From Realist Billiard Balls and Liberal Concentric Circles to Global IR's Venn Diagram? Rethinking International Relations via Turkey's Centennial.

• Author: Fisher-Onar, Nora

Introduction: A 100 Years of Solitude?

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's epic novel, 100 Years of Solitude, tells a tale of seven generations in an isolated community. Their story is shaped by internal forces like the personalities of each colorful character--their loves, hates, and aspirations--and the societal dynamics to which these concerns give rise. Yet, the story is also structured by the community's embeddedness in wider dynamics, from colonialism and wars of independence, to elections and coups d'etat. A linear narrative, as flagged by the book's title, the tale is also circumscribed by cycles. Thus, time and again, the reader is carried through the heady rise and decline--sometimes slow, sometimes precipitous--of its protagonists, institutions, and paradigms. On balance then, the novel shows us that even the most exceptional(ist) communities, who believe themselves to be alone in the world, are shaped by intertwined internal and external forces, which induce patterns of change and continuity discernible to the avid reader.

In the year 2023, the Republic of Turkey is confronted with an opportunity to revisit its own centennial story, with its inter-generational dramas, larger than life characters, tragedies and triumphs, suffering and resilience. And, just as with the novel, to make sense of these dynamics, we must grapple with how internal forces, which are specific to the Turkish context, intersect with international pressures. This reckoning is timely, moreover, for students of IR around the globe, as national projects launched at the apex of Western hegemony are confronted with the challenges and opportunities of a pluralizing international order.

In this piece, I first contend that at 100, the Republic of Turkey continues to grapples with a foundational tension between isolationist impulses, steeped in a nationalist, sovereigntist, i.e., a realist outlook on the world, and what I call the "embedded liberalism" of the republican project. Yet, despite the centrality of realism and liberalism in theories of world politics, neither is sufficient to explain complex patterns in Turkey's trajectory. (1) Rather, realist and liberal reflexes intertwine with context-specific historical and sociological forces. As the Western anchor for identity and action ebbs in and beyond Turkey, this gap between International Relations' (IR) Eurocentric theories and their explanatory power is problematic. How then to best make sense of (Turkey's) international relations looking back and moving forward?

Towards answering this question, I invoke three images of the international system as envisioned in realism (a billiard ball image), liberalism (a concentric circle image), and global IR (which I conceptualize as a Venn diagram.) My argument is that the Venn diagram best captures Turkey's challenges and opportunities because it incorporates constructivist claims regarding the historically and socially circumscribed nature of world politics, while also decentering Eurocentric notions of history and society. (2) I then canvass the global turn in IR, suggesting that analysts in and of Turkey have a comparative advantage in this flourishing space. This is due to an ability, albeit not always actualized, to read the world in plural terms--the epistemological equivalent of Turkey's proverbial bridging role in world politics. However, this capacity is not always activated, especially in moments of realist revival.

Realist Nationalism and Embedded Liberalism

Over 100 years of republican history redolent with drama and transformation, a rare constant has been Turkey's proverbial liminality. (3) Persistent ambivalence is due to the country's situation at the interstices of the geo-cultural blocks--"East" and "West", "North" and "South"--via which humans have chosen to describe the world. (4) Turkey's in-between positionality has been its great opportunity, but also its burden. A source of leverage in international affairs, Turkey's liminality causes anguish in a society at odds over the national project. (5)

If liminality has been the constant over linear time, a recurring cycle in its management has been the will to isolate. The reflex to turn Turkey's back on the world has pre-Republican sources in the protracted experience of Ottoman decline due to a combination of centrifugal forces, and European great power interventions. These interlinked processes were exacerbated by the ill-fated decision of the Young Turk triumvirate to join the Axis side in World War I. Culminating in Allied occupation (1919-1923) and the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, the empire faced dismemberment. Yet, Sevres went unratified even by most of its signatories' parliaments. Instead, proto-nationalist resistance led by Mustafa Kemal Pasa (later Ataturk) enabled a new settlement--the Treaty of Lausanne--and the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923.

