Democracy Identity And Foreign Policy In Turkey

Through critical analysis of Turkey's transformation under the AKP, this book explores the relationship between domestic transformations and global/regional dynamics. It also discusses the relationship between the Turkish transformation and the Arab uprisings and the implications of the Turkish case for regime transitions in the Arab world.

This volume aims to shed light on Turkish political issues. The discussions range over national and international politics, democracy and freedom of the press, voting patterns, official control of indigenous music, and conditions in industrial estates.

The trajectory of Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule offers an ideal empirical window into puzzling shifts in Turkey's domestic politics and foreign policy. The policy transformations under its leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan do not align with existing explanations based on security, economics, institutions, or identity. In Identity Politics Inside Out, Lisel Hintz teases out the complex link between identity politics and foreign policy using an in-depth study of Turkey. Rather than treating national identity as cause or consequence of a state's foreign policy, she repositions foreign policy as an arena in which contestation among competing proposals for national identity takes place. Drawing from a broad array of sources in popular culture, social media, interviews, surveys, and archives, she identifies competing visions of Turkish identity and theorizes when and how internal identity politics becomes externalized. Hintz examines the establishment of Republican Nationalism in the wake of imperial collapse and examines failed attempts made by those challenging its Western-oriented, anti-ethnic, secularist values with alternative understandings of Turkishness. She further demonstrates how the Ottoman Islamist AKP used the European Union accession process to weaken Republican Nationalist obstacles in Turkey, thereby opening up space for Islam in the domestic sphere and a foreign policy targeted at achieving leadership in the Middle East. By showing how the "inside out" spillover of national identity debates can reshape foreign policy, Identity Politics Inside Out fills a major gap in existing scholarship by closing the identity-foreign policy circle.

By using the core insights of the constructivist approach in International Relations, this book analyzes the foreign policy behavior of Turkey. It argues that throughout its modern history, Turkey's foreign policy has been affected by its Western identity created in the years following the War of Independence.

Democracy promotion is an established principle in US and EU foreign policies today, but how did it become so? This comparative study explores the promotion of democracy, focusing on exponents from emerging democracies alongside more established Western models, and investigates the impact of democratic interests on foreign policy.

This book explores how Turkey's contested national identity has affected its foreign policysince the late Ottoman era. The book takes a constructivist approach, asserting that identity matters for foreign policy decisions, but it separates itself from statist approaches by bringing identity question into domestic politics.

National and State Identity in Turkey uses the concepts of national and state identity to examine Turkey’s domestic and international politics and explain how the country’s position in the international system has changed over the last ten years. State identity is understood as the end result of a transformed national identity, linking both domestic and international levels. Toni Alaranta argues that there has been a radical reformulation of Turkey’s national identity, interest, and positioning in the world since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002. This transformed identity has helped the country renegotiate its status in the world. He first examines the changing nature of Turkey’s national identity before looking at the struggle between two extreme positions—secularism and Islamism. He then explains how the “New Turkey” discourse is part of an Islamic-conservative ideology that targets the notion of the “domestic other,” or minorities, versus the Turkish-Muslim “self.” This discourse is transforming not only the notion of national identity but also Turkey’s relations with the rest of the world, and particularly with the European Union.

