Losing Turkey? : Narrative traditions in Western foreign policy analysis

This thesis is about Western foreign policy analysis on Turkey as a second-order representation that is narratively constructed. The thesis argues that the scholarly field contains ideological antagonisms related to the West and is influenced by narrative traditions that offer apt metaphors and cultural resources to turn random foreign policy events into meaningful narratives. The thesis examines how Turkey is narrated in Western foreign policy analysis and how these narratives impact on debates over the idea of the West with the use of three theoretical approaches: the aesthetic approach is about representation, the narrative approach about the method of representation, and the interpretative approach about the relationship between representation and reality. There are two methodological foundations upon which the thesis is built: Hayden White’s tropology and the interpretative approach of Mark Bevir and R.A.W. Rhodes that focuses on beliefs, traditions, and dilemmas. The thesis also employs Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical tools as well as George Lakoff’s seminal work on foreign policy metaphors. In the thesis, White’s four master tropes are teased out with the use of three organising metaphors – the ‘losing Turkey’ metaphor, the ‘Turkey at a crossroads’ metaphor, and the ‘Erdogan-for-Turkey’ metaphor – that have been deduced from the data set using qualititative text analysis. Employing a paradigmatic method, the thesis identifies manifestations of the debate on the West in the data set, which includes over one hundred foreign policy analysis articles especially in Foreign Affairs, The National Interest and Foreign Policy but also in other journals, blogs, and books. The thesis follows the debate on Turkey to wherever it is taking place with the condition that the narrator speaks from a Western perspective, is familiar with the scholarly tradition of studying Turkey, and puts forward interpretations that resonate so widely that they have turned foreign policy imagination into facts and common sense