The Pendulum of Majoritarianism: Turkey’s Governmental Self-Identity and Turkish

Abstract

Turkey’s relations with Egypt abruptly hit rock bottom following the Egyptian army’s ousting of Mohammed Morsi in July 2013. Despite significant political fluctuations between the two countries, there is a gap in academic literature about addressing alterations in Turkish–Egyptian relations holistically. To this end, this article proposes that Turkey’s volatile relationship with the Egyptian governments since the so-called Arab Spring is partially a reflection of broader institutional changes in Turkey’s domestic settings. One of these salient changes is the discursive transformation of Turkish national self-perception. This article shows how Turkey’s new governmental self-understanding of “majoritarianism” manifests in its relations with Egypt. It asserts that this transformation in the governmental perception of the national-self made Turkey’s policies on Egypt, which oscillate between one extreme to another, “conceivable/thinkable” via the medium of national identity discourses. It shows the interplay between the governmental identity discourses of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) elites and Turkey’s policies on Egypt in the institutional/non-discursive foreign policy field.

Keywords

Arab Spring discourse analysis national identity Turkey–Egypt relations Turkish Foreign Policy

Introduction

Turkey’s political relations with Egypt abruptly hit rock bottom following the Egyptian army’s ousting of the democratically elected Mohammed Morsi in July 2013. As of early 2021, there is no notable sign on the horizon of the relations being restored. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan blasted the Egyptian leadership after the execution of nine Muslim Brotherhood (MB) members convicted of the assassination of Egypt’s chief prosecutor, Hisham Barakat (Al-Jazeera, 2019a; Ismail, 2019). Erdoğan stated that Egypt is governed by a totalitarian regime and that he would not talk to Egyptian President el-Sisi until there is a general amnesty for political prisoners (Al-Jazeera, 2019b). As a response to these remarks, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry accused Erdoğan of embracing the “terrorist group” MB (Sayed, 2019). Unorthodoxly, the Turkish President applied a democratic principle related to domestic politics as a normative condition to reinvigorate political relations with another sovereign country. Nevertheless, this governmental normative discourse toward Egypt is not a new phenomenon because of Turkey’s rhetorically avant-garde role during the so-called “Arab Spring.”

Despite the significant political fluctuations between the two countries in the last decade, there is a gap in academic literature related to addressing alterations in the Turkish–Egyptian relations holistically. To this end, this article asks the question “how” Turkey’s enduring relationship with Egypt vacillates between positive and negative extremes. It proposes that Turkey’s volatile relationship with Egypt since the Arab Spring partially reflects the discursive transformation of Turkish national self-perception. The common contentions on what drives Turkish policy toward Egypt are the Islamic self-identity fashioned by the pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) elites and their reliance on the Muslim Brotherhood in hard power politics.

Although these contentions are valid to some extent and the AKP elites narrate a civilizationally Islamic Turkish national-self, they mostly employ a normative discourse (majoritarian democracy) regarding Egypt’s political developments. This article shows how the Turkish government’s new self-understanding shaped by the AKP’s political elites manifests itself in its relations with Egypt. The article asserts that this transformation in the governmental perception of the national-self has made Turkey’s policies on Egypt, which oscillate between one extreme and another, “conceivable/thinkable” via the medium of national identity discourses. It shows the interplay between the identity discourses of the AKP elites and Turkey’s policies on Egypt in the institutional/non-discursive foreign policy field.

The socio-political schism between Turkey’s secularist and conservative blocs, which challenge each other to hegemonize institutional and discursive fields in Turkey, is emphasized throughout the analysis. The secular bloc gradually conceded its hegemonic status to the conservative bloc, currently represented by the AKP in the political realm. This inter-bloc transition of power revealed itself in the hegemonic discourses on the Turkish governmental self-understanding. The secularist bloc’s hegemonic secular republicanism discourses that had been determining and defining the national self-perception since the early epoch of the Republic were superseded by the conservative bloc’s majoritarianism discourses in parallel to inculcate social, economic, and institutional changes in Turkish society and statecraft. This research on the Turkish elites’ discourses toward Egypt in relation to actual policies reveals that the AKP government’s volatile relations with Egypt are closely connected to the “majoritarian” identity that was tailored for Turkey. Teetering interrelations became conceivable/implementable policy options through the justificatory medium of the governmental aspect of new hegemonic Turkish national identity discourses.

According to Calhoun (1997, p. 99), nations “exist only when their members understand themselves through the discursive framework of national identity.” National identities are discursive formations that are “the group of statements that belong to a single system of formation” (Foucault, 2010, p. 107). Nevertheless, these discursive mediums are not ends that ultimately and deterministically entrap subjects within discursive webs as systemic factors do in structural theorizing. National identities are discursive mediums enabling thinkable actions in social cognitive structures and lay the groundwork for spatiotemporal policy options (Hopf, 2002), not independent variables of causal narratives. Discourses are not epiphenomenal because they are necessary to make particular foreign policies implementable (Doty, 1996, p. 48). Therefore, it is crucial to discuss the discursive national identity framework to understand the cognitive limits of a nation-state’s behavior within the international system. The discursive national identity context would not inform us about inescapable policy preferences of a nation-state, but about the ideational horizon of these preferences. Since Turkish national self-perception change did not “cause” certain policies on Egypt but made them “conceivable,” the article’s analysis of Turkey’s relations with Egypt is not epistemologically predicated upon positivist causality but upon interpretivist conceivability.

Governmental Nodal Point in National Identity Discourses

There are nodal points (Laclau & Mouffe, 2014) within national identity discourses. Nodal points are privileged, partially fixed clusters of statements within discursive formations that hegemonically (re)-define/produce national self-identification. They enable us to locate the partially fixed discourses which are constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursive activity to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a center (Laclau & Mouffe, 2014, pp. 98–99), and to hegemonize a content to fix the meaning around a nodal point (Laclau, 1990, p. 28). Discursive hegemony around nodal points through regular statements constitutes a discursive formation within the relevant domain, a certain people’s national identity. There are various nodal points within national identity discourses, such as cultural, ethnic, governmental, and civilizational nodal points. Governmental self-understanding is sometimes a part of national identity narratives of states.

How a nation governs itself is germane to national identity construction in many cases because the form of self-governance is one of the factors that distinguish the national-self from others. The universal dissemination of certain models of political and economic governance that are affiliated with the national-self can be a part of the political purpose of a nation (Clunan, 2009, p. 31). National internalization of a certain state model or a political ideology was capable of creating international self–other binaries as in the Cold War. How nations govern themselves is one of the qualities that make them what they are. Thus, discourses on national governmental types or their moral and practical merits are intertwined with a nation’s cultural self-identification.

