Turkish foreign and domestic policy: the Balkan Pact, the Saadabad Pact, and Nationalism in the 1930s

Coban, Mustafa ORCID: 0000-0002-7059-4081 (2024). Turkish foreign and domestic policy: the Balkan Pact, the Saadabad Pact, and Nationalism in the 1930s. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

By examining the foreign policy dynamics of the Balkan and Saadabad Pacts, the thesis demonstrates the agency of signatory nation-states against a historiography that posits the Great Powers as causal in interwar regional foreign policy. There is more specific emphasis on the links between Turkish foreign and domestic policy that connects to regional diplomacy. This includes a new perspective on etatism as a pillar of Republican legitimacy, the state aimed to entrench itself over the territory by promoting the interests of the core nation, identified as Sunni-Muslim Turkish speakers. This included consolidating Ankara as the infrastructural centre of the new Republican order. There is a continuity and change narrative based on Erik Zürcher’s continuity of the state elite and Rogers Brubaker’s concept of the nationalising state. Turkish nationalism revealed itself in dynamic processes that demonstrated a gulf between the civic discursive inclusivity of all citizens and exclusionary practices of the state. CUP-RPP understandings of Ottoman collapse informed Ankara’s practices of active foreign policy to isolate the domestic sphere from external influence. I use the term capitulationphobia as a conceptual shorthand for this practice. Turkey in the 1930s consolidated the state which had been established in the 1920s.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):