Abstract
This chapter recognizes that in emerging Eurasian powers, imperial pasts are celebrated to harness present political and economic energies. It advances a novel unit of analysis—“former empires/rising powers” (FERPs)—which addresses the Western-centric bias of much international relations (IR), and exceptionalism of much area studies scholarship. Examining Turkey’s neo-Ottomanism, it considers lessons for other FERPs, especially China’s new Silk Road. Recognizing the difference in magnitude between these neo-imperial projects, it nevertheless notes that China leaves behind its “short twentieth century” as a middle power to (re)claim great power status in an age of heightened uncertainty. China therefore might note from Turkey’s experience as an ambitious middle power that neo-imperialist rhetoric can obscure the challenges facing its realization.
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Notes
- 1.
Ezgi Basaran, “Fetih 1453’e cok ihtiyacimiz vardi,” [We really needed Conquest 1453], Radikal, June 3, 2012, accessed October 24, 2015, http://www.radikal.com.tr/yazarlar/ezgi-basaran/fetih-1453e-cok-ihtiyacimiz-vardi-1080826/
- 2.
For a more extensive literature review, see Nora Fisher Onar, “IR and Middle Eastern Studies: Speaking Truth to Power in a Multipolar World,” International Relations Theory and a New Middle East, POMEPS Studies 16 (2015): 36–39.
- 3.
Kalypso Nicolaidis,Berny Sèbe, and Gabrille Maas, eds., Echoes of Empire: Memory, Identity and Colonial Legacies (London: IB Tauris, 2014). See also the seminal work of Andrew Hurrell on “would-be great powers” such as “Hegemony, Liberalism and Global Order: What Space for Would-be Great Powers?,” International Affairs 82.1 (2006): 1–19.
- 4.
Nora Fisher Onar, “Historical Legacies in Rising Powers: Toward a (Eur)Asian Approach,” Critical Asian Studies 45.3 (2013): 411–430.
- 5.
For a discussion of how international relations thinking in the FERPs often remains beholden to what I call “methodological Eurocentrism” as well as methodological nationalism, see Nora Fisher Onar, “Between History, Memory, and Historiography: Contesting the Ottomans in Turkey 1923–2012,” in Echoes of Empire: Memory, Identity and Colonial Legacies, eds., Kalypso Nicolaidis, Berny Sèbe, and Gabrille Maas (London: IB Tauris, 2014).
- 6.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 1979).
- 7.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
- 8.
For an overview, see Nora Fisher Onar, and Kalypso Nicolaïdis, “The Decentring Agenda: Europe as a Post-colonial Power,” Cooperation and Conflict 48.2 (2013): 283–303; Duara, Prasenjit, “The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism,” Journal of World History 12.1 (2001): 99–130.
- 9.
One vein of IR scholarship that has challenged the discipline’s ahistorical Eurocentrism is historical sociology, a fine exemplar of which is the comparison of Turkey, Russia, and Japan developed by Ayse Zarakol, After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010).
- 10.
See, for example, Charles Kupchan, The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
- 11.
Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, eds., Non-Western International Relations Theory: Perspectives on and beyond Asia (London: Routledge, 2009).
- 12.
Pinar Bilgin, “Thinking Past ‘Western’ IR?,” Third World Quarterly 29.1 (2008): 5–23.
- 13.
L. H. M. Ling, The Dao of World Politics: Towards a Post-Westphalian. Worldist International Relations (London: Routledge, 2013).
- 14.
Arlene Tickner, “Seeing IR differently: notes from the Third World,” Millennium 32.2 (2003): 295–324.
- 15.
For more on such barriers to the global IR conversation, see Arlene B. Tickner and Ole Wæver, eds., International Relations Scholarship around the World (London: Routledge, 2009).
- 16.
Fisher Onar, N. “Historical Legacies in Rising Powers”; Fisher Onar, N. “IR and Middle Eastern Studies.”
- 17.
See, for example, Nora Fisher Onar, “Echoes of a Universalism Lost: Rival Representations of the Ottomans in Today’s Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies 45.2 (2009): 229–241.
- 18.
That said, Russia and Iran both have more experience in their spheres of attempted influence, whereas Turkey, as noted, spent much of the last century channeling resources towards relations with the West.
- 19.
While Indonesia is arguably more successful, it is too far removed from the Middle East to be influential.
- 20.
Named for the post-World War I treaty which would have dismembered the Ottoman Empire and parceled its territories to the occupying Allied powers.
- 21.
See Nora Fisher Onar and Max Watson, “Crisis or opportunity? Turkey, Greece and the political economy of South-East Europe in the 2010s,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 13.3 (2013): 407–420.
- 22.
See, for example, Ronald Linden, Ahmet Evin, Kemal Kirişci, Thomas Straubhaar, Natalie Tocci, Juliette Tolay and Joshua Walter, Turkey and its Neighbors: Foreign Relations in Transition (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002); Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
- 23.
Frank Sieren, “Erdoğan’s Turkey is a High-Risk Partner,” Deutsche Welle, July 24, 2016, accessed August 10, 2016, http://www.dw.com/en/sierens-china-erdogans-turkey-is-a-high-risk-partner/a-19424081
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Fisher Onar, N. (2018). Former Empires, Rising Powers: Turkey’s Neo-Ottomanism and China’s New Silk Road. In: Mayer, M. (eds) Rethinking the Silk Road. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5915-5_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5915-5_11
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