The study of politics in Turkey : new horizons and perennial pitfalls / Güneş Murat Tezcür -- Democratization theories and Turkey / Ekrem Karakoç -- Ruling ideologies in modern Turkey / Kerem Öktem -- Constitutionalism in Turkey / Aslı Ü. Bâli -- Civil-military relations and the demise of Turkish democracy / Nil S. Satana and Burak Bilgehan Özpek -- Capturing secularism in Turkey : the ease of comparison / Murat Akan -- The political economy of Turkey since the end of World War II / Şevket Pamuk -- Neoliberal politics in Turkey / Sinan Erensü and Yahya M. Madra -- The politics of welfare in Turkey / Erdem Yörük -- The political economy of environmental policymaking in Turkey : a vicious cycle / Fikret Adaman, Bengi Akbulut, and Murat Arsel -- The politics of energy in Turkey : running engines on geopolitical, discursive, and coercive power / Begüm Özkaynak, Ethemcan Turhan, and Cem İskender Aydın -- The contemporary politics of health in Turkey : diverse actors, competing frames, and uneven policies / Volkan Yılmaz -- Populism in Turkey : historical and contemporary patterns / Yüksel Taşkın -- Old and new polarizations and failed democratizations in Turkey / Murat Somer -- Economic voting during the AKP era in Turkey / S. Erdem Aytaç -- Party organizations in Turkey and their consequences for democracy / Melis G. Laebens -- The evolution of conventional political participation in Turkey / Ersin Kalaycıoğlu -- Symbolic politics and contention in the Turkish Republic / Senem Aslan -- Islamist activism in Turkey / Menderes Çınar -- The Kurdish movement in Turkey : understanding everyday perceptions and experiences / Dilan Okcuoglu -- The Transnational Mobilization of the Alevis of Turkey : from invisibility to the struggle for equality / Ceren Lord -- Politics of asylum seekers and refugees in Turkey : limits and prospects of populism / Fatih Resul Kılınç and Şule Toktaş -- A theoretical account of Turkish foreign policy under the AKP / Tarık Oğuzlu -- US-Turkey relations since WWII : from alliance to transactionalism / Serhat Güvenç and Soli Özel -- Turkey and Europe : historical asynchronicities and perceptual asymmetries / Hakan Yılmaz -- Turkey's foreign policy in the Middle East : an identity perspective / Lisel Hintz -- Turkey and Russia : historical patterns and contemporary trends in bilateral relations / Evren Balta and Mitat Çelikpala -- Citizenship and protest behavior in Turkey / Ayhan Kaya -- Gender politics and the struggle for equality in Turkey / Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat -- Human rights organizations in Turkey / Başak Çalı -- Truth, justice, and commemoration initiatives in Turkey / Onur Bakiner -- The politics of media in Turkey : chronicle of a stillborn media system / Sarphan Uzunoğlu -- The AKP's rhetoric of rule in Turkey : political melodramas of conspiracy from "ergenekon" to "mastermind" / Erdağ Göknar -- The transformation of political cinema in Turkey since the 1960s : a change of discourse / Zeynep Çetin-Erus and M. Elif Demoğlu -- Political music in Turkey : the birth and diversification of dissident and conformist music (1920-2000) / Mustafa Avcı.

Enlargement to Turkey is arguably the greatest challenge facing the European Union today. After the narrowly averted "train crash" over Cyprus in 2006, the second election victory of the Justice and Development Party in July 2007 opened new prospects for Turkish-EU relations. But in an EU emphasising a collective identity based on shared civilisational values, Turkey’s European credentials have been increasingly called into question. Amending national identity through political change has become the key to the success or failure of the Turkish integration project. This volume examines the EU role in strengthening the domestic pro-reform coalition within Turkey, the paradox - and potential limits - of Turkey’s europeanising Islamists, and the impact of Europeanisation through conditionality, including a case study of Turkish policy towards the Cyprus Question. Also addressed are the Western stereotypes of Turkish identity influencing the country’s EU prospects, notably concerning the role of Islam in precipitating acts of political violence and its association with sexual and political violence in the discourse of European opponents of Turkish accession. Finally, the dynamics of EU accession negotiations are analysed and the potential role of a norm-driven rhetorical strategy in promoting Turkish accession as a moral and democratic imperative is discussed.

This book provides a critical discussion on how different discourses of nationalism in the Turkish media construct contested concepts of New Turkey's identity, which has great importance for mapping modern Turkey's place in the world of nations. Drawing on a Discourse-Historical Approach, the author analyses different discourses on Turkish national identity and foreign policy in Turkish media in the second term of the AKP government from 2007 to 2011, which was the period of consolidation of Muslim conservative nationalism in both internal and external relations. By using three case studies, including the Presidential elections in 2007, the launch of Kurdish Initiative in 2009, and the debate of axis shift in Western orientation of Turkish Foreign Policy in 2010, the book argues that not only has AKP's Muslim nationalism reconstructed new Turkish foreign policy, but also new Turkish foreign policy discourse has reconstructed Turkish nation's Muslim identity and reinforced Muslim nationalism.