The social construction of Turkish vatan: Geography and foreign policy

The traditional geopolitical discourse of Turkey is based on the belief that Turkey is located in a unique geography in the world and therefore Turkish homeland, 'vatan,' is besieged by internal and external enemies. Vatan has acquired an ahistorical and ontological status, considered as a timeless natural symbol of reality of Turkish nation state. Far from being neutral and authentic, vatan has been a historically constructed spatial grid, upon which various political forces have battled for the control of the national power structure and for the hegemony in physically controlling and representing the vatan. By problematizing the established geographical assumption of Turkey's foreign policy based upon the nation being engulfed and surrounded by internal and external threats, the dissertation leads to an understanding that defending the vatan legitimizes and confers hegemonic status to the holders of political power.;Three noticeable cases in Turkey's foreign policy are examined: political conflict with the Soviet Union after the Second World War and Turkey's entry into the anti-Soviet camp, Turkey's participation in the Korean War, and the Cyprus conflict. Defending the vatan was the common denominator in all these three cases: disagreements with the Soviet Union were reflected as an assault on Turkey's territorial integrity, Turkey's participation in the Korean war was defended by the ruling Democrat Party as protecting the vatan from a 'communist threat' in the distant Korean peninsula, and the Cyprus conflict was transformed into a nationalist discourse by depicting the island as 'baby-vatan.';The dissertation also analyzes how nationalist discourse had become established in educational materials, particularly how state education implanted national ideals into geography textbooks and promoted Turkish national identity and the country's spatial and cultural features. It aims to understand the nationalist representation of space in Turkey and the production of geographical knowledge by the Turkish state to justify its own power and authority over its citizens. Instead of considering national essences as commonsense and matters of fact, the dissertation deconstructs them to reveal processes of power and rhetoric. Processes rather than essences invent national homeland and national boundaries and treat them as meaningful.