The role and pertinence of political values in national identity discourses vary across the world. They are more salient and relevant for some nations than others. For instance, discourses of democracy and liberal values in governance are an integral part of the American (Lipset, 1963, cited in Fukuyama, 2006) and British national identities (McCrone, 1997; Parekh, 2000). The rise of Taiwanese national identity consists of democratic discourses to distinguish the Taiwanese identity from that of the People’s Republic of China (Hwang, 2007). These discourses about political self-governance and regime types constitute the governmental nodal point within the discursive formation of national identity.

The collection of irregular statements around the governmental nodal point might be seen as inconsequential for Turkish politics since ethnic, cultural, and civilizational discourses seem to overwhelm the discursive activity. However, a more diligent and closer review of discursive materials highlights the significance of the governmental nodal point within the discursive formation of Turkish national identity. Republicanism and secularism are defined as natural concomitants of Turkishness since the early republican era. The transformations in the Turkish political system and discourses during the last decade have initiated debates about the transition from secularist republicanism to majoritarian democracy (Hale & Özbudun, 2010) as a part of governmental self-identification. In this regard, this article proposes that this hegemonic transition from the secularist bloc’s secular (laik) republicanism discourses to the conservative bloc’s majoritarianism discourses occasioned particular foreign policy changes and maneuvers conceivable for Turkey.

A Brief History of Socio-Political Blocs and Governmental Discourses in Turkey

The Turkish Republic’s modernization project needed to emphasize the merits and virtues of the new political system and despise the ancient régime, to legitimize the regime change. Therefore, the discursive and institutional veneration of the republican way of governance has been omnipresent in Turkey. The “republican values” operate as a sacred notion and are embedded in the Turkish national-self narratives of the secular bloc. Besides, secularism (laiklik/laïcité – a constitutional principle since 1937 which still defines the Turkish Republic in Article 2 of the constitution) has been the most discursively emphasized and defining aspect of the new republican regime against “reactionaryism (irtica).” Civilizationally, secularism was crucial to governmental self-definition and as a token of rupture from the Islamic identity. Secularism’s defining status in national-self narratives played an important mediatory role to appropriate civilizational “Westernness” without adopting the West’s religious values.

After introducing multi-party democracy, the Democratic Party (Demokrat Parti, DP) came to power in the first free and fair elections in 1950. Since then, the political parties with traditional values, which were supposedly the carriers of citizens’ demands, have dominated the electoral politics against the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP). The discourse of majoritarianism has been instrumental in producing legitimacy against the secularist republican elites and for the center-right parties, starting from the DP. However, the activity sphere of electoral politics was limited to the bureaucratic state institutions (military and civilian bureaucracy and judiciary), which were traditionally supposed to be the “guardians” of the founding principles and of the continuity of the new regime, whereby the secularist bloc perpetuated its hegemony. The political representatives of the conservative bloc predominantly complied with the “habitus” (Bourdieu, 1990) of the Turkish political field. “This habitus acts as the ground that shapes social and state practice and sets discursive limits” (Rampton, 2010, pp. 46–47). The secularists had hegemonized the field via the bureaucratic state institutions. The conservative/right-wing politicians mostly reproduced the secular republican Turkish national-self discourses with minor policy and discourse deviations.

The secular bloc’s “regime of truth” and institutional hegemony, albeit with a noteworthy success to interpellate a significant portion of the Turkish population and elites, were not able to eradicate alternative national self-images and prevent them from circulating among the public, attracting the audience and challenging their form of national identity construction. The development of a conservative middle class and bourgeoisie, vibrant activity of conservative intelligentsia and academic circles, gradually increasing conservative cultural production and presence in bureaucracy, and flux of conservative masses into industrial urban areas from the agricultural countryside were some of the major domestic, social, and economic developments which made the institutional and discursive hegemony of the secular bloc less sustainable, without resorting to hard power for consent production. These developments strengthened the conservative bloc as a rising subjectivity, specifically during the 1990s. It is important to underline Turgut Özal’s era as an episodic disruption. Turgut Özal, prime minister (1983–1989) and president (1989–1993), challenged the hegemonic national self-understanding of the secular bloc by attempting to transform the Turkish national identity, based on culturally pluralist Ottoman and Islamic references. He also relied on the discourse of majoritarianism for deriving legitimacy. However, the institutional power and discursive superiority of the secular bloc prevailed, and such a transformation initiative remained an episodic venture.

This rising inter-bloc antagonism made itself clear in the so-called “postmodern coup” on February 28, 1997. The secularist Turkish military issued a memorandum against reactionaryism, which initiated the process that ended with the resignation of the Islamist-led (the Welfare Party/Refah Partisi) right-wing coalition government. The Welfare Party, as a supposedly marginal (Islamist) faction of the Turkish conservatives, was shut down by the Constitutional Court, which was also under the secular bloc’s influence. After this experience with Turkish Islamists, the AKP flourished from the ideological split between reformist and traditional factions of Turkey’s legal, and political Islamist tradition.

The reformist Islamist cadres, along with politicians from various factions of Turkey’s conservative spectrum, mainly from center-right parties, founded the AKP on August 14, 2001 under the leadership of the mayor of İstanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The AKP elites positioned themselves at the center to claim the mainstream representation of the conservative bloc rather than staying as “marginal” Islamists. The AKP came to power on November 3, 2002. The AKP also conformed to the hegemonic secular republicanism discourses in the early years of its rule because of the institutional vulnerability of the conservatives; however, the more the AKP consolidated its institutional power, the less it needed to comply with this political habitus. As of early 2021, the AKP remains in power without interruption since the 2002 general election.

Discursive Data Collection and Analysis

Discourse analysis “mostly deals with small corpora which are usually regarded as being typical of certain discourses” (Meyer, 2001, p. 25). It is never complete in any practical sense (Van Dijk, 2001, p. 99). This leads us to set clear criteria to collect manageable data and to prevent methodological anarchy:

Qualified “speaking” subjects (for example, politicians, businessmen, and artists): In this research, the AKP politicians (political elites) are the subjects who made foreign policies and discourses during this period.

Order of discourse—related topic—(e.g., national identity, foreign policy, medical policy, and economic discourses): The AKP elites’ speeches on foreign policy, government model, and national identity are the discursive orders of research.

The referent objects (e.g., units, people, and institutions,): The main referent object in the discourses is Egypt since the research analyzes Turkey’s relations with Egypt.

Reasonable timeframe: The research’s timeframe was from 2002, when the AKP came to power for the first time, to 2021, since the AKP elites are the “qualified speaking subjects” of this analysis. Nevertheless, discourses related to Egypt pervaded the AKP politicians’ speeches following the so-called Arab Spring’s eruption.

