Turkey Reframed: Constituting Neoliberal Hegemony by Özden Barış Alp & Bekmen Ahmet & Akça İsmet

Turkey Reframed: Constituting Neoliberal Hegemony by Özden Barış Alp & Bekmen Ahmet & Akça İsmet

Author:Özden, Barış Alp & Bekmen, Ahmet & Akça, İsmet [Özden, Barış Alp]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2013-12-11T16:00:00+00:00


2

Emblematic is the ‘yapsat’ system explained earlier.

PART II

Re-orientation(s) of the Social Question(s )

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Transformation of Social Welfare and Politics in Turkey: A Successful Convergence of Neoliberalism and Populism

Barış Alp Özden

This chapter aims to analyse the radical transformation of the social welfare regime in Turkey over the last decade in terms of its effects on state–society relations, as well as on the guiding normative principles of the political order. This transformation reflects a shift in political rationalities from the welfare state structuring which involved interventionist and protectionist economic policies to that of a neoliberal state which promotes competition and decentralisation while calling for personal responsibility and self-help to keep under control socio-economic insecurity aggravated by the expansion of market relations. The current episode of neoliberal transformation in Turkey, this chapter suggests, is hard to understand without a proper assessment of the role new poverty alleviation strategies have played in co-opting, assimilating or appropriating potential opposition to market reforms. In other words, the combination of a political reorientation regarding poverty alleviation and a discursive shift regarding the inclusion and empowerment of the most destitute have made the neoliberal project more stable and consensual. The innovative welfare transfer mechanisms and poverty reduction techniques pursued by the AKP government have also implied a new way of governing through multiple and competing administrative practices, which epitomises neoliberal state restructuring in Turkey (cf. Luccisano 2004).

Needless to say, this type of governing is very much in line with global trends in social policy making and shaped to a great extent by the spirit of the conceptual categories developed by international agencies such as the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (Yalman 2011). However, the timing, design and specific operationalisation of the reforms reflect the particularities of Turkish politics. This makes it all the more important to analyse Turkey’s specific welfare policy mix during the last decade within the wider context of neoliberal transformation. Furthermore, it is necessary to keep in mind that, as elsewhere in the world, this particular policy response has been played out against the backdrop of the welfare regime that Turkey established in the post-Second World War period (see Esping-Andersen 1990).

As highlighted in many chapters in this volume, the AKP’s ascent to national power in the November 2002 elections, coming after a series of economic-cumpolitical crises throughout the 1990s, was a watershed in Turkish politics that brought along a radical reordering of state–society relations. After the twin crises of 2001 and 2002, which swept all the three veteran parties out of the parliament and paved the way for the AKP’s victory as the only electoral alternative with a ‘clean’ record, poverty and widening socio-economic inequalities emerged as major issues in Turkey within the context of a prolonged process of structural adjustment over the previous two decades. Once in power, the AKP proved to be a loyal follower of neoliberal macroeconomic strategy. It was able to stabilise the economy and establish an appropriate environment for capitalising on the benefits associated with the



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