The concept of “millet” rivals other ideas, such as “the ghazi state” and “the decline paradigm,” as one of the principal formations around which Ottoman historiography has been constructed. Significantly, it was the Ottomans themselves who originated, and manufactured powerful illusions around, each of these notions. Fifteenth-century post-Interregnum (1402-1412) historians probably invented the view that the Osmanlılar of the previous century had constituted the pre-eminent ghazi principality along the Byzantine frontier; late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ottoman critics certainly concocted the proposal that the state was decaying after a brilliant epoch under Mehmed II, Bayezid II, Selim I, and Süleyman I (1451-1566); and post-Tanzimat (1839) reformers formulated the construct of millet as a defining characteristic of Ottoman society. Modern historians have tended to accept these models rather uncritically; only recently have we begun to examine the contents and contexts of such Ottoman self-portraits.

This paper discusses state-sponsored social work and its relation to social exclusion in contemporary Turkey. Linking state-sponsored social work to the dynamics of social exclusion, this discussion points to two contrasting sets of practices within the Turkish social work system. First, I focus on the contemporary reform of the child protection system: I examine the current restructuring of institutional care for children, showing its link with the neoliberal agenda of reducing state social spending and shifting social care from state to familial resources. The current emphasis on and the specific implementation of the policy of transforming institutional care perpetuate the processes of exclusion as experienced by the women and children who are the major clients of the social work system. Yet, examples of the ways in which social work can address social exclusion do exist in the system, and I try to offer a glimpse into these limited benefits which at least some clients receive through the system. I conclude by suggesting that, in order to better address the negative results of social exclusion, both the redistributive and interpretive underpinnings of the Turkish state social work system should be subject to critical scrutiny.

This paper introduces the two factors of temporality and interaction, which are not well-researched within the Turkey-EU relationship. I suggest that these two factors are important for understanding the process of Europeanization in Turkey and explaining the ups and downs in the long-lasting relationship. After briefly examining the two historical periods of the Turkey-EU relationship — that is, from 1959 to 1970 and from 1970 to 1999 — the paper mainly focuses on the more recent period following the Helsinki Summit of 1999 and shows how the factors of temporality and interaction operated differently between 1999 and 2004, and after 2004, turning from positive to negative. Having presented the historical evidence, the paper concludes by emphasizing the close interaction between the factors of temporality, interaction and the process of Europeanization in the Turkish context and suggesting that the analysis of these two factors opens up new possibilities for comparative research on other accession and candidate countries.

The velocity of money (V) indicates the number of times money stock turns over in the economy to accommodate a given level of transactions (proxied by GNP). In other words, velocity measures the relationship between nominal income and the money stock. In the original version of the quantity theory of money, nominal income is equal to velocity times money stock; i.e. Py = MV where P stands for the price level, y is real income, M is the money stock. In this framework, when velocity is assumed to be constant, changes in money stock can create predictable effects on the nominal income.

On the night of July 4, 2004, Greeks across the globe celebrated their national team's triumph in winning the European Championship Cup of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA). The victory had been unexpected and the celebrations, which lasted until the next morning, largely spontaneous. Urban streets everywhere in Greece filled with people clad in Greek flags and in plastic replicas of Alexander the Great's helmet; cars hooted past, horns blowing to that well-known five-and-six-beat rhythm signifying soccer victory, the air thick with the bright fumes of celebratory crackers. In the towns of Thrace, where the majority of Greece's Turkish population lives, the scene was the same: loud, celebratory, and full of nationalist symbols. In Komotini, the capital of Thrace, minority members watched and listened, some with apprehension, others with excitement about the unexpected victory.

It is the aim of these notes to make a balance sheet of the development problems which Turkey is currently facing and to assess medium-term growth prospects for the Turkish economy. Such a balance sheet necessitates a retrospective look into the recent past, in which a distinction should be made between the pre- and post-1980 periods since it was early in 1980 that a major reorientation of economic policies into an orthodox “structural adjustment” line took place. Hence we investigate roughly two seven year periods covering 1973-79 and 1980—86 (with more emphasis on the second period), being fully aware that with respect to certain variables the year 1980 may not always serve as a dividing line.