The Great Catalyst

European Union Project and Lessons from Greece and Turkey

Bülent Temel

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2013
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780739174494
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For over half a century, European Union has been a promising endeavor of cooperative institutionalism. It has shown that even nation states with a long history of conflict are capable of collaborating with one another to serve their own interests. However, the EU project has also made visible that there is no one-size-fits-all policy in economics that can be applied to all countries with success. Economics starts and ends with the society. Common culture determines the outcomes of economic policies, and ordinary people pick up the bill when policies turn out to be failures.

This book presents two different tales of the European Union to provide an empirical challenge to oversimplified assumptions behind the neoliberal orthodoxy in policymaking: Favorable experience of the EU-candidate Turkey, and the regrettable venture of the EU-member Greece. The fact that these two neighboring countries with similar cultures have had vastly different experiences with the European Union suggests that the EU functions as a catalyst of change in the countries that associate with it, but this impact could be negative as well as positive depending on the role the EU plays. Political economist Bülent Temel presents a lucid analysis of the Turkish and Greek encounters with the EU—based on contributions from a diverse range of social sciences; economics, game theory, finance, political science and sociology.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Greece and the Eurozone
• Chapter 2: Euro and the Economic Crisis in Greece
• Chapter 3: Doomed to Failure
• Chapter 4: Effects of Economic and Monetary Union on the Greek Political System
• Chapter 5: Greece and the European Union
• Chapter 6: Acrobats on a Rope
• Chapter 7: Regularizing the Unregulated?
• Chapter 8: EU Fervor in Turkey1
• Chapter 9: Alignment of Turkish Securities Market Legislation with the EU Acquis1
• Chapter 10: Turkey’s EU Accession Prospects
• Chapter 11: Political Stability and Economic Expansion
• Chapter 12: Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict
• Chapter 13: Trajectory of Corruption in Turkey’s EU Venture
• Chapter 14: Cognitive versus Emotional Evaluations as the Foundations of Public Perception of the European Union in Turkey
• Chapter 15: Turkish Democracy during the EU Process
• Chapter 16: Candidacy versus Membership
• Appendix
• About the Contributors