The &ldquo / German Question&rdquo / was on the agenda of the international community from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Following the end of the World War II, due to the existence of a Soviet threat, the incorporation of West Germany into the liberal-democratic institutions of the western world was the principal issue to be dealt with. Following the reunification of Germany and the end of the bipolar international structure, the &ldquo / German Question&rdquo / was revisited. The German insistence on the early recognition of Croatia and Slovenia and German participation in the Kosovo War brought questions whether Germany has become more assertive and on the way to return to the power politics. This dissertation will analyze German foreign and security policy in the post-Cold War era in order to understand whether Germany has shifted from its civilian and multilateral orientation or has made small adjustments in its policies to adapt to the new international structure. In approaching the issue, the study attempts to link the theoretical and practical aspects under the guidance of a conceptual framework provided by realist, neorealist and constructivist approaches. Through contextualizing the coexistence of realist, neorealist and constructivist factors in German foreign and security policy, the dissertation argues that although Germany has made some small policy adjustments to adapt to the new international structure, German foreign and security policy has not shifted from its civilian and multilateral orientation.

In my doctorate thesis, I have discussed the notion of the experience of the ethical and its political consequences. In this context, I have pointed to the central strategy of Kantian ethics that is called transcendental strategy. Transcendental strategy relies on a concept of causality, which unlike the causality that governs the laws of nature, arises from freedom in its cosmological meaning. I have discussed Heideggerian challenge to this concept of causality from an ontological point of view that gives rise to totalitarian political consequences. In relation to Heideggerian challenge, I have argued that Derrida&rsquo / s critique of Heidegger gives rise to democratic political consequences that reconcile the origin of ethics with fiction through utilization of the transcendence of transcendentality. Thereby, I have argued that experience of the ethical for Derrida induces to similar political consequences with holistic pragmatism.

In this thesis I analyze the evolutionary ethics and propose a new perspective that develops on the notion of altruism. The view of evolutionary ethics, especially the sociobiological account, has some problems. The most important philosophical problem is the &ldquo / is-ought&rdquo / problem which refers to the question as to whether moral propositions can be inferred from factual statements. In order to overcome this problem I suggest a different reading of the notion of altruism namely &ldquo / altruistic behavior practice&rdquo / that refers to norms, habits and repeated actions that provide the sustainability of society. The notion of altruistic behavior practice is presented and evaluated with the help of Alasdair MacIntyre&rsquo / s and John Dewey&rsquo / s moral philosophy. The moral views of these two philosophers are based on human practices and habitual formations in society. In this respect, evolutionary ethics and the notion of altruism are re-established on the basis of human practices and habitual modes of socialization.

Privatization, which is the most important component of neo-liberal policies since the 1980s, has been legitimized by the neo-liberal doctrine through a purely economic and technical terminology. Contrary to this, this thesis maintains that privatization is a highly political process, shaped by intertwined class- and identity-based interests in different countries. To support this argument, the thesis makes a comparative analysis of the privatizations of large-scale state economic enterprises in Turkey in the 2000s, namely Petrol Ofisi, T&Uuml / PRAS, ERDEMIR, T&uuml / rk Telekom and PETKIM, as part of the neo-liberal transformation of the Turkish state. It concludes that the privatizations of large-scale SEEs in Turkey represent typical examples to what David Harvey terms as &ldquo / accumulation by dispossession&rdquo / throughout which wealth has been transferred from the laboring classes to capital by the active involvement of the state though the Turkish experience has its own historical specificities. Political preferences made by governments in charge since the late 1990s in general and by the Islamist AKP government after 2002 in particular have to be understood to make sense of these specificities.