Argumentative strategies to evade state apologies: The Turkish example

Countries are often reluctant to publicly recognize and express regret for past wrongdoings despite urgent pressures or calls to do so, and in the past decades there have been numerous examples of states that have issued statements that evade an admission of wrongdoing or apology. Evading an apology requires politicians in authority to make argumentative maneuvers to steer the discourse to their own advantage. But what do such maneuvers look like? This paper sets out to address this question by drawing on a Turkish example and by analyzing President Erdoğan’s message of condolences addressed to the Armenian community in 2014, when he was the Prime Minister of Turkey. We utilized the pragma-dialectical notion of ‘strategic maneuvering’ in uncovering how he exploited the topical potential, addressed the audience expectations, and chose from available presentational means to defend the standpoint that ‘Turkey should not be blamed for the events of 1915’. Our analysis suggests that even when political authorities evade an apology, they may still try to observe dialectically reasonable and rhetorically effective argumentation. The message we analyzed shows how this can be done by pairing evasive language about past atrocities with expressions of empathy with the victims and by highlighting the importance of dialogue, mutual tolerance, and compromise in establishing a common future.