The impact of Turkey's natiolistic culture on Turkish foreign policymaking as observed in Turkey's relations with the central Asian Turkic Republics

Abstract

The emergence of independent Turkic states in former Soviet Central Asia and Azerbaijan has triggered off the latent Turkish nationalistic culture in Turkey. Indeed, it has been lying dormant since the last days of the Ottoman Empire. In this thesis, the existence of a latent undercurrent of extreme Turkish nationalism has been related to the nature of the particular model of the national identity building adopted by the Turkish intelligentsia. The incompatible combination of Anthony D. Smith's Western/civic-territorial and non-Western/ethnic models constituted the Turkish framework of the nation. In Smith's ethnic model of the nation, there is an overe mphasis on the mythical, historical, and linguistic traditions of the community. Genealogy assumes a special importance in this non-Western conception of the nation. The Western type, on the other hand, underlines the existence of a common civic-legal ideology, and an historic homeland. In this thesis, the mythical aspects of some of the important tools employed by the elites iil transforming the Ottoman Empire to the modern Turkish nation have been examined. These national myths have been decomposed by using Roland Barthes's theory on the nature of mythologies. Barthes conceived of myths as the outcome of the association between a signifier and a signified. He further emphasized the two-level semiological system underlying every mythical speech. The message conveyed by the myth operates on the plane of language- the immediate, surface meaning , and the plane of myth the distortion of the surface meaning. The combination of Barthes's views on mythologies with Smith's conception of the nation has demonstrated that the overreliance on mythical ele ments in the initial phase of the Turkish nation-b uilding process has unwittingly nourished a latent stream of pan-Turkism. The pan-Turkist attitude which used to have negative implications has, however, assumed a relatively positive connotation at present. Its claim for a political-geographical unity of all the Turkic peoples has been replaced by a yearning for Turkic cultural unity. The factors that have paved the way to the current popularization of cultural panTurkism will be analyzed with regard to Turkey's relations with the Turkic republics in post-Soviet Central Asia and Azerbaijan. The hypothesis that Turkey might be intending to establish and lead a prospective Turkic culture area has been studied in this context. It has been concluded that while the Ministries of Education and Culture tend to form their policies in a cultural pan-Turkist line, this would not seem to be the policy pursued by Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.