French and Turkish Representations of the Mediterranean: Artificial Intelligence Based Content Analysis.

• Author: Savas, Cem

Introduction

Fernando Passao once asked the sailor in his famous poem: "Are the seas of other countries beautiful?". Most Mediterranean residents either give a negative answer to this question or find it unnecessary to ask. Everyone looked at the same sea but saw their own sea. (1) In that sense, as Fernand Braudel said, the Mediterranean spoke with many voices. (2) Historically conceived as the basin of grand confrontations and strategic nodes/resources (3), the Mediterranean contains different logics of empires and nation-states, together with the current Euro-Mediterranean region-building dynamics such as the "Union for the Mediterranean".

Geographies are differently imagined and represent various meanings for societies. (4) Multiple links between rich history and space in the Mediterranean make its character fairly complex. (5) This complexity has also been echoed in the Turkish and French representations. Turkey and France were among the foremost competitors in the Mediterranean, from the Crusades (6) to the present day. Their bilateral relationship has been characterized by multifarious dynamics, from cooperation to hostility. For instance, while dialogue and cooperation marked Turkish-French relations in the 17 (th) century, Napoleon's expedition to Egypt deteriorated bilateral ties in 1798. Although many determinants affect the relationship between Turkey and France, this article focuses on the role of the two states' spatial imaginations of the Mediterranean as one of the most important factors. When the Mediterranean images developed by the two countries are adverse/unfavorable/conflictual, the relationship in a given era deteriorates and vice versa. This pattern was observed throughout the ages, especially when the two countries' views of the Mediterranean were conflictual.

In the turbulent context of Turkish-French relations after the 2010s, this study investigates how the two states' representations of the Mediterranean have changed over time (several presidential/ministerial eras) and how these changes have affected contemporary bilateral relations, as in history. Searching for answers to these questions, this study will rely on Critical Geopolitics and Word Embedding, an emerging content analysis method. Critical Geopolitics is based on a comprehensive critique of the conventional geopolitical approaches that reflect the so-called neutral and objective practice of studying global space. Unlike traditional state-centric strategic analysis, this critical approach considers geopolitics as a profoundly ideological and politicized study rather than an unbiased understanding of given geographical facts. (7) In this regard, Critical Geopolitics offers a plural and critical theoretical framework that helps to better comprehend particular connections between space and history, especially in the Mediterranean nexus between France and Turkey.

While historical representations will be reviewed through the Critical Geopolitics approach, the contemporary era (2007-2021) will be studied using the Word Embedding technique via the news from the Agence France-Presse (AFP) (between 2007-2021) and the Anatolian Agency (AA) (between 2010-2021) (8). In computerized content analysis, programs are generally utilized for frequency analysis, such as to count how often the word is used in the text or which words are used together with the most. However, these approaches ignore the semantics of the words in texts. (9) On the other hand, with the "word embedding" method, one of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques in Artificial Intelligence, words can preserve their meaning in the content analysis. In this way, it is a promising method, especially in critical theories and methods where the representations of words are essential.

The first part of this study underlines the theoretical and methodological discussions by focusing on Critical Geopolitics and the Word Embedding method. Subsequently, the historical dynamics between France and Turkey is elaborated by comparing the changing representations of the two countries toward the Mediterranean from the 16 (th) century to the end of the Cold War. In the final part, empirical findings from AFP and AA will be analyzed by employing Word Embedding to explain/compare how Turkish and French representations of the Mediterranean have affected their contemporary bilateral relations.

Deciphering Spatial Representations through Critical Geopolitics

From the early 19 (th) century to the end of the Cold War, Geopolitics was regarded as the study of statesmanship and great powers. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, studies entitled "Critical Geopolitics" were first introduced through the growing popularity of critical approaches in International Relations (IR). (10) Based on a critique of mainstream Geopolitics, Critical Geopolitics deals with the representations and spatial practices. It entails a comprehensive and multifaceted analysis of power struggles over territories rather than a one-dimensional and deductive form of Geopolitics. From this respect, Geopolitics is considered an intellectual terrain concerned with the interaction of geography, knowledge, power, and social structures. (11)

Rather than core geographical factors, Critical Geopolitics considers global politics as culturally formed and politically sustained through statecraft discourses and representations. (12) Hence, it focuses on the representations that are formed cumulatively over time, and they can aggregate a variety of cultural, historical, ethnic and geographical aspects. In this way, Critical Geopolitics exposes representational contradictions in a particular region from a critical standpoint. For Yves Lacoste, representation is "the set of beliefs and collective perceptions of a political, religious, or other nature that drive social groups and form their perspective of the World". (13) Thereby, geopolitical representation encompasses not just geographical issues but also collective cognitive beliefs, identities and imaginaries about specific locations. (14)

Critical Geopolitics is also concerned with the formation of borders between "within" and "outside", "domestic" and "international", rather than the "outside of the state". (15) Critical geopolitical thinking raises questions such as how current situations arise or how power works to maintain specific contexts. Hence, it argues that the assumption of a detached and objective researcher charting the observable realities of international politics is fallacious. (16) Moreover, discourses play a crucial role in Critical Geopolitics because they help understand specific political decisions by invoking core spatial meanings. (17) Many prominent post-structuralist scholars, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, contributed to the knowledge of discourse and the relevance of geopolitical representations. (18) Accordingly, Geopolitics for critical writers should be re-envisioned as a "discursive technique" in which statecraft intellectuals spatialize' international politics in order to describe a "world" marked by specific sorts of places, peoples, and dramas. In sum, Geopolitics is a type of discourse, representation and political practice, according to Critical Geopolitics.

Deciphering Spatial Representations through "Word Embedding"

Content analysis is a method used in social sciences that analyzes the content of communication in a systematic manner. Content analysis can be applied to any material delivering a message. (19) Although its history dates back centuries, content analysis gained popularity with the behaviorist turn in the 1940s. Scholars such as Ole Holsti, Robert North, and Harold Lasswell conducted content analysis mostly quantitatively through word frequency analysis and classifications of the texts. Both the difficulties of manual analysis and the increasing criticism such as frequency not being an indicator of importance in texts, (20) led to a decline in the usage of content analysis after the 1960s. This trend was even accelerated by strengthening the post-positivist tradition and the complete exclusion of content analysis, which was regarded as a positivist method.

In the new millennium, the capacity of computers and technology progressed unprecedentedly so that faster, more accurate and in-depth analysis could be conducted. Hereby, content analysis has regained its popularity. (21) Many different programs and techniques have been developed (e.g. Wordfish, MAXQDA and NVivo). However, the basic logic of these programs is similar: Coding the words and finding the relations either between these words or between texts. To assess these relationships, computer programs calculate the frequencies of words and are used to place related concepts according to the researchers' aims. Nonetheless, as traditional approaches assert, just because a word is used frequently does not mean that it is significant because these methods ignore the semantics of the words. (22)

To overcome this issue in content analysis, "word embedding", one of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, offers great promise. NLP is an area of artificial intelligence that allows computers to understand, process, and analyze natural human languages. (23) Since human languages consist of words and sentences, NLP tries to extract information from sentences. (24) Technologies such as chatbots and command assistants on smartphones fall within NLP's area. In NLP, word embedding (also called word vectors) is a technique to convert words into numerical vectors with actual values. Word embedding assigns similar numerical representations to words with similar meanings through tokenizing and converting each word in a sequence into vector space. Hence, all words protect their semantic representations in the text without the coding process of researchers.

There are slightly different types of word embedding models (e.g. fastText, GloVe and Word2Vec); however...