Geopolitical codes in Davutoglu's views toward the Middle East.

• Author: Ersen, Emre
• Position: Report

Introduction

Critical geopolitical approaches analyze how politics is imagined spatially and aim to reveal the politics behind the geography of global space. To this end, they make a distinction between three types of geopolitical reasoning. Formal geopolitics represents the geopolitical knowledge that is produced in strategic institutes, think tanks, and academia. Practical geopolitics refers to everyday forms of geopolitical reasoning that is utilized by political leaders and civil servants in explaining and legitimizing their foreign and security policies. Popular geopolitics is associated with the geopolitical narratives that are found in the mass media, cinema, novels, and cartoons. The first two categories are particularly important since most geopolitical reasoning takes place either in the formal or practical geopolitical spheres. Foreign policy decision-makers use practical geopolitical reasoning when they try to make spatial sense of the world, but they also frequently resort to formal forms of geopolitical knowledge to respond effectively to particular foreign policy questions.

It is difficult to claim that critical geopolitics and especially its three types of geopolitical reasoning are reflected broadly enough in the academic discussions in Turkey. Although recently there has been a remarkable increase in the number of studies attempting to analyze the geopolitical discourses in Turkey by utilizing a critical approach, the field is still dominated by traditional ideas, which tend to associate geopolitics with realist concepts like national security, strategy, interest, and power. (1) The prevalence of such a realist approach in geopolitical studies in Turkey is astonishing, when one considers that critical theories have become nearly as influential as traditional ones in other major fields of the international relations discipline in the Turkish academia. In order to initiate a similar trend in the sphere of geopolitics, there is a need to deconstruct or at least reinterpret some of the popular geopolitical themes and concepts that are frequently used by Turkish scholars and policymakers.

Ahmet Davutoglu, who has been Turkey's foreign minister since 2009, is a particularly important figure in terms of critically analyzing the forms of geopolitical reasoning in Turkey. This is because his ideas represent both formal and practical geopolitics due to his dual identities as a professor of international relations and a minister of foreign affairs. In the formal geopolitical sense, his seminal book Strategic Depth: The International Position of Turkey (2001) is still regarded as one of the most influential sources for scholars of post-Cold War Turkish foreign policy. In the practical geopolitical sense, even before his appointment as a foreign minister, he served as the chief foreign policy advisor to the Turkish governments under the Justice and Development Party (AK Party). His statements and writings, in this regard, provide very important indicators about the evolution of geopolitics in Turkey in the past decade. Employing a critical geopolitical approach, this paper aims to explore the formal and practical implications of Davutoglu's ideas toward the Middle East. To this end, his writings and speeches will be critically analyzed and the images and narratives that shape his geopolitical understanding of this region will be identified.

Formal, Practical, and Popular Geopolitics

The theory of "critical geopolitics" developed around the ideas of a group of political geographers working in the universities in North America and Europe who have been particularly interested in the post-structuralist discourse analysis methods of French political scientists like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. (2) Critical geopolitics rejects the deterministic view of traditional geopolitical approaches that regard geography as an independent variable governed by constant and unchangeable laws. Instead, it treats geography as a discourse, claiming that geographical assumptions and understandings are culturally constructed and politically sustained. (3) In this regard, it particularly criticizes traditional geopolitical theories' tendency to reduce geography to something that should be conquered or controlled. It also rejects their excessive emphasis on the military/strategic aspects of interstate relations and defends a new geopolitical understanding that reflects the cultural, economic, and social changes in a globalizing world.

The most important objective of critical geopolitics is to understand how "borders" are "spatialized" and how the "us and them" dichotomy is geopolitically represented, so that the real "geopolitical map of the world" as well as the geopolitical imaginations that influence the perception of this map can be examined. (4) For this purpose, it proposes a threefold typology in analyzing various forms of geopolitical reasoning. Formal geopolitics symbolizes the geopolitical reasoning that is produced by analysts, intellectuals, and scholars in academia, strategic institutes and think tanks. Practical geopolitics is to be found in the geopolitical discourses of government representatives and foreign policy bureaucrats. Popular geopolitics represents the geopolitical narratives that are reflected in the mass media, cinema, novels, and cartoons. (5)

These three categories of geopolitical reasoning are closely interrelated. (6) Academics and journalists have regular contacts with each other as well as government officials and other state authorities. Such contacts reinforce an intensive exchange of ideas on many political and social issues. Geopolitical frameworks that are shaped during the course of this exchange are processed by the mass media and penetrate into popular culture. Metaphors such as the "iron curtain," "rogue states" or "axis of evil" aim to simplify international politics for the public and help people make the "us and them" or "friend and enemy" distinctions in a more simplified manner. These abstractions are frequently exploited by politicians to defend a particular policy. At the same time, they also initiate popular public debates of a geopolitical nature.

Due to the rapid improvement of communication technology, popular geopolitics has recently become the subject of an increasing number of academic studies. (7) Yet, it is argued that most geopolitical reasoning in world politics still takes place in the realm of formal and practical geopolitics. Formal geopolitics, which is based on the works of academics and think tanks, is also associated with "geopolitical thinking" or "geopolitical traditions". (8) The geopolitical tradition that has influenced world politics since the end of nineteenth century is based on the writings of political geographers, including Friedrich Ratzel, Rudolf Kjellen, Alfred T. Mahan, Halford J. Mackinder as well as Karl Haushofer's German school of Geopolitik. (9) After the Second World War, it has been carried into the next decades mainly by American writers like George Kennan and Nicholas Spykman. It has maintained its influence in the contemporary period with the books of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who are also well known for their official positions within the US foreign policy bureaucracy. This geopolitical tradition is state-centric, accepts geography as static, places strong emphasis on size and other physical attributes, claims that geography can be dominated or at least controlled by traditional power factors like military force, and presents a rather simplified world map that is based on dichotomies like "East versus West" or "Land Power versus Sea Power." As argued earlier, critical geopolitics rejects this tradition's assumption that geography is governed by natural laws and asserts that complicated social-political processes cannot be reduced to simple geostrategic calculations.

At the national level, geopolitical traditions are also quite important since every state has one or more geopolitical tradition, which develops in accordance with its unique historical, geographical, or cultural features. These traditions mainly represent the geopolitical reasoning of the scholars in that country. Each tradition, in this regard, is based on a distinct definition of national identity, state interest and friend-enemy distinction. Graham Smith, for instance, indicates three dominant geopolitical traditions in the Russian Federation: one viewing Russia as part of Europe, one believing that Russia is neither European nor Asian, and one suggesting that the country is a bridge between the two continents. (10) A similar study was conducted by Walter Russell Mead, who claimed that differences of national interest, social support base, and cultural identity produced four separate geopolitical traditions in the US. (11) Timothy Garton Ash, on the other hand, discovered four geopolitical traditions in the UK, which respectively defined the country as small Britain, cosmopolitan Britain, European Britain, and American Britain. (12)

Practical geopolitics, which is the second category in critical geopolitics, is closely related with formal geopolitics due to two factors. First, the theories and strategies formulated in the universities and think tanks aim to provide guidance to policymakers as well as legitimacy for their decisions. The most well known examples are the alleged influence of Haushofer's views on Hitler's policies and the US "containment policy" during the Cold War, which was largely based on the geopolitical ideas...