| Summary/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.
|