Discursive plane—textual source—(e.g., newspapers, journals, archives, and official proceedings): The Turkish daily Hürriyet newspaper is the discursive plane as the main textual primary source. Hürriyet’s online archive contains the texts of speeches of prominent AKP politicians since it assumed power in 2002. The data corpus is composed of 330 articles selected from the Hürriyet electronic depository, including references to Egypt, the Middle East (specifically, the Arab Spring), and Turkey’s self-governance, among over 20,000 pages to create an illustrative discursive set of samples. Every single news page under the newspaper’s category of “agenda (gündem)” in the online archive since 2002, which is the category for political news (including news of the economy, pop-culture or even a sporting event if they are politically significant), was scanned and examined, instead of filtering news and speeches by search keywords. This “exploratory research” helped identify discursive themes signified a posteriori instead of setting keywords a priori, which would limit the investigation. Thirty-five speeches derived from 330 Hürriyet online pages were employed throughout the article. Further, academic articles, unpublished PhD and MA theses, books, and various reports are sources of discursive data. These sources are also used to link this data with the institutional context of Turkey’s relations with Egypt.

The method of analysis of critical discourse analysis in this article is Ruth Wodak’s discourse-historical approach (DHA) (Wodak et al., 2009). DHA distinguishes discursive and non-discursive (institutional) activities and realms and does not isolate them from each other. It is based on the interpenetration of these two spheres. DHA is appropriate for this study because it is known to “assume a dialectical relationship between particular discursive practices and the specific fields of action (including situations, institutional frames and social structures), in which they are embedded” (Wodak, 2001, p. 66). The illustration of institutional settings as a non-discursive realm is necessary to explain the interplay between particular articulations and environment, time, and institutions.

DHA’s hermeneutic process of reading and its non-causal discursive epistemology is complementary to epistemological conceivability. Instead of applying discourse analysis on longer but fewer excerpts from speeches within a shorter time span, the article covers a relatively longer period through brief but numerous references from momentous and representative/typical articulations displaying continuity and change the utterances of AKP elites over time, in relation to Turkish foreign policy toward Egypt (Tetik, 2020, p. 5). This article analyses the governmental discourses of the AKP elites within path-dependent historical context of Turkey-Egypt relations through the prism of DHA.

Mutual Respect and Mild Rivalry: Turkey–Egypt Relations until the “Arab Spring”

Identity-driven Historical Context

The Republic of Turkey and Egypt established diplomatic relations in 1926 and gradually established economic and cultural relations. Notwithstanding, they also had serious episodic fluctuations and tensions during the Atatürk era, mainly because of Egyptian shelter provided to the opponents of the new Turkish Republic and discrepancies between the governing regimes (Baş, 2015). Even though the characteristics of each country’s regime caused friction between them, the relations did not deteriorate since these two countries were indispensable to each other as the major powers in the Middle East (Bulut, 2010). This realist mutual respect and mild rivalry have endured as the defining themes of Egypt and Turkey’s interrelations. At the beginning of the post-World War II era, Turkey’s interest in playing an active role in the Muslim World as part of the Western security architecture and Egypt’s struggle to assume the Arab leadership driven by the 1952 Egyptian “revolution” drove the governments’ ambitions. After Gamal Abdel Nasser assumed power in Egypt in 1954, bilateral relations started to sour significantly. The Egyptian government held Turkey responsible for the new Western attempt to hegemonize the region, and the MB even blamed Turkey for being a “second Israel” and called for its destruction (Bozdağlıoğlu, 2003, p. 118; Karpat, 2015, p. 202). Egypt perceived Turkey as a challenge to its supposed leadership and domination in the Arab world and a blow to the Arab unity. The Baghdad Pact/The Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) process was a salient instance of Turkish-Egyptian rivalry and the contest for leadership in the region (Bishku, 2012; Karpat, 2015, p. 191) that surfaced in the Middle East in an interest-based/realist and national identity-driven (cultural/ethnic Arab–Turkish division) manner.

Turkey’s participation in the Western bloc with NATO reinforced its image as the “Trojan Horse” of the colonialist West in the Middle East. Turkey considered Egypt to be under the enemy bloc’s influence, namely the Soviets (Bozdağlıoğlu, 2003, p. 67), and some officials in the Turkish government also perceived Nasser as a communist agent (Bishku, 2012, p. 39). After 1965, Turkey had begun to strive for better relations with the Arab-majority countries, including Egypt. For instance, Turkey had avoided antagonizing Egypt and other Arab countries in the 1967 Six-Day War against Israel (Magued, 2016, p. 13). Further, Turkey’s pro-Arab stance against Israel echoed positively and was appreciated by the Arab-majority countries, including Egypt (Daşdemir, 2006, p. 206; Köse, 2017, p. 84; Kösebalaban, 2014, p. 205). Furthermore, the dramatic military fiasco of Egypt and other Arab countries in the Six-Day War emasculated the Arab nationalist ideology (Ateş, 2012, p. 52; Özkan, 2013, p. 402), which was the primary ideological/identity-driven barrier for Turkish–Egyptian reconciliation.

Egypt’s foreign policy priorities changed gradually and considerably during the 1970s under Anwar Sadat. After the death of Nasser, the Egyptian government sought to ease relations with the West and with Israel, leading to the 1978 Camp David Accords that led to the deterioration of Egypt’s relations with some other Arab countries (Ateş, 2012, pp. 83–84; Kösebalaban, 2014, p. 219). Turkey consistently took side with Arabs during this period while also avoiding antagonizing relations with Israel as much as possible. Sadat’s policies and Turkey’s soft pro-Arab policy opened a path for deepening future relations between the two countries. Egypt’s primary concern in foreign affairs under Hosni Mubarak during the 1980s was to restore Egypt’s image in the Arab and Islamic world, an image devastated by the 1978 accords with Israel and the pro-Western policies of Sadat (Magued, 2016, p. 14; Özkan, 2013, p. 403). Under Mubarak, both governments established stronger ties and pursued stable relations. Political, social, cultural, military, and economic relations between Turkey and Egypt intensified rapidly and significantly (Daşdemir, 2006, pp. 272–277). Even though there were small-scale disagreements on various issues (Magued, 2016), Turkish-Egyptian political relations did not go through a notable crisis during Mubarak’s tenure until the Arab Spring (Köse, 2017, p. 107).

