The Ironic Western Self: Radical and Conservative Irony in the ‘Losing Turkey’ Narrative

Introduction

This article focuses on ironic narrative forms in international media and policy debates concerning political developments in Turkey during the era of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) in the 2000s and 2010s. More specifically, the article examines the narrative of the West ‘losing’ Turkey and argues that it contains an ironic, self-critical reading that contributes to debates on the idea of the West. Irony has been discussed in the field of International Relations (IR) to advance knowledge concerning, among others, ethics, ¹ global justice, ² and emotions, ³ but it still remains a scantily researched topic. As Steele notes, ‘the academic discipline of IR has barely paid attention to the way in which irony can be used to understand international politics’. ⁴ The article advances knowledge on different forms of ironic narratives, proposing that we need to distinguish between (1) radical irony and (2) conservative irony. The two forms are modified from a categorisation between radical and conservative satirists, with the former calling ‘attention to the hypocrisy of elites that preach one thing and practice another’ and the latter aiming ‘to recall their audience to traditional values’. ⁵

This article employs a paradigmatic method to the study of narratives, analysing a collection of narratives and seeking to map out notions that appear across them. ⁶ The narratives that are analysed here are collected from internationally focused publications that provide influental foreign policy commentary and analysis. In the data selection process the purpose has been to ‘identify particulars as instances of general notions and concepts’, in this case the ‘losing Turkey’ narrative as a manifestation of debates over the idea of the West. ⁷ In these debates there is at least an implicit recognition that there exists a discursive space with ‘boundary-producing political performances’ ⁸ that ‘construct the external realm as different, inferior, and threatening’. ⁹ This discursive space is an arena for imagining what being ‘Western’ entails, which is an intersubjective process with the ‘external realm’, in this case Turkey.

In other words, these narratives are not only analysing Turkey but also imagining and challenging the Western self, aiming to include Turkish perspectives in the analysis. As such, these ironic narratives are not self-constituted but take form in interaction with Turkish narratives. In these ironic narratives there is often an attempt to show awareness of Turkish interpretations and to demonstrate that the debate on Turkey cannot take place in a discursive vacuum. This article argues that radical irony is an outward-looking strategy to advance social justice and to challenge the Western self’s hegemonic representations, while conservative irony is an attempt to re-strengthen the Western self’s hegemony in international politics. Here narratives are discussed as forms in which knowledge and meanings are transferred, not as mere ‘stories’ that can be fictive.

To employ the metaphor of ‘losing’ is to localise or particularise the principle of transformation, which is about representing ‘a development from one order of motives to another’. ¹⁰ In other words, ‘depicting a thing’s end may be a dramatic way of identifying its essence’. ¹¹ In Western foreign policy debates, the metaphor of ‘losing’ is usually narrated in a futuristic mode – if Turkey acts in a certain way, the country will be lost (to the West). There is an inbuilt assumption that the West was ‘getting’ or already ‘had’ Turkey. The ambiguity around the inside/outside border, which has dominated the representational practices concerning Turkey’s Western identity, allow for such a liminal imaginary of ‘becoming’ where Turkey is constantly at a risk of being on the move. Such metaphors in turn reflect the ambiguous and self-contradicting identities of being Western and European. ¹²

The metaphor of ‘losing’ is convincing only because of the pre-existing liminal representations and threat images that are carried in that imaginary. Burke has described futuristic thought as a process where ‘the role of the future is allowed to usurp the role of the present’. ¹³ This is similar to the jeremiad tradition that Bercovitch has examined in the American context, showing that the key question is never ‘who are we’ but ‘when is our errand to be fulfilled’. ¹⁴ The gap that opens up between the represented and the representation ‘is the very location of politics’. ¹⁵ The metaphor of ‘losing’ entails the nexus between identification and division with its assumption that one of us is about to get lost, divided from us. Division is the ironic counterpart of identification. According to Burke, ‘one need not scrutinize the concept of “identification” very sharply to see, implied in it at every turn, its ironic counterpart: division’. ¹⁶

