Turkey facing east

Islam, modernity and foreign policy

Ayla Gol

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781526107480
  9780719090752
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526103345
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Turkey facing east is about the importance of Turkey's relations with its Eastern neighbours – Azerbaijan, Armenia and the Soviet Union – during the emergence of the modern Turkish nation-state from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. The principal strength of this book is that it not only combines historical and theoretical arguments in order to provide a better understanding of the foreign relations of a predominantly Muslim country from a critical and interdisciplinary perspective, but it also applies the new approach to the analysis of Turkish foreign policy towards the South Caucasus between 1918 and 1921. Hence, it stands out with its original interdisciplinary approach to the Turkish transition and foreign policy-making that offers perspectives on the extant possibilities for the particular transitional states resulting from the Arab spring uprisings.

1

Foreign policy analysis and transitional states

Turkey between 1918 and 1921 is identified as a transitional state, which had gone through a transformation from an Islamic empire to a modern nation-state. Turkey was the first historical example of a secular, nation-state in the Islamic world. However, such a complex process of transformation is usually explained as a ‘one-man revolution’, and its foreign relations as ‘Kemalist’ foreign policy in orthodox Turkish historiography.¹ The emergence of Turkish nationalism under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and foreign relations between the Turkish nationalists and Western Allies after the First World War became the dominant point of departure in understanding the making of modern Turkey.² This explanation overlooks one important fact: such a transformation is a product of complex socio-historical conditions, which cannot be reduced either to a single leader or to domestic conditions at a certain point in time. The existing literature also overlooks the role of the Turkish–Bolshevik rapprochement in the East during the making of a modern state in Turkey. Specifically, to understand the causes and consequences of the unique rapprochement between Turkish nationalists and the Russian Bolsheviks, after the collapse of the Ottoman and Russian empires, requires engagement beyond the mono-causal explanation of their common struggle against Western imperialism.

A new interdisciplinary theoretical framework is necessary in order to explain the complexity of state transformation and foreign policy-making when understanding a Muslim country’s engagement with European modernity. After pointing out the insufficiency of studying domestic politics and/or the leadership only, the proposed theoretical approach here offers an analysis within a wider historical structure and specific context from a multi-causal and multi-disciplinary perspective. An attempt is made to base this new framework on three pillars: the study of foreign policy, transition to modernity and the ideology of nationalism. Alone, neither foreign policy nor modernity nor nationalism can explain Turkish state transformation and its influence on foreign policy-making. Together, each pillar is analysed, taking into consideration the implications of each analysis for the others, in order to present a novel understanding of Turkish foreign policy towards its eastern neighbours in the South Caucasus.

Bringing foreign policy back to international relations

As Hill argues ‘foreign policy is a central part of our understanding of international relations, even if it is far from being the whole story. It is currently neglected, for some good reasons, but many bad, and it needs bringing back into focus.’³ This need has become evident in the context of better understanding Muslim societies in the aftermath of 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and the Arab Spring of 2011. The unprecedented events in international politics made us re-think the meaning of foreign policy in relation to who decides for whom, and who is affected by foreign policy decisions and actions at the international level. Therefore, the study of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) is chosen as the departing point for two main reasons: it is a ‘bridging discipline’,⁴ and, more importantly, it translates ‘abstract theory into concrete problems’.⁵ Furthermore, FPA’s interdisciplinary character creates the possibility of breaking down boundaries among the disciplines of social sciences in general, sociology in particular and International relations (IR). According to Rengger and Hoffman:⁶

there were previous attempts in the late nineteenth century to identify international relations as an aspect of the developing discipline of sociology, thus firmly placing it within the history of the social sciences. These attempts to define the study of the international system as the sociology of world politics were unsuccessful in overturning the intellectual grip of international law. It is only within the last decade that there have been concerted efforts to try and reformulate the study of international relations in an historical sociological framework. This approach is exemplified, for example, in the works of Skocpol, Tilly, Barrington Moore, Halliday, Gellner and Hall.

Since the mid-1990s, there has also been a new trend to break down the boundaries among disciplines in order to understand the various aspects of global politics that scholars deal with under separate sub-fields in IR and FPA.⁷ Based on this trend, this book proposes ‘an interdisciplinary approach’ to the analysis of the foreign policy of a state in transition by offering a new conceptual and theoretical framework and bringing history, sociology and FPA together.⁸ The first part of the book, consisting of three chapters, proposes a new approach to the study of the foreign policy of a state, which aims to transform itself from an empire into a modern nation-state. The proposed interdisciplinary approach based on the triangle of foreign policy, modernity and nationalism which together represent a powerful explanation of the relationship between Turkish state-transformation and foreign policy-making. The second part of the book, consisting of four chapters, draws on a case-study in order to apply the new conceptual framework to the systematic empirical investigations of Turkish foreign policy towards the South Caucasus between 1918 and 1921. By combining conceptual framework with empirical study, it offers a theoretically informed analysis of history that explains the origins of Turkey’s engagement in Eastern affairs from an interdisciplinary and critical perspective.