Perpetuation of Realist Policies and Discourses

During the initial years of the AKP rule, Egypt did not appear often in the daily discourses of AKP politicians since Egypt was not an important matter of discussion in Turkey’s foreign agenda until 2011. The AKP’s general policies and discourses on Egypt until the break-out of the so-called Arab Spring, were mostly consistent with Turkey’s traditional “realist” outlook. When the AKP came to power in November 2002, Turkey and Egypt already had a stable relationship that was growing slowly. In December 2005, Turkey and Egypt signed a free trade agreement, which boosted their already growing economic interactions. After a gradual rapprochement between Turkey and Egypt during the Mubarak years, Turkish elites spoke of Egypt as an important “friendly” country using historical references. The speech delivered by Ahmet Necdet Sezer, the then secularist President of Turkey, in Cairo during his visit in 2005 displayed this traditional apprehension of Egypt: “We saw that our approaches, regional, and international issues are similar as two ‘friend’ and ‘brother’ countries. Turkey and Egypt are both in leadership positions to establish peace and stability in the region [the Middle East]” (Hürriyet, 2005).

It is important to note that even though the AKP government complied with the secular president’s active and friendly approach to the Egyptian government, the AKP was ideologically at odds with the Egyptian regime under Mubarak. The AKP’s democratic success urged “moderate” Islamic political movements in Egypt to pursue a similar trajectory to seize political power (Altunışık, 2010). Yet, the AKP furthered close economic and political ties with Egypt during Mubarak’s tenure, reiterated the hackneyed formal and diplomatic “friendship” rhetoric, and emphasized the irreplaceable weight and leading role of both countries in regional stability.

The Gaza War: Partially Surfaced Identity-driven Antagonism

Latent political–ideological friction between Turkey’s conservative elites and the Egyptian regime surfaced partly during and after the Israeli military assault on the Gaza Strip (Operation Cast Lead) in 2008–2009 against Hamas. Since Hamas had won a majority of seats in the 2006 Palestinian legislative election, Erdoğan stated during the Gaza crisis that disregarding Hamas’s electoral victory and attacking it was not coherent with democratic principles. He rhetorically urged everybody to respect Hamas’s supposed political legitimacy (Hürriyet, 2009a). Hamas was discursively constructed in the Turkish public sphere as a legitimate pro-Islamic Palestinian political party fighting for the Palestine cause. Hamas’s assumed political legitimacy was deployed in discourses concerning the governmental nodal point of majoritarianism more than the supposed common Islamic civilizational bonds. However, since Hamas had widely been seen as an extension of the main Islamic opponent MB, the Egyptian government was biased and suspicious about the organization (Akpınar, 2015, p. 7) and stayed close to the pro-secular Fatah. This antagonistic perception of Hamas by Turkey and Egypt was a salient manifestation of an identity-driven chasm between the AKP elites and the Egyptian government.

Mubarak’s Egypt adopted a cautious and balanced rhetoric and policy during the Gaza crisis and even imputed responsibility to Hamas along with Israel (Aras, 2009, p. 18; Köse, 2017, p. 97). This was an explicit divergence of discourse and policy on the issue, which had deeper connotations for the regional balance of power and perception of leadership role. Turkey’s mediation initiative between Palestine/Hamas and Israel before the Israeli assault and between Hamas and Fatah after the assault was already a concern for Egypt due to its fear of handing over its regional role to Turkey. Turkey intentionally tried to refrain from causing anxiety in Egypt about Turkish engagement in Arab affairs in ways that might shift the geopolitical balance (Dinç, 2011, p. 69).

During the negotiations for a ceasefire, Erdoğan said that Turkey would not intervene in issues under Egypt’s control (Hürriyet, 2009b). Even though Turkey declared that it is not trying to steal a role from Egypt in 2009 (Altunışık, 2010, p. 15), the weakening of Egypt’s leadership role under Mubarak in the shared sphere of influence enabled Turkey to fill this vacuum by posing itself as the main defender of Muslims in international platforms (Altunışık & Çuhadar, 2010, p. 373; Altunışık & Martin, 2011, p. 577). Turkey’s openly pro-Palestine/Hamas stance required distancing itself from Mubarak’s Egypt (Bank & Karadag, 2013, p. 297), and Mubarak’s Egypt stayed skeptical about Turkey’s regional intentions (Magued, 2016, p. 19).

Turkey continued to make joint efforts with Egypt to solve regional problems in the Gaza crisis and furthered close political and economic relations despite fractured identity-laden positions. Prime Minister Erdoğan toured major Arab countries, including Egypt, during the hot days of the Gaza crisis. There was intense diplomatic traffic between Turkish and Egyptian officials for post-war solutions in Palestine. The Turkish side strongly emphasized the necessity of a coalition between Fatah and Hamas during these mutual visits (Hürriyet, 2009c) and appreciated Egypt’s efforts in initiating such a coalition, although Mubarak preserved Egypt’s traditional, pro-Fatah position (Hürriyet, 2009d). In later days, Turkey urged Egyptian officials to reopen the Egypt-Gaza border for humanitarian relief. Even though the AKP’s ideological proximity to the Islamic elements in Egypt surfaced partially during the Gaza crisis, the AKP elites maintained Turkey’s realist approach. Hence, Egypt did not often appear in the daily speeches of the AKP politicians during the crisis, and the AKP elites employed a cautious and diplomatically respectful rhetoric vis-à-vis Egypt despite a semi-veiled ideological antagonism.

Turkish–Egyptian “Spring” during the Arab Uprisings Period

Rhetoric of Emancipation on the “Arab Spring”

The so-called Arab Spring erupted “in Tunisia on 17 December 2010 when a street vendor self-immolated in protest of maltreatment by the local police” (Başkan, 2017, p. 3), which ignited the on-going mayhem in the Middle East. Even though “Turkey had been developing close ties with the ‘autocratic regimes’” of the Arab World before the uprisings (Alessandri & Altunışık, 2013, cited in Ayata, 2015, p. 95), the AKP government started to adopt a conspicuously pro-opposition position when public clamors began to shake Egypt’s streets. Taking a clear and categorical side during the disorder in the Arab World, the AKP consequentially reoriented Turkey’s modus operandi in the region. In his first statement, Erdoğan called on Hosni Mubarak to address people’s humane demands and desire for change without hesitation or delay. He emphasized that Egypt deserves the best democracy and freedom, any suffering of the Egyptian people would deeply hurt the Turkish nation, and that the Middle Eastern governments should not defy “the will of people” (Hürriyet, 2011a, 2011b). This protestor-friendly strong rhetoric that legitimized the unrest and discursively constructed the opposition as the rightful side signaled Turkey’s subsequent close and partisan engagement in the Middle East.

