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Contention during economic crises: Turkey in 2001 and 2008

Paper submitted to ECPR General Conference in Reykjavik 2011

Kıvanç Atak, Researcher

Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute

e-mail: kivanc.atak@eui.eu

Abstract: In both 2001 and 2008, Turkey has gone through the consequences of economic crises; one

rooted domestically, the other globally. Protest mobilization in the course of first term was massive,

geographically diffused, and at times radicalized. Throughout the second period, on the contrary, social

unrest was not as eruptive as in the previous case. This paper first looks at the economic narratives of the

two crises in terms of their social impact on the population. By way of comparison, I problematize

economic accounts for the different levels of protest activity and rather focus on political processes to

address the question. I argue that a) the fragmentation and division among the ruling elites, and b)

scandalous corruption cases having a direct effect on people’s everyday concerns have articulated material

grievances into political ones, contributing to the growing social unrest resulted in large-scale mobilization

in 2000/2001.

Keywords: economic crisis, protest mobilization, divided elites, corruption, Turkey

In 2001, Turkey experienced one of the most devastating economic crisis throughout its

republican history. Banks were collapsed leaving all the savings and fortunes of thousands of

their depositors eroded, incomes fell drastically and people lost their jobs. The consequences of

the crisis also frustrated the government which had been in office since 1999. The three coalition

partners could not survive any longer and called for early elections in 2002, when all of them

were strictly punished by the entire electorate. The scope of the social unrest was considerably

high, as street protests became a routine practice of the quotidian social life, which at times

turned into tense encounters between demonstrators and the police. Massive protests were held

by shopkeepers, public and private workers and civil servants who had to bear the heaviest

burden of the economic hardships.

Around seven years later, the global markets, of which Turkey is an ambitious player entered

into the greatest depression since 1929. Perhaps motivated by self-confidence out of already six

years in rule as the head of a single party government, Prime Minister Erdoğan said that ‚the

crisis will only be tangent to Turkey‛. To him, the Turkish economy was stable and strong

enough to overcome the crisis with a minimum damage. The curious question was, of course,

was that really the case for an economy which is highly dependent on global capital? Although

the two crises were structurally different, certain economic indicators show that the effects of

the 2008 depression on Turkey was far from being ‘tangent’, if not equally destructive as in

2001. However, the level of social contention was significantly lower in the latter episode. Was

mailto:kivanc.atak@eui.eu

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Erdoğan right, or is there something more to say about the protest mobilization in these two

terms?

The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the differences in contention during the

two crises periods in Turkey. For that I will look at the protest events comparing the two crisis

terms. Here, I will argue that albeit rooted dissimilarly, a comparison of the crisis outcomes will

not suffice to explain the different levels of mobilization in the course of the economic downfall.

Instead, one shall look at (a) the configuration of the ruling elites, and (b) the politicized issue of

corruption in 2000/2001 to better understand why social contention acted out through street

protests was lower in scale, less diffuse, and less radical in the second half of 2008 and first

couple of months of 2009.

This paper is structured as follows. First, I will give a descriptive account of what has exactly

happened in Turkey in 2001 and 2008 as a result of the economic crises. I do not aim at digging

into the details of the crisis narrative; rather I plan to give a general idea about the extent to

which the Turkish society was affected by the two crises on a macro level. Then, I will share the

results of the protest event analysis covering each one-year periods in 2001 and 2008. Finally, I

will structure my argument along the axes of ‘divided elites’ and the salience of corruption

(political dissent).

The twin crises of 2000 and 2001

The Turkish economy throughout the 1990s was experiencing typical difficulties instigated by

an uncontrolled financial liberalization. A series of IMF-led programs turned to be

unsustainable leading to high inflation rates, devaluations, large budgetary deficits, and

onwards. In 1999, the government signed a stand-by agreement with the IMF with an ultimate

aim of stabilizing the economy. Yet, following a short term of a successful implementation, in

November 2000, the banking system entered into a formidable turbulence. The impasse of a

huge foreign exchange debt pushed the banks towards a liquidity crisis. The $7.5 billion extra

credit provided by the IMF helped the Central Bank to temporarily calm down the shock wave.

