https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5234-2067
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ABSTRACT
This article has two main goals. The first is to examine the role of politics of space and time in making Turkey’s international relations. The second is to answer a more general question: what happens to a non-Western state like Turkey that cannot eliminate ‘differences’ that mark that state as non-Western? My answer is that these states handle these ‘differences’ that do not entirely disappear by creating exceptionalism. Exceptionalism rebrands ‘difference’ as ‘distinctiveness’ that can only be possessed by a specific country or nation. The article identifies two main pathways to the creation of Turkish exceptionalism, space and time, and explores the brief history of these spatio-temporal imaginations leading to the making of the exceptionalist narrative and their implications for Turkey’s foreign relations and identity.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the reviewers and the editor for their suggestions. This piece builds on earlier works of the author.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Zarakol After Defeat.
2 Tyrrell, ‘American Exceptionalism.’ 1031.
3 For an initial elaboration of this idea please see Yanık, ‘Constructing Turkish Exceptionalism.’
4 The translation of this Bab-ı Hümayün inscription written in Ottoman into modern Turkish is available at http://www.topkapisarayi.gov.tr/tr/content/bab-ı-hümayun. The version in modern Turkish was translated into English by the author.
5 Brummett, Mapping the Ottomans, 7–8.
6 Emiralioğlu, ‘Relocating the Center.’
7 Casale, The Ottoman Age, 14.
8 Çırakman, From the ‘Terror of the World’,’, 105.
9 Ibid, 217.
10 Bilgin, ‘Globalization and In/Security,’ 73.
11 Burçak, ‘The Institution of the Ottoman Embassy,’148.
12 Bilgin, ‘Globalization and In/Security,’ 72.
13 Zarakol, After Defeat, 19.
14 ‘İsveç Kıralı,’ 320–321.
15 Atatürk’ün Başlıca Nutukları, 1920–1938, 138.
16 İnönü, Hatıralar.
17 Athanassopoulou, ‘Western Defence Developments.’
18 Brockett, How Happy, 67–80.
19 Yanık, ‘Bringing the Empire Back In.’
20 Barchard, Turkey and the West.
21 Esmer, ‘The Straits.’
22 Congressional Record-House, 1947, 4815.
23 Congressional Record-House, 1947, 4598 and 4610.
24 McGhee, ‘Turkey Joins the West.’
25 ‘I. Saraçoğlu Hükümetinin Programı, 5.8.1942.’
26 Adalet, Hotels and Highways, Ch. 1.
27 Lerner, The Passing.
28 A copy published by the Turkish Information Office in 1955 can be accessed at this link https://menadoc.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/landau/content/titleinfo/205449?lang=de.
29 Durgun, Memalik-I Şahane’den Vatana, 291.
30 Barchard, Turkey and the West, and Fuller, ‘Turkey’s New Eastern Orientation.’
31 Davutoğlu, Stratejik Derinlik.
32 Van Prooijen, The Psychology, 25–32.
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Lerna K. Yanık
Lerna K. Yanık is Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at Kadir Has University. She received her B.A. from Boğaziçi University and Ph.D. from Georgetown University and has previously worked at Bilkent University. She was visiting scholar in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2017–2018 and was the first prizewinner of the 2006 Sakıp Sabancı International Research Award. She has written more than twenty-five academic articles and book chapters exploring politics of time and space, spatial politics and non-Western international relations theory, critical geopolitics and politics and culture with a focus on Turkey. Her work has appeared in journals such as International Studies Review, Third World Quarterly, Uluslararası Ilişkiler, Political Geography, Geopolitics, Turkish Studies, Human Rights Quarterly, and Europe-Asia Studies.