Desires,Fantasies and Hierarchies: Postcolonial Status Anxiety through Ontological Security

Status-Seeking in International Relations

The objective of this section is to ask to what extent the status-seeking literature can help to understand and conceptualise the postcolonial status anxiety. To answer this question, the conceptualisations of three formative dimensions of status politics, which are identity, international hierarchical context and affective elements, will be unpacked.

According to a widely accepted definition in IR status-seeking literature, status refers to ‘collective beliefs about given state’s ranking on valued attributes (wealth, coercive capabilities, culture, demographic position, socio-political organisation, and diplomatic clout)’ (Larson et al., 2014: 7). Conventionally in IR, status and status anxiety have been shaped by dynamics generally arising from winning or losing conflicts (Ikenberry, 2011), and analysed mainly from a (neo)realist perspective. Whether they focus on major or great powers status politics (Volgy et al., 2014), or smaller powers (Pedersen, 2018), (neo)realist status literature takes identity as given and, instead, engages with the competitive behaviours of states and material manifestations of status. Alternatively, deriving from Social Identity Theory (SIT), Larson and Shevchenko (2010: 70) argue that states compare themselves with others unfavourably, which prompts them to improve their position through ‘identity management strategies’ by embarking upon a status-seeking process(Ibid. 71–74). This framework has been widely accepted and applied to analyse status-seeking behaviours of, to name a few, Norway (Wohlforth et al., 2018), Turkey (Dal & Dipama, 2019), Brazil (Larson & Shevchenko, 2014), Russia and China (Krickovic & Zhang, 2020).

While the SIT-driven approach frees status politics from a neorealist zero-sum framework, the way identity is conceptualised and studied is problematic because identity is either reduced to a resource that is strategically managed by the state elite to obtain the targeted status (Larson & Shevchenko, 2010) and/or used as the main explanatory factor that determines the policy options available to the elite (Wohlforth et al., 2018). This approach superficially separates status and identity as belonging to two distinct planes of interstate relations, rather than exploring the mutual constitution between identity formation and status-seeking. The formation process of identity, discursive/contextual dimensions, emotional investments in the process and contestations over the narrative on the identity are black-boxed and how these factors interact with a state’s understanding of status are not explored. Consequently, it significantly limits the understanding of status anxieties.

However, studies that can enable a more sustained engagement with complexities involved with identity formation and maintenance in relation to status-seeking must also be noted for this conceptualisation of postcolonial status anxiety will contribute to these debates more substantially. For example, Ward (2020) understands a status claim as an element of identity narratives, which opens up an analytical space for examining how the state elite imagines the state’s position in international hierarchies. Therefore, status is not treated as ontologically distinct from identity but understood and studied through identity narratives: ‘status as identity’ (164). In another approach, Subotic and Vucetic (2019) introduce ‘performances’ to status politics. Unlike the behaviourialism and rationalism of the SIT-driven approach, performances aim to constitute ‘the objects they invoke’ and indicate ‘how states imagine themselves to be and what they imagine their role in international society is’. Adopting role theory, Karim (2018), similarly, concentrates on the roles states identify for themselves based on the ways they imagine themselves and enact these roles.

From different perspectives, these important contributions to status-seeking politics claim that how states imagine, narrate and/or perform who they are or who they would like to be is mutually constitutive to where they see themselves in hierarchies and vice versa. Following them, not black-boxing identity and superficially separating it from status as either an explanandum or explanans but acknowledging its narrative and performance dimensions within and through status-seeking shifts the analytical attention to the importance of construction and maintenance of ‘the self’ and anxieties associated with the production of ‘the self’ in status-seeking. That said, the current openings do not offer a theoretical foundation to conceptualise such anxieties about ‘the self’ in status politics. This move requires analytical focus on the subject production process, and inevitably entails an understanding of identity that cannot be closed down or stabilised, as will be discussed in the second section based on the ontological security theory.

The second dimension that requires a critical attention to conceptualise the postcolonial status anxiety concerns the formation of international hierarchies or how states are hierarchised. Like identity, there is a general tendency in the status literature to take international hierarchies as given instead of exploring changing determinants of international hierarchies over time and space, and their racialised, gendered and classed characteristics. However, an analysis of status politics (in this case, postcolonial states’) cannot be reduced to a discussion of status-seeking behaviours and reading intentions of postcolonial state elites through pre-determined identity categories in decontextualised and fixed hierarchies. Instead, the analysis should be situated within the broader social and historical context in which hierarchies are (re)established (and performed) and in relation to status, along with identity, is moulded in these contingent contexts.