Just three months later, nevertheless, a political conflict between the president and the prime

minister sparked the second major hit to the financial system which already ran out of its power

to resist massive capital outflows. Within a single day on February 21st, the infamous ‘Black

Wednesday’, the stock market fell down by almost 20 per cent, and the Turkish Lira depreciated

about 30 per cent against the U.S. dollar (Uygur 2001; Akyüz and Boratav 2003; Dufour and

Orhangazi 2009).

The immediate social reaction to the crisis came from the established institutions of the civil

society. The day after the ‘Black Wednesday’, the civil initiative conglomeration (Sivil İnisiyatif

Başkanlar Kurulu) of professional chambers, labor and employer unions made a declaration to

the government claiming that they will not support any recovery program which does not take

into account their opinion (İşveren, February 2001). The Labor Platform (Emek Platformu) went

further by stating that if their demands for stopping mass lay-offs of workers and other anti-

labor practices are not met, ‚the entire landscape of Turkey will be turned into a field of

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demonstrations‛ (www.belgenet.com). A representative body of the business sector, TOBB, The

Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey, made a call in the national

newspapers with an analogy to the ‘Independence War’, emphasizing national unity. The call

was also concerned about breaking out of a potential social upheaval which would lead to

widespread public disorder (Milliyet 20.03.2001). Nonetheless, the growing popular discontent

with the economic conditions has eventually led to mass protest mobilizations throughout the

whole country. Starting from April 2001 onwards, not only in major cities such as Istanbul,

Ankara, and Izmir, but also in many other Anatolian towns like Konya, Gaziantep, Bursa, and

Eskişehir, which do not have regular records of large events, hundreds of thousands of people

gathered to protest against losses of jobs, savings, bankruptcies and so on. Particularly those

people called esnaf, which refers to a class of small shopkeepers, artisans and traders, were very

active and mostly organized by TESK, the Turkish Confederation of Artisans and Shopkeepers.

They were accompanied by a variety of emekçiler, composed of all segments of public and

private workers and civil servants. The cycle of protest has slowed down towards the end of the

month, yet it rejuvenated, albeit smaller in magnitude, by contentious gatherings of the banking

personnel who lost their jobs due to the confiscation of certain banks by TMSF, the Savings

Deposits Insurance Fund.

The traumatic experience of the Turkish society has turned into a driving force for restructuring

the economy. The then deputy president of the World Bank, Kemal Derviş, was literally called

for carrying out this difficult task which was headed ‘Strong Economy Program’ under the

auspices of the IMF. The core aims of the program were 1) eliminating the financial

vulnerability of the Turkish economy by reinforcing the banking sector, 2) ascertaining the

transparency and accountability through supervisory institutions, 3) achieving stability via

deflationary policies, and 4) facilitating economic growth (Central Bank of the Republic of

Turkey – www.tcmb.gov.tr). These survival efforts notwithstanding, the governing parties as

well as their contemporaries were highly discredited in the public eye. Not surprisingly

therefore, one of the sharpest political outcomes of the crisis was the punishment of almost all

mainstream political parties by the electorate that kept them out of the parliament, let alone

losing their governing positions. It was more or less due to the same reason why AKP, a very

recently established party composed of ex-Islamists, could make an unchallenged victory in the

early elections of 2002.

The ‘tangent’ 2008

The 2001 crisis was rooted domestically, thus originally different from the 2008 depression

which started in the U.S. mortgage markets and gradually diffused to the globe. The banking

sector being restructured, and the commitment to the new economy program having yielded

successive growth rates, the main question concerning Turkey was about to what extent the

country was susceptible to the aggressive waves of the global crisis. The Turkish political

authorities spoke very confidently about the fate of the national economy, whose survival is

paradoxically dependent on the mobility of the global capital. Indeed, since the aftermath of the

2001 crisis the Turkish economy has recorded an average of 5% annual growth in line with the

neoliberal measures. Note that this performance was not due to the explosion of the real sector

http://www.belgenet.com/http://www.tcmb.gov.tr/

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and the industrial production. It was made possible through mass privatizations and volatile

capital transactions such as foreign direct investments and portfolio investments (Yeldan 2009).

