Turkey’s Quest for a “New International Order”: The Discourse of Civilization and the Politics of Restoration

Authors : Murat YEŞİLTAŞ

Pages : 43-75

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Publication Date : 2014-01-01

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :This article argues that the increasing emphasis of civilization in Turkish foreign policy discourse fundamentally affected Turkey’s criticism of the current international order. Political elites during the Justice and Development Party era have framed their critiques of international order in the context of the “politics of restoration”; the political discourse seeks to re-construct Turkey’s national, regional and international political discourse and engagement. They have also recontextualized the politics of restoration along the axis of a discourse of the “New Turkey”. In this sense, the “New Turkey” discourse reproduced the civilizational identity part of Turkey’s international order narrative by blending it with an anti-hegemonic “dissident” discourse. Instead of taking civilization as a given, as many studies concerned with the relationship of Turkish foreign policy and civilization have done, this article takes Davutoğlu’s constitutive role of the idea into account and analyzes the framework provided by the term for the politics of restoration of national, regional, and global order while considering civilization as a historical institution formed by the interaction between culture-economics-politics and a “being-knowledge-values” based mentality
Keywords : Civilization, politics of restoration, selfperception, international order and Turkish foreign policy