Strategy and Strategic Discourse in Turkish Foreign Policy.

• Author: Unsal, Deniz

By Hasan Yukselen

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 260 pages, [euro]64.99, ISBN: 9783030390365

Strategy has been a much-debated concept in the International Relations discipline. In his book, Hasan Yukselen, chooses not to simplify strategy as a prolongation of states' military objectives. Instead, he comes up with theoretical evidence from Turkish foreign policy to show that strategy does not operate in a vacuum and that it evolves historically and sociologically. According to the author, in this process, the agent, who/which may be a leader or a group, depending on the state, pours its thought into action but beyond that, the agent represents strategy through discourse. Yukselen puts forward the questions: how do discourses represent strategy? How did the discursive aspects of different strategies in Turkish foreign policy shift between 1919 and 2015? By taking the shifts in Turkish foreign policy into account, Yukselen lucidly demonstrates the relationship between different strategies and discourses in Turkey.

After introducing the concept of strategy in the first two chapters, the author scrutinizes revisionism as a leading strategy of Turkey in 1919-1923, in chapter three. Yukselen begins this chapter by arguing that the strategic end was the transformation of the Ottoman Empire into a Turkish nation-state, whereas the means were force and diplomacy between 1919-1923. According to the author, the empire was compelled to employ a balance-of-power strategy as a survival tactic, yet structural factors such as its relative weakness and the rise of nationalism governed this period. These structural factors accelerated the dismantling of the empire. He illustrates that both late-Ottoman leaders and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk benefitted from a balance-of-power strategy to overcome relative weakness, but that Ataturk embraced this strategy to allocate means and ensure the end--inde-pendence-rather than to prolong the ongoing conflict. Hence, Yukselens vigilance in distinguishing between different balance-of-power strategies should be praised.

The author examines the challenging days of the new Republic in chapter four. The leitmotifs in this chapter are 'reconstruction' and 'isolationism,' which were the ways of ensuring the development of the country through diplomacy. The author's articulation is remarkable since he argues that Turkey's relative weakness continued to endure, but the decline of the European establishment relieved it in this period...