The recessive fluctuations in the global markets thus posed serious risks for the Turkish

business sector which used to enjoy external demands and borrowings.

Unlike 2001, Turkey did not pass through a ‘black’ weekday in 2008; however, the social

implications of the latter were by no means incomparable to the previous crisis. The Turkish

Statistical Institute (TUIK) reports an erosion of the GDP per capita by about $2000 which

amounts to the 20 per cent of its average sum by then. During the same term, the

unemployment rate within the male population has risen by 57, whereas among the females it

has increased by 45 per cent (Dinççağ and Dündar 2011). A survey investigating household

welfare conducted by UNICEF, World Bank and TEPAV (Economic Policy Research Foundation

of Turkey) also supports these indicators in sociological respect. The results have shown that

around three quarter of the household declared a fall in their income, which is particularly

higher among lower classes and those who work in the informal sector (TEPAV, 29.09.2009). In

other words, the impact of the global depression seems to have deeply penetrated into the

material perceptions of Turkish population. In order to have a comparative perspective, the

Table 1 presents selected indicators of the two crises.

Table 1 – Selected indicators

2001 2008

GDP per capita fall at current prices (%) 26 20

Unemployment rate (%) 8.4 11

Young unemployment (%) 16.2 20.5

Closed/established traders (%) 81 80

Closed/established companies/cooperatives (%) 8 19

Reel net wage index public & private workers (mean) 96.7 93.1

Reel net wage index civil servants 104.8 136

Source: TUIK, State Planning Organization

Needless to say, the table is not a full-fledged inventory of the crisis conditions in Turkey. Yet,

these indicators suffice to show that the outcomes of the 2008 depression do not seem much less

severe, if not equally detrimental to the societal affluence. In certain respects such as the

unemployment or terminated businesses, the latter looks even more serious as a potential

source of discontent. That is to say that once we assume that the economic grievances had been

the main source for the widespread protest mobilization following the 2001 crisis, we can also

anticipate comparably strong grievances in the latter period which can potentially lead to

mobilized social unrest. Whether this assumption is problematic or not, is a question that this

paper is trying to address.

As far as the mainstream media is concerned, the social unrest impeded by the material

deterioration in the course of the 2008 crisis has not been amongst the most popular public

debates in Turkey. At first glance, the level of protest mobilization seemed neither as massive

nor spatially as diffuse as in the 2001 period. The role of the media in manipulating social

reality could of course be a possible explanation for the underrepresentation of a particular

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phenomenon. Considering the worsening situation of the press freedom in the country, this

would indeed make sense. Without any systematical research, however, such an argument

would only remain as a speculation. This is what I will try to overcome in the next section.

Protest events

Arguably, the mobilization of social unrest is most visibly observable during episodes of protest

events. That is why I decided to examine events which are in one way or another related to the

consequences of the economic crises. For the analysis of the protest events, I have relied on a

national newspaper called Cumhuriyet. The newspaper has left-nationalistic leanings, but my

selection for collecting information on protests is motivated by a practical rationale, rather than

by the source’s ideological qualities. Among other media sources, it turned out to cover the

highest amount of protest-related news which enabled me to have a larger pool to analyze.

Actually, using newspapers for such an analysis is not immune from plausibly critical

interpretations (McCarthy, McPhail and Smith 1996, 2001; Oliver and Maney 2000; Strawn 2008;

Davenport 2010). The selection and description biases that stem from the very strategies and

political stances of the media source on the one hand, and the nature of the events being not

always sufficiently ‘spectacular’ to be labeled as ‘newsworthy’, on the other hand, cast

reasonable doubts on the reliability of newspaper information. Still, once the researcher is

aware of the potential problems that such biases would cause, it is safe to claim that

‚researchers can effectively use such data, and newspaper data does (sic) not deviate markedly

from accepted standards of quality‛ (Earl et al. 2004, 77).

