The Ironic Western Self: Radical and Conservative Irony in the ‘Losing Turkey’ Narrative

Abstract

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.

Representing the International

“…The book shows that the boundary between representations and the represented is much more blurred than usually suggested (Morozov & Rumelili, 2012). The narrative traditions are formed in interaction with Turkish voices, including critical voices of the Western self (Vuorelma, 2019).…”

“…The concept of the West continued to feature in representations concerning Turkey in the early AKP era in the 2000s, but they increasingly reflected the rift between Europe and the United States. During the Cold War, the idea of the West as a political union was not widely challenged in transatlantic policy circles, but as a result of 9/11 and the subsequent Iraq War in 2003 the idea of 'two Wests' gained strength (Vuorelma, 2019). The 'long conversation' about Turkey began to involve elements of that rift, with the US narratives accusing the EU of treating Turkey unfairly and European narratives focusing on the institutional framework of the access negotiations.…”

Geoculture and unevenness: Occidentalism in the history of uneven and combined development

“…In contrast to the claims of poststructuralist and constructivist theorisations, for example, the nineteenth-century discourse of a universal Western civilisation cannot be grasped simply as an 'unintended' 'rhetorical commonplace,' 'tossed up by a general mutation in discourse' (pace Jackson 2006, 73-74;cf. Hellmann and Herborth 2017;Vuorelma 2019). Instead, Occidentalist discourse works in and through the racial and civilisational categorisations of differential development which accompanied the long-nineteenth century rise of a deeply uneven and empire-centred world economy (Kaiwar and Mazumdar 2003, 264).…”

From Beliefs to Traditions

“…It is not only events in international politics that can be studied in narrative terms but also the theoretical foundations of the study field. There are, for example, tragic (Lebow, 2003), romantic (Spencer, 2016), comic (Kuusisto 2009, ironic (Steele, 2010;Vuorelma, 2019), and satirical (Hall, 2014) elements that can be recognised both in the practice and in the study of international politics. Bruner (1991, 15) argues that genres can be representations of social ontology but can also be 'invitations to a particular style of epistemology.…”