ABSTRACT
When modern Turkey was created in 1923, one of its top priorities was the modernization and realignment of the economically underdeveloped country. The process of modernization originated from above, on the initiative and according to the plans of the state, and it experienced uneven success. In the beginning of the 2000s, things took an unexpected turn. In the country with a secular state organization that had been created by Kemal Atatürk eight decades ago, a party with Islamic roots won the 2002 elections, a party that began its fifth term in office in 2018. This, however, has only made the latent process that began several decades ago obvious: the Kemalist project for modernization was less and less able to legitimate itself, and in a country inhabited mostly by Muslims, a moderate but clearly Islamic-based approach has become more and more popular. At the same time, starting in the early 2000s, Turkey has become one of the emerging economies that has been successful in joining global economic production and trade flows, and thereby has experienced fast economic growth. The combination of these two factors makes Turkey an interesting case study for observing changes in the state’s role in the economy.