For each case, I have looked at one-year periods, i.e. from November 2000 and from June 2008

onwards respectively. These more or less correspond to the time intervals when the crises

started to be effectual until the domestic conditions began showing signs of recovery. The

coverage includes every second day issues of the newspaper plus the front pages of the days in

between.

Figure 1 – Protest cycle during crisis terms

Source: Cumhuriyet

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Figure 1 displays the distribution of the protests with no geographical differentiation. These are

protests that are either directly mobilized against the economic crisis, or raise relevant issues

such as unemployment, layoffs, salaries, increase in prices, and also financial matters such as

the collapse of the banks. In the first period, the initial phase of the crisis seems to have fostered

immediate contentious response which temporarily calmed down until the second phase. Then,

the mobilization skyrockets abruptly in April which subsequently flattens as the protest cycle

dies out. In the latter case, the magnitude of the cycle is considerably less strong.

The spatial diffusion of the protest events also shows marked differences between the two

episodes. Turkey is divided into 81 administrative provinces that are located in 7 geographical

regions. During the 2000/2001 crisis, protests have taken place in 20 provinces as they were

reported by Cumhuriyet. In fact, since the actual number of protests is much higher than the

reported one, the amount of the provinces involved shall also be higher. But as same holds true

for the latter term, one can justifiably ignore this lack of actual correspondence. In 2008, on the

other hand, the newspaper has reported only 13 provinces, which means that the spatial

diffusion has occurred to a firmly lesser extent.

One thing which merits close attention concerns the forms of collective action and the responses

from the law enforcement authorities. A useful categorization distinguishes peaceful and

demonstrative forms of protest from confrontational and violent ones (Kriesi et al 1995). In

many events, in fact, these action forms can coexist depending both on the profile of the

protesters involved, and on the police reaction which can turn a peaceful demonstration into a

violent event. By confrontational forms, I refer to the protests that push the limits of legal

permissiveness such as occupations and blockades, or unauthorized gatherings, rallies and so

on. Violent events usually go more extreme and involve physical attack on property or security

forces. In 2001, crisis-related protests at times became radicalized in terms of the forms of

collective action. Cumhuriyet reports 10 such events all of which has occurred during the cycle in

April. But by the same token, the police was also quite repressive as they detained 464 people

under custody according to the newspaper coverage. In this regard, the 2008 events proved to

be much less radical, which as an exogenous factor has translated into softer tactics of protest

policing.

Table 2 – Diffusion and radicalization

2000-2001 2008

Geographical diffusion (number of provinces) 20 13

Confrontational/violent events 10 2

Detainees/custody 464 0

Source: Cumhuriyet

These results are remarkable when we also consider the participants of the protest. Obviously,

organizational affiliation and preparation is an advantage for the masses to mobilize on the

streets. That is why it is not surprising to see labor unions and confederations as the most active

organizations partaking in crisis protests. Part of the reason also owes to the fact that public and

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private workers, civil servants and other fixed salary groups are economically amongst the most

vulnerable social classes during times of crisis. Currently, there are three worker and two public

laborer confederations in Turkey. Among them, DİSK (Revolutionary Labor Unions

Confederation), KESK (Public Workers Unions Confederation) and individual unions of TÜRK-

İŞ (Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions) have been most actively involved in crisis protests.

For the purposes of this paper, two things are worth mentioning. First, in 2001, Emek Platformu

(Labor Platform) was one of the leading organizers of mass demonstrations during December

and April waves in particular. This is a temporarily established platform composed of labor

confederations, professional chambers, and associations et cetera in order to show collective

reaction not only to the crisis conditions but also to certain economic and social policies. Second

and as I mentioned before, the esnaf groups who were at times mobilized by their umbrella

organization TESK, were also in the foreground of 2001 protests. Both of them were almost

absent throughout the 2008 term. Especially recalling the proportion of terminated businesses to

the established ones which was more or less equally high in 2008 as the records of 2001, the

quiescence of the esnaf is a genuinely curious matter.

