Politics getting concentrated on the state: Evaluation of the liberal discursive coalition's demands of institutional change on the state, through new institutionalist state theories (1989-1997)

In the present dissertation study, the question and the subject were determined based on the politics, which focused on the phenomenon and concept of the state in the first decade of the 2000s. During this period, concepts oriented towards defining the state identity gained increasing popularity: Neo-Ottomanism, Second Republicanism, Eurasianism, Nationalism, etc. Since the origin of the first two concepts goes back to the early 1990s, the focus was set especially on the first half of this decade. The fact that the actors who produced the concepts and were from right and left-wing politics before 1980, found a compromise in liberal values, affirmed Özal's politics, albeit at different levels, and demanded institutional change within the state, were the reasons for the structuring of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks of the study based on state-centered political analysis. First of all, new institutionalist state theories and particularly the discursive (or constructivist) subfield were used to evaluate the demands of the actors for institutional change within the state at the philosophical level. The continuity resistance of the state was tried to be comprehended with the new institutionalist subfields, especially historicism. In order to define the state that was criticized and desired to be reached, the concepts of transcendentalism and instrumentalism were used with reference to Metin Heper. Heper had developed these concepts in his study, in which he reviewed the state tradition in Turkey, based on the state-centered literature that got re-developed beginning at the end of the 1960s. In the first part of the study, the conceptual and theoretical frameworks were tried to be associated and integrated. In the second part of the study, the conditions and formations that affected the neo-liberal and neo-conservative transformation in the 1980s were emphasized. In the third part, the ideas and discourses of the actors forming the reconstructive discursive coalition gathered around Özal's politics, which has been defined as the pivot and iconic actor, were evaluated. With the method of content analysis, the discourses of the actors regarding the demands of institutional change were evaluated based on the concepts of transcendentalism, instrumentalism, state tradition and political culture. It has been determined that actors, a substantial part of which came from the academy, but a significant majority of them establishing their opinion-discourse communication through the media, kept their evaluation and production mostly within a journalistic thought-language range due to their prioritization/haste to expedite the history for Turkish politics after the end of the cold war. At the end of the day, it was seen that liberals could not deal with the phenomenon of the state in the contexts of the state tradition and the political culture that emerged out of this tradition, and could not "fill" the concepts of transcendentalism and instrumentalism.