Lisel Hintz’s Identity Politics Inside Out: National Identity Contestation and Foreign Policy in Turkey offers a framework with which to read an important, understudied phenomenon: how foreign policy is leveraged toward domestic ends. Part constructivist IR theory, part Turkish politics, the book is a timely addition to both.
In the introduction, Hintz raises a flurry of interesting questions, but ultimately boil down to: Why has Turkey turned away from the staunchly transatlantic foreign policy it displayed for decades? Her argument, in short, is that supporters of a revisionist Ottoman Islamic project were confronted with institutionalized obstacles, even when elected to power. One such obstacle was that domains such as the army and courts were reserved for the predominant Republican Nationalist project. However, foreign policy offered an alternative arena for contestation. Turkey’s leadership thus leveraged external instruments like the EU accession process toward bringing about internal reforms. This led to dismantling of the status quo and the construction of a “new Turkey” in which Ottoman Islamism—hence ambivalence toward transatlantic relations—became prominent. On balance, this approach offers promising tools with which to read domestic–foreign policy linkages and helps explain a critical outcome; it also entails several theoretical and empirical omissions.
The book’s forte is its channeling of recent political developments in Turkey toward a constructivist analytical framework in Chapter 2, tentative application of the theory to a wider set of cases in Chapter 7, and the satisfying moments throughout when Hintz harnesses insights from Turkey to refinement of the theoretical project. In this capacity, Identity Politics Inside Out is a lively contribution to the constellation of work on how political culture/narratives and domestic audiences can shape foreign policy and vice versa (e.g., Michael Barnett, Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order, 1998; Ted Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics: Identities & Foreign Policies: Moscow, 1955 and 1999, 2002; Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, 2014).
The framework emanates from the claim of social identity theory that “individuals fulfill their innate social psychological need for group belonging and self-esteem through intergroup comparative evaluation” (p. 31). This leads to the articulation of rival “identity proposals” (basically, worldviews) whose champions seek ideological hegemony. Deploying criteria developed by Abdelal et al. (Measuring Identity: A Guide for Social Scientists 2009), identity proposals are mapped vis-à-vis their constitutive norms, social purpose, relational perspective on ingroups versus outgroups, and cognitive worldviews. These orientations can be accessed via sources that, in Hintz’s operationalization, include ethnographic, interview, student survey, and popular culture materials. The schema and data enable the charting of overlap and divergence across identity proposals. This feature is welcome because it helps capture the fluidity of identity proposals despite the framework’s potentially essentializing commitment to the “immense ontological significance” of identity (p. 18). The exercise also enables note of “red lines of seeming intolerability” (p. 22) across identity proposals that are said to drive political mobilization inside and outside of national contexts. Specifically, the move to leverage foreign policy occurs when champions of a proposal are blocked at home. In principle, this analytical template can be replicated for use in cross-case analysis. In practice, however, much depends on the interpretive skills of the analyst.
In Hintz’s talented hands, the story begins with Chapter 3, which identifies hegemony-seeking identity proposals. Chapters 4 and 5 map the historical attempt to universalize Republican Nationalism and its grip—until recently—on key institutions. Ottoman Islamist capture of these domains is canvassed in Chapter 6. The account of institutions and the post-2002 period since Ottoman Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power is compelling in its combination of empirical coverage and narrative flair. That said, there are significant problems associated with selective engagement of the secondary literature on Turkey’s identity politics, EU–Turkey relations, and the role of neoliberal interests as an alternative explanation for the AKP’s successful displacement of its rivals. In addition to the impact on content covered later, this neglect is troubling given the tendency to erase “non-Western” voices in IR scholarship wherein data and insights from “peripheral” academies are harnessed toward (Anglo-)American scholarship, but the prestigious task of theory building is reserved for scholars at “core” institutions (e.g., Ersel Aydinli and Julie Mathews, “Periphery Theorising for a Truly Internationalised Discipline: Spinning IR Theory out of Anatolia.” Review of International Studies, 34 (4), 2008; Arlene B. Tickner, “Core, Periphery and (Neo) Imperialist International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations, 19 (3), 2013).