The most central question for me at the moment is, then, if the economic grievances brought

about by the 2001 twin-crisis were the main catalyst for the massive protest mobilization back

then, why was level of mobilization in 2008 incomparably less massive, less diffuse and less

radical although the consequences of the 2008 crisis were comparably hazardous? I argue that the

answer lies within (a) the configuration of the ruling elites, and (b) the politicized issue of

corruption, both of which facilitated mobilization in 2001, while they worked out differently in

2008, and can be counted for the weaker protest behavior back then.

Divided ruling elites, widespread corruption: social unrest heightened

a. Divided elites

The concept of ‘divided elites’ has been coined as one dimension of the political opportunities

which is seen as a potential catalyst of mobilization. The logic follows that the ‚divisions among

elites not only provides incentives to resource-poor groups to take the risk of collective action;

they encourage portions of the elite that are out of power to seize the role of ‘tribunes of the

people’‛ (Tarrow 1998, 79). Previous research has shown different ways of looking at the

phenomenon of divided elites with regard to its influence on contentious politics. For instance,

in their study on the women’s protests and congressional activities in the U.S., Sarah A. Soule

and her colleagues have conceptualized the division between supportive elites in the legislature

and the oppositional presidency in terms of their responsiveness to women’s claims as a form of

elite division, and found that it worked as a spurring factor for the women’s collective action

(Soule et al. 1999). A more recent work on political parties and social protest in 17 countries in

Latin America has employed an event-count model on legislative fragmentation and party

system institutionalization (Arce 2010). The author has shown that in countries with weaker

and more fragmented parties in the legislation, i.e. more divided elites, channeling economic

discontent through street protests is more common than those with less fragmented

parliaments. Elite division, in short, undermines the unity of the ruling power block which

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would otherwise have stood against dissenters’ claims, and thus creates an ample opportunity

for them to find influential allies.

I argue that the political process leading to the 2000/2001 crisis in Turkey was taking place

under conditions of elite division, which, once coupled with disclosed stories of notorious

corruption, escalated social unrest to a much higher extent. This was of course, not an overnight

story, but an ongoing narrative starting from early 1990s onwards, a decade characterized by

political and economic instability. Within a ten-year period, Turkish politics witnessed ten times

of a governmental change (Grand National Assembly, TBMM). These governments were

composed of parties whose electoral turnouts were swinging at the margins of 20 per cent;

which at times were less than a majority in the parliament, and occasionally (February 28th,

1997) interrupted by military intervention. Under these circumstances, it was common to

observe economic programs suspended, indicators fluctuating, all of which to the detriment of

the social sectors. One clear example was the then Prime Minister Çiller’s withdrawal from IMF

program after four months since its inauguration, and her call for early elections in 1994.

Prior to the general elections in 1999, the tripartite coalition of Motherland Party (ANAP),

Democratic Left Party (DSP) and Democratic Turkey Party (DTP) have formed a government

with the aim of ‚saving the country from the regime and state crises caused by the previous

government‛ (Grand National Assembly, TBMM). They were preceded by the Erbakan-led

government which had to resign following the soft coup against the ‚imminent Islamic threat‛

within the state apparatuses. Nevertheless, the coalition could only survive a bit more than

eighteen months because of a corruption scandal concerning the tender of a national bank

allegedly involved by two leading figures of ANAP, Mesut Yılmaz and Güneş Taner. The

negative vote of confidence for the government has culminated in the formation of an interim

government to lead the country until the elections in 1999. Another tripartite coalition by DSP,

ANAP and Nationalist Action Party (MHP) was formed and remained in office until 2002,

strongly discredited by the economic crisis and paralyzed by the inter-party conflicts especially

between the latter two.