Steven Ward’s (2020) framework to study accommodation in status claims can be read as an exception. Following Bially Mattern and Zarakol’s conceptualisation of hierarchy (2016), Ward (2020: 165) argues that ‘the relations of super- and subordination that are the direct object of status contestation are related to discourses and ideas at a deeper level about what kinds of characteristics and performances are valuable’, so his framework concerns the ideas and discourses that underline stratification between states in an international hierarchy. These ideas and discourses define what is valued in such a hierarchy so states that have or express them are believed to have higher status in the hierarchy. They can consist of both capabilities like military, economic or demographic characteristics and ways of conduct such as aggressiveness, prudence or cooperative behaviour. What is collectively and normatively acknowledged as ‘valuable’, ‘legitimate’ and ‘acceptable’ in an international or regional community provides the social context in which status-seeking occurs.

Whilst Ward points at the relevance of ideas, values, norms and practices that are deeply embedded in international social structures and are constitutive to international hierarchies, the framework does not go far enough to capture how status-seekers themselves can reproduce these hierarchies. Pouliot’s practice approach (2014) addresses this gap. Motivated by the questions regarding how international hierarchies are formed, and based on what classifying characteristics that change over time, Pouliot identifies status-seeking as a ‘social game’, a form of ‘illusio’, following Bourdieu: ‘a disposition acquired through playing a game, which leads players to come to value its rules and stakes as the natural order of things’, and consequently, ‘it is not only agents who invests in a game ... [they] are also invested, or taken, by the game’ (2014: 197–198, italics original). The practice approach not only complements the efforts of constant reproduction of identities through status-seeking (see above) but also paves the way for analysing the broader social context in which ‘the game’ is played.

According to the practice approach, states (i.e. individuals representing states) play the status game as an irreducible dimension of their sociality and relationality, and they are invested by status politics. Combined with the discussion on identity above, it is, therefore, plausible to theoretically assume that intersubjectively negotiated meanings in broader social contexts become historically constitutive to their autobiographical narratives (stories about ‘the self’) and are repeatedly performed. Consequently, it is not surprising that a state’s status-seeking practices in a hierarchy where a state is racialised, gendered and classed can paradoxically reproduce the very social meanings which led to the subordinated position and subjectivity in the first place. Suzuki (2009), Zarakol (2010) and Bilgic (2016) demonstrate this process in relation to the interactions between international society and China, Russia and Turkey and Ward (2017) in relation to the Japanese empire’s status-seeking. This has implications for conceptualising postcolonial status anxieties which relate not only to ‘status’ per se but also self-narratives that are conditioned in a hierarchical social context, by that context, and eventually reproducing the context. The introduction of ontological security will help to theorise this relationship between status, identity and anxiety in hierarchies.

The last essential step to conceptualise the postcolonial status anxiety is a discussion of how psycho-social or affective elements are involved in the status literature in IR. In their review and critique of status debates in the discipline, Larson et al. (2014: 4–5) rightly argue that the instrumentalist approach to status that overwhelmingly focuses on great power and/or hegemonic competition overlooks the social and psychological dimensions of status politics. While such an instrumentalist understanding is still dominant in some debates (e.g., see how reputation is understood by Pedersen, 2018), the SIT-driven approach, with its rationalist underpinnings, also does not provide a theoretical framework to analyse psycho-social factors as contingent constitutions of status politics. However, there are two important exceptions. In order to develop a more nuanced theoretical framework to understand status hierarchies, Reinhard Wolf (2019: 1189-91) differentiates ‘deference hierarchies’ (i.e. regional hegemonies, colonial empires) from ‘esteem hierarchies’. Wolf’s theoretical model enables one to conceptualise status disputes or conflicts in their own complexity and diversity where psycho-social factors play a distinctive role. For example, ‘honour [status] conflicts’ can rise if an actor feels its integrity is at stake or if glory is not recognised, an actor can have the feeling of being treated unjustly (Wolf, 2019: 1198, see also Wood & Cox, 2021).

Emotions are also important for Ward’s theory of ‘status immobility’, which refers to ‘the belief that a state’s status ambitions face an obstacle that is fundamental to the status quo order and cannot be overcome from inside of it’ (2017: 42). Ward explains some aggressive and revisionist state behaviours (the imperial Japan and Wilhelm’s Germany) not as policies to seek status per se but those to manage social psychological dynamics mainly originated from domestic politics so the state can avoid ‘the indignity of being complicit in one’s own humiliation’ (2017: 5).

Although none of the models above theorises how affects play their part in the formation of identities through status politics, they successfully explain why status-seeking cannot be reduced to a (neo)realist competition or rationalist identity conflicts. Rather, they demonstrate that status politics concerns with seeking recognition of one’s self-identification, which is a highly affective process and often involves domestic political considerations. However, despite the openings regarding the centrality of emotions, anxiety as a driving emotional force of status politics has not been conceptualised.

