Abstract
The chapter depicts the domestic power struggle in present-day Turkey, focusing in particular on how interpretations of Turkish and Ottoman history have long resembled a battleground for various groups. That they do so increasingly nowadays indicates the use of the past in the present, which has been described as the ‘politics of history’. Analysis of the foreign-policy narratives espoused by the different groups reveals how the idea of defensive modernization reflects the basic mentality driving the narratives, which is closely connected with the reformation and modernization policies aimed at transforming society with Western novelties in order to halt Western dominance. The project to modernize quickly and thus to resist outside interventions represents the most widespread and influential conceptualization of Turkey’s place in the world during the greater part of the twentieth century. To what extent has the defensive modernization paradigm been abandoned in the Islamic-conservative foreign-policy narratives that build upon the idea of a ‘New Turkey’ with its more assertive foreign-policy doctrine?
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Alaranta, T. (2022). Nationalism and the Meaning of Modernization. In: Turkey’s Foreign Policy Narratives. Global Power Shift. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92648-9_4
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