The making of Turkish exceptionalism: the west, the rest and unreconciled issues from the past

ABSTRACT This article has two main goals. The first is to examine the role of politics of space and time in making Turkey’s international relations. The second is to answer a more general question: what happens to a non-Western state like Turkey that cannot eliminate ‘differences’ that mark that state as non-Western? My answer is that these states handle these ‘differences’ that do not entirely disappear by creating exceptionalism. Exceptionalism rebrands ‘difference’ as ‘distinctiveness’ that can only be possessed by a specific country or nation. The article identifies two main pathways to the creation of Turkish exceptionalism, space and time, and explores the brief history of these spatio-temporal imaginations leading to the making of the exceptionalist narrative and their implications for Turkey’s foreign relations and identity.