The aforementioned openings in the status debates must be welcomed as they facilitate analyses of how the formation of state identities is intrinsic to status-seeking in a broader historical and political context, and how affective this process can be. The status analysis, therefore, is not simply about what identity management strategy the state elite rationally chooses or materialistic manifestations of status-seeking. It, instead, is about reproduction of international hierarchies, their formative elements and how states imagine themselves in these hierarchies with affective undercurrents and consequences of these self-imaginations vis-à-vis ‘the superior other’. This calls for an understanding that factors in these imaginations within contextual power relations, how states narrate about themselves, the sources of these narratives and what happens politically if these biographical narratives are challenged (Subotic, 2016).

That said, status-seeking literature still overlooks an important constitutive dimension of status-seeking: anxiety, how it works and what it does in status politics. ² When status claims are challenged internally or externally, this feeds into a type of anxiety for the status-seeking state, which becomes an emotionally uncomfortable reminder of its lack of fixed identity, and amounts to a denial of an attempt to have a complete sense of ‘the self’. It is such completeness that can only be ‘achieved’ through the desired status, hence, status-seeking. Status anxiety refers to more than a mood about whether the ‘higher status’ group would defer or not to the status ambitions of a state. It is much more substantial and touches on the core of the subject. It renders the state ontologically insecure by contributing to existential anxiety that is homed in historical and social contexts. It pushes the possibility of having an anchor to which identity narratives can be attached further away. Status is not a foreign policy objective but a way to seek ontological security, or avoid ontological insecurity in Browning’s words (2018), as a historical and affective process where status anxieties conflate with existential anxieties, and they become analytically inseparable. A rethinking of status-seeking in light of ontological security is particularly important for postcolonial states which are the main focus of contemporary status-seeking literature in IR. Their existential anxiety in a historically produced racialised, gendered and classed international context lay at the core of their status claims as a pursuit of ontological security.

Anxiety and Ontological Security: A Lacanian Approach

In a nutshell, ontological security refers to ‘security not of the body but of the self, the subjective sense of who one is, which enables and motivates action and choice’ (Mitzen, 2006: 344). Following Anthony Giddens (1991), studies on ontological security in IR have flourished (among others, see Kinnvall, 2004, 2008; Zarakol, 2010; Vieira, 2018; Eberle, 2019). However, not all studies on ontological security are useful to conceptualise postcolonial status anxiety in the framework of status-seeking. The following analysis, therefore, will focus on works that allow for such a conceptualisation because of their understanding of (a) identity differentiated from subjectivity, (b) broader social contexts where hierarchies are intersubjectively formed and (c) affective dynamics in ontological security, in line with the identified gaps in the status-seeking literature.

Catarina Kinnvall (2018: 530) argues for an ontological security approach that understands it as a process, not an end point. In this way not only temporality of ontological security in relation to the imagined past and future but also desires, fantasies and imaginations in the process can be explored. However, Kinvall argues, this requires an ‘antifoundational notion of self’, in other words, ‘the self’ that is produced and reproduced through images and fantasies, always in relation to ‘the other’ with the objective of achieving wholeness, tackling the lack of an existential anchor (531, see also Eberle, 2019). Similarly, ‘lack’ of an existential anchor lay at the core of Vieira’s ontological security approach. It is ‘constituted by the always-unresolved and endless pursuit of discursive master signifiers that would purportedly capture the subject’s core existential meaning’ (2017: 149). The subject is constituted through an identification with ‘the other’ (‘imaginary dimension’, see below). This produces self-perceptions that signify what the subject lacks vis-a-vis ‘the other’. As incompleteness captures the process of making sense of ‘the self’, master signifiers are included in identity narratives to address what ‘the self’ lacks. Shifting the attention from ‘identity’ (with a stable self and other and assumed wholeness) to the understanding of ‘the self’ and production of subjectivity, studies of ontological security based on the Lacanian approach recognise the subject’s dependency on the imaginations about ‘the other(s)’ for its reproduction, and therefore, impossibility of wholeness. In short, stable identity is a fantasy that is ever pursued.

Such an endless pursuit is in the realm of two interrelated dimensions of subjectivity. The first ‘imaginary’ dimension relates to ongoing ‘idealised’ identifications with an (superior) other. The subject becomes aware of what it ‘lacks’ and through imitating ‘the other’, it tries to tackle ‘lack’ so its identity can be stabilised and fixed. ‘It is in the imaginary dimension that the anxiety-laden lack is introduced and becomes the subject’s unconscious motivational force in its pursuit of ontological security’ (Vieira, 2017: 150). The second dimension, symbolic order, connects self-perceptions with broader and pre-existing social contexts. The symbolic order is where ‘subjects permanently draw the master signifiers (ideals, values, conventions, and meanings articulated in language) they desire to embody, emulate, and obey as a way to sustain an illusionary sense of psychological stability’ (Vieira, 2017: 150). As Kinnvall (2018: 531) argues, actors are born into this symbolic order and making sense of ‘the self’ is only possible through identifications with ‘the other’ through adopting master signifiers. This leads to the point that these master signifiers are manifested in actors’ auto-biographical narratives where ‘the self’ vis-a-vis ‘the other’ is (re)imagined. Symbolic order paves the way for critically examining broader social contexts where hierarchies between ‘the self’ and ‘the (superior) other’ are (re)produced or challenged to deal with ‘lack’.