The harsh terms of Sevres and cumulative experience of Ottoman contraction nevertheless furnished a foundational trauma in Republican historiography. This sense of "moral injury" (6) has been perpetuated over generations via official statements, commemorative practices, national curricula, and cultural production. (7) The experience encoded a sense of siege, suspicion of internal minorities, and distrust of external, especially Western actors. In short, an isolationist chord with anti-Western reverberations has long run through the Turkish national project, with significant impact on foreign policy. Especially salient at times of regional or global turmoil, the approach is steeped in survivalist fears, and a strong sense that the solution is "self-help". This emphasis on sovereigntist militarism is in sync with the basic tenets of what IR scholars call a "realist" worldview.

Yet, since the dawn of the Republic, the isolationist / realist impulse has co-existed with another tendency which, riffing on Ruggie, I call the "embedded liberalism" (8) of the Republican project. This refers to the elements of political liberalism which are baked into Turkey's legal and institutional regime, despite the fact that the early nation-builders were etatist in their approach to governance and took a unitary approach to national identity (a contradiction likewise baked into French republicanism). As with realism, the country's embedded liberalism had its origins in prior Ottoman adaptation to the European-dominated international system during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After all, the era of British- and French-led liberal imperialist globalization--which Albert Hourani famously labelled "the liberal age" (9)--entailed benefits for the great ports of the Ottoman eastern Mediterranean. (10) Thus, generations of reformers across the Empire engaged with liberal economic and political ideas from markets to constitutionalism. Yet, paradoxically, engagement was also a form of resistance, aimed at building the capacity to resist Western penetration. (11)

These processes meant that liberal practices were present at the creation of the Turkish Republic which was founded in light of Wilsonian attempts to solve the tragedy of great power politics by enlarging the "family of nations." The fledgling Republic's liberal inheritance included parliamentary, political party, and electoral traditions, and the foundational Treaty of Lausanne which enshrined minority rights. Such measures were enhanced by recognition of women's political rights and the voluntaristic conception of national belonging within the 1924 Constitution (Article 88). Civic elements were embedded in several of the guiding "arrows" of the Republican People's Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi CHP) program, (12) and even during the single party era, liberal democracy was envisaged as an eventual goal. Steeped in the progressive logic of thriving within the Western-dominated, world order, the paradigm reflected the basic tenets of what IR scholars call a "liberal" worldview.

The embedded liberalism of Turkish republicanism--despite ongoing isolationist / realist reflexes--served leaders across the political spectrum. Key figures included ismet Inonu, who at the end of World War II, positioned Turkey within the club of Western-dominated, capitalist democracies. Subsequent leaders on the center-right, like Adnan Menderes and Turgut Ozal, embraced market capitalism and (majoritarian) electoral politics. A common thread across their governments: the touting of Turkey as an imperfect democracy, staunchly allied with the US-dominated "free world."

Similarly, when the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) came to power in 2002, it invoked embedded liberalism to pursue domestic transformation and European Union (EU) membership. Simultaneously, the AKP advanced neo-liberal, economic transformation, an undertaking I have previously called "Turkey Inc." The latter has endured even as political liberalization ground to a halt. (13)

Democratic decline was caused by structural as well as agential factors. In the wake of 9/11, earlier proposals for a cosmopolitan Europe, which Turkish accession would have consolidated, were sidelined by the global securitization of Muslims. In conjunction with struggles within Turkey over key state institutions, EU-oriented democratization dwindled. Meanwhile, the neo-liberal restructuring of Turkey Inc.--of which AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan described himself as "CEO"--thrived under the permissive global economic conditions of the 2000s. This context was transformed by the 2008/9 economic crisis, pushing the AKP to strategically pivot to Gulf investment and religious populism. (14) The elision engendered diverse forms of domestic opposition including a near-successful bid to dislodge the party from its parliamentary primacy in 2015. In response, the AKP allied with ethno-nationalist elements, reactivating the country's isolationist / realist impulses. (15)

As suggested by this brief survey...