{"id":28776,"date":"2019-04-03T15:55:01","date_gmt":"2019-04-03T14:55:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coreblog.prod.adnc.cambridge.org\/?p=28776"},"modified":"2019-05-20T13:05:45","modified_gmt":"2019-05-20T12:05:45","slug":"turkey-and-egypt-in-the-cold-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2019\/04\/03\/turkey-and-egypt-in-the-cold-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Foreign Policy as Nation Making: Turkey and Egypt in the Cold War"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\r\n\r\nIn the wake of the Arab uprisings, and particularly the conflict in Syria, the Turkish government has appeared to disregard its affiliation with Western multilateral institutions, whether in its overtures to Russia, or its war on Syria\u2019s Kurds. Meanwhile Egypt\u2019s regional influence has markedly diminished, reflected in its deference to Saudi Arabia\u2019s lead in particular, and its abstention from action in Syria. What has made both developments so controversial is their departure from longstanding foreign policy traditions in each country: Turkey\u2019s prominent position in the Atlantic Pact, and Egypt\u2019s recognised status as Arab leader. In my book, Foreign Policy as Nation Making: Turkey and Egypt in the Cold War<\/a><\/strong><\/em>, I explore the decade in which both these traditions were established, the 1950s, and uncover the origins of the current terms of debate in each country.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nAt that time, Cold War dynamics were intersecting with decolonisation processes in the Middle East, and superpowers, imperial powers, and newly independent states were all vying for influence. By 1955, Turkey\u2019s Democrat Party government had secured NATO membership, and its leaders were encouraging their Arab neighbours to join the Western camp. Egypt\u2019s Free Officers were promoting a pan-Arab alliance instead, within an Afro-Asian neutralist bloc. The book asks: given Turkey and Egypt\u2019s shared historical and cultural experience, why did their foreign policy stances diverge so much in the 1950s?\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nConventional wisdom around the foreign policies of the Democrats and Free Officers tends to downplay their agency vis-\u00e0-vis the superpowers. Turkey\u2019s accession to NATO, and its promotion of NATO\u2019s regional extension, the Baghdad Pact, are most often cast as a reaction to Soviet expansionism. Egypt\u2019s advocacy of pan-Arabism is presented as pragmatic manoeuvring aimed to avoid superpower pressures, and yet doomed to fail in their shadow.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nI challenge these ideas by rethinking foreign policy as an arena for nation making. I analyse the clashes of the 1950s not as realpolitik, but as a series of positions taken in a larger quest to fashion a modern \u2013 and sovereign \u2013 nation, by elites whose political formation occurred against the backdrop of war, imperialism, and underdevelopment. My analysis draws on largely untapped Turkish and Arabic primary sources from state and media archives, private collections, and politicians\u2019 memoirs. This approach brings theories of international relations and nationalism into conversation. Any leadership\u2019s claims about the nation presuppose interlocutors who recognise that nation\u2019s sovereignty and its leaders\u2019 narratives of national belonging, and who will enable \u2013 not obstruct \u2013 their pledges on national progress. Nation making thus involves engagement with the international, and should not be analysed as bound within a \u2018domestic\u2019 sphere.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nIn Turkey\u2019s case, joining NATO reflected the Democrats\u2019 westernising nation making project, which explicitly aimed to transform Turkey into a \u2018little America\u2019. Meanwhile Egyptian neutralism reflected the pursuit of decolonisation within a pan-Arab national framework. In both cases, political leaders negotiated dilemmas between their nation making objectives and their limited resources: it was this that drove the evolution of their foreign policy, rather than any superpower prerogative. These contrasting nation making projects are thus key to our understanding of Turkish and Egyptian foreign policies\u2019 divergence.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nThis approach to foreign policy reveals new dimensions of each leadership\u2019s nation making project in turn. First, despite the scholarly focus on anti-Kurdish\/Armenian\/Greek discourses in Turkish nationalism, I find new evidence for the equally significant role of the Ottoman state tradition of Orientalism, which proved to be constitutive of Democrat stances vis-\u00e0-vis the Arab world. Meanwhile, and in contrast to conventional wisdom on the instrumentalisation of pan-Arabism by Egyptian leaders, I show that it was an early feature of their nation making projects before British withdrawal, perpetuated later by Israeli attacks. I compare these positions as different nationalist responses to the legacies of European empire in the Middle East. In this way, the book contributes new perspectives on postcolonial and anticolonial nationalisms in the global South, where existing literature has often focused on South Asia.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nThe book\u2019s conclusions underline Turkish and Egyptian actors\u2019 agency in the Cold War context. In the case of Turkey, although the Democrat leadership was participating in collective security schemes thought up variously by Britain, the United States, and France, its active efforts shaped the fate of each of these ventures significantly. Similarly, Egypt\u2019s positive neutralist policy afforded it productive leverage between the superpowers, while its pan-Arabist practice garnered it the regional weight with which to sustain their attention, and in the American case, to suppress some of their more hostile designs.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nToday, international politics are configured differently, yet the frameworks set up by the leaderships of the 1950s continue to resonate. In Turkey, the Democrats\u2019 foreign policy choices have proved enduring, and they were formative of a centre-right tradition which Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan appropriated in his rise to power. Meanwhile, the 1950s experience in Egypt gave rise to the political tradition of \u2018Nasserism\u2019, which has been invoked and repurposed by Arab opposition movements from Tunisia to Iraq. In both Turkey and Egypt, the pursuit of nationalist commitments continues to animate foreign policy debate and practice. As we approach the centenary of the Turkish republic, and the ten-year anniversary of Egypt\u2019s January 25th<\/sup> Revolution, the connections and alignments forged in the 1950s remain very much alive.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nReem Abou-El-Fad teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her new book Foreign Policy as Nation Making: Turkey and Egypt in the Cold War<\/a><\/strong><\/em> is now available. Her work has also appeared in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Journal of Palestine Studies, and the International Journal of Transitional Justice.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the wake of the Arab uprisings, and particularly the conflict in Syria, the Turkish government has appeared to disregard its affiliation with Western multilateral institutions, whether in its overtures to Russia, or its war on Syria\u2019s Kurds. Meanwhile Egypt\u2019s regional influence has markedly diminished, reflected in its deference to Saudi Arabia\u2019s lead in particular, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":750,"featured_media":28926,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,17],"tags":[],"coauthors":[5708],"class_list":["post-28776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/750"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28776"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=28776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}