The discussion so far has provided a new understanding of identity (defined in terms of ‘lack’) and international hierarchical context (as the symbolic order where master signifiers are derived from) to the status debates. The remainder of this section will examine how emotions should be approached differently through ontological security.

Unrealisable (therefore, a ‘fantasy’ in the Lacanian terminology) as it is, the pursuit of a stable identity, an anchor for ‘the self’ to achieve completeness in the ‘mirror image’ of ‘the other’, is a desire and it is destined to be frustrated. Emotions are more than a dimension of the anti-foundationalist ontological security understanding. They are constitutive elements of the subject production, relations with ‘the other’, and meanings from the symbolic orders. Importantly, one particular affective dynamic, anxiety, is the driving force behind the ontological security pursuit.

Studies in ontological security have long acknowledged the affective dimension of the concept which maintains ontological security through identity construction (Cash, 2017), but more particularly because of the centrality of existential anxiety in ontological security theorising (Kinnvall, 2004; Steele, 2008). However, a sustained theoretical engagement with emotions has come with the Lacanian turn in ontological security.

As discussed above, the subject’s pursuit of wholeness in the face of ‘lack’ is central to sociality of actors. Emotions explain why social actors are attached to these ever-frustrating processes. Jakub Eberle (2019: 244) connects ontological security with ‘desire’ and ‘fantasy’ in the Lacan’s terminology: the fundamental desire to achieve wholeness, a complete identity, or in Edkins’ (2000: 154) words, ‘hunger for certainty’. Fantasy is a narrative that the subjects tell themselves which connects them to social order, past and future; and as master signifiers originate from social orders, it can have a stabilising effect on the symbolic orders and promises existential certainty to the subject (Eberle, 2019: 246). Because social identities provide the subject with the possibility of recognition and a place in a social order (Kinnvall, 2018: 531), fantasy tells a story of how such recognition and place have come about, been maintained and secured. According to Eberle (2019), what differentiates fantasy narratives from other narratives is their certainty and black-and-white storytelling. As they temporarily tackle uncertainty and incompleteness, enjoyment is generated by such illusionary fullness (Vieira, 2017: 149, for original see Lacan, 2006: 73). ‘Emotional investments through symbols, myths, and memories’ are made in fantasies so illusionary as they are, fantasies as emotionally loaded narratives have political consequences (Kinnvall, 2018: 532).

The centrality of affects in ontological security is not limited to a desire for wholeness and emotional investments made in the process. The desire for feeling secure and whole is driven by another affective phenomenon, that is, anxiety generated by ‘lack’. Fantasies’ main purpose is to address such anxiety by offering stability and completeness (Eberle, 2019). Vieira defines anxiety as ‘a productive emotional force and core psychological ingredient, even necessary condition, for structuring one’s subjectivity’ (2017: 149, italics original). In other words, the production of subjectivity through fantasies is possible because of the subject’s anxiety originating from incompleteness, lack generated by its identifications with ‘the superior other’. Anxiety drives ontological security seeking and it is not avoidable but a condition of sociality (Gustafsson & Krickel-Choi, 2020; Kinnvall & Mitzen, 2020). While anxiety itself can be unavoidable, political consequences of management of such existential anxiety can differ. Cash (2017) shows, for example, how emotions such as fear and hate enable collectivities to re-produce the old enemy-friend fantasies when such a distinction is not hegemonic politically in the case of Northern Ireland following the Good Friday Agreement. Zarakol (2010) focuses on internalisation of humiliation and shame, and associated existential anxiety in the cases of Russia, Turkey and Japan. Kinvall and Mitzen (2020: 246–47) define broadly two possibilities emerging from anxiety management or ontological security seeking: securisation of subjectivity, meaning, ‘a process of transposing existential anxieties into identifiable objects of fear’ or by taking advantage of disruption of existing fantasies, creation of new thinking. However, existential anxiety is unavoidable and affective. Thought together with focus on subject production and symbolic orders, a Lacanian ontological security approach, discussed in this section, will provide a fresh perspective in the status debates in IR.