It is essential to situate the discourses of the AKP elites on Egypt in their broader democracy (majoritarian) narrative in the context of the “Arab Spring” to analyze how Egypt became conceivable and implementable on some of Turkey’s policies. In February 2011, the minister of Foreign Affairs, Ahmet Davutoğlu, defined the uprisings and potential democratic transformation in the region as the “normalization of history” because the Western colonization and the Cold War artificially separated the Middle Eastern nations (Hürriyet, 2011c). Davutoğlu strongly associated the authoritarian regimes with disunity and disorder in the region (Davutoğlu, as cited in Başkan, 2017, p. 10). He articulated that democratized Syria, Egypt, Libya, and others would integrate Turkey with each other more than ever and that Turkey would work tirelessly for people’s legitimate aspirations (Davutoğlu, as cited in Altunışık, 2013, p. 4; Başkan, 2017, p. 10). The potential transition to democratic regimes was discursively portrayed as the abolition of artificial borders between people.

This narrative of the “Arab Spring” depicted democracy as a regionally unifying factor and discursively approximated the Turkish national-self with the Middle Eastern nations. This discursive strategy alienates ancient anti-democratic régimes of the region from “real” nations, which were “naturally” akin to each other. The Middle Eastern countries were conceived under the banner of a common Islamic Civilization, and, now, with the Arab uprisings, democracy was presented as the essential governmental means of achieving such a civilizational integration.

Likewise, Abdullah Gül, the then President of Turkey, adopted this emancipatory discursive representation of the “Arab Spring” and signified it as a historic transition to democracy, through which the people of the Middle East seized their fates (Hürriyet, 2011d). Gül made an analogy of the Arab Spring with the revolutions of 1848 and the “democratic waves” in Europe and South America after 1989 (Hürriyet, 2011e). This discursive approach constructed a powerful democratic narrative of the so-called Arab Spring, which was domestically parallel with the theme of majoritarian democracy within the Turkish national identity discourses concerning the governmental nodal point. This governmental understanding of the national-self reflected itself in the “Arab Spring” through the support of Arab opposition, which was perceived and constructed as “democratic forces.”

The AKP elites overcame the ethics/norms versus self-interest/stability dilemma in the region (Öniş, 2012, p. 46; Tocci, 2011) by discursively constructing the promotion of democracy among the Arab countries to be in Turkey’s national interests. The AKP politicians presented democratization to remedy the chaotic situation, thus including it in Turkey’s national interests. The AKP government expected to see that the electoral victories of its ideologically related political parties (generally referred to as “moderate Islamists”) in those countries would advance regional integration, and Turkey would materially benefit from this situation. These potential developments might have made Turkey play its supposed “historical leadership role” in the region through the soft power of the so-called “Turkish model” by like-minded governments in Arab-majority countries (Aras & Yorulmazlar, 2016, p. 6; Ayata, 2015, p. 95). If we were to put the AKP’s general narrative during the “Arab Spring” in a nutshell, it would be that the AKP elites adopted an electoral democracy discourse which attached these discourses to their governmental understanding of the Turkish national-self along with emphasis on Islamic civilizational commonality.

“A Turkish Model” or “Inspiration” for Egypt and the Others?

The so-called “Turkish model” or “Turkish experience” (Öniş, 2012, p. 45) was an important theme in the discourses of the AKP elites on Egypt and the Arab uprisings. The AKP’s experience is supposed to be a successful blueprint of “democratic Islamic” party politics. This was the theme of the “Turkish model.” The AKP politicians adopted an ambiguous and cautious rhetoric for the “Turkish model” for Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries. While they did not explicitly acknowledge the idea of being a “model” for other countries, they deemed Turkey to be a source of “inspiration” (Ülgen, 2011, p. 3). Turkey’s being a democratic “inspiration” for the “Muslim nations” was depicted as “natural” because Turkey and those nations composed a historical and civilizational totality. İbrahim Kalın stated that Turkey influenced the wave of change in the region by being an example through democratization and economic development led by the AKP government (Hürriyet, 2011f). Erdoğan stated that the “Islamic World” was saying that democracy and Islam were reconcilable thanks to the Turkish experience (Hürriyet, 2011g). He put the AKP’s position as follows: “We are not seeking to be a ‘model’ whatsoever, but we can be a source of ‘inspiration’ since Turkey has shown that Islam and democracy can co-exist perfectly” (Erdoğan, as cited in Sailhan, 2011).

This choice of labeling Turkey as an “inspiration” rather than a “model” stemmed from the concerns of potential and actual allegations of Turkey’s “Neo-Ottoman” expansionist hidden agenda. This “Neo-Ottomanism” claim was insistently denied by the AKP officials (Samaan, 2013, p. 65) to prevent a possible backlash. The AKP politicians were vigilant of the discursive formation of the contemporary Turkish nation in the Middle East as a Neo-Ottoman villain, which had already been constructed with the discursive theme of the old “Turkish yoke” in the historiographical narratives of the Arab nationalist regimes (Yılmaz & Ustun, 2011, p. 87). The AKP politicians discursively downplayed the active promotion of its governmental model because of “regime export” or “imperial” connotations but passively constructed the Turkish way of governance as a unique national feature that could inspire other civilizationally “brother” nations. These discourses contributed to the national identity construction at home as a majoritarian/electoral democracy concerning the governmental nodal point and made much closer relations with Egypt conceivable and possible in the following years.

Democratic Transition, the MB Rule, and the Golden Age of Relations

Turkey’s supposed normative popular leadership and the close interest of AKP officials in Egypt while using pro-revolutionary rhetoric drew the attention of the Egyptian public and political groups (Sabra, 2013, p. 100). The Turkish-Egyptian relations saliently deepened and turned into a political alliance after the resignation of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. Abdullah Gül visited Cairo in March 2011, which made him the first head of a state to visit Egypt after the “25 January Revolution” (Özkan & Korkut, 2013, p. 170). Erdoğan paid a visit to Egypt in September 2011 with many Turkish businesspeople to sign economic and trade agreements between the two countries (Khalifa, 2017, p. 105). Turkish and Egyptian officials signed an agreement on forming the High-Level Strategic Cooperation Council, which was planned before the “revolution.” Turkey’s identity-driven discursive shift, which conceived of Egypt and Turkey as segments of the same civilizational totality, also fed the geostrategic rhetoric of the AKP elites and discursively constructed Egypt as an ally who needed to be strong rather than a latent competitor. Ahmet Davutoğlu (as cited in Altunışık, 2013, p. 4) stated that Turkey wants a strong Egypt and that the Turkish-Egyptian alliance would be an axis of “real democracy” (as cited in Özkan & Korkut, 2013, pp. 171–172).

