On 6 March 1995 the EU-Turkey Association Council took a decision regarding the inauguration of a customs union between the EU and Turkey, following the pattern set out in the Ankara Agreement of 1963 and the Additional Protocol of 1970. The Council's decision received the European Parliament's assent on 13 December 1995, enabling it to enter into force on 1 January 1996. Following the Association Council's customs union decision, the Turkish government has launched a series of democratizing and liberalizing reforms. It is apparent that the tactical goal of the Turkish government for initiating the reforms has been to persuade the European Parliament to give its consent to the Association Council's customs union decision. The government's strategic goal, on the other hand, has been to fulfill the necessary political conditions, such as those formulated in the June 1993 Copenhagen meeting of the European Council, of Turkey's qualification for full membership in the EU.

The first line of the United States Marine Corps anthem, “From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli,” refers to one of the earliest encounters between the United States and the Ottoman Empire, when the American navy attempted to suppress “pirating” along the northern coast of Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Field 1969, pp. 27-67). This ritualization of animosity, framing the American image of the Ottoman Empire, has elements carried over from Europe, in which Muslims in general, and the Turks in particular, are drawn as “cruel, fanatical, lustful and dirty” (Wheatcroft 1993, p. 231). According to the European vision, “[the Turks] were, from the first black day they entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity” (Gladstone 1876). American images mirrored this European perception. For example, as the United States entered World War I in 1917, Henry Cabot Lodge, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, presented the war effort not just as aimed at the defeat of Germany, but as a crusade for the destruction of the Ottoman Empire:

[The Ottoman Turks] have been the pest and the curse of Europe, the source of innumerable wars, the executioners in countless massacres… Such a… government as this is a curse to modern civilization. Like a pestilence it breathes forth contagion upon the innocent air (USC 1917, vol. LVI, p. 64).

Even though multicultural groups have always existed in Turkey, identity politics has only recently been central to the Turkish political system. There have been many studies that have argued that this is a late development delayed by the repressive measures of the state. I shall not refute these arguments, but I shall take a different approach. I shall try to indicate some of the socio-economic developments in Turkey in the 1980s that either facilitated or initiated identity politics. I will not argue that these are the only reasons; on the contrary, there may be many other international, cultural, and political factors that have been influential.

The assertion that economic conditions prevailing during a government's tenure influence the level of electoral support it receives is frequently expressed in Turkey. Despite frequent references to economic dimensions of electoral behavior in Turkish media and academic circles, however, there are only a few systematic analyses of the impact of macro-economic performance on incumbents' electoral success. Bulutay and Yıldırım (1969) and Bulutay (1970) were the first attempts in this direction. These pioneering empirical analyses were mainly descriptive and rely on cross-sectional observations across provinces for the elections between 1950 and 1969. Based solely on developments in the agricultural sector they concluded that economic factors were first among the factors determining election outcomes. Özselçuk (1975) included macro-economic indicators, such as changes in per capita income and prices, in a regression model to explain changes in incumbents' vote share. Özselçuk provided some evidence that incumbents' electoral support was shaped by developments in macro-economic indicators, however, his analyses were technically deficient and his results were poorly documented.

In the space of less than a decade, the metropolitan cities of Turkey have witnessed a dramatic and continuing change with the entry of international retailers into the Turkish retailing sector. This development was both sudden and surprising for a society in which retailing had always been dominated by small and independent domestic retailers. For years, the only structural change which had been anticipated by politicians and academics was an increasing role of public authorities in retail distribution, with the objective of eliminating middlemen and connecting producers more directly with consumers. In the late 1970s, there were doubts as to whether distribution should be left to the workings of the capitalist market. Even in the mid-1980s, people had only just started to learn how to pronounce the names of the largest international retailers. Then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, foreign retail companies became involved in Turkish retailing.

This paper aims to propose a political economy framework to analyze environmental problems in Turkey. A political economy approach seems to be the appropriate way of investigating environmental issues, as not only are economy and the environment interwoven entities, changes in one affecting the other, but also collective actions are almost always required in dealing with such problems. With this integrated approach one can thus better understand the causes of such a degradation and subsequently search for the economic and political conditions that are conducive to halt environmental degradation.

Despite its theoretical and implementational problems, conventional economic theory has a well developed body of tools for examining environmental degradation, i.e. pollution and overuse of natural resources. But the theory assumes the existence and competence of a rather sterile political authority which enforces corrective measures. The corollary of this assumption is that the enforceability of these measures will become lax should there exist various forms of government failures. This paper will focus on Turkey as an example of a country where such government failures have been a priori accepted.

Soon after coming to power in 1994, one of the first actions of the Islamist municipality in Istanbul was to paint the cobblestones around the municipal area green. The semiotics involved in this seemingly unimportant alteration from the usual yellow or white was immediately recognized by the media, which in turn drew the public's attention to the issue. The municipality was harshly criticized for marking out its territory with an Islamist symbol, i.e., the color green. The mayor, in return, responded by asserting that green was one of the colors that was legally designated for this particular purpose. Yet, instead of arguing further in terms of the lawfulness of this action and democratic rights involved in the administration of a municipality, he declared that the green cobblestones in fact symbolized the environmentalist aspect of the municipal policy.