Postcolonial Status Anxiety: A Desire for Status, a Fantasy of Completeness

Understanding ontological security as an affective process of seeking wholeness in the production of subjectivities within symbolic orders where meanings emerge and signifiers are drawn from can offer an alternative way of thinking status and status-seeking in IR. Like the two previous conceptual sections, the final discussion will focus on identity, hierarchies and emotions in status politics from the Lacanian ontological security angle.

Firstly, from the subject’s (i.e. a postcolonial status-seeking state) point of view, status is a way to achieve wholeness, tackles the lack of existential anchor; and status-seeking is an attempt to feel ontologically secure. Status becomes a fantasy narrative that can provide the completeness the subject craves for. As Vieira (2017: 153) argues, by introducing the postcolonial condition to ontological security, the postcolonial subject imagines a ‘mirror identification with an alleged superior coloniser and their associated self-assigned inferior location’. It produces autobiographical narratives about ‘the self’ that are bestowed with imaginations about their standing vis-à-vis the ‘superior other’, what the other has, and most importantly, in relation to it, what ‘the self’ lacks. Autobiographical narratives (or narratives about identity) are designed to address this existential lack. They tell ‘the other’ that the postcolonial subject has ‘caught up with the standards’ (Bilgic, 2016; Zarakol, 2010). However, this process generates and regenerates the existential lack; status-seeking or seeking a standing in a world of hierarchies does not end for the postcolonial subject. Status becomes a fantasy of completeness in the pursuit of ontological security. This approach challenges the existing accounts of identity in status literature by separating identity from subjectivity and recognising the instability of identity. It transforms not only how to understand status but also postcolonial states’ status anxieties: the existential anxiety.

Secondly, the pursuit of wholeness in the form of status occurs in the symbolic order (context) where meanings are intersubjectively produced and from which master signifiers are drawn. What is valued in a social context in terms of traits, values and practices is formed in the symbolic order. What constitutes an honourable act? What does it mean to have glory? Which traits are considered more valuable? Answers to these questions are formed in the symbolic order. Postcolonial literature in IR is rich in conceptualising and demonstrating how race, gender and class work in producing international hierarchies (among others, see Anievas & Nisancioglu, 2015; Anievas et al., 2014; Chowdhry & Nair, 2003; Parashar, 2016; Persuad & Sajed, 2018). More specifically, Vieira (2017) points at race as to define what is valued and what it means to have a ‘higher status’ while Bilgic (2015, 2016) explores the gendered and classed characteristics of hierarchies. In a symbolic order where race, gender and class differences/dichotomies determine the vertical hierarchies and produce the postcolonial subject as inferior, autobiographical narratives are formed to address such inferior subjectivity. In this context, status markers can be practices (such as, in our illustration below, paying off the debt to IMF). They can be identified as manifestations of master signifiers (having a larger quota in or loans to IMF) originating from the symbolic order. Hierarchies as functions of the symbolic order produce the racialised, gendered and classed postcolonial subject. In their status-seeking to achieve completeness, the postcolonial subject reproduces the symbolic order – and hierarchies as functions of this order, where it was produced as inferior in the first place.

A rethinking of identity and status hierarchies from a Lacanian ontological security angle puts a stronger emphasis on emotions, and in particular, anxiety in status politics. To reiterate, the role of emotions in status politics is under-theorised, which obscures the conceptualisation of status anxieties. Autobiographical narratives to pursue a fixed identity or a status in racialised, gendered and classed hierarchies make affective appeals. The postcolonial subject makes emotional investments in these narratives through using affective language and sometimes through symbolic practices such as ceremonies and memorials. As identity and the desired status are pursued affectively, the possibility of such completeness generates enjoyment in the Lacanian terminology. However, as Solomon (2015: 49) argues, as the subject thinks it is close to enjoyment, it moves further away, creating anxiety. As anxiety is central to the subject production and pursuit of ontological security, it forces the subject to seek status as an anchor for wholeness. Unlike implied in the status literature, anxiety does not come because there is no deference from the higher status group or fail to accommodate the status ambitions. Anxiety in status politics is existential and drives status-seeking in the first place as an existential condition for making sense of ‘the self’, to address the ‘lack’. As a result, postcolonial status anxiety can be defined as the emotional driving force to feel complete, to be whole, in racialised, gendered and classed hierarchies and it is not avoidable. Furthermore, recalling Ward (2017), status-seeking concerns with domestic politics. As discussed with reference to Kinnvall (2018) earlier, fantasies have political consequences including those in domestic politics.

Turkey and International Monetary Fund: Narrative of a Fantasy

The purpose of this final section is to illustrate how the postcolonial status anxiety conflates existential anxieties in contemporary debates in Turkey. The country has been experiencing an economic crisis from 2018 onwards which has brought the IMF back to a subject of political debate. The discussion will focus on the statements of the incumbent political elite (mainly the government) to understand both the autobiographical narrative they generate and what kind of identity they pursue through this fantasy narrative as status. The discussion starts with situating this narrative in a historical context.

