Turkish-Greek Relations: Rapprochement, Civil Society and the Politics of Friendship.

• Author: Selcuk, Orcun
• Position: Book review

Turkish-Greek Relations

Rapprochement, Civil Society and the Politics of Friendship

By Leonidas Karakatsanis

London; New York: Routledge, 2014, 283 pages, $145.00, ISBN 9780415730457.

LEONIDAS KARAKATSANIS' book looks at the reconciliation efforts between Turkey and Greece which, according to the author, resemble a pendulum that repeatedly swings between two extremes of enmity and friendship. The book is an expanded and updated version of a Ph.D. dissertation written at the University of Essex's Ideology and Discourse Analysis Program. It relies heavily on scholars like Derrida, Schmitt, Laclau, and Mouffe. The book focuses on diverse initiatives intended to promote the Turkish-Greek friendship in the post-1974 era. The author uses the term "floating signifier" to describe the existence of a diverse set of groups with the broader aim of friendship. It is the friendship discourse, which is analyzed by examining meanings attached to the language, signs, images, representational practices, and bodily encounters.

The book covers the time period between 1974 and 2013. However, it also discusses the early peace attempts of Ataturk and Venizelos, as well as the alliance of two countries in the aftermath of the Second World War against the rising Soviet threat. Karakatsanis argues that the armed conflict in Cyprus in 1974 had reactivated the already existing Greek national habitus "picturing the Greek nation as the eternal victim of Turkish aggression" (p. 10). Similarly, the official Turkish historiography depicted the image of Greeks with cliches such as "we threw the Greeks into the sea in 1922" (p. 13).

In the first part of the book, a spectre of the leftist identity in both countries is described with the idea of the ultimate goal of establishing Turkish-Greek friendship. The internationalist discourse within leftist movements had manifested itself as a discursive pattern of promoting friendship. Among the people that were involved in this movement were Yasar Kemal, Zulfu Livaneli, Aziz Nesin, Mikis Theodorakis, and Maria Farantouri, who used certain discourses like left, democracy, and friendship as a common vocabulary in the post-1974 period when bilateral relations reached its nadir. Moreover, in the aftermath of the 1980 coup in Turkey, EAMLET (Association for Solidarity between the Greek and Turkish Peoples) was founded with the participation of Turkish radical leftists who fled the country via the Greek border.

Apart from the involvement...