Description
My paper addresses the historical, inter-societal roots of the emergence of Neo-Ottomanism; a project developed by the IR academic and the former Prime Minister of Turkey Ahmet Davutoglu and is adopted by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Turkey as the blueprint for Turkish foreign policy. Through this example, my paper tries to explore how the unevenness of the experiences of communities of their transition to the Westphalian order has led to the formation of competing yet co-constitutive desires out of which various post-nation-statist imaginaries have emerged.
A considerable part of the literature on neo-Ottomanism has understood it as a forward attempt for the neoliberalisation of Turkey or a backward move to Islamism manifested as a reaction to the EU's refusal to grant Turkey membership. Both accounts imply a unilinear and Eurocentric understanding of time and the transformation of the regional/international order that dismisses the inter-societal origins of the formation of desires that post-nation-statist imaginaries such as neo-Ottomanism try to fulfill.
Alternatively, my paper suggests that neo-Ottomanism is an international imaginary that tries to redefine the contours of the imagined community of Turkey based on a specific knowledge of the modern international system. Such knowledge has emerged from the inter-societal condition of the coexistence of the modern state of Turkey with both the former Ottoman communities and the rump states of other former Empires. This condition has resulted in an international imaginary based on an understanding of what Turkey has lost, lacks, and might lose or gain compared to both groups. I will explain the historical-subjective roots of this inter-societally formed knowledge of the modern international system and its implications for understanding the temporal trajectories of the transformation of international imaginaries.