Historically, Turkey’s postcolonial status anxiety in relation to its economic subordination manifested through receiving loans from the West and can be traced back to the Ottoman Empire. Grand Vizier Mustafa Reşid Pasha is often cited as the Ottoman statesman who first sought a loan of 55 million francs from Her Majesty’s Government in 1851 amid financial difficulty (Anderson, 1964: 47). Though, with dismay of the Sultan, the loan was dismissed and Reşid removed from office, signifying the Ottoman’s tragic debut in the Western market (Ibid). Nonetheless, 3 years later, the Ottoman Empire contracted its first foreign loan from European powers following the Crimean War totalling £3 million and carrying a 6% interest rate (Birdal, 2010: 26). Throughout the 1860s, however, the Empire accumulated further debt and officially declared bankruptcy in 1875, leading to ‘the collapse of the entire system in one of the most spectacular financial crashes of the period’ (Eldem, 2005: 431). The Ottoman Public Debt is a term dating from 1854 and is symbolic of Turkey’s indebtedness to European creditors. The Ottoman Empire subsequently received loans from the British and French governments again in 1855 and became subject to the establishment of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA) in 1881.

The OPDA, known as Düyun-u Umumiye, was a European-controlled debt management and collection administration ensuring the repayment of Ottoman debt to European companies in action until 1918. Importantly, the OPDA has been analysed from two lenses in literature on the subject, with some deeming the Administration to be European ‘economic imperialism’ (Stolz, 2021: 5) whilst others recognise the benefits to the Ottomans fiscal policy (Ecchia, 2010). It is within this period that the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ phrase was coined and became the manifestation of Ottoman subordination vis-à-vis Europe along with its existential anxiety.

Reflecting on the late-eighteenth century and early-nineteenth century enables one to track European involvement in Ottoman affairs and tease out the foundations for contemporary status anxieties. Transitioning from a stark rejection of European loans to the establishment of an independent, European-controlled bureaucracy within the Ottoman bureaucracy is significant, particularly when researching postcolonial anxieties in terms of economic subordination. In academic literature, Düyun-u Umumiye is frequently compared to the IMF’s more recent endeavours with the Republic of Turkey (Birdal, 2010; Manjapra, 2020). Whilst the ODPA and IMF differ in their structure and purpose, the former bearing the sole responsibility of collecting re-payments from a ‘sick’ Empire, and the latter concerned with a more global agenda for the benefit of international trade (Birdal, 2010), the ontological security ramifications of European/Western indebtedness are echoing among Turkish policymakers today.

To understand autobiographical narratives produced by the contemporary Turkish political elite vis-à-vis IMF and how it is associated with Turkey’s status in international hierarchies, they need to be contextualised in history. In addition to the Ottoman past and OPDA, Turkey had an uneasy relationship with IMF. Successive economic crises forced Turkey to enter new negotiations with IMF, which increased the debt gradually. This ‘yoke of IMF’, as identified by President Erdogan (see below), signified not only Turkey’s subordinated classed status along with other IMF-debtor states from the Global South but also ‘old Turkey’ where poverty, crises, unemployment, inflation and corruption shaped domestic politics. In other words, the fantasy of completeness narrated through an autobiographical narrative is an important political tool to consolidate and legitimise the contemporary political regime in Turkey.

Turkey joined the IMF as a member in March 1947, with the Republic’s first stand-by arrangement delivered over a decade later in January 1961 (IMF, 2008). In the years spanning this period, the IMF repeatedly attempted to establish an agreement with the ruling Demokrat Parti (DP), advising the government to restrain on consumption to maintain development, though met with resistance. Instead, PM Adnan Menderes publicly rejected the IMF’s suggestions amid growing economic difficulties, accusing the IMF of using contractionary measures and being politically driven (Taskinsoy, 2019). The DP’s IMF stance proved popular with the Turkish electorate in the 1954 General Election. Five years later, Turkey’s economy was deteriorating, with inflation leading to a 10–20% annual price rise, the DP government looked towards the IMF Resource Fund to alleviate strain on the economy (Sturc, 1968: 206). Shortly after, in August 1958, the IMF launched a stabilisation program for Turkey, overseeing a de facto Lira devaluation and reduced government spending (Krueger et al., 2003). Evidently, the cycle of rejecting Western presence in the economy before later accepting external supervision and economic support continued over a century later from the OPDA.

