ABSTRACT

This article has two main goals. The first is to examine the role of politics of space and time in making Turkey’s international relations. The second is to answer a more general question: what happens to a non-Western state like Turkey that cannot eliminate ‘differences’ that mark that state as non-Western? My answer is that these states handle these ‘differences’ that do not entirely disappear by creating exceptionalism. Exceptionalism rebrands ‘difference’ as ‘distinctiveness’ that can only be possessed by a specific country or nation. The article identifies two main pathways to the creation of Turkish exceptionalism, space and time, and explores the brief history of these spatio-temporal imaginations leading to the making of the exceptionalist narrative and their implications for Turkey’s foreign relations and identity.

摘要

本文有两个主要目标。首先是考察时空政治在土耳其国际关系中的作用。第二个是回答一个更普遍的问题：像土耳其这样的非西方国家如果无法消除标志着该国家非西方的“差异”，会发生什么？我的答案是，这些国家处理这些“差异”，而这些“差异”并没有通过创造例外论而完全消失。例外论将“差异”重新定义为只有特定国家或民族才能拥有的“独特性”。本文指出了创造土耳其例外论的两条主要途径：空间和时间，并探讨了这些时空想象导致例外主义叙事形成的简史及其对土耳其外交关系和身份的影响。