Elif Uzgören
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Integration of a peripheral country into the capitalist world system
Turkey’s political economy
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Chapter 2 situates Turkey–EU relations within the uneven development of global capitalism and highlights particular coordinates of class struggle historically. This prepares the ground for debating the struggle among social forces in the following three empirical chapters. The analysis is structured on three levels, the social relations of production, the form of the state, and the world order within three distinct historical periods: the Fordist period of the 1960s and 1970s; the neoliberal turn in the 1980s; the post-2007 authoritarian neoliberal period. Turkey–EU relations are analysed at the end of each section. How can we read Turkey’s transition to capitalism under structural conditions of uneven exchange? How has neoliberal restructuring impacted Turkey–EU relations? How have the Great Recession and the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism transformed the future trajectory of Turkey–EU relations? The book argues that, during Keynesian embedded liberalism, relations reflected a tug of war between social forces in favour of industrialisation by protectionism versus liberalisation by the Customs Union. Following the neoliberal turn, Turkey applied for membership in 1987 and participated in the Customs Union in 1995 in the absence of a labour perspective. Turkey’s AKP regime is then read as trasformismo in the 2000s as a condition of the formation of an ever more extensive ruling class. The AKP government has resorted to coercive policies in the 2010s in tandem with the crisis of neoliberal hegemony and dependent financialisation. Turkey–EU relations are not centred around membership but involve transactional cooperation around issue-specific areas such as migration, visa liberalisation and person-to-person cooperation.

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