Between 1963 and 1977, Turkey experienced considerable economic growth. Gross national product increased from 6.4% to 7.2% (Cecen, Dogruel & Dogruel, 1994: 38), and industrial employment increased at 4% per annum (Yalpat, 1984: 17). However, social unrest escalated, with workers clashing with government forces over the rising cost-of-living ³ and demands for higher wages (Landau & Landau, 1974). By the end of the 1970s, Turkey was experiencing another economic crisis, leading to numerous stabilisation programs being implemented together with the IMF. On January 24^th, 1980, Turgut Özal’s (then director of the State Planning Agency) neoliberal economic reform program was announced. Only 6 months later in June was an IMF stand-by agreement reached and subsequently $1.25 billion made available to Turkey (IMF, 2008).

In the early 1980s, the views of Turkish policymakers and the IMF largely converged. After the coup d'état overthrow of the government, the military regime elected Özal as Deputy Prime Minister and thus economic improvements continued (Arpac & Bird, 2009). This was recognised by London’s International Banking Review, stating:

A feeling of hope is evident among international bankers that Turkey’s military coup may have opened the way to greater political stability as an essential prerequisite for the revitalization of the Turkish economy (Naylor, 2004: 92)

Between 1980 and 1984, the government utilised $1.475 billion in funds provided by the IMF (IMF, 2008), and results proved to be reasonably successful (see Kopits, 1987 publication for details).

Fast-forward to 1994, with a poor credit rating and depreciating Lira, the Turkish government looked towards the IMF once again. In 1998, the IMF agreed a Staff Monitoring Program to allow for closer economic supervision, notably further structural reform, a fixed exchange rate and tighter fiscal policy (Colmant et al., 2001), alongside $15 billion loan from the Supplemental Reserve Facility (IMF, 2008).

Despite a series of economic crises in the 1990s, the Turkish government failed to protect the country from future crises and arguably lacked the resilience to withstand the 2001 economic crash. On February 19th, 2001, Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit famously announced, ‘This is a serious crisis’ (CNN, 2001), after Central Bank reserves depleted by $5.5 billion in 1 week (Koch et al., 2001:471), leading to the closure of 4146 businesses and public demonstrations against the government (Ibid: 473). In this context of economic crisis, the AK Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, Justice and Development Party) came to power in 2002. Neoliberalisation of Turkish economy first accelerated in this period (Bilgic, 2018; Bedirhanoğlu, 2021), and in May 2013, the Turkish government paid off the Turkey’s debt to IMF. However, since 2018, Turkey has been experiencing a subtle but prolonged financial and economic crisis with raising inflation, sharp recession and diminishing foreign exchange reserves. Facing these problems, Turkey’s relations with the IMF have become a political topic, revealing Turkey’s postcolonial status anxiety and how Turkey’s Ottoman past has never left its contemporary politics

Economic subordination to the West continues to be the subject of political elite’s narratives expressing Turkey’s existential anxiety. In 2018, for example, when the AK Party government’s Finance Minister and President Erdoğan’s son-in-law Berat Albayrak made an agreement with the US firm McKinsey to receive consulting services. The leader of the main opposition party, CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, Republican People’s Party), reacted:

There is no greater catastrophe. This is the new Ottoman Public Administration. It is worse and heavier than even IMF…The management of our economy has been left to a foreign company. ⁴

Following such criticism, Erdoğan asked the ministers to stop using the services (Gmrukcu, 2018). ⁵ A few days after CHP’s criticisms, Erdoğan made a speech about the IMF. While his speech’s aim was to attack CHP, it highlights how the incumbent Turkish political elite interprets the IMF’s role as political:

The IMF’s mission is the transformation of not only the financial but also political structures of states with troubled balance of payments … Turkey was put under the IMF’s yoke after the 1960 military coup and could not free itself until the AK Party government … We do not know what Turkey has gained from 19 agreements signed with the IMF but it is clear that we have politically paid a lot. ⁶

The speech continues with the allegation that after Turkey paid off its debt, a new process started with the Gezi protests (the mass anti-government protests throughout Turkey in May–June 2013) to put Turkey, according to Erdoğan, under the IMF’s yoke again. In Erdoğan’s narrative, the connection between the anti-government protests and Turkey’s new emboldened status as a country that has paid off its debt to IMF is striking. For him, when Turkey addressed its economic subordination, domestic destabilisation of Turkey was used to ‘punish’ the AK Party government as well as Turkey. While the importance of this narrative as a delegitimisation strategy of the dissent in Turkey cannot be ignored, the autobiographical narrative he built fantasises a Turkey (in the embodiment of Erdoğan) which has economic and political independence, an elevated status in the world and wards off sinister attempts to subordinate it again: a completeness without existential anxiety.

