Having considered the mid-1990s as a turning point in terms of increasing concerns over corruption, Tanzi recalls that the Financial Times described 1995 as the year of corruption. For their encouraging comments, acknowledgement is also due to those participants in the ‘Historical Materialism Conference: New Directions in Marxist Theory’ held on 8 – 10 December 2006 in London, to whom an earlier draft of this paper was presented.ġ Vito Tanzi, ‘Corruption around the world: causes, consequences, scope, and cures’, imf Staff Papers, 45 (4), December 1998, p 560 and Arvind K Jain, ‘Corruption: a review’, Journal of Economic Surveys, 15 (1), 2001, pp 102 – 103. The article substantiates these arguments by examining the trajectory of the neoliberal anti-corruption agenda in Turkey with a particular focus on the developments of the post-2001 financial crisis period.įor their invaluable intellectual and editing support during the preparation of this article, the author would like to thank Tevfik Doğan Toker, Biray Kırlı, Cengiz Kırlı, Julian Saurin, Funda Hülagü and Dimitri Tsarouhas. In the absence of alternative radical conceptualisations, this essentially competition-induced neoliberal orthodoxy on corruption has been easily articulated within morality-based popular concerns in domestic politics and hence acquired a hegemonic capability.
This discourse is ahistoric insofar as it fails to recognise corruption as a problem of modernity biased insofar as it associates corruption with Southern countries' historical and cultural specificities only contradictory in terms of its counter-productive anti-corruption strategies and politicised as it has redefined ‘corruption’ as ‘rent-seeking’.
This article draws attention to the ideological role that the neoliberal discourse on corruption has fulfilled in the promotion of the second generation reforms in Southern countries since the 1997 East Asian financial crisis.