Post-1980 Turkey Research Articles

Liberal Foreign Trade in the Sustainability of Economic Development: The Case of the Post-1980 Turkey

The new economic order substantially constrains the ability of developed countries to penetrate into developing markets and to easily sell commodities. Besides, it makes it increasingly more difficult for these countries to acquire raw materials necessary for manufacturing high technology products. This is an important development for international trade. In the end, these developments in international trade significantly alter countries’ existing levels of importance. However, oddly, many underdeveloped and developing countries fail to realize the fact that the economic sustainability of developed countries depends on the size of their import and export capacities. Moreover, due to their economic dependence on developed countries, these countries feel obliged to implement the foreign trade regulations imposed on them by developed countries without any questioning. In this study, after examining the impact of liberal international trade policies upon global trade, Turkey’s foreign trade in the post-1980 had been addressed

Contemporary Turkey: An Islamic-capitalist variety of modernity?

This article offers a new conceptualization of the multiple modernities debate by analyzing the relationship of Islamic conservatism to modernity. I argue that in post-1980 Turkey ‘modernity’ was re-interpreted, giving ever more emphasis to capitalism and to the Islamic societal self-understanding at the expense of commitment to autonomy, to critique and self-questioning, to gender equality, and so on. I pose the question whether this is still an interpretation of modernity or does it deviate so much from the basic definition of modernity that it should be considered something else. First, I consider the limits to the openness of modernity to interpretation in an attempt to understand whether a ‘cultural theory of modernity’ suffices as explicandum. Initially I consider the essentially changing relationship both within and between Turkish society and the state, and relate these changes to the discussions concerning the relations between modernity and multiplicity. I then demonstrate that recent occurrences in Turkey illustrate the corruption of modernity, in contrast to the assumptions that view contemporary Turkey as an Islamic-capitalist variety of modernity.

From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess: Gender Constructions in Ideological-Political Discourses of the Kurdish Movement in post-1980 Turkey

The Kurdish movement in post-1980 Turkey successfully mobilized Kurdish women. Themes related to gender equality have gained importance especially in late 1990s, when Kurdish women started to participate actively in the Kurdish movement. In the same period, the mythological sources of Kurdishness as a political identity were changed. Building on feminist studies exposing the interaction between ethnic/nationalist processes and gender relations, this article aims to examine the Kurdish movement’s ideological discourse from a gender perspective. By analyzing Ocalan’s writings during the 1978-1999 period, the article argues that there is a mutual interaction between the Kurdish movement’s ideological political and women’s agency in political participation. The paper shows that the left-wing and secular characteristics of the Kurdish movement facilitated women’s participation in the movement and that women’s participation affected both the importance of gender equality within the ideological and political discourse of the Kurdish movement and within its organizational structure. The paper concludes by pointing out the limits and contradictions of the movement’s discourse on gender equality.

On resilience and response beyond value change: Transformation of women's movement in post-1980 Turkey

This study examines the nature of, and reasons for, the transformation of the women's movement in Turkey in the post-1980 period by focusing on the origins, rationale, organization of two women's organizations and their interaction with political institutions. It seeks to answer two questions: in what ways do the post-1980 women's organizations differ from those of pre-1980 in Turkey? What factors have played a role in this transformation? In addressing these, this study critically examines two propositions put forward in the general literature on transformation in movements: emergence of postmaterialist values and changing political opportunity structures. Relying on evidence from Turkey, this study proposes three alternative factors adding nuance to these propositions in the general literature: the restrictions imposed by the 1980 coup on social movements bearing new frames of reference by activist women, the changing values and ideas of second wave feminism, and the limits of state-centered modernization for the women's movement in Turkey.

Sam Kaplan, The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006). Pp. 280. $65.00 cloth, $25.95 paper.

Sam Kaplan, The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006). Pp. 280. $65.00 cloth, $25.95 paper.

