Recent decades have seen a proliferation of works on Turkey and Europe/the West, largely thanks to Turkey’s pursuit of European Union (EU) membership, which gathered speed in the 2000s. In a similar vein, interdisciplinary approaches to international relations (IR) have also flourished since the late 1990s, especially with the rise of constructivism and thus an engagement with history, sociology, and most recently anthropology in explaining international politics. Einar Wigen’s book State of Translation: Turkey in Interlingual Relations is a commendable work that adheres to this variety of interdisciplinarity by adopting a historical perspective in order to study a relatively neglected aspect of the Turkey-Europe relationship; namely, translation. The book tackles the question of how certain key concepts related to the state, nation, and state-citizen relations that have been central in the history of Western political thought came to be (re)interpreted and (re)utilized in the late Ottoman and the early Turkish republican era in such a way as to legitimize certain political acts for (re)shaping and stabilizing social relations within the state, as well as for regulating the state’s relations with the outside world, in particular with Europe and the West.

Wigen does this by first introducing the reader to the theoretical framework and the central concepts of the study, which he does in the Introduction and Chapter 1. These two chapters outline in detail how Wigen approaches the concept of translation as a form of “creative reinterpretation” rather than a mere technical process (p. 14). In the formulation of this theoretical lens, he draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Mikhail Bakhtin, and in doing so he adopts a non-essentialist and dialogical view of language whereby concepts are perpetually (re)shaped through dialogic engagement. The following four chapters constitute the main empirical sections of the book, with each chapter focusing on the reinterpretation of one key concept in the late Ottoman and early republican era; namely, in order, “civilization,” “empire,” “citizenship,” and “democracy.” These chapters contain meticulous empirical analyses, often of primary sources, detailing the ways in which each of these concepts has been articulated by contemporary statesmen and intellectuals in response to specific challenges faced in the political and social realms; that is, broadly speaking, to the increased need for legitimacy first in a declining Ottoman Empire and then in the newly established Republic of Turkey. Chapter 7, entitled “Teleology,” takes a different tack by focusing its gaze on how these selected concepts have been used in the modern Turkish republic to form coherent historical narratives that could serve to legitimize four important contractual points in Turkey’s relations with the West: Turkey’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership, its application for associate membership in the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1959 and the subsequent signing of the Association Agreement in 1963, its application for full EEC membership in 1987, and the declaration of its EU candidacy in 1999. In the Conclusion, Wigen draws attention to the need for an interlingual approach to IR, one where conceptual entanglements as such would be studied.

With this concluding call, the book relates itself to the current pleas for a global IR at a time when narratives of “the decline of the West and the rise of the rest” are rife. While oftentimes these calls for a global IR are made without necessarily engaging in concrete scholarly endeavors that demonstrate the means to carry out such a project, this book in and of itself constitutes a solid and convincing study of how it can be done in relation to the specific, yet highly contested, relationship between Turkey and Europe/the West. Instead of treating Turkey as a mere receiver and/or resister of European concepts and norms, Wigen’s study successfully demonstrates the active agency of “the Turkish self” in its appropriation through mutual engagement (p. 212). In this sense, State of Translation is a highly original and innovative work that relies on a broad range of primary data and an acute attention to linguistic detail. The empirical sections are incredibly rich, displaying a laborious effort that produces a detailed account of how each selected concept has traveled and in turn been transformed through local ownership in the Turkish context. As such, although it does not explicitly bear such an intention, the book also manages to shed light on certain elements of more contemporary Turkish politics, particularly in relation to democracy and citizenship, which are still key points of contention in the country’s relations with Europe.

All of this does not, however, mean that Wigen’s book could not be further improved. First, the study would benefit from a section on methodology. Although it claims to provide a “toolkit” (p. 229) for the study of interlingual relations, there is less engagement with method than might be expected from a toolkit, which aims to demonstrate how the research is undertaken in practice. As such, there is little discussion, for example, on which texts were chosen for analysis, as well as the justifications for why certain texts were selected but not others. The same goes for the producers of the texts themselves: it would be useful to know why the utterances of certain statesmen and intellectuals, particularly in the late Ottoman era, have been privileged in the analysis. This concern of mine with methodology extends in particular to the final empirical chapter before the conclusion, where newspaper articles are inserted into the analysis. The reader is left in the dark as to which papers were selected, as well as to the exact timeline of the analysis. Second, and related with the first, despite the emphasis on the dialogical nature of the study, relatively little attention is paid to the actual “dialogue” that was taking place between two sides. Hence, as it stands, Wigen’s study tends to privilege the agency through which concepts become rearticulated, rather than empirically dealing with the actual dialogue that was occurring. At times, and particularly in the empirical chapter on “civilization,” this makes one wonder how different this is from a genealogical study on the appropriation of the concept of “civilization” in the Turkish context. A more attentive take on the method could help in the alleviation of this issue. A closer engagement with the literature on IR theory could also help with this, which brings me to my third point. For a study that locates itself (also) within the IR literature, one would expect more engagement with the literature on IR theory, and certainly with the extensive literature on contemporary Turkey-Europe relations, which the author only selectively engages with. Space limitations undoubtedly played a significant role in these choices, and the fact that this study is an interdisciplinary endeavor surely made this doubly difficult, yet still, the book’s theoretical sections would be enriched by a discussion of the study’s relevance for IR theory. Finally, it would be very helpful for the reader if certain repetitions could be avoided and a closer connection could be forged between the conceptual sections and the empirical parts of the book.

These issues notwithstanding, Einar Wigen’s State of Translation represents a notable and valuable contribution to the literature on global conceptual history, relations between Turkey and Europe/the West, and the history of Turkish political thought. It will be of interest to both students and scholars of international relations, history, and Turkish politics.