The ‘Losing Turkey’ Narrative

The election victory of the religiously oriented AKP in 2002 intensified international policy analysis about Turkey. On the one hand, the promise of a moderate Islamist party in the post–9/11 era raised high hopes that Turkey could act as a model in the region on how to successfully merge Islam and democracy. On the other hand, there was scepticism as to how genuinely the AKP was committed to liberal democratic values and Turkey’s secular state identity. The ‘losing Turkey’ narrative became a popular representation especially in think-tank circles in the United States as well as in European political punditry to voice these concerns about Turkey’s future developments. ¹⁷ However, the narrative resources that have been utilised in the ‘losing Turkey’ narrative date back much further, to the 1920s when Turkey’s transformation from an Islamic empire to a secular republic was seen as such a dramatic event that it was described as a ‘bewildering’ change and a ‘fantastic play of unrealities’. ¹⁸ At the time, Turkey was often represented as a state that was attempting to transform into a Western state only in appearance, but that in essence remained Eastern. It was, for example, argued in a Foreign Affairs article in 1925: ‘The Turk’s labors to construct a nation on ultra-Western lines are wholly foreign to his blood and to his traditions. Our Western foundations become in his hands mere camouflage for the things which are to him racially inborn – the personal struggle of the few, the political indifference of the many’. ¹⁹ Turkish interlocutors have always participated in these Western debates, challenging or supporting such representations. For example, in her influential 1930 book Turkey Faces West, Turkish writer and academic Halidé Edib offered an extensive analysis of Turkey’s historical and political developments as well her country’s relationship with the West. Edib argued that in Western debates on Turkey, there has been a ‘dense cloud of hatred and prejudice and political obstruction raised by the older West’. ²⁰

The alleged tension between Turkey’s official state identity and the supposedly deeper identity layer continues to offer powerful resources for the ‘losing Turkey’ narrative, even if the language to describe this tension has changed since the early 1900s. The Cold War represented a rupture in this discursive practice as Turkey formed an important ally in the ideological conflict through strong institutional arrangements, especially NATO membership, but as soon as the Cold War was over, concerns as to how deeply Western values were really rooted in Turkey arose once again. Turkey was yet again represented as a country that was on the move and searching for her direction – potentially away from the West. The idea that culturally Turkey might have remained Eastern despite her political commitment to the West became an increasingly popular framing in the post-Cold War era. This concern materialised in the question of religion in Turkey. The narrative impulse behind the ‘losing Turkey’ narrative has been implicitly or explicitly related to what Bayat has referred to as ‘the infamous question of whether Islam is compatible with democracy’. ²¹ Only a few years after the Cold War Andrew Mango, an Istanbul-born British author who has written extensively on Turkish politics, asked in The National Interest whether the West was ‘losing’ Turkey as a result of the election victory of the Islamist Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) in 1996. ²² The metaphor of ‘losing’ was also employed in a 1999 analysis of Turkey’s difficult path towards EU membership. ²³ There was a significant proliferation of the ‘losing Turkey’ narrative in the 2000s during the AKP leadership. In the mid-2000s, it was suggested in Newsweek that Turkey might be lost given the tense relationship between secularism and Islam, which was described as the deepest ‘war’ that has ‘long raged beneath the surface of the Turkish republic’. ²⁴ With the AKP, it was argued, the line between Islam and secularism had become more ‘blurred’. In 2010 Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish journalist and writer who has contributed widely to the international debate on Turkey and the West, noted in Foreign Affairs: ‘These days, most of Washington is asking, “Who lost Turkey?” rather than envisioning more extensive cooperation with it’. ²⁵