This short overview, I think, is useful to have an idea about the political climate dominant

throughout that decade. Back then, the DSP-ANAP-MHP coalition had a difficult task to fix the

chronic problems of the Turkish economy troubled by huge public debts and growing current

account deficits in the first place. DSP was one of the post-1980-coup parties with leftist

orientations rooted in the late 1960s and 1970s, which more and more leaned toward

nationalistic overtones. MHP has been an extreme nationalist player strategically capitalizing on

anti-(‘Kurdish’-) divisiveness propaganda. ANAP on the other hand, has been an ambitious

supporter of a free-market economy and liberalization. Obviously, it was not a coalition based

on shared political stances. When it came to issues of political reformation in line with

European Union prospects, for instance, disagreements were common which sometimes have

led to deadlocks in passing laws in the parliament.

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It was in such an atmosphere when the ruling elites were trying to carry out a program

stipulated by an agreement with the IMF in summer 1999. The then Undersecretary of Treasury,

Selçuk Demiralp, described the situation as follows:

It is very difficult, almost impossible to implement such programs by coalition governments.

Problems arose out of it. When necessary, immediate measures could not be taken. Long

discussions took place *

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At the end of the decade, on the contrary, the picture looked quite differently in this respect. In

terms of the government composition, the AKP was enjoying its second term as a single-party

government, having increased its votes by around 30 per cent almost to the half size of the

entire electorate in July 2007. Soon after the elections, President Sezer was replaced by Abdullah

Gül, a founding member of the AKP. This not only enabled AKP to make politics (and

manipulate issues such as economic crisis) without being disrupted by internal challenges, but

also gave the opportunity to seek almost an absolute control over significant bureaucratic units

of the state. It does not necessarily mean that the ruling elites were transformed into a

monolithic body, but provides a sharp contrast to the fragmented and at times conflicting

relations among the elites in the previous term.

b. Corruption (political dissent)

The second thing that, in my opinion, has broadened the scale of social unrest at the turn of the

century was widespread corruption involving business and political entrepreneurs. In general,

the negative effect of corruption on political support of the incumbents is a substantiated

argument (Anderson and Tverdova 2003). What is more relevant for this paper is its relation to

protest mobilization. Certain findings from earlier studies displayed that high rates of

corruption intertwined with severe economic hardships is a potent factor cementing social

protest. One research on the 1991 spring wave of protests in several Sub-Saharan African

countries has rejected economic accounts for the intensifying social unrest because;

the issue of elite corruption1 served as a vehicle for transforming narrow economic grievances into

broad political demands. Protests began to draw a connection between economic failures and the

lack of political accountability in single-part states. Rather than condemning the decline in

commodity prices or western protectionism, they blamed patronage and nepotism for the

economic crisis. (Bratton and van de Walle 1992, 430)

Just as economic grievances can grow with political outcry against corruption, the latter

deepens further with a solidified sense of material losses. Chen’s work on the labor

demonstrations in China in the mid of the 1990s pointed out that corruption among managers

of state owned enterprises could not by itself render workers to rise up ‚if their lives are not

terribly affected by it‛. Protests began as workers were ‚simultaneously confronted with

subsistence crisis and witnessing cadre corruption in their enterprises‛ (Chen 2000, 51).

In Turkey, corruption seems to have a played a similar role in bringing together economic

grievances with political contention during the 2001 crisis term. Actually, the Corruption

Perception Index (CPI) prepared by Transparency International (TI) shows that Turkey

improved only slightly from 3.6 in 2001 to 4.6 in 2008 in the ten-point scale, while its ranking

fell down from 56th to 58th among other countries (Transparency International Annual Report

2001, 2008). But arguably, the sort of corruption disclosed towards the end of the 1990s and the

beginning of the 2000s was more tangible by the population due to the amount of losses and the

1 Italics by the author.

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eruption of scandals. Several civil society organizations prepared reports to inform the public

about the scale of corruption whose damage on the domestic economy is enormously high. On

the top of the corruption scandals was the banking sector, if not confined to it.

Banking, utilities, and public tenders are the most important areas of corruption. More than

US$42 billion was siphoned off by state and official banks. (Global Integrity Country Report 2004,

5)

Only between the years 1999 and 2001, the Savings Deposits Insurance Fund has confiscated 19

banks, some of them brought together and sold, others sold directly, or conveyed to other banks

(TMSF). A research conducted by TOBB reveals that the losses of the yet-thirteen banks

transferred to TMSF amounts to $12.5 billion (Savurganlık Ekonomisi Araştırması, TOBB 2001).

