Foreign policy and the construction of modern Turkish citizenship during the national struggle period

Abstract

This dissertation is an attempt to present a different historical account of the construction of modern national citizenship and the politics of inclusion and exclusion that is the politics of citizenship through a rereading of the official foreign policy of the formative years of the Turkish Republic. From the theoreticalanalytical point of view, the dissertation rests on the proposal that there is a relationship between the foreign policy dynamics and the domestic socio-political structure, namely the nature of the relationship between the state and the citizen, the basic features of the collective and individual political identities and the formation of the terms of legitimate and proper membership which can all be termed as the politics of citizenship of a particular country. Within this framework, the dissertation uses the general foreign policy orientation and specific acts and decisions of the nationalist Ankara government as the analytical instrument to follow up the formation of the early premises of Turkish national citizenship identity. The main argument is that the territorial, cultural (national) and political boundaries of modern citizenship identity in Turkey were drawn mainly in and through the foreign policy acts and decisions of the new ruling elite which were reflected in the foreign policy texts –treaties and agreements- of the period between 1919-1923.