The Neoliberal Restructuring of Turkey's Social Security System

Date

2009-04-01

Author

Cosar, Simten
Yegenoglu, Metin

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

319
views

0
downloads

For almost thirty years Turkish capitalism has taken the form of neoliberalism. Turkey's subordination to the world neoliberal order started in the late 1970s and was pursued consistently after the 1980 military coup. The coup reflected Hayek's contention that a transition to "free markets" may require a dictatorship.1 By dissolving political and social opposition, the coup provided the necessary political environment for the shift from the import substitution industrialization that framed economic policy since the 1960s to an export-oriented economics. During the interim regime (1980-83), Turkey experienced a fierce process of depoliticization, which limited the opportunities for an effective opposition against the launch of neoliberal policies. All segments of the labor movement that had made political gains in the preceding decade were banned from politics and the majority of prominent activists were imprisoned. The general elections held in 1983 were a farce. The military rulers banned all political parties that had organic links to pre-coup political organizations and that were in opposition to the coup and the interim regime, and allowed only three political parties to participate.

Subject Keywords

Geography, Planning and Development, Sociology and Political Science, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Gender Studies

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/64895

Journal

MONTHLY REVIEW-AN INDEPENDENT SOCIALIST MAGAZINE

DOI

https://doi.org/10.14452/mr-060-11-2009-04_3

Collections

Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

The Military and Europeanization Reforms in Turkey Ünlü Bilgiç, Tuba (Informa UK Limited, 2009-01-01) The Europeanization reforms in Turkey are partly designed to bring about the demilitarization of Turkish politics. However, up to now reforms have not been free from the military's impact. The democracy game is still played in a field whose borders have been delimited by the Turkish armed forces (TAF) and its interpretation of Kemalism. Even when the boundaries of these borders were extended, it was more due to the TAF's self-restraint, motivated by the prospect of membership in the EU, rather than the rest...
The politics of neoliberal transformation on the periphery: a critical comparison of Greece and Turkey Gonenc, Defne; Durmaz, Günseli (Informa UK Limited, 2020-11-01) Financialization and neoliberal globalization have increased the dependency of peripheral countries on core economies. This paper tracks the neoliberalization processes of Greece and Turkey, two neighbouring countries on the periphery of Europe. By using a comparative political economy method and borrowing from the variegated capitalism literature, it critically investigates how these two Mediterranean countries were affected by the 2008 global financial crisis, their variant responses, and the impacts of t...
The European Union's strategy towards the Western Balkans: Exclusion or integration? Türkeş, Mustafa (SAGE Publications, 2006-09-01) This article analyzes the European Union's strategy towards the Western Balkans as a hegemonic project. The European Commission's strategy is neither total exclusion nor rapid integration. The Commission's aim is to restructure the Western Balkans in line with neoliberalism to prepare the region for the "preincorporation stage." The Commission's major initiatives show that this neoliberal restructuring need not end in full membership but remains an open-ended process. Two components of the Commission's form...
The Rise of populist radical right parties in Europe: the case of the alternative for Germany (AfD) Çalışkan, Hülya Ecem; Alpan, Başak Zeynep; Department of European Studies (2018) This thesis aims to show that the Alternative for Germany displays a good combination of populism, nativism, and authoritarianism, which are three core ideological features of populist radical right parties. This thesis also aims to find out what the rise of the Alternative for Germany means for the future of Europe. This thesis claims that the populist radical right ideology that the Alternative for Germany stands for is a serious threat to the European integration project which has provided a framework fo...
The Economic Crisis of 2008: Reproduction of the Core-Periphery Relations between the European Core and the Balkans Rüma, İnan (Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi (Ankara, Turkey), 2014-12) The 1990s were marked with the transition process that aimed to transform the central command economies to liberal free market economies and the single party regimes to multiparty democracies. The result has been mostly the reproduction of the peripheral characteristics of the Balkans. The shortcomings of the process have been asserted as if the deficiencies were local and hence the Balkan countries were to blame for it. Few could predict that the core would be in crisis. The 2008 crisis in the core di...

Citation Formats

S. Cosar and M. Yegenoglu, “The Neoliberal Restructuring of Turkey’s Social Security System,” MONTHLY REVIEW-AN INDEPENDENT SOCIALIST MAGAZINE, pp. 36–49, 2009, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/64895.