Soner Çağaptay, a Turkish-American scholar who has been called a ‘leading exponent of the “we are losing Turkey” school’, ²⁶ has frequently used the ‘losing’ metaphor to draw a sharp line between the AKP and the secular, Kemalist tradition in Turkey. For example, in his 2010 article ‘Turkey Lost Turkey’ in The Wall Street Journal, Çağaptay argued: ‘The real problem is that the ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) doesn’t share the dream of a liberal, Western Turkey … the reason Turkey will not join the EU any time soon is not because of European reservations toward a Muslim country but because of the Turkish government’s reservations toward European values’. ²⁷ In 2010 it was argued in The Washington Times that the republic’s secular founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, had ‘lost’ Turkey by imposing an alien, Western identity on rural Anatolians who never accepted the secular, modern way of life. ²⁸ Turkey’s impulse to turn towards the East, it was argued, was the result of the anti-Western Anatolian peasantry gaining more ground. ²⁹ Austrian journalist Bernhard Zand wrote in the German magazine Der Spiegel in 2010 that the West ‘is losing Turkey’ as ‘frustrated’ Turkey was looking towards the East. ³⁰ Referring to the shattered relationship between Israel and Turkey following the Gaza flotilla incident and Turkey voting against Iranian sanctions in the United Nations Security Council, Zand, who has served as Der Spiegel’s Istanbul correspondent, claimed that the West was ‘shocked’ over Turkey being ‘suddenly a friend of the mullahs’. ³¹

In narratives that employ the metaphor of ‘losing’, then, there is often an inbuilt idea that Turkey is somehow naturally inclined towards the East and that her Western identity is more superficial and an elite-led project. As such, the early 1900s belief that Turkey had only superficially turned towards the West continues in the patterns of representing Turkey. It is sometimes suggested that the ‘losing Turkey’ narrative is a conservative or neoconservative representation in the United States. ³² This is, indeed, one narrative that has been advanced with the use of the metaphor. The purpose of this article is to show that the metaphor of ‘losing’ has also been employed to show that it is the Western self that is ‘lost’ in its attempts to engage with Turkey – either because of a lack of understanding and empathy or because of its weakness or hypocrisy. This is in line with what US Defense Secretary Robert Gates famously stated in 2010, turning the critical gaze towards the other side of the traditional Atlantic partnership: ‘I personally think that if there is anything to the notion that Turkey is, if you will, moving eastward, it is, in my view, in no small part because it was pushed, and pushed by some in Europe refusing to give Turkey the kind of organic link to the West that Turkey sought’. ³³

Narrating International Politics

Many scholars have compellingly shown that the language employed to advance knowledge and theories in IR not only contains moral and aesthetic preferences but also is narratively constructed. Lebow, for example, has argued that the realist understanding of the international system derives from a tragic vision of the world. ³⁴ Kuusisto has demonstrated that comedy as a narrative form offers conflict resolution strategies in international politics. ³⁵ Spencer has shown how romantic narratives influence our understanding of events. ³⁶ According to Ringmar, the debate over the Iraq War in the early 2000s was best characterised as a battle between different narrative types. ³⁷ Payne has argued that comedic and satirical narratives can be valuable in challenging power structures in international security. ³⁸ In a similar vein, language in foreign policy debates contains moral and aesthetic preferences and follows particular narrative types. White has influentially argued that ‘every historical narrative has as its latent or manifest purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats’. ³⁹ This moralising aspect can be recognised also in foreign policy debates, often deriving from the ‘need or impulse to rank events with respect to their significance for the culture or group’ in question, in this case the West. ⁴⁰

Debates over the idea of the West provide a particularly fruitful arena for examining the moralising impulse in narratives because the West is a fluid and contested concept that is an intersubjective site of imagination, interpretation, and narration. The West can be perceived as an idea, ⁴¹ a rhetorical claim, ⁴² a direction, ⁴³ a concept, ⁴⁴ a semantic configuration, ⁴⁵ a trope, ⁴⁶ a metaphysical civilization, ⁴⁷ a metageographical concept, ⁴⁸ a cult, ⁴⁹ or a narrative. ⁵⁰ The negotiations over the nature of the West can take place directly as an explicit debate on the topic or indirectly through other topics. The ‘losing Turkey’ narrative is an illustrative case where a Western subject is imagined and narrated indirectly with moral and aesthetic preferences. The ironic re-imagining is an attempt to critically respond to and challenge a self-righteous image of the West as well as to engage in a more dialogic process with Turkish voices. The debate on ‘losing’ Turkey can be seen as a negotiation about the moral traditions that underpin the West as an imagined and narrated social system.

