severe financial crisis, which deepened and continued to-date. The official stance is that the crisis was the result of the failure of the public sector to maintain the austerity targets and the failure to implement fully the free market rationale of globalization. We argue in this article that, contrary to the official wisdom, the current economic and political crisis is not the result of a set of technical errors or administrative mismanagement unique to Turkey, but is the result of a series of pressures emanating from the process of integration with the global capital markets. We further provide a discussion on the fundamental parameters of the Turkish politics connected with the crisis. © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd

The ideology and politics of the Nationalist Action Party of Turkey

This article has two central areas of concern. The first involves the analysis of how the basics of the ideology of the Nationalist Action Party (NAP) of Turkey (1969-1981) drew some strength from the fascist potential of the political traditions of the Kemalist period, but at the same time deviated from it. The second argument, however, demonstrates the deep impact the party had on the course of Turkish democracy. It was a party with a narrow superficial power base and was sustained artificially in the political scene by the objective historical conditions in the crucial decade of 1970s. This second contention implies that the NAP was a conjunctural phenomenon with no hope of a long-term success in Turkish political landscape and had therefore to adopt a radical ideological content and a strategy of action to come and stay in power. Furthermore, and more important, what kept it going was not any authentic and pressing needs emanating from the grass-roots of its constituency, but the strategy of the dominant political forces on the centre-right. The following analysis of these two arguments is heavily based on the primary sources related to the NAP

Conceiving the new Turkey after Ergenekon

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Rethinking development space in emerging countries: Turkey's conservative countermovement

Despite an increasingly flexible global policy context, most emerging countries refuse to venture beyond their pre-existing development strategies. This article contends that domestic political constraints under liberalized markets might preclude policy dynamism in some cases. In particular, it draws attention to the tension between market expansion and social cohesion as a formative influence over policy patterns. This tension is sometimes addressed through a conservative countermovement whereby liberally-oriented governments entice sections of the poor into broad electoral coalitions by employing palliative interventions alongside market-expanding policies. Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is one example. Central to the Turkish case has been the redeployment of the country’s historic foreign capital-dependent pattern of growth in the service of selective redistribution and credit-fuelled consumerism. The ensuing deficit-led neoliberal populism assured stable and equitable growth in the extraordinary international and domestic context of the mid-2000s, but proved unfeasible since the global crisis. Even then, this coupling of market and social preferences has become politically so firmly entrenched in time that it now constrains the policy options to address Turkey’s developmental impasse