Identity Politics Inside Out

Abstract

Teasing out the complex link between identity politics and foreign policy, this book turns the concept of identity politics as traditionally used in IR scholarship inside out. Rather than treating national identity as a cause or consequence of a state’s foreign policy, it rethinks foreign policy as an arena, alternative to domestic politics, in which contestation among competing proposals for national identity takes place. It argues that elites choose to take their contestation “outside” when their identity gambits are blocked at the domestic level by supporters of competing proposals, theorizing when and how internal identity politics becomes externalized. Turkey offers an ideal empirical window onto these dynamics because of dramatic challenges to understandings of Turkishness and because its identity is implicated in multiple international roles, such as NATO ally, EU candidate, and OIC member. Using intertextual analysis, the book extracts competing proposals for Turkey’s identity from a wide array of pop culture and social media sources, interviews, surveys, and archives. It then employs process tracing to demonstrate how elites sharing an Ottoman Islamist understanding of identity counterintuitively used an EU-oriented foreign policy to challenge the institutional grip of pro-Western, secular Republican Nationalism back home, thus clearing the way for an increased presence of Islam domestically and a renewed role in the Middle East. The framework developed closes the identity-foreign policy circle, analytically linking the “inside-out” spillover of national identity debates in foreign policy with changes in the contours of these debates produced by their contestation abroad.