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

Yıl 2023, Cilt: 20 Sayı: 78, 139 - 142, 25.06.2023

Tunahan Yıldız

Öz

Lisel Hintz’s Identity Politics Inside Out: National Identity Contestation and Foreign Policy in Turkey is an empirically rich and theoretically well-designed account of Turkish foreign policy and domestic politics. It is derived from Hintz’s PhD thesis supervised by Marc Lynch at the George Washington University,1 which is also partially published in the European Journal of International Relations in 2016.2 The book’s main theoretical premise is that domestic identity contestations are transferred to the domain of foreign policy when identity proposals are blocked in the domestic arena. Building on its identification of major national-identity proposals struggling for hegemony in Turkey, the book explains on this theoretical ground the Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) early policy towards the European Union (EU) accession process and the “Ottoman Islamist” transformation of Turkish foreign policy and domestic politics. Hintz argues that when its “Ottoman Islamist” identity proposal was blocked by “Republican Nationalist” institutions in the domestic domain, the AKP moved to the foreign policy arena to weaken these institutions, overcome their blockage, and eventually, open space for its identity proposal.

Anahtar Kelimeler

Identity, Turkey, Foreign Policy