Probably one of the most dramatic examples of this autobiographical narrative is from February 2019. In this speech, President Erdoğan directly connects Turkey’s international status with the status marker (i.e. not being a debtor to IMF) derived from the symbolic order (i.e. classed international hierarchies) in Turkey’s identity narrative:

When we came to power, Turkey’s debt to IMF was $23,5 billion. We found this debt on our laps. We are the government which has both made extensive investments and paid off this debt. Turkey closed the IMF chapter in May 2013 and, if God’s willing, it will never re-open it. It is a treason even to make such a suggestion [going to IMF] that will put Turkey at the same level with African, Asian, and South American countries. ⁷

This quotation is important for two reasons. Firstly, Turkey tries to tackle the ‘lack’ of an existential anchor through the identity narrative that revolves around no debt to IMF. However, this pursuit of ontological security (‘avoiding ontological insecurity’) is intrinsically connected to Turkey’s status-seeking. Through imitating ‘the superior other’, Turkey aims to address the existential status anxiety which, in this narrative, puts Turkey above those states who are debtors to IMF. Therefore, a fantasy is narrated where Turkey is in the superordinated position in racialised, gendered and classed hierarchies. Secondly, through this very practice, Turkey reproduces these hierarchies in spite of the high anti-imperialist and/or Western rhetoric adopted by Erdoğan (for this rhetoric, see Kaliber & Kaliber, 2019). The symbolic order where the status markers are derived from is the order in which Turkey fantasises its completeness as a superior vis-à-vis others.

This narrative needs to be reproduced because the existential anxiety of the subordinated in hierarchies is not only unavoidable but also historical. In September 2019, the AK party deputy chair draws upon the Ottoman past to debates on the IMF:

We remember what they offered us during the negotiations of the 19^th stand-by agreement with the IMF. They wanted to create a new Public Debt Administration through giving independence to the Revenue Administration … Turkey will never knock at the IMF’s door. ⁸

The negotiations mentioned in the quotation were conducted in 2009 and the IMF asked strongly for legal regulations to ensure the autonomy of the Revenue Administration. The government did not agree with these changes because, as the then Prime Minister Erdoğan explained in a TV programme, it was an important tool of the government to control tax revenues. The interesting dimension for this discussion is the reference to the OPDA as this institution has an important purchase in the existential anxiety of Turkey as a manifestation of its subordination (and in this narrative, thanks to the AK Party government, it is not subordinated). That being said, repeated references to the IMF still shape the elite’s narrative that bring together Turkey’s elevated status and a fantasy of completeness (not being a debtor to IMF). In October 2021, President Erdoğan stated:

The most significant example of the impact of our democratisation and development reforms is the end of our indebtedness to IMF, which was used as the stick of the global tutelage. Those who remember the old Turkey will understand the meaning of this achievement. We cannot forget our struggle to transform the Turkey of misery, poverty, oppression and persecution into one of the most powerful countries in the region as well as globally. ⁹

The President’s words were uttered when Turkey has been experiencing the worst economic and financial crisis in recent years (BBC, 2021) ¹⁰ . Turkey’s resistance to go back to IMF, in spite of the current crisis, can be explained through the framework developed in this article: this move would shatter the fantasy of completeness.

Conclusions

This article has argued that status-seeking signifies a search for wholeness, an ultimate desire of the subject, in a hierarchy where ‘the other’ has a superior position. Desired status becomes a solution to the existential anxiety through identifications with the imagined superior ‘other’. Being more than simply a position or ‘standing’ in a hierarchy that state elites are purported to improve, status represents a fantasy for a stable identity, offers wholeness, a closure to an existential search. This search happens in racialised, gendered and classed hierarchies in symbolic orders from which master signifiers are drawn and they become part of identity, or status, narratives. Postcolonial status anxieties are existential and unavoidable.

In this discussion, we do not claim that Turkey’s postcolonial status anxieties can only be demonstrated through Turkey’s relations with the IMF. Neither do we overlook the implications of these relations on domestic politics. These dimensions must be explored as further research. This discussion has demonstrated that, firstly, an analysis of status-seeking of postcolonial states requires a more historical and contextual understanding of status. This is particularly important because for the states such as Turkey which have been historically subordinated, even if not formally colonised, in international hierarchies, status-seeking is a way to pursue ontological security. Second, the focus on subject production (in addition to identity) offers an alternative way to theorise status and status-seeking in IR. Conceptualising status as a fantasy narrative, rather than a position to be possessed through deference of ‘the (superior) other’, highlights the continuity of status-seeking as a historical process but not an end point. This approach offers a new and fresh perspective to the studies on Turkey’s status-seeking which is narrowly explained through problematic identity frameworks. Finally, by focusing on anxiety, a Lacanian ontological security approach to status-seeking demonstrates why some postcolonial states’ status ambitions (such as Turkey’s) are deeply and intrinsically connected to who they aspire to be. As the brief discussion on Turkey has highlighted, reasons of some policies such as refusal to go to IMF can be found in historical anxieties.