Globalization and social democracy in the European periphery: paradoxes of the Turkish experience

Abstract

During the course of the 1990s, center-left and center-right parties around the world have attempted to revise their strategies to be able to cope effectively with the new environment and conditions of globalization. We suggest that the experience of social democracy in Turkey in this context presents a peculiar case, in that the kind of strategy that could have brought electoral success has instead been adopted by the existing center-right government with moderate Islamic identity. The principal social democratic party, in turn, has been unable to transform itself in such a way as to capitalize upon the opportunity space provided by the changing domestic, regional and global context. This paper attempts to account for the peculiar and paradoxical nature of this experience by providing an historical and political- economic analysis of social democracy and its embeddedness in the state-centric and top-down modernization process in Turkey. In order to substantiate its analysis, the paper also focuses on the contrasting electoral victory of the Justice and Development Party (the AKP) over its principal social democratic rival, the Republican People's Party (the CHP).