Theorising Irony

Irony is always negational in that it attempts to challenge the hegemonic representation of reality and turn it around in a carnivalesque sense. There is a critical gaze towards the self, whether in the self’s weakness to put herself in the position of the other or in the self’s inability to recognise the hypocritical nature of her action. Irony has the ‘potential to de-stabilise and de-naturalise hegemonic discourses of globalisation’ as well as to address questions of global ethics. ⁵¹ It can be seen, as Brassett has argued, as a coping mechanism that in the British context is about Britons dealing with ‘their collective sense of loss: loss of empire, loss of the moral high ground, loss of economic and military credibility, loss of ignorance to Empire’s excesses. In this way, irony can be more than merely playful recognition of our own certain fragilities’. ⁵² There are often inbuilt hierarchies in ironic representations that attempt to either lift or lower the social and moral status of some actors in international politics. ⁵³ These representations are often a reaction to perceived moral failings in the hegemonic order. Domanska has argued that the ‘ironic apprehension of the world arose in an atmosphere of social breakdown or cultural demise’. ⁵⁴ Or as Steele has pointed out, ‘irony helps us face our limitations by forcing us to self-create and self-reflect. It is based at its core upon a juxtaposition, founded on the limits of knowledge practices, and the contingencies of human action’. ⁵⁵

Irony highlights the limits of our linguistic capacities to deal with our surrounding reality. According to Domanska, ‘irony tends to turn into word play, to become a language about language, to conceive the world as trapped within a prison made of language, the world as a “forest of symbols”’. ⁵⁶ Or as White has argued, irony is ‘radically self-critical with respect not only to a given characterization of the world of experience but also to the very effort to capture adequately the truth of things in language’. ⁵⁷ Because of the reactionary nature of irony, it always requires a prior narrative to build upon. It often produces satirical narratives of international politics that aim to reverse the unjust and hypocritical moral order. ⁵⁸ Satire is a form of irony and, as Hall has shown, ‘tends to make substantial use of irony, of saying the opposite of what the author and the audience know is (or ought to be) the case, in order to draw attention to an inconsistency or contradiction’. ⁵⁹

Since satire assumes ‘an ironic stance towards the world, it is parasitic on other narrative forms, and since it lampoons the established social order its aims are subversive rather than constructive. The basic strategy is to turn other plot structures inside-out, upside-down, or to deconstruct and reassemble them in unrecognizable patterns’. ⁶⁰ White has similarly argued that the ‘aim of the Ironic statement is to affirm tacitly the negative of what is on the literal level affirmed positively, or the reverse’. ⁶¹ According to Rorty, irony is ‘if not intrinsically resentful, at least reactive. Ironists have to have something to have doubts about, something from which to be alienated’. ⁶² Ironic forms are present throughout the various manifestations of the ’losing Turkey’ narrative. However, the type of irony varies. The distinction between radical and conservative irony is proposed here to draw a more nuanced picture of the use of irony in the narratives.

Taking Turkey Seriously – a Self-critical Gaze

The idea that Turkey is ‘lost’ because of her repugnant actions or inherent qualities is interwoven in ironic narratives; they acknowledge it in order to challenge it. One of the most common ironic narrative forms is to represent the Western self as hypocritical, unfair or complacent. In short, as a hegemonic actor that is lacking in self-criticism. Germany’s former Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor, Joschka Fischer, employed the metaphor of ‘losing’ in a radically ironic way in his article ‘Who “Lost” Turkey?’ in Project Syndicate in 2010: ‘I believe that these fears [of losing Turkey] are exaggerated, even misplaced. And should things work out that way, this would be due more to a self-fulfilling prophecy on the West’s part than to Turkey’s policies’. ⁸⁵ Fischer argued that despite Turkey’s strategic importance and her efforts to modernise, the West had treated Turkey as a ‘Western client state’ with the European Union (EU) in particular causing damage with its demeaning attitude in Turkey’s accession negotiations.