For methodological clarity, this chapter begins by evaluating the orthodox studies of FPA in the next section; it will assess the evolution of foreign policy analysis to demonstrate why a new theoretical approach to the foreign policies of transitional states is proposed here. The rest of the chapter will identify the main dimensions of the foreign policies of transitional states by differentiating them from those of traditional and modern states.

An evaluation of orthodox foreign policy analysis

In the age of globalisation and post-9/11 era, we witnessed the rise of new challenges to international security and the discourses of the global ‘war on terror’. Meanwhile, the notions of modernity such as statehood, sovereignty, national identity and the foreign policy of states have become increasingly contested in the study of international relations. In general, the concept of foreign policy has been by-passed in the main theories of IR.⁹ In particular, the increasing meta-theoretical interests in the studies of global politics ‘have only occasionally collided with what has by now become the orthodoxy of a decision-making approach’ in FPA.¹⁰ However, the study of foreign policy is not only limited to the analysis of the decision-making process. As Hudson argues, FPA among all sub-fields of IR is the ‘most radically integrative theoretical enterprise’, which brings a broad variety of information from numerous disciplines of human knowledge through different levels of analysis.¹¹ This is why it is the departing point of an interdisciplinary approach to foreign policy, which sets up a new conceptual framework to explain a complex process of transformation from an Islamic empire to a modern nation-state in Turkey.

One minimalist definition of foreign policy is that it is ‘the sum of official external relations conducted by an independent actor (usually a state) in international relations’.¹² The analysis of foreign policy is the ground of IR, which arguably could not exist as a discipline without FPA.¹³ In this sense, FPA is the study of transactions between different units as independent actors; ‘the domestic circumstances that produce them, the effect on them of the system and its structures and their influence on the system’.¹⁴ Furthermore, as Smith argues, the disciplinary concerns of FPA overlap with four main epistemological, methodological and even ontological difficulties that are part of the general studies of IR.¹⁵

The first problem is about the theoretical concern: is there a general theory of international behaviour?¹⁶ The second problem concerns the impact of the international system on the behaviour of states. The relationship between the state and the international system is double-edged. On the one hand, the international system determines the behaviour of states; on the other, the state becomes an independent agent. The third problem is on the role of human agencies/individuals given the fact that the main actors of foreign policy have been accepted as the decision-makers of states. But the impact of structures and processes on the behaviour of decision-makers cannot be denied by the theories of foreign policy.¹⁷ And finally, the emphasis on the nation-state and the decision-making process has been particularly problematic for FPA.¹⁸ However, despite the main criticism that FPA is state-centric foreign policy, analysts managed to move away from the state as the main actor and its policy-procedures.¹⁹ Therefore, it is useful to begin with the self-criticism of foreign policy analysts but keeping in mind these major problems of IR.

The origins of traditional FPA can be divided into three main categories: the domestic politics perspective, middle-range theories and comparative foreign policy (CFP).²⁰ The first perspective sought to generalise about the sources of state behaviour by focusing on the decision-making process of the formal state apparatus.²¹ Within this approach, the ‘bureaucratic politics’, ‘rational actor’ and ‘organisation process’ models became the most well-known explanations of how foreign policy decisions were made.²² Thus, the study of decision-making occupied a central part of FPA.²³ The second approach, middle-range theories under the influence of behaviouralist methods, moved the focus to the concepts of perception/misperception, the personality of individual leaders and the effect of the psychology of groups on foreign policy.²⁴ Finally, the CFP approach, which is rooted in the neo-positivist vision of science, was a search for a theory via comparisons of a cross-national data analysis.²⁵

Despite these developments, the increased importance of economic factors in international relations also led to a questioning of the role of state and the centrality of its decision-makers. Not only was the distinction between foreign and domestic policy seen as blurred because of interdependence between the developed and the developing worlds, but it was also recognised that a general theory of foreign policy behaviour was not going to emerge. Since the early 1970s, there has been a decline of CFP-type analysis and a resurgence of interest in an analytical focus on single-country theories.²⁶ Moreover, foreign policy analysts realised that FPA could afford to ignore neither the norms of external environment nor the structure of the international system.

Three main criticisms against ‘classic FPA scholarship’ will be summarised here.²⁷ As classified by Light, the first complaint is about the methodology of subject:

‘grand’ theorists maintain that FPA is devoid of theory; it is simply diplomatic history. Both diplomatic historians and IR traditionalists disagree, complaining that foreign policy analysts concentrate on political process at the expense of policy outcome and accusing them of ‘scientism’. Methodological purists, on the other hand, believe that FPA methodology is insufficiently rigorous, while international system theorists argue that by focusing on the inner workings of the state, foreign policy analysts get the level of analysis wrong and study politics, not international relations.²⁸

While the second complaint is a result of general disappointment that the empirical data of FPA r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Foreign policy analysis and transitional states
• 2 The Turkish transition and alternative modernity
• 3 Modernity, nationalism and Islamic identity
• 4 Challenges of nationalist foreign policy
• 5 New rules of engagement between Ankara and Moscow in the East
• 6 The Turkish question: Islamist, communist or nationalist?
• 7 The recognition of the modern Turkish state
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendices
• Index