Review: The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey by Sam Kaplan

The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey by Sam Kaplan. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. 254 pp. ISBN 0-8047-5433-0. Turkey has long gripped the fervent imaginations of imperial policymakers and colleagues in Western academia, 1 where the country and region are often conceived of in dualist terms—Islamic fundamentalist or Western modernist (Munir, 2007). With an amenable disposition towards various imperial geo-political intrigues, steady arms purchases, and perhaps most emphatically, forced secularity in the erstwhile home of the most recent Islamic Caliphate, Ataturkism 2 has been good for the West and is thus the lauded regional example of Westernization par excellence. The Pedagogical State by Sam Kaplan draws substantially on the historical links among groups and their particular ideologies in Turkey to tease out the multiple and often overlapping identities existing across time and to show how they influence the debate on Turkish education. Specifically, Kaplan seeks to address how the military, secular industrialists, and religious nationalists promulgate their respective worldviews in schooling. Discourse on the convergence of these views in the Turkish public sphere is framed within an eclectic sociocultural milieu (amid a vast Ottoman-Islamic legacy) by a range of complimentary and antagonistic groups. For example, secular and religious groups continue to voice great displeasure with an economic future mortgaged to the whims of global debt capital, 3 brutal regional military occupations (e.g., Iraq and Palestine), and a corporatized school system which, for many Muslims, further relinquishes Islamic teachings and values to a profit- driven secular humanism (Ramadan, 2003). Conversely, significant portions of the electorate, particularly those in the employ of the military-industrial complex, unconditionally support Turkey’s sociopolitical maneuvers and strategic alliances with the West. The Pedagogical State is designed around a multi-layered analysis of the power relations inflecting Turkish schooling since 1980. Kaplan highlights Turkey’s religious and political threads using a contextualized historical lens. This helps focus his rendering of Turkey’s conceptual socioreligious chassis, the secular Turkish Islamic Synthesis: 4 “only religion can effectively link an ever- changing material culture with an invariant native essence” (p. 77). From this Foucauldian reference point Kaplan engages two interrelated issues: the notion of governmentality—extrapolating how groups contest the politics of education with their world views—and the notion of subjectivity—how mass schooling prepares students to participate in the public sphere (p. xvi). Kaplan’s textually driven approach synthesizes these issues, providing insights into ways that identity and sociohistorical transformations develop across generations in a specific village

The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey and Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories

The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey. By Sam Kaplan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 254p. 24.95 paper.Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories. By Gyanendra Pandey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 228p. $55.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.There were relatively few states when the modern discipline of political science came into being, and the most thoroughly institutionalized among them became intellectual as well as normative templates for what states should be. Our initial expectations for the political development of the vast number of new states—an increase from fewer than 60 to more than 200 since the end of World War II—had been conditioned by ahistorical takes on the roles of the social and the cultural in state formation and nation building (see Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman, eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas, 1960; and not excepting the contributions of Charles Tilly and associates in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, 1975). Two such expectations were that, over time, states' populations would exhibit more coherent political cultures and increasing social order (with diminishing violence) within frameworks of state-delineated laws and state-centered institutions. The authors of these two books suggest that those expectations are more likely to be met in form and illusion than in substance. For Thomas Hobbes, stateness is hardly sufficient for social cohesion or nonviolent civil existence. They also give reason to ask how well they have been met in the model states of the historic West.

The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey

The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey

Asymmetrical power relations and upgrading among suppliers of global clothing brands: Hugo Boss in Turkey

When a relatively powerless clothing supplier encroaches on the core competence of its dominant network partner and emerges as a competitor in its own right, this calls for detailed documentation and explanation. In this paper, we provide such an explanation through inquiry into the Turkish firm Sarar. A 13-year manufacturing contractor of Hugo Boss, it withdrew from its partnership with the German lead firm in 1998 and has since created its own brands of men's suits that are now sold at home and abroad. After the withdrawal, Hugo Boss established its own manufacturing facilities in Turkey. Here we investigate the relevancy of the national origin of the lead firm Hugo Boss and of the broader institutional and market setting of the post-1980 Turkey in which the relationship between the two firms was embedded. The findings are in some tension with the organizational frameworks that are frequently used to describe the clothing industry. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.

Ali Bulaç: Political Ideas of a Leading Turkish Islamist

Ali Bula is indeed one of the most controversial Islamists in contemporary Turkey. He is a well known writer in his country and has published more than twenty books. However, quoting his name in some Turkish academic or Islamist circles is ayip' (rude). The most common reaction when I would men tion that I was working on Ali Bula was 'You could have started your research with somebody more serious'. Nonetheless, Ali Bula is maybe the first example in post-1980's Turkey of a 'Muslim intellectual', a distinctive feature of Turkish contemporary Islamist writ ers. Muslim intellectuals left the active militancy of the 1970s shaped on the ex tra-parliamentary leftist movements because after the 12 September 1980 coup, they realized the deep changes in Turkish society. They started a more moderate and less ideological policy of influencing the masses through media and culture. To shake off their image of backwardness they had to fully immerge themselves in European humanities and its language yet they criticized it and tried to pro pose alternatives to Western style modernity. Ali Bula has been one of the pioneers of Islamist media as well. He passed from the marginalised reviews of the 1970s modelled on leftist press, to nation based newspapers. He was in fact also one of the founders of the most popular Islamist newspaper Zaman.