One of the discursive themes employed within the discourses of AKP politicians, particularly on Egypt during the “transition process,” was historical empathy through governmental analogies. Egypt supposedly has a politically and socially conservative-secular dualism like Turkey, which has been working in favor of the secularist establishment and has been victimizing conservatives. This supposed antagonist domestic structure in Egypt provided the AKP politicians with an opportunity to discursively revoke analogies that linked the social groups in both countries with each other. Strong analogical narratives closely connected the domestic national identity discourses regarding the governmental nodal point with the “democratic transition” in Egypt. Pejorative floating signifiers like “status quo,” “tutelage,” “elitists,” “oppression;” and affirmative vocabulary like “the voice of people,” “change,” “ballot boxes,” and “democracy” were used in the same manner and with the same rhetorical function vis-à-vis the Egyptian establishment as it was discursively weaponized internally against the secular bloc (Hürriyet, 2011h, 2011i). This discursive strategy aimed to construct the “new” Egypt as a natural ally of the new Turkish national identity.

Turkey also became involved in the transformation of Egypt and other Arab countries “by providing technical assistance, political advice, and economic help” (Altunışık, 2013, p. 5) during and after the “democratic transition” phase. The Turkish–Egyptian relations had gained new momentum with the electoral victory of the MB’s Mohammed Morsi as the first democratically elected president of Egypt in June 2012. This result bolstered the AKP’s intention to “build a regional partnership with Egypt, to establish a new axis of power in the Middle East” (Özkan & Korkut, 2013, p. 171) via like-minded governments that shared the same governmental (majoritarianism) and civilizational (Islam) national self-perception. “The AKP government was quite supportive of President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in general, extending political, economic and technical assistance to ensure its success” (Altunışık, 2014, p. 11). The Morsi government’s connections with the MB groups across the region were useful for the AKP government to further its political influence in the Middle East (Pala & Aras, 2015, p. 11).

The Morsi government warmly welcomed Ankara’s significantly supportive approach and substantial contributions. The perspectives of the Egyptian and Turkish governments on regional matters became more harmonious; for instance, Egypt under the MB adopted a similar stance and rhetoric as Turkey, the common Palestine “cause,” Israel, and Hamas, which was once considered a national security threat to Egypt (Agdemir, 2016, pp. 227–228). As Rashid al-Gannouchi, the leader of the “moderate Islamist” Ennahda Party of Tunisia, put it, Morsi’s Egypt and Erdoğan’s Turkey shared a majoritarian understanding of democracy (Kirişçi, 2013) along with the common civilizational national self-perception. This unprecedented level of good relations between Turkey and Egypt was promising as a strong political axis since both are historically leading countries in the region. However, the 2013 Egyptian “coup d’état” dramatically changed this because of the drastic and overarching power shift in Egypt.

The “Fall”: Turkey’s Egypt Predicament in the Post Arab Spring Era

The AKP elites immediately defined the Egyptian army’s intervention as a “coup d’état (darbe).” Whereas the “coup” government was demonized discursively, the Egyptian people and the MB were strictly distinguished as the victims of this intervention. The first verbal reactions to the “coup” laid out the AKP’s consistent discursive approach towards the military-dominated Egyptian government in the following years. During the early days of the “coup,” Davutoğlu stated that the overthrow of a “democratically elected government of Egypt” was not acceptable (Hürriyet, 2013a). Egemen Bağış said that Turkey expected that the Egyptian “brothers” would build “democracy” again and demonstrate to the world that “the national will” could not be defeated by tanks and rifles (Hürriyet, 2013b). Erdoğan emphasized that the Egyptian military’s intervention was constitutionally illegitimate, and the only way to “democracy” was the “ballot box” (Hürriyet, 2013c). Abdullah Gül defined the intervention as an interruption of democracy and declared his wish that Egypt be run by “elected governors” (Hürriyet, 2013d).

The floating signifiers related to the governmental nodal point, such as “ballot box,” “national will,” “coup,” and “legitimacy,” were operationalized in the discourses on the “coup” in Egypt. There was a clear continuity between the governmental self-perception of the “new” Turkey and discourses, before and after the coup in Egypt. Erdoğan defined Turkey’s struggle in Egypt as a “cause of democracy” (Hürriyet, 2014a). The normatively saturated expressions of the AKP elites were the illustrative articulations of the “majoritarian democratic” governmental understanding of the national-self reflected onto the Egyptian case. Besides, the democratically-elected nature of the Morsi government conflated with its Islamic character within the AKP’s discourses, but the “majoritarianism” aspect was prioritized.

The AKP merely focused on the majoritarian/electoral side of the Morsi government as the sole base for democratic legitimacy and almost completely disregarded the popular discontent with the MB government. The AKP elites discursively constructed a binary opposition of us/democratic/pro-Muslim in Turkey and them/anti-democratic/anti-Muslim in Egypt. As in the Turkish domestic narrative, the military/judiciary-based bureaucratic hegemony in Egypt was rhetorically alienated from the “real/authentic/genuine” Egyptian society via the discursive strategy of governmental illegitimacy. The emphasis on governmental illegitimacy through a discourse on majoritarianism constituted the discursive medium for the crisis of Turkey-Egypt political relations. The golden age of relations was discursively constructed on the governmental and civilizational narrative of national-self proximity. The same narrative of governmental proximity which approximated the two countries enabled the sudden deterioration of relations due to the instant governmental transformation which was ushered in by the “putschist Egyptian army.”

Analogous Themes and the Projection of the Turkish National-Self onto Egypt

As opposed to the AKP government’s consistent endorsement of the MB, the military-backed interim Egyptian government declared the MB as a terrorist group and launched a regional campaign against it (Darwich, 2017, pp. 1–2). The bitter rhetoric of the AKP elites vis-à-vis the “coup government” and their pro-MB narrative caused an inevitable backlash from the Egyptian side as meddling in its internal politics (Samaan, 2013, p. 67). On November 23, 2013, the Egyptian government declared the Turkish ambassador in Cairo persona non grata, and Turkey reciprocated this action by expelling the Egyptian ambassador. As a response to the pejorative portrayal of the “coup government” by the AKP elites, the Egyptian government depicted the Turkish state as a bullying enemy (Özkan, 2013, p. 21). Even though economic transactions and trade between the two countries did not collapse, there was a noteworthy decrease in numbers (Köse, 2017, pp. 206–209).

