Performing Turkey: Continuity and change in Turkish statecraft, 1990-2012

This study seeks to explore the link between foreign policy and the rise and decline of political hegemonies in Turkey. It offers a poststructuralist foreign policy analysis that rests on two basic premises. First, in contrast with the mainstream view of foreign policy, which focuses on states' relations with other states, poststructuralism argues foreign policy engages in signifying the state as a complete totality by drawing boundaries between its inside and outside. Second, the sovereign state is grounded on the basis of nation, boundaries between inside and outside are drawn according to a specific definition of nation.;Poststructuralists admit that foreign policy is integral to the process of reproducing hegemony of the elite in charge of the state. Yet, the linkage between foreign policy and hegemony is undertheorized mostly due to poststructuralists' reluctance to base discursive practices on a foundational source, a "voluntarist" political actor. This carries the risk of bracketing the hegemony dimension in foreign policy.;This study attempts to fill this gap by combining foreign policy analysis with Laclau's theory of hegemony. The most important aspect of Laclau's theory is its provision of an account of subjectivity, which is compatible with poststructuralism. The subject is conceptualized as a "subject position" in a system of differential relations. Political subjects/elites struggle to integrate themselves into the objective field, which consists of the construction of particular subject positions/structures and hegemonies in a given political space.;Accordingly, this study attempts to re-conceptualize foreign policy as a process involving the construction of corresponding meanings in the domestic and international political spaces around a projected identity/nation. It displays the state and a particular hegemony are reproduced as long as those meanings are corresponding; otherwise, they face a "crisis of representation" and significant changes in identity take place.