The Emergence of Kantian Culture in Turkish Foreign Policy (1980-2012): A Holistic Constructivist Approach.

• Author: Adisonmez, Umut Can
• Position: Book review

The Emergence of Kantian Culture in Turkish Foreign Policy (1980-2012): A Holistic Constructivist Approach

By Enes Bayrakli

Saarbrucken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2012, 329 pages, $101,00, ISBN: 9783659264702

There is hardly a more thoughtprovoking subject in the contemporary political history of Turkey than the country's transforming state identity vis-a-vis its reflection over the changing foreign policy direction and apparatuses. At this crux, the increasing influence of Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AK Party) on the state's already shifting ideological orientation has been a remarkable case to tease out.

Since its foundation in 1923, the Turkish bureaucratic elites' efforts to ensure the state's physical existence and 'Westernizing identity' have found themselves in a critical dilemma: whether to break the cultural codes with its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire, and exist as a Western-oriented nation-state, or to develop its relations with the former Ottoman provinces and embrace a 'multifaceted' state identity.

Turkish readers will recognize that the above-mentioned debate, which, at its heart, offers two incompatible narratives, is deeply entrenched not only within Turkish domestic politics, but also in foreign policy. In The Emergence of Kantian Culture in Turkish Foreign Policy (1980-2012), Enes Bayrakli approaches this decades-long dilemma of interpretation, claiming that Turkey's foreign policy culture has since the 1980s been relocating itself into the Kantian mind-set, putting emphasis on friendship and cooperation.

In exploring this relocation, the manuscript provides a good account of developments since Turkey's transition to a liberal economy in 1980, and aims at drawing attention to how both external and domestic factors have radically changed the foreign policy course of the country and re-defined its position on the regional and global scale. While Bayrakli's analysis of various topics offers a comprehensive framework, the book is suitable for the general readership. From the very beginning to the conclusion, the author works to unearth the causal links shedding light on his two hypothesis which will be shown below.

As we have already touched upon, the author's main purpose is to make sense of how and why the liberal economic policies Turkey introduced in the 1980s have altered its foreign policy direction (1980-2012). The reader, however, might find his second claim more absorbing. Inspired by Alexander...