Turkey’s Integration to Capitalism Within Uneven and Combined Development Approach: “1945-1960”

Abstract

This article aims to criticize classical international relations theories in regard to issues of internalityand externality, ahistoricism, and asociologism within the scope of historical sociology. In doing so, thearticle will address the uneven and combined development approach. An analysis of Turkey’s integrationto world capitalism between the 1940s and the 1960s will serve as a case study for this critique. The articlewill employ a Marxist method with a historical analysis. The article claims that historical sociologytakes up international relations by embedding it in societies’ historical contexts and structures. Withinthis framework, the uneven and combined development approach provides a significant dimension tounderstanding the social interactions between the domestic and the international structures withinhistorical processes. Particularly, combined development, which connotes the amalgam of modernand backward forms of production, helps us to overcome the separation between the national and theinternational. For this reason, the article claims that Turkey’s incorporation into capitalism after WWIIcontains significant dynamics of combined development (economic, political, and sociological) in bothintra – and inter-state levels. Specifically, Turkey’s technology transfer after the war in terms of newclass dynamics emerges as a significant mechanism of combined development.