Identity Politics Inside Out: National Identity Contestation and Foreign Policy in Turkey.

• Author: Hintz, Lisel

Lisel Hintz's Identity Politics Inside Out: National Identity Contestation and Foreign Policy in Turkey is an empirically rich and theoretically well-designed account of Turkish foreign policy and domestic politics. It is derived from Hintz's PhD thesis supervised by Marc Lynch at the George Washington University, (1) which is also partially published in the European Journal of International Relations in 2016. (2) The book's main theoretical premise is that domestic identity contestations are transferred to the domain of foreign policy when identity proposals are blocked in the domestic arena. Building on its identification of major national-identity proposals struggling for hegemony in Turkey, the book explains on this theoretical ground the Justice and Development Party's (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) early policy towards the European Union (EU) accession process and the "Ottoman Islamist" transformation of Turkish foreign policy and domestic politics. Hintz argues that when its "Ottoman Islamist" identity proposal was blocked by "Republican Nationalist" institutions in the domestic domain, the AKP moved to the foreign policy arena to weaken these institutions, overcome their blockage, and eventually, open space for its identity proposal.

Hintz's work builds on and contributes to the constructivist school of International Relations (IR) in its demonstration of the causal power of identity and its definition of foreign policy as "an arena for identity contestation" rather than being merely "a source or product of identity" (p. 7). One can identify five main elements in her "inside-out theory of identity contestation." First, there are multiple identity proposals, "suggested understandings of identity that prescribe and proscribe specific standards of behavior and compete to establish a particular national identity" (p. 4), in a country context to define the nation. Second, these identity proposals strive for hegemony or a sufficiently widespread and durable status in the domestic arena. Third, their contents often include elements of intolerability or "red lines" for their rival proposals and thus pave the way for contestation and blockage by "identity-based obstacles" defined as established institutions (p. 23). Fourth, domestically blocked proposals "utilize an 'inside-out' strategy of contestation" (p. 84) and are externalized in the foreign policy arena. Finally, this all culminates in domestic politics, where "foreign policy...