Papers > By author > Ayhan Berkay

Turkey is in the midst of a major economic crisis. The crisis sparked around mid-2018 due to geo-political tensions as well as contradictions of the debt-driven financialized regime of accumulation. The government responded by construing the crisis as an economic war of independence. There was an attempt at summoning the Turkish public to act together in this supposedly national-popular struggle against foreign powers. The manifestation of economic nationalism can be observed in numerous policy responses; calling for national mobilization to fight inflation, campaigns for exchanging gold and foreign currency to Turkish lira, creating new labels to identify Turkish brands, and launching a campaign to revive the construction industry. This study seeks to explore the constitution, articulation, reception, and legitimacy of this economic nationalist imaginary from a multidisciplinary perspective. Cultural political economy (Sum and Jessop, 2013) underlines the centrality of meaning-making in accounting for the operation of contemporary market economies. The ways in which a crisis is identified, explained, understood, and acted upon requires us to study the formation, selection, and retention of discursive aspect of economic phenomena. This study aims to contribute to the calls for a multidisciplinary political economy that simultaneously accounts for the economic, political, social, and cultural aspects of its object of inquiry.