Research Information System
INTERNASJONAL POLITIKK, vol.52, no.2, pp.139-175, 1994 (SSCI)
The post-Cold War world presents Turkey with radical new challenges and opportunities: Her membership of 'the West' based on geostrategic importance was temporarily questioned, Western Europe's newfound love in Eastern Europe increased the distance Brussels-Ankara and the disintegration of the Soviet Union begot 6 new Central Asian republics of which 5 are Turkish speaking. Turkey, therefore, has been and is in a process of redefining her foreign policy orientation. This goes as deep as involving a reconstitution of the meaning of state and nation, of 'Turkey'. Especially the new 'Turkish Republics' have questioned the relationship between state and nation: the nation obviously stretches further than the borders of 'Turkey'. The dominant policy and identity response has not been to react by extending state borders to match language borders (radical pan-Turkism), but a mix of traditional cautious Kemalism and soft pan-turkism, where the state still ends at the given borders, but a larger nation is seen in the form of a family of consanguineous states. Such processes of national self-redefinition can not be grasped by traditional geopolitical or international relations analysis. It is necessary to work through the national traditions regarding discourses on state, nation, politics, and religion. Therefore the article consists of a brief first section on the relationship between Turkey and Europe, a large main section on Turkey's political discourse, and a third and final section on emerging re-articulations of concepts and traditions in the new political setting.