The Egyptian media retaliated against Turkey’s majoritarianism discourse weaponized against the legitimacy of the military intervention by accusing Turkey of supporting terrorism in Egypt (Cagaptay & Sievers, 2015). Under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Egyptian government perpetuated the “Turkey as the supporter or sponsor of terrorism in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East” rhetoric. The AKP refused to brand the MB as a terrorist organization and offered asylum to the members of MB (Dunne, 2017). Therefore, Turkey has appeared as the villain in the Egyptian narrative of the war against terrorism due to Turkey’s relations with the MB, which was the target of a vicious crackdown by the Egyptian government (Grimm, 2017). Moreover, Erdoğan is blamed for having colonial ambitions, and this anti-Erdoğan or AKP rhetoric was extended to attack the common Ottoman past in the following years (Al-Jazeera, 2020).

The Egyptian military’s violent intervention in the anti-coup protests, jailing the supporters of the MB and handing death penalty sentences to Morsi and other various MB affiliates, hardened the rhetorical tone of the AKP elites against the Egyptian interim government and later, the rule of el-Sisi. Turkey opposed Morsi’s eviction and sentence, called for sanctions against the ruling “coup” regime, and provided political asylum to MB members (Magued, 2016, p. 2). The military-backed Egyptian government considered these actions “a blatant intervention in its domestic affairs and a derogation from diplomatic norms” (Magued, 2016, p. 2). Erdoğan accused President el-Sisi of killing thousands of Morsi supporters and considered Morsi the legitimate President. These developments during the years following the 2013 “coup” exacerbated political tensions between the two governments and pushed them to take geopolitical steps and make strategic alliances (such as Egypt’s growing cooperation with Greece and the Greek authority in Southern Cyprus) to undermine each other’s position. The realist perception that both governments had of each other in the past led to a mild rivalry, non-interference, balance, and mutual respect. As regional major powers were reinvigorated, it turned into an identity-driven hard rivalry.

One of the prevalent discursive themes in the narrative of the AKP elites on Egypt after the “coup” has been the recurring analogies with Turkey’s internal socio-political dispositions and infighting in the ideological blocs. As pointed out earlier, pejorative vocabulary borrowed from the Turkish domestic field of discursive activity like “military/judiciary tutelage,” “status quo,” “anti-democracy,” “elitism,” “authoritarianism,” and “national will” were operationalized against “pre-revolution” (2011) and “post-coup” (2013) Egypt as part of a linguistic arsenal. The AKP politicians repeatedly emphasized that since Turkey experienced several military coups throughout its history, the Turkish people empathized with the Egyptian people and did not want Egyptian people to undergo the same processes (Hürriyet, 2013e, 2013i).

These analogous discourses demonized the military-backed Egyptian government as the “enemy of their own people” by discursively constructing internal antagonistic binary oppositions. For instance, Erdoğan compared Turkey’s military intervention on February 28, 1997 and the May 27, 1960 junta to the Egyptian “coup” (Hürriyet, 2013f). They discursively applied the same antagonistic pattern to the political picture in Egypt through these analogies, which coded the Egyptian government as the enemy camp and enabled the worsening of the relations. The AKP elites also used the linguistic tool of analogy in a grand conspiracy narrative against Turkey and Egypt. They discursively situated these two nations amidst major and coherent devilish international conspiracies and political designs. For instance, they associated the 2013 Egyptian “coup” and protests, which were considered the spark of the “coup” with the 2013 Gezi Park Protests in Turkey and claimed a clear continuation between them (Hürriyet, 2013g, 2014b). This analogical international conspiracy theme constructed two nations as the victims of the same internal and external villains (Hürriyet, 2013h, 2014c, 2014d). The discursive strategy of heteronimization the AKP elites bound the contemporary rulers of Egypt with the secularist opposition in Turkey. Since the supposed proxy of external villains was in power in Egypt, this ostensible Egyptian-friendly narrative strengthened tensions between the two governments and enabled the downward spiral in relations.

When Muhammad Morsi was sentenced to death by an Egyptian court in May 2015, Erdoğan and the AKP government criticized this verdict severely. They inserted personal analogies with former (Menderes-Morsi) and contemporary (Erdoğan-Morsi) Turkish politicians into discourses (Hürriyet, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c). These personal and collective analogies projected the supposed dualist socio-political composition in Turkey onto Egypt with the same value-laden and normative discursive strategies. It is also important to note that the Rabia sign/salute (four fingers raised), which was the symbol of solidarity with the MB and the reminder of the “Rabia massacre” committed by the Egyptian army to gradually disperse anti-coup protesters, became the official hand gesture/salute of the AKP in the years following the incident. Transferring even the party salute from the MB and Egypt demonstrated how the AKP closely identified the Turkish national-self with Egypt and their ideological position with that of the MB. This governmental and civilizational discursive construction of Egypt in the Turkish public sphere made national self-identification highly relevant to the relations with Egypt and made today’s still-frozen relations conceivable. The AKP elites identified Turkey with a segment of Egyptian society, demonstrated solidarity with it, and severely and morally demonized the ruling faction. The reflection of national self-perception and its projection onto Egyptian society caused seriously negative consequences between the states and enabled reciprocal hostile policies.

Discursive Possibilities of a Prospective Restoration

Unlike other major actors in the international system, Turkey mostly side-lined its material motivations after the 2013 Egyptian “coup” and took an ideological stance that focused on a majoritarian form of democracy and illegitimacy of a military overthrow (Yegin, 2016, pp. 4–5), that caused its relations with Egypt to plummet. During 2016, voices from the AKP elites who held out an olive branch to the Egyptian government began to timidly reverberate in the Turkish public sphere (Hürriyet, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c). Economic incentives, the Egyptian government’s infrequent signs of softening restraints on the MB, the demand of the business of community both countries, and tumultuous circumstances in the region were encouraging forces for such a rapprochement.

Even though some reluctant voices from political and business elites were also heard after 2017, in favor of restoring and reviving political relations (Zamel, 2017), there was no notable sign of an upcoming Turkish-Egyptian rapprochement. On the contrary, these two governments were still pursuing foreign policies that would balance and contain each other via alliances with other countries. The discursively demonized “post-coup” Egyptian government was still in power, and el-Sisi, the leader of the 2013 military intervention, was re-elected as the president in March 2018 with more than 97% of votes in an election that is widely reported to have been forged (Duclos, 2018; Khorshid, 2018). Egypt sought cooperation with Turkey’s archenemies: Greece and the Greek administration in Southern Cyprus, especially regarding the energy fields (gas and oil) in the Eastern Mediterranean. This resulted in a harsh backlash from Turkish officials, and the Egyptians declared Turkey’s intervention as undermining Egyptian sovereignty (Abdulhamid, 2018; Aleem, 2018; Helmi, 2018). Besides, the Egyptian government took steps to eradicate the symbols reminiscent of the Turkish-Ottoman past by changing street names (Galal, 2018), conducted joint military drills with Greece in 2017 (Awny, 2017), and strongly condemned Turkey’s Olive Branch Operation in the Syrian city of Afrin in 2018. Turkey developed strong ties with Egypt’s southern neighbor, Sudan, including military cooperation and agreements on gigantic construction projects at the end of 2017 (MacKenzie, 2018; Maguid, 2018).

