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The recent Turkish involvement in the Middle East constitutes an important test case for establishing the boundaries of regional power influence in a changing global context. The AKP government in Turkey has become a major supporter of political change and democratization in the era of the Arab revolutions. Accumulating empirical evidence suggests, however, that the highly assertive and pro-active foreign policy of the AKP government in recent years has not been effective in terms of facilitating reform or regime change in Syria or helping to influence the direction of political change in Egypt towards a durable pluralistic order. Indeed, the policy might have been counter-productive in terms of undermining Turkey's image of a benign regional power, by drawing it to sectarian conflicts and over-engagement in the domestic politics of key Arab states. Turkey has the potential to play an important role model in the highly uncertain world of the Arab revolutions. Its ability to perform this role, however, requires an improvement in its own democratic credentials, rather than being excessively involved in the domestic politics of individual states. Adapted from the source document.

Privatisation has been on the policy agenda in Turkey since the mid-1980s. Yet progress was slow throughout the first two decades of the Turkish neoliberal experiment. More recently, however, Turkey has experienced a major privatisation boom in the aftermath of the 2001 crisis. This paper tries to understand the nature of the recent privatisation boom from a political economy perspective and attempts to account for the paradox of the mass or hyper-privatisation experience of Turkey, comparable with Mexico and Argentina in the 1990s. A key concept here is the 'pro-privatization coalition'. An attempt is made to understand how this coalition is progressively strengthened while the power of the anti-privatisation coalition has been undermined in the post-2001 era. An interesting insight in this context concerns the importance of legal and institutional changes which also help to shift the balance from the anti- to the pro-privatization coalition. The final part of the paper aims to study the changing nature of resistance to privatisation by selective references to the opposition to some of the major privatisation deals in Turkey. Adapted from the source document.

Turkey has experienced consecutive financial crises in 2000 and 2001. The crisis of 2001 was particularly far-reaching in terms of its impact, resulting in a major collapse of output and employment. It was also quite distinct in terms of its income distributional consequences in the sense that not only the wage earners, but all sections of society at varying degrees encountered its negative consequences. The crisis also provided an avenue for a new wave of neo-liberal restructuring with a major emphasis on regulatory reforms. Turkey's political economy in the post-2001 era is investigated on the basis of four key inter-related elements: the impact of the IMF and the World Bank; the restructuring of the state's relationship with the domestic financial sector especially through regulatory reforms; the opening up of Turkey to foreign direct investment; and the adoption of a wide range of reforms modelled on the European Union, in line with the goal of entry into the EU. Indeed, the regional context associated with EU conditionality has provided the political focus of the process as a whole. A key hypothesis is that Turkey continues to be vulnerable in spite of the fact that the banking sector is much more tightly regulated in line with international norms during the post-crisis era. Adapted from the source document.

The article builds on the premise that the standard left-right division is not a meaningful characterization of Turkish politics. Political competition in Turkey in the present era is increasingly characterized by a contest between 'conservative globalists' and 'defensive nationalists' and the political environment is marked by the conspicuous absence of a European-style left-of-centre social democratic party. The article investigates the kinds of influences that enabled the Justice and Development Party to enlarge its electoral coalition in 2007 suggesting an even bigger swing of the pendulum towards conservative globalists compared to the situation in the previous election of 2002. It also tries to highlight the inherent weaknesses of conservative globalism and points towards the absence of effective and constructive opposition as a means of explaining the recent instability and re-polarization in Turkish politics which constitutes a major obstacle on the path to democratic consolidation. Adapted from the source document.

Argentina & Turkey are two important 'emerging market countries' that experienced a major economic crisis during the same year. Focusing on the period leading up to the respective 2001 crises in the two countries, this article attempts to place the two experiments in historical perspective & provide an understanding of the common elements as well as the diversity of the neoliberal restructuring process in semi-peripheral settings. The article also attempts to identify some of the key mistakes made by the imf, which was, in part, responsible for the crises experienced. A central conclusion is that 'new' or unconsolidated democracies find themselves particularly vulnerable when they are suddenly & prematurely exposed to financial & capital account liberalisation. The outcome is a highly fragile, debt-led growth path with costly consequences. Indeed, although both countries have managed to accomplish impressive recoveries in the post-crisis period, given their past trajectories & the heavy debt burden that they face, it is too early to say that the recovery process will be translated into sustained & crisis-free growth. The regional environment in which the two countries find themselves might be particularly important in this context, with the powerful EU anchor a possible important advantage in the Turkish context. Tables. Adapted from the source document.