Between apology and utopia: A study on the sources of Turkish conduct

How does Turkish state behave? Why does it behave the way it does? This dissertation is a treatise on the sources of Turkish state behavior or which I called as Turkish Conduct. Turkish conduct is made of a dichotomy. It is a dichotomy which each and every modern nation-state experiences. When I situate Turkey within its own unique experience, I diagnosed a similar dilemma. I called it Turkish sovereign dilemma. Turkish sovereign dilemma is composed of binary oppositions. On the one hand, there is a self-fulfilling rhetoric: the Sevres Apology, which is based on an apologetic notion that foreign centers [dis mihraklar] are responsible for Turkey's problems. The Sevres Apology holds the outer-world responsible for Turkish angst. The outer world, especially the West, aims to dismember and eventually destroy Turkey by conspiring against Turkey. This suspicious outlook of being conspired against has its roots in the Treaty of Sevres of 1920. One can also trace back the pretext of the Sevres Apology to the Eastern Question. As a belief system inherited from the Ottomans, the Sevres Apology is not only a legacy but also a public myth, which has long found itself a significant place in Turkish psyche. At the other end of the spectrum I put Westernist Utopia or modernization with a dominant Western character. The best tool to grasp Turkey's Westernist Utopia is the idea of modernization. Modernization is Turkish policy maker's compass. Turkish statesmen evaluate each and every idea through the lens of modernization. For Turkey, modernization is an ongoing and dynamic process. In this continuum various ideals collapse into one single major notion: "Turkey's survival as a modern nation-state." Deconstructing Turkish Conduct, I applied the notion of binary oppositions by contextualizing it in a legal framework. I materialized the idea in the Greek-Turkish conflicts, namely the Aegean and Cyprus Disputes. Two sub-conflicts were taken to sharpen the distinction between two different forms of sovereign dilemma. One is the problem about the distribution of sovereign rights, the other one is about the sharing of sovereignty. The Aegean Dispute is the conflict over the distribution of sovereign rights in the Aegean Sea. The Cyprus Dispute is on sovereignty sharing. Both of these cases provide ideal assessments of the notion of Turkish sovereign dilemma. On the one end of the spectrum, Turkey wants to move to a more reconciliatory position with Greece, on the other end, in its reading of applicable rules, norms and regimes; it understandably tries to maximize its own sovereign rights. This does not come as easy as it reads. Turkey is in a constant process of balancing equally legitimate and mutually exclusive four binary legal maxims: a. equity vs. equitable principles; b. negotiation vs. adjudication; c. participation vs. non-participation; d. Bi-zonal/Bi-communal vs. unitary state.;Finally I conclude that within the constraints and anomalies of international life what we witness in Turkish Conduct is merely a constant balancing act which stems from Turkish experience as well as systemic constraints. Hence as a provocative manual for the students for Turkish politics I concluded that: "Almost all of the Turkish policy makers, observe almost all of the premises of "the Turkish sovereign dilemma" almost all of the time. Almost all of the Turkish policy makers, almost all of the time, think between Sevres and Brussels, act between Apology and Utopia."...