From Beka to Ghaza? New Ontological Security Regime and Turkey’s Neo-Imperial Bid in World Politics

Abstract

Turkey’s domestic and foreign policy agendas have long been dominated by the state survival politics (‘Beka Meselesi’ in Turkish). This survival logic is so powerful as it gravitates around collective anxieties and their re-production since the beginning of the early Republican period, the separation of Turkey along ethnic lines being the most distressing. Building on this, this article makes two claims. Firstly, it argues that alternative interpretations have emerged regarding Turkey’s self-image under the Justice and Development Party’s (JDP) rule. Specifically, the JDP elites re-imagined the country’s standing in world politics by drawing on the nostalgia for Ottoman grandeur. With this new self-image in mind, the JDP elites have critically engaged with the survival codes and priorities of the ‘Old’ Turkey by taking these notions as negative reference points in shaping the ‘New’ Turkey’s foreign policy direction. With this revised worldview and self-image, Turkey would finally reclaim its agenda-setter role in International Relations based on the historical, political, and sociocultural links with its imperial geography and beyond. Secondly, we argue that this shift from a more defensive survival-based approach towards a more offensive-interventionist imperial stance has two-fold dynamics. On the one hand, it has emerged in parallel to the changing nature of international order, that is, multipolarity and the rise of illiberalism. On the other hand, it has gained further momentum by the rising Turkish military-industrial complex that is closely linked with Turkey’s post-2016 realities. The article unpacks Turkey’s bid for neo-imperial standing in an evolving international order by drawing on the self-interrogative reflexivity approach in ontological security theory. © The Author(s) 2024.