Turkish Foreign Policy in the Centennial Republican Anniversary: Quo Vadis?

• Author: Cemrek, Murat
• Position: "Turkey's Foreign Policy Narratives: Implications of Global Power Shifts," "Critical Readings of Turkey's Foreign Policy," "The Nation or the Ummah: Islamism and Turkish Foreign Policy"

Turkey's Foreign Policy Narratives: Implications of Global Power Shifts

By Toni Alaranta

Switzerland: Springer, 2022, 176 pages, [euro]109.99, ISBN: 9783030926502

Critical Readings of Turkey's Foreign Policy

Edited By Birsen Erdogan and Fulya Hisarlioglu

Switzerland: Springer, 2022, 322 pages, [euro]54.99, ISBN: 9783030976361

The Nation or the Ummah: Islamism and Turkish Foreign Policy

By Birol Baskan and Omer Taspinar

Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2021, 222 pages, $99.00, ISBN: 9781438486475

The Republic of Turkiye is proudly celebrating its centennial anniversary as a nation erected on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, which had reigned for six centuries until it was wrecked by the First World War. Since the end of the Cold War, Turkiye has been incrementally attracting more and more attention in world politics compared to any previous era. The more Turkiye is under the spotlight, the more it increases its activist foreign policy, becoming routine under the AK Party led by Turkiye's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Thus, Turkish foreign policy (TFP), in return has also attracted substantial scholarly work not only from the national International Relations students and scholars but also from foreign policy analysts both in Turkiye and abroad.

This review article is based on three books: Starting with Alaranta, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs in Helsinki, Finland, who has already published extensively on Turkiye, Kemalism, Turkish transformation, Turkiye-West relations, and the TFP. Thus, Alaranta's Turkey's Foreign Policy Narratives could be depicted as the summary of his typical research interests. Alaranta indicates this book is--to some extent--a continuation of his earlier book titled as National and State Identity in Turkey: The Transformation of the Republic's Status in the International System (2015)." However, this book could be depicted as analyzing the TFP narratives in an era of global power shifts, reference to Kuhnian paradigm shift makes sense in this context, as well as international and national historical processes of the ever-changing international system. Alaranta's book encompasses two main parts: the first composed of the second and third chapters, goes through narratives shaping and being shaped by some major events in Turkish history and the concomitant international system of the corresponding era. The second part, composed of chapters four to seven, scrutinizes the preceding ten years covering the relationship between the current global power shift and Turkiye's role in global politics with reference to the context of the new presidential regime and TFP's rising activism.

The author is quite aware that the transformation of the international system is not a one-way ticket but a round trip, while opening the floor to how the current global power shifts have touched the leading identity propositions and their relevant discourses of the ideal TFP. Meanwhile, the TFP has taken a long path in shaping the world politics, at least on the regional basis. Alaranta is also knowledgeable about the rising resentment concerning the breach between large-scale structures analyzed through various IR theories and individual responses to them on the one hand and on the other hand the sheer reality that many major issues originally and essentially come from the local, micro-level basis.

The author is a fan of the concept of "narrative" since it has become almost the catch-all concept both in humanities and the social sciences in recent decades, though its functionality is already over according to many. In fact, the narrative's importance is based on its penetration through primary cognitive processes by which identities shape individuals and communities while constituted within narratives. Or, in the author's words "Furthermore, each foreign-policy narrative comprises such fragments, thereby offering its own interpretation of the world" (p. 5). Thus, the author defines his book as "... demonstrating how foreign policy narratives function as a micro-level, textual site for either questioning or reproducing global power structures within a single nation-state" (p. 13), entailing recognition of the conceptual inventories to work as the ideological basis of such narratives.

Alaranta pays enormous attention to various diverse tensions in the centennial Turkish Republic history through its adamant relentlessly reinterpreted modernization, read as a Westernization experiment, in many respects. However, according to the author, the TFP has become increasingly activist in the last two decades, especially under the AK Party's rule, during the discussions about the socalled liberal international order's (LIO) future with reference to ideology and narrative. Thus, the Turkish Republic's centennial anniversary is alluring to evaluate the pros and cons of its problematic modernization process including nation-building and state-building dimensions. Therefore, the author's focus on narrative processes and traditions describes Turkiye's positioning within the recent global power...