The social costs of these bankruptcies were to be borne by, on the one hand, thousands of

banking personnel who became jobless, and on the other, those who had deposits in these

banks and lost their savings accumulated in several years. This was nevertheless, only part of

the whole story. Besides the losses in the banking sector; corruption, waste and other forms of

mismanagement of public resources throughout the 1990s are estimated to have a $195 billion

cost to the Turkish economy (TOBB 2001, 20-21). Indeed, a corruption report prepared by

KAMUSEN (Public Laborers Unions Confederation of Turkey) indicates 18 criminal operations

against corruption only in 2000 and 2001 (Türkiye KAMU-SEN, date unknown). As the stories

of corruption scandals became disclosed one after another, they probably have contributed to

the growing social dissent related to worsening economic conditions. Results from certain

public surveys adduce to the salience of the corruption issue attributed by the Turkish

population. At the beginning of the 2000s, it was perceived as one of the three most important

social problems to be solved in Turkey. However, in 2008, the salience of the issue lost weight in

the public eye (Adaman, Çarkoğlu, and Şenatalar 2001; 2009).

This is certainly not to suggest that at the end of the 2000s, corruption was insignificant as a

matter in Turkish politics. The TI report proves that this was by no means the case. However, at

the beginning of the decade the corruption of political and business circles was organically

intermingled with the economic crisis, so much so that the public outcry turned into a snowball

against the ruling elites in addition to the material conditions. It is, in contrast, hard to say that

the same held true in the latter term. Perhaps, a comparison of the level of trust and satisfaction

with domestic politics in the two periods could be a better indicator of how social unrest was

intermingled with political discontent in 2001, whereas the latter was not as large-scale in 2008.

Figure 2 summarizes the descriptive statistics from the two waves of the European Values

Study (EVS). Obviously, the dissatisfaction with the government performance was much higher

in 1999/2000 period, whereas satisfaction increases considerably in 2008. By the same token, half

of the survey participants displayed complete distrust in the parliament during the first wave,

while the results are more evenly distributed during the second wave.

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Figure 2 – View of the government and trust in parliament

Source: European Values Study

Discussion and concluding remarks

In this paper, I have compared and contrasted the protest activities in Turkey during the

domestic economic crisis in 2000/2001 and the 2008 global depression. Albeit rooted differently,

the material consequences of the two crises did not differ from each other significantly,

considering certain indicators that one may expect to influence everyday perceptions of

individuals about economic wellbeing. The protest mobilization in the latter period, however,

turned out to be strikingly less massive, less diffuse and less radical. My explanation of this

question has relied on political processes. I have argued that first, the fragmented and divided

configuration of the ruling elites, and second, the scandalous corruption cases which directly

impinged on the affluence of the masses have fused with the economic grievances and

contributed to the growing of the social unrest with political dissent at the beginning of the

decade. In the latter period, not only were the ruling elites much less fragmented and divided,

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but the political discontent with the routine governance, of which corruption is possibly a part,

also did not seem as high as to be integrated to the economic grievance caused by the

depression. Hence, I have claimed, the level of participation and the engagement of various

social groups, the spatial diffusion and the radicalization of the protest mobilization in

2000/2001 occurred to a much higher extent compared to the contentious activity in 2008/2009.

The picture that I have drawn in this paper does only focus on general political dynamics and

misses certain points regarding organizational and individual questions. In other words, I offer

only a partial answer to the puzzle that I have posed to address. What could complement this

picture would be a meso-level analysis of the organizations, i.e. labor unions, confederations in

the first place, but also other actors in the civil society who were active in the first period but

not that much during the second. Individual motivations for mobilization and non-mobilization

are no less important as a question, which can be addressed by means of in-depth interviews.

By doing so, I would say, the analysis will wrap in bone and flesh.

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