This article focuses on ironic narrative forms in international media and policy debates concerning political developments in Turkey during the era of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) in the 2000s. More specifically, the article examines the narrative of ‘losing’ Turkey, which has grown in significance during the AKP era, and argues that the metaphor also contains an ironic, self-critical reading that contributes to the debate on the idea of the West. The article advances knowledge concerning different functions of ironic narratives, proposing that we need to distinguish between (1) radical irony and (2) conservative irony. It is argued that radical irony is an outward-looking strategy to advance social justice and to challenge the Western self’s hegemonic representations, while conservative irony is an attempt to re-strengthen the Western self’s hegemony in the international system. The debate on ‘losing’ Turkey is an illustrative case where a Western subject is intersubjectively imagined and narrated with moral and aesthetic preferences. It can be seen as a negotiation about the moral traditions that underpin the West as an imagined and narrated social system. The article argues that the Western self is partly constituted through ironic narrative forms.

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This article examines the role of trust in the age of mediatised politics. Authority, we suggest, can be successfully enacted despite the disrupted nature of the public sphere if both rational and moral trust are utilised to formulate validity claims. Drawing from Maarten A. Hajer's theorisation of authority in contemporary politics, we develop a model of how political actors and institutions as well as the media employ both rational and moral trust performances to generate authority. Analysing a Finnish case of controversial investigative journalism on defence intelligence, we show how the media in network governance need to critically evaluate the authority performances of political actors while at the same time enacting their own authority performances to retain their position within the governing network and to manufacture trust among networked publics. This volatile position can lead to situations where the media compete for authority with traditional political institutions.

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