Bücher von Toni Alaranta

This book offers a comprehensive account of Turkey's foreign policy narratives in a period of global power shifts. By examining international and national historical processes, the author highlights narrative processes and traditions that describe Turkey and its position in world politics. He also analyzes how global power shifts, such as the rise of China, affect Turkey's increasingly active and confusing foreign policy and the narratives associated with it. The book covers topics such as Kemalist modernization, Islamic conservative views of the New World Order, Turkey's relations with non-Western countries such as Russia and China, and Turkish narratives of the Syrian war and the COVID-19-pandemic. It is intended for scholars of international relations and European and Middle Eastern politics, and appeals to anyone interested in Turkish history and politics.

This study analyses the attempt to build political legitimacy in the Republic of Turkey from the 1930s to 1980s. This is done by exploring the texts produced by Kemalist writers who reproduced a European-originated enlightenment meta-narrative in order to legitimize the existence of Kemalist state-ideology. Central in this process was a hegemonic representation of history, namely, the interpretation of the Anatolian Resistance Struggle of 1919¿1922 as a Turkish revolution executing the enlightenment in the Turkish nation-state. The study first demonstrates the way in which the fundamental presuppositions of this enduring narrative were initially produced in the famous Six-Day speech (Nutuk) of Mustafa Kemal Ataürk, the founder and first president of the republic, and then proceeds to uncover how this narrative was reproduced, with minor variations, in different historical contexts during the period concerned. The study demonstrates that the Kemalist enlightenment meta-narrative created a group of narrative accruals which enabled generations of secular middle classes to internalize Kemalist ideology.

This study uses the concepts of national and state identity to examine Turkey's domestic and international politics and explain how the country's position in the international system has changed over the last ten years. State identity is understood as the end result of a transformed national identity, linking both domestic and international levels.