In Fischer’s narrative, Turkey’s evolving relationship with Russia and Iran was turned into a metaphor of Western decline, signifying a particular direction that Turkey was being pushed in by the morally weak West: ‘European policy is driving Turkey into the arms of Russia and Iran’. ⁸⁶ Fischer’s ironic narrative was a typical ‘declinist West’ narrative that called for the West to strengthen its moral and political position in foreign affairs because otherwise it would face a dramatic decline. ⁸⁷ Also Sweden’s former Foreign Minister and Prime Minister Carl Bildt has employed an ironic narrative form to turn the critical gaze towards the Western self. Bildt argued in Project Syndicate just weeks after the 2016 failed coup attempt in Turkey that the West’s ‘lack of empathy for Turkey during this traumatic period has been astonishing’. ⁸⁸ Bildt’s criticism concerned not only the lack of adequate support for Turkey’s democracy in the EU – ‘Is Brussels asleep, or just ignorant?’ ⁸⁹ – but Europe’s alienating attitude towards Turkey in general. He argued that ‘Turkey’s accession talks with the EU have ground almost to a halt, owing partly to outright hostility against Turkey in some EU member states … the overall effect has been to alienate many Turks, who now feel rejected by a Europe that once inspired them. Not surprisingly, some Turks now look for inspiration and opportunities elsewhere’. ⁹⁰

In Bildt’s ironic narrative, the situation is turned upside down in order to reveal the EU’s hypocritical and prejudiced nature that might lead to Europe ‘losing its moral authority’. ⁹¹ Bildt noted that the EU does not understand what it is like when democracy is truly threatened, and that the EU reacted to France’s emergency actions after the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris in a very different way than it did to Turkey’s post-coup situation. The critical gaze was directed firmly towards the EU, which Bildt argued was being hypocritical in applying different standards to ‘them’ Turks than ‘us’ Europeans. Bildt noted that no one ‘should be surprised that Turkey is now trying to purge Gülenists from positions of power. Any state faced with insurrection from within would do the same’. ⁹² The EU’s ‘shameful reaction to the 2013 coup in Egypt’ was brought up with the purpose of strengthening the normative aim of moralising the West. Finally, Bildt created a causal linkage between the EU’s reaction and the harsh political atmosphere in Turkey after the coup attempt.

Fischer’s and Bildt’s narratives are radically ironic as they, first, challenge the notion that Turkey’s political Islam-inspired government would inevitably move Turkey away from the West; ⁹³ second, turn the critical gaze towards the Western self’s weakness to understand the consequences of her arguably hypocritical politics towards Turkey; and third, attempt to show that Turkey reacts the same way as ‘we’ would respond in a similar situation, showing that ‘us’ and ‘them’ are not different from one another. If Fischer’s and Bildt’s narratives illustrate a radically ironic form of a European ‘losing Turkey’ narrative with their focus on solidarity and understanding towards Turkey, Doug Bandow’s narrative is an American version with an equally critical approach towards the Western self but with a different moral and political preference. ⁹⁴ Responding to Gates’ above-mentioned 2010 speech, Bandow, a Conservative foreign policy commentator who worked in the Reagan Administration, argued that Turkey’s EU membership ‘is not Washington’s business … Imagine the German Foreign Minister showing up in Ottawa or the British Foreign Secretary visiting Mexico City and declaiming about Washington’s irresponsible failure to form a North American Union’. ⁹⁵

Bandow turned the pre-existing narrative upside down and as such attempted to show its moral weakness: that the United States should not advise others because, first, it would not like to be subject to a similar treatment, and second, its own policies were politically and morally weak. Bandow argued: ‘But given the foreign policy messes routinely created by U.S. governments, American policymakers should be appropriately humble before blaming other nations for today’s problems’. ⁹⁶ Even though their political preferences were different, the ironic narratives of Fischer and Bandow were similar: they both turned the critical gaze towards the self and highlighted the West’s moral weakness. While Fischer defended Gates’ speech, Bandow opposed it and attempted to frame it in such a way as to make Gates seem ridiculous. Bandow argued: ‘Defense Secretary Robert Gates is upset. And he is vocal with his complaints. Not with the North Koreans or Iranians. Not with the Chinese or Russians. Not with the Palestinians or Israelis. And not with the Turks. He is upset with the Europeans’. ⁹⁷

