Foreign Policy as an Identity Marker: Turkey, the European Other and the Eastern Mediterranean Conundrum

European Union (EU)-Turkey relations and the growing disenchantment by both sides was characterised by a steady de-Europeanisation and decentring Turkey’s western orientation in favour of one as a multi-regional actor of international politics. Yet, when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) won its third parliamentary elections in 2011, the message conveyed to the domestic and international audience was that its victory was to be seen as the beginning of a new era for all Muslim-majority societies embroiled in civil wars, conflicts and poverty due to Western conspiracies. TFP identity was remoulded by re-imagining the West as the ‘other’ of Turkey. The Eastern Mediterranean has been the recent focus of Turkey’s revisionist regionalism where this self/other encounter between Turkey and the EU has been translated into practice in a policy area for the first time. The discovery of hydrocarbon reserves in off-shore Cyprus, seismic exploration and drilling activities, antagonistic security discourses, overlapping and competing claims of economic exclusive zones by Greece and Turkey due to delimitation agreements with Egypt and Libya respectively seem to complicate and internationalize the Eastern Mediterranean dispute involving the EU and the regional countries. That Greece projected the regional issue on the EU, seeking the support of member states, resulted in the EU taking side effectively with its members Greece and Cyprus. By critically engaging in the Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT) and the post-positivist accounts of foreign policy as an identity-marking practice, this study examines how the securitized Eastern Mediterranean dispute has served the construction of a specific notion of the Turkish self and of the European other. In the (re)definition of regions, perceptions of collective identity, norms and beliefs ‘in combination with material factors’ play a very substantial, yet often underestimated role. RSCT downplays the significance of domestic regionalist discourses in the social reproduction of regions, for these discourses are regarded merely as part of the intra-elite political struggle. Bringing the RSCT and the post-positivist account of foreign policy into dialogue with each other, this study explores how specific conceptions of national/state identity have been implicated in and enabled by definitions of regions and regional (in)securities. The article at hand fits squarely with this book’s objectives exploring continuities and ruptures in Turkey’s imagination of its self and its other(s).