Ali Burak Güven

Global Crisis, National Responses: The Political Economy of Turkish Exceptionalism

With its dilatory and piecemeal fiscal activism and uncharacteristic aversion to IMF assistance, the Turkish governments response to the global economic crisis of 2008–9 diverged considerably from prevalent trends in other major emerging market countries. Underlying this intriguing pattern were Turkeys pre-existing policy and macroeconomic constraints, cognitive lapses on the part of policymakers, and the conjunctural dynamics of domestic politics. The interplay of these factors progressively narrowed the policy space for vigorous action, leading to a motley combination of reactive initiatives that neither offered sufficient protection to vulnerable social groups nor promised sustainable growth in the long run despite rapid short-term recovery.

The Global Economic Crisis and the Future of Neoliberal Globalization: Rupture Versus Continuity

This article outlines the main elements of rupture and continuity in the global political economy since the global economic crisis of 2008-2009. While the current calamity poses a more systemic challenge to neoliberal globalization than genetically similar turbulences in the semi-periphery during the 1990s, we find that evidence for its transformative significance remains mixed. Efforts to reform the distressed capitalist models in the North encounter severe resistance, and the broadened multilateralism of the G-20 is yet to provide effective global economic governance. Overall, neoliberal globalization looks set to survive, but in more heterodox and multipolar fashion. Without tighter coordination between old and emerging powers, this new synthesis is unlikely to inspire lasting solutions to pressing global problems such as an unsustainable international financial architecture and the pending environmental catastrophe, and may even fail to preserve some modest democratic and developmental gains of the recent past.

The Feasibility of IFI‐Led Institutional Reform: Four Turkish Experiments Compared

Institutional reform has proved an enduring theme in the lending programmes of international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the IMF and the World Bank. But research harbours strong objections to the feasibility of IFI-led institutional restructuring. This article evaluates these objections in the light of evidence from Turkey, a country with an early record of programme-based reform initiatives in many institutional domains. Drawing on Turkeys central bank independence, banking regulation, anti-corruption and agricultural subsidy reforms, it argues that IFI-guided institutional restructuring may indeed encounter severe feasibility problems unless prescribed and implemented in a propitious environment marked by powerful international norms, widely accepted design templates, high levels of bureaucratic preparedness, and active endorsement from key domestic players.

The World Bank and emerging powers: beyond the multipolarity-multilateralism conundrum

ABSTRACT The discrepancy between the increasingly multipolar world economy of the recent decades and the stubbornly limited representativeness of the organisations mandated with its governance causes much strain in global politics. Some scholars suggest that this chronic mismatch will undermine existing multilateral bodies, while others expect the present architecture to persist. This article contends that the outcomes of this challenge are institution-specific. In settings where significant operational realignments are possible within existing mandates and governance structures, the multipolarity–multilateralism conundrum could be partly mitigated. The argument is based on a thematic analysis of all IBRD-IDA loan commitments between 2002 and 2015 in the World Bank’s seven all-time top borrowers: Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey (collectively, the Big Seven). The key finding is that while these emerging countries remain the Bank’s biggest clients, the terms of their engagement have shifted precisely along the lines where they had already differed from the rest of the Bank’s clientele: away from politically onerous governance and institutional reforms, and towards developing physical and market infrastructure while attaining social sustainability. This implicit realignment is facilitated by the Bank’s diverse policy repertoire, which allows considerable inter-regional and intra-regional variation in lending patterns to accommodate member preferences.

Whither the post-Washington Consensus? International financial institutions and development policy before and after the crisis

ABSTRACT This article explores the direction, drivers and implications of change in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank’s policy vision for developing countries before and after the global economic crisis. By examining the evolution of the Fund’s structural conditionalities and the thematic distribution of Bank commitments, it provides evidence for a significant change on the ground: a partial retreat from the post-Washington Consensus (PWC) agenda, which marked a turn-of-the-century upgrade of orthodox neoliberalism. Conceptualising the PWC as a paradigm expansion that followed severe policy failures, the analysis finds that although narrow institutional reforms towards upgrading fiscal and financial regimes remain popular, there is now less emphasis on good governance and broad institutions; meanwhile in social policy the twins increasingly diverge. It is argued that this selective disengagement is driven by extant operational imperatives and constraints, which are further intensified by changes in lending framework and ongoing transformations in development finance. Rather than constitute a paradigm shift, the partial decline of the PWC reflects an adjustment in policy practice towards increased flexibility and discretion in a progressively challenging environment. These findings have implications for the study of the twins. They also highlight the evolving parameters of North–South development cooperation.

Book Review: Richard Sandbrook, Reinventing the Left in the Global South: The Politics of the Possible

This book has the wide-ranging objective of providing a critical and comprehensive (both in terms of chronological period and the breadth of societies considered) overview of the rise, fall and post-socialist transformation of the state socialist project. Three major themes guide the analysis – the rise of state socialism on the model of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), an account of how it was dismantled in Europe, and an evaluation of the outcomes of the transformation. The discussion is centred around the Soviet Union and its successor-state – the Russian Federation. However, within this setting, the book uses comparative analysis to compare the transformation of three sets of post-socialist states: the new member states of the European Union and the European and Asian members of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Moreover, throughout the book the author makes comparisons with China, which has followed a unique reform strategy. The author concludes with a discussion of the alternatives open to the post-socialist countries. The book can be recommended for courses in political science on Russia and the post-socialist states and is written at a level which makes it of particular interest to researchers of the Soviet Union, Russia, Eastern Europe and China as well as students of transformation. The strength of the book is in its novel approach of looking at socialist and post-socialist developments within the system of postsocialist states as a comprehensive yet differentiated whole, and the author succeeds in outlining the general systemic processes, while also paying attention to the variety of transformative pathways. The analysis brings together a wide range of materials from several different fields and succeeds in synthesising a diverse range of sources. The account does not include the impact of the global financial crisis, although this omission does not detract from the goals and analytical contribution of the book. This is the only book that deals in any detail and in a scholarly way with the whole socialist period and what ensued. It also considers the future developmental trajectories of the states under discussion, and persuasively argues that, although the fall of state socialism was a setback to the socialist project, the universalist goals of socialism have not been invalidated by the dismantling of state socialism. The analysis includes a thorough consideration of the history, development, policy and sociology of the state socialist system, while also evaluating the lessons and implications for socialism in the current global system.