Trade Liberalization and Innovation Decisions of Firms: Lessons from Post-1980 Turkey

Determinants of innovation decisions of Turkish manufacturing firms are estimated for 1989–93, with an emphasis on determinants that are linked to trade policy reforms of the 1980s. Using plant-level data, we find that positive effects of trade liberalization on innovation decision are transmitted mainly through technology embodied in imported machinery. Being a technology licensee, an exporter, or having a foreign partner does not exert a significant positive effect on a firm’s probability to innovate, nor do technology spillovers due to the presence of foreign firms in the Turkish manufacturing industry.

Globalization and the Changing Political Economy of Distribution Channels in Turkey

Since the 1980s, under the influence of global economic processes, there have been dramatic changes in the distribution channels of food, beverages, tobacco, and other fast-moving consumer goods in Turkey, resulting in a redistribution of both economic and social power. The outcome has been the rise of a few businesses, with others being left increasingly vulnerable in the face of a changing environment. Consequently, there has been an important power shift towards large and enormously influential corporations (active in retailing, distribution, as well as in manufacturing) from small manufacturers, retailers, and wholesalers who share commonalities with each other despite belonging to different sectors. One indicator of this shift is an ever-growing resentment among traditional communities, witnessed by their lobbying efforts as they look to the state to protect them from the devastating effects of intensifying competition. In this paper, the authors adopt a political economy approach in order to understand this power shift and to incorporate the larger political economy and the effects of globalization into their analysis. They show that these changing power structures are intrinsically connected to both the government's economic policy and also to global influences. In this context, three attributes of post-1980 Turkey are of primary interest: import liberalization, the opening up of the economy to global firms, and persistently high inflation and interest rates.

Liberalism, democracy and the Turkish centre‐right: the identity crisis of the true path party

In recent years there has been a sharp deflation of the left in political societies throughout the world. Accompanying this global trend has been the general acceptance of the primary tenets of neo-liberalism,' namely: political centrism; pragmatism; moderation; depoliticization; social and economic reforms that roll back the 'social' state; and the establishment of market capitalism. Neoliberal ideas provided the impetus for the quality of political democracy and economic liberalization in post-1980 Turkey. This context allowed the centre-right political parties2 to adopt the agenda of neo-liberalism and to obtain historical electoral results on behalf of the Turkish Right. The new postmilitary era relied on the 'taming of the right'3 into the new rationale of the market-oriented model. In theory, this required a fundamental alteration in representative politics and in political parties traditionally dependent on stateadministered patronage. It was also to involve a laborious transformation process in the political identity of centre-right parties, reorganizing political representation based on 'ideas' rather than on state largesse. This article will examine the identity struggle of the True Path Party (TPP), the senior party of the present coalition government as well as the current dominant party of both the Turkish Right and the electoral arena in general, since its birth in 1983. The implications of this analysis go beyond a dramatic account of the TPP trying to recapture the lost leadership of the Turkish Right which once belonged to its predecessor, the Justice Party (JP), which had been a key party during the three military intervention periods of 1960 (the JP was formed after the military relinquished direct rule in 1961), 1971 and 1980. In an era of international and domestic consensus on neo-liberalism, examining the TPP's identity struggle in the post-1980 period creates a better understanding of three important current problems in Turkey's experiment with democracy. First of all, this struggle highlights the dynamics and contradictions which the shift to economic liberalism has produced in the character of the Turkish centre-right. Given the historical strength of Turkish centre-right parties as independent actors, the TPP's commitment to liberalization has been impeded

Dilemmas of structural adjustment and environmental policies under instability: Post-1980 Turkey

The Turkish structural adjustment since 1980 has been associated with chronic instability. Since the late 1980s, the weaknesses in the fiscal system and the premature external liberalization emerge as the main factors hindering the passage toward stable growth. Enforced and erratic distributional changes and relative stagnation of capital accumulation have undermined the growth potential of the economy. Further, it is demonstrated that existing market structures may negate environmental policies based on market incentives. These observations, as well as those on the interactions of the market system and the environment, create strong arguments in favor of an active state.

Why Military Regimes Fail: The Perils of Transition

This article argues that in industrializing democratic (or semidemocratic) societies, where military interventions have been viewed as solutions to increasingly complex economic and political problems, the return to civilian rule is a frustrating experience for the military leaders. Even under the best of circumstances-when soldiers withdraw willingly-the transition process rarely produces the results desired by the military. The shortcomings of the transition are imbedded in the dynamics of the process, which include the officers' own miscalculations and, more importantly, civilians' need to demonstrate independence and resistance. This article demonstrates the perils of transition in the case of post-1980 Turkey, where the military undertook a well-planned and thought-out process of disengagement under very favorable conditions. There was almost no civilmilitary conflict or opposition from external sources. Yet the final outcome disappointed the generals.