Again, Iran was mentioned to trigger a particular response in the audience, which was clearly imagined as Western. It was a call for a more united West to act as a counterbalance to its more obvious adversaries in international politics: Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia. But even more importantly, Bandow advocated an American foreign policy that was less interventionist and more moral in a Kantian sense: that the United States should act the same way as it wanted to be treated. According to Bandow, the United States had ‘become a caricature of itself’. ⁹⁸ Fischer’s narrative was similarly based on Kantian morals: the EU needed to treat Turkey fairly if it wanted to receive positive political outcomes. In 2007, Professor of History at the University of Michigan and a prominent American commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, Juan Cole, used a ‘losing Turkey’ narrative that was similarly critical towards the American self and strongly sympathised with Turkey, asking ‘what Ankara ever did to us that we are treating them so horribly’. ⁹⁹ Cole argued that if Turkey turned away from the West, it would be because of the way in which the United States had treated it. Also Cole ironically reversed the roles: ‘Imagine what things look like from a Turkish point of view’ – ‘the strongest ally that the United States has had in the Middle East since the end of WWII’. ¹⁰⁰

Cole’s narrative formed around the Armenian genocide vote in the United States, but there were also other events that were connected to the narrative, particularly the Iraq War that caused instability on Turkey’s borders. In Cole’s ironic narrative the United States was represented as a morally and politically repugnant actor in international politics. Cole argued that the timing of the Congressional vote condemning Turkey was the most inappropriate, with Turks ‘already raw from watching the US upset all the apple carts in their neighborhood, unleash existential threats against them, cause the rise of Salafi radicalism next door, coddle terrorists killing them, coddle the separatist KRG, and strengthen the Shiite ayatollahs on their borders’. ¹⁰¹ In Cole’s narrative the United States was represented as almost a similar ‘monster’ as Latouche’s image of the West. ¹⁰²

In these ironic narratives, Rorty’s ‘local final vocabulary, the common sense of the West’ concerning democracy and human rights is challenged to show that there is a wide gap between Western vocabulary and action in foreign policy. ¹⁰³ Here the function of the ironic form is to self-critically highlight both hypocrisy and self-conceit in Western action, which are often intertwined. ¹⁰⁴ The moral dimension in radical irony is about advancing social justice, aiming to show that the self should treat the other like one of us. When these ironic narratives and their self-critical claims about the hypocritical nature of the West are examined in more detail, it is clear that what they are concerned with is justice. As such, the moralising gaze contains a quest for a more just world order. This is what Runciman has argued in relation to Hobbes’ concern about the role of hypocrisy in politics: ‘Hypocrisy is not the issue for Hobbes. The issue is justice’. ¹⁰⁵

In Rorty’s terms, it is about opening up a wider horizon to social justice, revealing how it is not the other that is repugnant but us who is treating the other unjustly. When these ironic narratives are analysed in light of the claim that the West is simply ‘stigmatising’ others and being complacent about its own actions, there is a clear contradiction. ¹⁰⁶ Because the self-congratulatory image of the West coincides with the hegemonic representation of the West, it is a particularly pervasive image of the West, often overshadowing ironic narratives that are an equally powerful part of the idea of the West – even necessary to it. ¹⁰⁷ The purpose of the radically ironic ‘losing Turkey’ narrative is to seize the powerful metaphor and turn it around to show that it is the West that is more ‘lost’ because of its inability to recognise its own failings and prejudices. The critical gaze is often directed towards the liberal tradition in the West where tolerance is a core value. This is something that Niebuhr also brought up in the 1950s, arguing that ‘collective man always tends to be morally complacent, self-righteous and lacking in a sense of humor. This tendency is accentuated in our own day by the humorless idealism of our culture with its simple moral distinctions between good and bad nations, the good nations being those which are devoted to “liberty”’. ¹⁰⁸

