A constructivist analysis of Turkey's foreign and security policy in the post- cold war era

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Tezin Türü: Doktora

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi, Uluslararası İlişkiler Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2005

Öğrenci: HASAN ULUSOY

Danışman: HÜSEYİN BAĞCI

Özet:

The thesis is about how the foreign and security policy of Turkey is constructed in a realist world where states follow rationalist policies according to how they see and perceive this world. The main argument is that Turkey̕s foreign and security policy has shown an unbroken continuity of a pragmatic and consistent nature guided by rationality that functions in conformity with how the state perceives the outside material world, through the lenses forming its own identity. As the focus is on the identity analysis, the thesis has utilized the constructivist approach in its conventional form. Conventional constructivism, which provides not alternative but complementary explanations to the world run by political realism without rejecting the realist-dominated mainstream scholarship, serves to understand how the material world where realist parameters dominate through rationalistic behavior of states is constructed and thus how the foreign polices of states are formulated. It focuses on the examination of the lenses through which states perceive and construct the world outside. These lenses simply shape the identity of the state in question. Building on this theoretical tool, the thesis seeks to provide alternative explanations to the consistency and continuity of Turkish foreign and security policy, in the post-Cold war era till the Iraqi crisis in 2002. It is based on the examination of the lenses forming the identity of the state that has governed the foreign and security policy in general and in respect to the collective identity-building of the state as regards (collective) security in particular. The assertions of the thesis are as follows: contrary to the arguments of mostly critical studies, in the Turkish foreign and security policy there exists no identity crisis despite the plurality of identities stemming from the multi-dimensionalism in this policy. These