Epilogue: Anti-Westernism and the Reconfiguration of Turkish National Identity

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2026-01-01

Author

Öztürk, Ahmet Erdi
Dağı, İhsan Duran

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This volume began with a deceptively simple question that has become harder to answer precisely because it is so frequently invoked in public debate: why has anti-Westernism become so pervasive in Turkey, despite the country’s long and deep entanglement with Western models, institutions, and alliances? The chapters assembled here suggest that the puzzle can only be resolved if we resist treating anti-Westernism as an episodic reaction to discrete crises, diplomatic disputes, or short-term political incentives. What emerges instead is a layered phenomenon that is simultaneously historical and contemporary, ideational and strategic, elite-driven and socially embedded. Anti-Westernism in Turkey is not a single ideology with a stable content; it is a repertoire-a set of narratives, tropes, affective registers, and interpretive shortcuts that can be activated, reconfigured, and redeployed across time. Its power lies precisely in this flexibility: it can be moral (a claim about civilizational insult), political (a claim about interference and sovereignty), economic (a claim about dependency and exploitation), cultural (a claim about authenticity), and strategic (a claim about autonomy and multipolarity), sometimes all at once. Put differently, anti-Westernism is not merely a stance towards “the West”; it is a way of narrating Turkey’s selfhood. It becomes a language through which the state, political movements, and ordinary citizens articulate the anxieties of status, the burdens of modernization, and the unresolved legacies of imperial collapse and republican nation-building. The paradox that structures the book-Westernization alongside widespread anti-Western sentiment-looks less paradoxical once we recognize that admiration and resentment, alignment and anxiety have historically been co-constitutive in Turkey’s encounters with Western power and knowledge, rather than mutually exclusive.

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https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=105043965319&origin=inward
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/119894

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Department of International Relations, Book / Book chapter