BARÇIN YİNANÇ
barcin.yinanc@hurriyet.com.tr
“The rise and demise of the Turkish trading state; is there a way out?” was the title of the speech Professor Kemal Kirişci delivered recently to mark the fifth year of the Foreign Policy Forum of Boğaziçi University and TÜSİAD, Turkey’s top business body.
Kirişci, who currently works at Brookings Institute as a TÜSİAD senior fellow, is the scholar who had introduced the concept of a “trading state” to explain one of the factors transforming Turkey’s foreign policy in the 2000’s from “’regional coercive power’ to a ‘benign’ if not ‘soft’ power.”
Kirişci had substantiated his thesis by providing key statistics about Turkey’s foreign trade. In 1975, the percentage of overall trade in the GDP was 9 percent. In 1995, it reached 23 percent. By 2005, trade made up 39 percent and by 2007, 42 percent of the GDP; this showed the degree to which Turkey was integrating into the world economy.
