Research Information System
Critical Studies on Security, 2025 (ESCI)
This paper argues that to understand the ambitions of Turkish geopolitics, we should also understand the frameworks instilled in Turkish society and culture via the Cold War Americanisation. The country’s historical and geographical relations with Europe and its intention to become an EU member have an indisputable effect on its foreign policy. However, while most of the debates in the literature to date have focused on the country’s Westernisation processes through Europenisation and institutional analyses, we contend that this attitude is missing. What is mostly overlooked is the repercussions of Americanisation in its foreign policy. Hence, the paper offers a psychohistorical framework from a Lacanian perspective to argue that Turkey moved into the international arena through an Americanised Mirror Phase from the 1950s, which reverberates today. Therefore, we maintain that the current power projections of the Turkish geopolitical self are not merely the result of its self-induced aspirations, rather they are also the by-products of what it introjected through an Americanised symbolic order of the international. To do so, with three case studies, we interpret how Turkey socialised itself anew through an Americanised sense of world politics, which impacts its positioning, self-images, and security posture through a Lacanian perspective.