Although it sounds quite assertive, I want to start with this sentence - if you do not understand what is going on in Turkey in terms of finance, sociology and politics, you cannot understand the journey of the system through the 21st century. Unfortunately, particularly in the previous few years, evaluations, comments and news about Turkey have aimed to falsify the truth about the country. The reason of why this is happening is a matter of another debate. However, I want to explain why understanding what is going on in Turkey means understanding the 21st century.
The current crisis in capitalism is the last big crisis. The most significant feature is that isolating this crisis from others will not end with new emerging markets accessing new technology, followed by a rapid economic crash. This crisis, rather than a rapid crash, is a process in which development differences among countries and regions are gradually melting down and technology has spread horizontally. This crisis has led to some delays in the emergence of new industries and profitability, which caused massive unemployment in the developed countries of the West while leading to rapid economic growth and emergence of demanding societies in the developing countries of the East.
If the political powers in those developing countries make economic and democratic reforms in line with the requests of demanding classes, they can protect their position. Otherwise, there will be large-scale demonstrations called "revolutionary resistance" in those developing countries. Unlike in the West, those demonstrations are organized. This is due to the fact that the newly emerged educated class has easy access to current technology, which enables them to renew themselves rapidly and demand from the government and political powers revolution rather than reform.
The uprisings in the Arab world and Ukraine are good examples of this. However, we cannot say the same thing for large part of Latin America since the political leaders who came into power after military regimes were leftist victims of military coups. Therefore, those leaders made radical reforms and charged pro-coup politicians in courts. Yes, this process was carried out by leftist governments in Latin America.
But in Turkey, the conservative AK Party been doing the same over the past decade. During this process, Turkey introduced many democratic and economic reforms and removed the anti-democratic elements within the state, the army and the judiciary.
An example of this is Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan taking the democratic demands of Kurdish people into consideration and starting the peace process. Turkey is, of course, in a position due to transit trade roads and energy pipelines to determine the map of the Middle East in the near future. For this reason, stability in Turkey is not dependent upon its own domestic dynamics alone. It is also dependent upon the Middle East policies of the U.S., U.K. and the EU. The U.S. should note that instability in the Middle East, such as in Syria, threatens not only Turkey but the Western world and the U.S. as well. The AK Party government made many reforms that erased the signs of military regimes and took significant steps toward EU membership. For the first time in the history of the Republic, Turkey assigned a Minister of the European Union. It fulfilled the Maastricht criteria in the field of public finance and public debt ratio. Moreover, after the 19th IMF Stand-by Arrangement ended, public sector borrowing requirement rapidly decreased and this improvement enabled interest rates to decrease too. Turkey gave weight to small and medium-sized enterprises and assisted those enterprises through their established foundations in technology and trade. Today, Turkey's machine industry can compete with Germany's machine industry and many Turkish companies manufacture in Germany by exporting capital there. Again in 2008, government allocated $15 billion to South Eastern Anatolia Project (GAP) and laid the foundation for a peace process.
Together with Azerbaijan, Turkey started the TANAP and TAP projects, which are going to change the energy equation in the regions of Khazar and Middle East, and highlight energy supply diversity and security of the EU and the world. The investment cost of this project is almost $50 billion. Those projects will also shape energy stock markets in Europe.
The fact that alternative natural gas sources are going to go to Europe via Turkey will put Turkey in a significant position that will meet the increasing energy needs of Europe. When energy sources of the Kurdistan region and Khazar are connected to the Southern Gas Corridor through southern Turkey, a new energy stock market will open up. Trading natural gas within the body of energy stock market will allow Turkey to price energy, which will help Istanbul to be one of the important financial centers in the region. Energy stock market projects both allow more reliable pricing depending on supply and demand and strengthen financial connections between energy manufacturing countries, particularly in the regions of the Mideast and Khazar, and European countries. That is to say, energy stock market is a significant step to arrange the financial side of the TANAP and TAP projects that will be established in a region comprising of EU, Turkey and Asia Minor. This step will also strengthen Azerbaijan and Turkey in the field of energy. Turkey is about to revive the Silk Road by carrying out new railway projects such as Marmaray. Turkey has a qualified young population who can build society's knowledge base and then enable a shift from industrial conomy to a knowledge economy.
Taking all the points mentioned above into consideration, Turkey will be one of the leading countries of the 21st century.
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