An Examination of Cultural Transformation in Türkiye After 1980 in the Context of “Neoliberal Governmentality”

Abstract

The January 24 Decisions of 1980 and the subsequent Özal era marked a profound rupture, carrying Türkiye from an import substitution economy to an outward‐oriented, “free‐market” order. Drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of neoliberal governmentality, this study conducts a qualitative, interpretivist discourse analysis of Turgut Özal's official speeches, the period's press, party documents, and legal regulations: the new human type projected by neoliberal values and arabesk music as an index of changing taste. The central argument is that this cultural transformation was not a spontaneous market outcome but a governmental strategy constructed through the state's own steering interventions. The findings show that the governmental discourse of the period programmatically summoned an entrepreneurial subject along the axes of depoliticization, individualization, and consumption, whereas arabesk, passing through legitimation, marketization, emotional privatization, and identification, was reconstituted as a field of experience in which this subjectivity was rehearsed in everyday life. Despite the state's failure in its direct design, transformation through the market reveals a logic of “governing without governing,” turning culture into a functional apparatus for reproducing hegemony.