This interpretation can be found in the analysis of Graham Fuller, an American author and political analyst who specialises in Islamic extremism and has written extensively on Turkish politics. Fuller has argued that it is ironic that although the West is critical towards Islam, it does not recognise or is blind to the religious nature of its own societies. According to Fuller in 2004: ‘We in the West are often uncomfortable with the presence of religion’ but ‘America today remains the most religious country in the industrialized world’. ¹⁰⁹ Furthermore, ‘the most emotional features of American politics are exactly those that entail religious concerns, even if they are not expressed in explicitly religious terms’. ¹¹⁰ Furthermore, Mango has turned the critical gaze away from the Turks towards the liberal Western self, arguing that ‘liberal criticism of the Turks has a long pedigree. In the past, it concentrated on the maltreatment of non-Muslim minorities, while disregarding the sufferings of the Muslims elsewhere … Religious bigotry has long poured from liberal English mouths in the guise of racial generalizations’. ¹¹¹

In Fuller’s narrative, the American self was represented as an actor that was preaching secularism abroad but practising religion at home. In other words, there were different rules and norms for us and them. Mango, similarly, took a self-critical approach towards the supposedly high moral standing of the Western self vis-à-vis the Turkish other, bringing up the ‘religious bigotry’ of the liberal tradition in England. Radical ironic narratives are more prone to accusations of relativism because they often reject value statements that contain subtle hierarchies in which the self is lifted to a superior position than others, presupposing ‘at least a tacit awareness of the disparity between a statement and the reality it is supposed to represent’. ¹¹² However, the accusation of relativism does not capture the essence of irony and often, as Burke has argued, confuses it with the dialectic. ¹¹³ This brings us back to Rorty’s idea that irony opens up a horizon to social justice, and this applies only to the contributory and radical forms of irony that highlight the self-reflective and self-creative nature of irony.

From Radical to Conservative Irony

Representing the West as a weak actor in its action towards Turkey is a particular prominent practice in conservative circles in the United States. The idea of a weak Western self is connected to both hypocrisy and self-conceit, which it is argued results in a declinist status in international politics. One manifestation of this is to represent the United States as an actor that is easily fooled in its relations with those actors that truly understand what power means in international politics. Samuel J. Brannen, an American security analyst and advisor, wrote in The National Interest in 2013 that the Obama Administration was convinced that it ‘could heal wounds and build consensus on emerging crises. It was wrong. To Erdogan and his cronies, the engagement consistently affirmed that the United States needed Turkey more than Turkey needed the United States’. ¹¹⁴ Brannen argued that ‘senior U.S. officials and many Washington foreign policy elites continue to observe as a tenet of unswerving faith that the United States might inadvertently “lose Turkey” if its leaders are ever pressed too hard or disagreed too publicly. This is not true’. ¹¹⁵

Similarly, Mark Steyn, a Canadian author and commentator who has written widely against multiculturalism and Islam in the West, wrote in his 2010 article ‘Who lost Turkey?’ in The Washington Times that Erdogan ‘looks at the American hyperpower and sees, to all intents, a late Ottoman sultan – pampered, decadent, lounging on its cushions, puffing a hookah but unable to rouse itself to impose its will in the world’. ¹¹⁶ Also Caroline Glick, an American-born Israeli journalist, argued in her article ‘Who Lost Turkey?’ in The Jerusalem Post in 2010 that ‘Obama and his European colleagues may believe that they will not be blamed for the loss of Turkey … But they are wrong. If they continue to sit on their elitist laurels, Turkey will be lost on their watch and they will not be forgiven by their own peoples for their failure to act in time’. ¹¹⁷

The narratives of Brannen and Steyn represent conservative irony not only because of their inward-looking gaze towards the weak self but also because of their emphasis on power politics and re-building hegemony. ‘Healing wounds’ and ‘building consensus’ are signs of weakness that leave actors in international politics vulnerable to exploitation and ridicule. A conservative web of belief in which inaction shows moral strength influences these narratives. As Lakoff has argued, conservative values are premised upon a belief that ‘it is immoral to be a “do-gooder,” since not seeking your own self-interest upsets the system and does not maximize well-being for all’. ¹¹⁸ This type of reasoning concerning moral strength represents a conservative tradition in which morality ‘is being upright. Evil is a force in the world. You must be morally strong to keep from falling to the force of evil. If you are morally weak, you are bound to fall; that is, you are bound to do evil, and so moral weakness is itself a form of immorality’. ¹¹⁹

