Turkey’s ‘Geopolitics Dogma’: International and Intra-national Relations.

This paper is an inquiry into the ubiquity of ‘geopolitics’ in myriad actors’ discourses in post-Cold War Turkey. In accounting for the centrality of geopolitics in the Turkish context, the paper offers the concept of ‘geopolitics dogma’, defined as a structure of well-established assumptions as to ‘what geography tells one to do’ and ‘why this makes sense’. Section 1 outlines the main features of Turkey’s ‘geopolitics dogma’ and points to its centrality to the ‘security imaginary’. Section 2 is intended as an exposé of the ubiquity of appeals to geopolitics in post-Cold War Turkey. The analysis of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ dynamics in Section 3 is offered as evidence to the argument that such ubiquity should be understood as a corollary to not only the aforementioned ‘external’ dynamics but also to the ‘geopolitics dogma’, the structure of cultural resources that helps to make sense of those very dynamics. If geopolitics has come to occupy such a central place within Turkey’s security imaginary, the paper suggests, this has transpired as an unintended outcome of the confluence of two factors: the Turkish Military’s active dissemination of geopolitics as a ‘privileged perspective’ (with itself as the ‘master’ of this perspective), and the relative weakness of alternative ways of making sense of world politics. Whereas the former was an upshot of the Military’s post-WWII attempt to re/entrench its position in shaping Turkey’s intra-national relations, the latter has to do with the study and discourse of International Relations in Turkey. In the concluding section, the argument comes back full circle and looks at the uses of geopolitics, i.e. those discursive practices that help (re)produce the geopolitics dogma. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]