Turkish Foreign Policy and Turkish Identity

By using the core insights of the constructivist approach in International Relations, this book analyzes the foreign policy behaviour of Turkey. It argues that throughout its modern history, Turkey's foreign policy has been affected by its Western identity created in the years following the War of Independence. It underlines the inadequacy of structural constructivism and offers an interactive model, which takes domestic and systemic factors into account. It also offers a critique of the rational-choice literature on Turkish foreign policy and argues that Turkish foreign policy has been, and still is, guided by identity considerations, which are analyzed in terms of three competing conceptions: Western, Islamic and Nationalist.Even though there is a massive amount of research on Turkish foreign policy, only has a small portion of it dealt with the effects of the Turkish identity on foreign policy. Furthermore, those who studied Turkish foreign policy from the perspective of identity lacked a solid theoretical foundation and analytical framework, which significantly weakened their argument. This book endeavors to fulfill the gap in the existing literature by offering an alternative constructivist approach to the study of Turkish foreign policy.