Business Associations and Turkey’s Foreign Economic Policy: From the ‘Özal Model’ to the AKP Pe

Abstract

Turgut Ozal, former Prime Minister and President of Turkey, has without doubt left a lasting heritage on Turkish politics. His pragmatic and dynamic approach to administrating the country’s affairs has been embraced by several later statesmen and politicians, giving rise to the notion of an “Ozal model” that found application with respect to several issues in the political and economic realm. Focusing on foreign economic policy as one such issue area, and emphasizing the increasing participation of business actors in policy making process, this paper examines the main tenets of the Ozal model, and deals with the question of to what extent Turkey’s foreign policy under the current government can be explained with this model. To that end, the paper compares the Ozal period with the AKP period using an analytical framework that evaluates the foreign policy participation of business actors at different levels, i.e. structural level, domestic level, and the individual level. The framework proposed in the paper incorporates the factors of state capability, business power and issue salience as determinants of policy influence at the domestic level, and within this context, a typology of roles assumed by business associations is referred to in order to identify the different policy areas where business is active. As a result, the paper finds that while there are similarities between the two periods in the sense that in both cases business actors are actively taking part in foreign policy issues, there are also significant divergences.