Identity Politics Inside Out: National Identity Contestation and Foreign Policy in Turkey

Published 2018.

The trajectory of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's time in office offers an ideal, empirical window into puzzling shifts in Turkey's domestic politics and foreign policy that do not correspond to usual shifts in geopolitical dynamics, international economic conditions, or the coming to power of a new party or leader. In Identity Politics Inside Out, Lisel Hintz teases out the complex link between identity politics and foreign policy in Turkey. Rather than treating national identity as cause or consequence of a state's foreign policy, she repositions foreign policy as an arena, alternative to domestic politics, in which contestation among competing proposals for national identity takes place. Using intertextual analysis, she extracts competing elements in Turkey's identity from a wide array of pop culture and social media sources, interviews, surveys, and archives examined through 18 months of fieldwork to theorize when and how internal identity politics becomes externalized. Hintz traces the evolution of Turkish national identity from the wake of the Ottoman collapse and its effects; to the attempts of the Islamist Welfare Party (RP) to spread Ottoman Islamism in Turkey's public sphere; to shift the country's foreign policy away from the West and toward the Middle East. With a unique framework developed through an in-depth study of Turkey, Identity Politics Inside Out analytically links the "inside out" spillover of national identity debates into foreign policy and fills a gap in existing scholarship by closing the identity-foreign policy circle.