First, regarding identity politics, the categories developed in Chapter 3 (Pan-Turkish Nationalism, Western Liberalism, Ottoman Islamism, and Republican Nationalism) are welcome in that they complicate a picture all too often reduced to binary conflict between secularists and Islamists. Identity categories are always tricky, and Hintz's proposals are broadly convincing except for a few odd claims, such as taking at face value a Republican Nationalist argument that the project is ethnicity-blind or “anti-ethnic” (p. 46) or, later in the book, the overly tidy differentiation of AKP supporters as “Ottoman Islamic” from followers of former AKP ally and current nemesis, the U.S.-based preacher Fethullah Gülen characterized as “Turkish Calvinist” (pp. 140–44.) It is also puzzling why Hintz neglects the expansive literature on neo-Ottomanism. Dismissed perfunctorily in the introduction, this corpus includes works that propose similar categories. The claim that it was necessary to ignore these works to preserve inductive agnosticism is not persuasive given that the same agnosticism would have been required during primary source triangulation. The result is a rendering of the four traditions—Pan-Turkish Nationalism, Western Liberalism, Ottoman Islamism and Republican Nationalism—that is deeper than most non-native readings, but that may not do justice, above all, to the Ottoman Islamic identity proposal, which is portrayed unsympathetically as a restrictive, neoconservative project. Such elements feature in strands of neo-Ottomanism, to be sure, especially after 2013. Yet, the account minimizes the real resources for pluralism and tolerance within the Ottoman Islamic canon that have been explored by scholars like Hakan Yavuz (Secularism and Muslim Democracy in Turkey, 2009); Ömer Taşpınar (Turkey’s Middle East Policies: Between Neo-Ottomanism and Kemalism, 2008); Jeremy Walton (“Confessional Pluralism and the Civil Society Effect: Liberal Mediations of Islam and Secularism in Contemporary Turkey,” American Ethnologist, 40 (1), 2013; Karen Barkey and George Gavrilis, “The Ottoman Millet System: Non-Territorial Autonomy and Its Contemporary Legacy,” Ethnopolitics, 15(1), 2016; and contributors to Stefano Taglia’s collection “Ottomanism Then and Now: Historical and Contemporary Meanings,” Die Welt des Islams, 56 (3–4), 2016).
Chapter 4 similarly suffers from the methodological-cum-narrative move to selectively interweave sources from the historical period under examination with contemporary materials like student surveys and a novel from the 2000s about the events in question. The chapter thus ignores the cardinal rule of Skinnerian intellectual history: that analysis respect the specificities of time and place in constituting political projects. The result is that even a reader who has specialized in this period has difficulty differentiating between which parts are historical, which are historiographic, and which are the author’s own ethnographic interpretation. Although Hintz’s innovative use of novels, film, and social media as resources for identity politics analysis is laudable, the lesson from Chapter 4 is that attempts to channel such sources to the study of history must be accompanied by a clear rubric with which to distinguish between the historical, the historiographic, and the ethnographic. As with the more sympathetic and thorough reading of Republican Nationalism versus Ottoman Islamism in Chapter 3, an explicit and reflexive account of the analyst’s positionality also would help improve the toolkit.
A second concern is neglect of work on EU–Turkey relations, despite its prominence in Turkish Studies during the period under scrutiny. This results in underspecification of the foreign policy process on which the explanatory mechanism would seem to hinge: accession negotiations. The story is simply missing in the otherwise illuminating process-tracing exercise that is Chapter 6. The EU is barely mentioned, nor is the broader literature on Europeanization and its shortcomings. Yet these are natural audiences for the “inside-out” project given the framework’s potential for assessing how actors in settings like Serbia, Poland, and Hungary use and abuse the EU in their leveraging of identity politics toward attempted state capture.
Elements from the EU–Turkey and Europeanization literatures that could be probed to enhance the study of foreign policy as an arena of domestic politics include the accession framework and its mechanisms of conditionality and monitoring, such as financial “sticks and carrots,” and prospective dates for opening or closing negotiations. How were these procedures and promises used to dismantle Republican Nationalist stewardship? What role was played by the intensive bi- and multilateral civic and public diplomatic engagements of the early 2000s, when the AKP actively pushed for inclusion in the European project? Crucially, did the process really sour because of the intrinsic will to hegemony of Ottoman Islamism? Or was it due, in fact, to individual, interactive, and EU, as well as Turkey-side, dynamics like the provocative personalities of Erdoğan and, say, French president Nicholas Sarkozy or culturalist hysteria in Europe over Turkey’s prospective accession? And what about structural factors like the implosion of the Eurozone in 2008–9? Without addressing such questions, the otherwise brilliant Chapter 6 is ultimately a story of internal contestation in which domestic moves including EU accession-oriented reforms, and not foreign policy, are the focus of analysis.
Third, the primary counterargument to Hintz’s overall claim that AKP actions were motivated by the will to Ottoman Islamic hegemony lies in the ample but unmentioned international political economic literature on Turkey’s transformation as driven by neoliberal restructuring. Hintz deals with this elephant in the room by referring to “Ottoman Islamic interests” when narrating the material dimensions of political contestation. A more productive solution for the overall project would have been to incorporate a discussion of Ottoman Islamic interests into the theoretical framework. What are those interests, how do they operate vis-à-vis identity proposals, and what differentiates them from interests tout court? The framework’s affinities with Gramscian notions of hegemony should be able to accommodate such a theorization given the interlinked nature of structure and superstructure.
These omissions notwithstanding, Identity Politics Inside Out is a truly promising debut. In particular, the theory, its wider application in Chapters 2 and 7, and Chapter 6’s account of Turkey’s contemporary politics would be valuable additions to syllabuses in courses on the international relations or comparative politics of the Middle East.