Glick’s narrative illustrates conservative irony with its emphasis on the weak Western self, unable to impose her will upon Turkey. This, it is argued, causes serious harm to the Western self who is oblivious to the fact that she is not a respected and superior actor but a laughing stock that Turkey is taking advantage of. Glick represented Turkey’s AKP leadership as clever and cunning, manipulating Western leaders who were foolish in their commitment to soft power tools of promoting democracy and human rights instead of looking after their own interests. Glick wrote in 2009: ‘You have to hand it to Turkey’s Islamist leaders. They sure know how to get their way’. She further argued that ‘Obama paid a preening visit to Ankara where he effectively endorsed the Islamization of Turkish foreign policy that has moved the NATO member into the arms of Teheran’s mullahs … By forcing Turkey to curb its military’s role as the guarantor of Turkish secularism, the EU took away the secularists’ last line of defense against the rising tide of the AKP’. ¹²⁰ And finally: ‘Turkey’s Islamist leaders have used the Western language of democracy and freedom not only to abandon the West. They have used that language to destroy the foundations of Turkey’s Western-style secular democracy and transform the governing system of NATO’s sole Muslim member into a hybrid of Putinist autocracy and Iranian theocracy’. ¹²¹

Glick’s narrative of ‘losing Turkey’ is not a ‘triumphalist West’ narrative but a ‘declinist West’ narrative that directs the moralising gaze towards the Western self, who is deemed responsible for the negative political developments in Turkey. The narrative motive is not to widen the sense of solidarity towards Turkey but to call the Western self to toughen its policies and to reassert its hegemony. Furthermore, the narrative relies upon a highly metonymical division between a repugnant Islamic governance that cannot be trusted and a desirable secular leadership that can keep Turkey on the right track. However, the narrative implication is not that Turkey is lost despite the West but because of the West. As such, Glick’s narrative is very different from that of Çağaptay, who suggests that Turkey is being lost despite the West’s best efforts to guide the country in the right direction. ¹²²

Conclusion

When metaphors, their meanings and their limits are investigated, they provide conditions for political criticism. ¹²³ The critical gaze can be directed not only towards the agents and structures of international politics but also the narrators, foreign policy commentators. Chilton and Lakoff argue that the concepts that international relations experts use are ‘metaphorical through and through. The metaphors have important entailments for our lives and for the lives of millions of others. Yet the metaphors and their entailments have largely gone unrecognized and unexamined’. ¹²⁴ ‘Losing’ a country is one such metaphor that directs our thinking and contains strong moral and aesthetic preferences in interpreting international politics.

The triumphalist idea of the West is a persistent image both within and outside the West, which often goes hand-in-hand with suggestions that the West is a complacent actor, lacking in self-criticism and self-reflection. When foreign policy debates are examined more closely, self-critical and ironic narratives can be clearly identified. In this article, ironic narratives were analysed in reference to Turkey with the purpose of teasing out ironic manifestations of the Western self. It was argued that there are two forms of irony that can be recognised in the field. Radical irony is outward-looking and emphasises the need to have solidarity and understanding for the other who seems distant only because of our persistent practices of othering. This form is radical in that it challenges the commonsensical notion of the West as a morally and politically triumphant community that is deservedly a hegemonic actor in the international system.

Conservative irony is more inward-looking and focuses on a weak Western self, blind to her inability to fulfil the ideals that she upholds, therefore causing damage to the self. This form is conservative in nature in that it attempts to bring back a past strength that is often nostalgically narrated. Both these ironic forms direct the moralising impulse towards the Western self, but the consequence of this self-criticism is different. The former highlights the need to widen the horizon to social justice and the latter the need to strengthen the politically weak self. The metaphor of ‘losing’ is employed not only to claim that Turkey is lost despite the West but also to show that, ironically, Turkey is lost because of the West.