Turkey’s Foreign Policy Narratives

Toni Alaranta is a senior research fellow in the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Helsinki, Finland. His fields of interest are Turkish history and foreign policy, international relations, and political ideologies. His main publications concentrate on Kemalism, Turkish transformation and Turkish foreign policy in the changing world. Alaranta has published several books and dozens of articles on Turkey and Turkey-West relations, and he is a frequent commentator of current affairs in Finnish and international media.

“The book investigates the representation of competing ideological traditions and expressions of national identity … and how they interact with a changing international order. ... Its methodological rigour and interdisciplinary approach make it an essential reading for scholars and practitioners working in International Relations, Middle East politics and Turkish history and politics. In general, it has the potential to provide a much-needed context for Turkey’s increasingly active and erratic foreign policy in the age of a global power shift.” (Samuele Carlo Ayrton Abrami, The International Spectator, May 31, 2024)“The book is addressed to anyone interested and working in International Relations, Middle East politics, Turkish history, and politics. It deserves positive comments in many ways. First of all, it should be noted that the content is very well constructed. The theoretical background, the historical process analysis, and discussions on the subject are well distributed in the sections.” (Fatma Çakır, Insight Turkey, Vol. 25 (3), 2023)

• Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. The Global Power Shift and Liberalism.- Chapter 3. Turkey and the Liberal Philosophy of History.- Chapter 4. Nationalism and the Meaning of Modernization.- Chapter 5. Interpreting the Liberal International Order.- Chapter 6. Approaching the Non-West: Russia and China.- Chapter 7. Narratives of the Syrian War and the Pandemic.- Chapter 8. Conclusion.