Furthermore, Turkey’s high-profile political and military engagement in the civil war in Egypt’s western neighbor Libya and the Turkey–Libya maritime deal designating sea borders of the two countries (exclusive economic zones [EEZ]) in 2019 startled the Egyptian government. Egypt reciprocated by signing a maritime agreement on EEZ with Greece in August 2020. Egypt allied with UAE (with the indirect participation of France and Russia) in supporting Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army against the Turkey-Qatar alliance backing the internationally recognized Government of National Accord in Libya. President Erdoğan furthered the governmentally normative discourse on Egypt in the case of Libya’s turmoil and used the analogy between Khalifa Haftar’s military rule in Libya and the Egyptian “coup” (Hürriyet, 2019c).

Even though the volume of bilateral trade between the countries increased in 2018 and 2019 thanks to the still-holding free trade agreement (Sarıaslan, 2019), the Egyptian government’s execution of MB members and the death of former president Morsi during a trial in 2019 received a harsh rhetorical response from the Turkish side (Kalabalık, 2019). Erdoğan called President el-Sisi a “murderer” and “cruel,” made an analogy between himself and the deceased Morsi, and declared him a “martyr” (Hürriyet, 2019a). The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs furthered the governmentally normative narrative on Egypt and declared that “Martyr Mohammed Morsi will be always remembered as an exceptional personality in his country’s fight for ‘democracy’” (Hürriyet, 2019b). Although potential geopolitical and economic profits incentivize a political rapprochement, the AKP government’s “majoritarianism” discourse about Turkish national-self and Egypt has not shown a noteworthy reconfiguration.

Turkey’s relations with Egypt returned to their pre-Arab Spring realist terms and became even worse than the default, which was a mild rivalry with mutual respect to each other’s power. Both sides now consider each other ideological enemies and strategic rivals. Besides, Egypt almost disappeared from the daily discourses of the AKP elites. It appears episodically, depending on the significance of an Egypt-related development. The recent incidents in the Eastern Mediterranean and Libya, which became new sources of friction between the two countries, put Egypt on the headlines in Turkey again. The Turkish opposition problematizes the counterproductive aspect of AKP’s policies, specifically regarding the context of tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean, and pressures the government to sit at the table with Egypt to protect Turkish national interests. Although Erdoğan admitted that Turkey and Egypt discuss confrontation via intelligence agencies, this national interest-driven conversation did not end well because of the Greece-Egypt maritime deal, and it does not herald an imminent détente. The AKP government fell into a rhetorical entrapment while avoiding the reconciliation of Turkish national interests and identity narratives regarding Egypt.

Since this enmity is conjunctural, and the Egyptian people are still defined as a victimized “brother” nation suffering under evil governors, a rapprochement is likely to occur in the future depending on domestic factors or structural pressures. However, as of 2021, there is no discursive medium to make this possible restoration of relations conceivable. Unexpected and/or dramatic transformations in the domestic political stages of both countries might give way to a fundamental change in the relations. In the absence of such drastic changes, the AKP elites might invoke a national interest discourse and rationalize a possible restoration by discursively portraying it as an inevitable and temporary evil imposed by cumbersome conditions, alongside historical and civilizational brotherhood narratives.

Conclusion

Turkey’s relations with Egypt experienced positive and negative extremes in a short period. There is a lacuna in academic literature in holistically addressing these significant alterations in Turkish-Egyptian relations. This article attempted to fill this void by panoramically focusing on Turkey’s interrelations with Egypt since the beginning of the AKP rule. The level of social, economic, and political changes that Turkey underwent during the last decade after the foundation of republican institutions during the 1920s and 1930s, was unprecedented. These seismic shifts also echoed in Turkey’s national self-perception with regard to governmental ideology. The transition of institutional and bureaucratic power from the secularist elites to the conservative ones enabled the new hegemonic bloc to transform Turkey’s national self-image discursively. The hegemonic “secular republicanism” discourses of Turkey’s secular bloc were gradually replaced by the conservative bloc’s “majoritarianism” narrative.

This transformation in Turkey’s hegemonic governmental discourses and self-perception became a discursive medium for consequential changes in Turkish foreign policy, including its relations with Egypt. For a long time, Egypt used to appear in the Turkish public sphere in realist terms as a respected regional major rival/player. However, today, Egypt is constructed as a victimized “brother” under a democratically illegitimate government, which bound it with Turkey’s governmental national self-perception. We witnessed oscillations of the political pendulum of deterioration and alliance in Turkey’s relations with Egypt depending on domestic factors. The governmental “majoritarianism” discourses of the Turkish conservative elites extended beyond Turkey’s borders, which enabled the pinnacle of Turkish-Egyptian relations during Morsi’s tenure. Since Turkey’s capacity to influence other actors in the international system was not adequate to kindle a change in Egypt, this governmentally normative and assertive discourse became a medium for the deterioration of interrelations following the Egyptian army’s removal of the Morsi administration.

Nevertheless, both sides have plenty of real incentives, like the recent energy resource competition in the Eastern Mediterranean and Libya’s military crisis. Furthermore, since there is no ontological enmity between Turkey and Egypt, a rapprochement between the two nations is inevitable. However, a preparatory and transitional discursive framing is vital to make such a rapprochement “conceivable” and place this détente in Turkey’s box of policy options, unless an unpredicted intra-national power shift occurs in one of these countries. For the time being, we do not observe such a development on the horizon.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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The Pendulum of Majoritarianism: Turkey’s Governmental Self-Identity and Turkish–Egyptian Relations

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Governmental Nodal Point in National Identity Discourses

A Brief History of Socio-Political Blocs and Governmental Discourses in Turkey

Discursive Data Collection and Analysis

Mutual Respect and Mild Rivalry: Turkey–Egypt Relations until the “Arab Spring”

Identity-driven Historical Context

Perpetuation of Realist Policies and Discourses

The Gaza War: Partially Surfaced Identity-driven Antagonism

Turkish–Egyptian “Spring” during the Arab Uprisings Period

Rhetoric of Emancipation on the “Arab Spring”

“A Turkish Model” or “Inspiration” for Egypt and the Others?

Democratic Transition, the MB Rule, and the Golden Age of Relations

The “Fall”: Turkey’s Egypt Predicament in the Post Arab Spring Era

Analogous Themes and the Projection of the Turkish National-Self onto Egypt

Discursive Possibilities of a Prospective Restoration

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

References