Turkey's geopolitics dogma

Abstract

A first look at Turkey’s case reveals it to be an ‘ideal’ one, which affirms the hypothesis ‘tested’ in this volume: that a ‘revival’ of geopolitical thought occurs in those settings where a crisis of foreign policy identity coincides with a pre-existing disposition to materialist foreign policy thinking, active involvement of key actors fluent in geopolitics-speak and their employment of this discourse in pursuing a conservative agenda. A second look, however, calls for qualifying this hypothesis in that geopolitical discourse has been employed in Turkey by a variety of actors in pursuit of political agendas that are conservative/radical in different ways – so much so that the same set of notions and images driven from classical geopolitical thought have been invoked in justifying policy agendas diametrically opposed to each other. For example, in the post-Cold War era, whereas a coalition of ‘Eurosceptic’ actors have tapped geopolitics to make a case for Turkey remaining outside European integration, those wishing to make a case for Turkey joining European accession have employed the same discourse. This, I offer, could be understood as a function of the historical centrality of geopolitical assumptions and language to Turkey’s security imaginary – heretofore referred to as the ‘geopolitics dogma’. The chapter begins by laying out the main features of Turkey’s ‘geopolitics dogma’ in an attempt to highlight the mutually constitutive relationship between security imaginary, (foreign policy) identity and (re)production of geopolitical thought. While it may seem counterintuitive to begin with ‘the geopolitics dogma’, I have chosen to do so to underscore my finding that the post-1989 ‘revival’ of geopolitical thought in Turkey is more one of quantity and less of quality. That is to say, references to geopolitical assumptions and language have never been far from central to Turkey’s security imaginary. The end of the Cold War has only reinforced an already existing propensity to invoke geopolitics in support of policy choices of various kinds – conservative and radical.