The making and the crisis of Turkish social democracy: Roots, discourses and strategies

Abstract

The making and the crisis of social democracy in Turkey has a structural and historical context. It is also an agent of Turkish political modernisation which is an authoritarian one. In this sense it is interrelated with the constitutive ideology and the parameters of Turkey's hegemonic state discourse, namely Kemalism. The condition faced by Turkish social democracy is an outcome of the crisis of modernity started in the 1980s and in the 1990s, under such influences as postmodernism and globalisation. In order to reach the deep causes of the crisis the analysis develops both on the vertical and horizontal axis, the first encompassing the internal and the latter encircling the external conditions. As the main cause of the crisis is assumed to be the nationalist, parochial character of Turkish social democracy, and its inability in getting adopted to the new emerging conditions, the thesis, as a conclusion, develops a prospective approach drawing on the recent theories that has helped the upheaval of this political ideology in West-European countries.