The Metamorphosis of Metaphors of Vision: “Bridging” Turkey's Location, Role and Identity After the End of the Cold War

Abstract

During the Cold War, "buffer" or "bastion" seemed a popular metaphor to describe Turkey. After the Cold War, "bridge," (and, to some extent, the "crossroad") metaphor started to dominate the Turkish foreign policy discourse. This article traces the use of "bridge" metaphor in this discourse in the post-Cold War period by the Turkish foreign policy elite. It develops two arguments. First, the word bridge is a "metaphor of vision" combining Turkey's perceived geographical exceptionalism with an identity and a role at the international level. As a "metaphor of vision," the employment of the word "bridge" highlighted Turkey's liminality and justified some of its foreign policy actions to Eurasia and then to the Middle East. Second, because the bridge metaphor was used in different context to justify different foreign policy choices, its meaning has changed, illustrating that metaphors are not static constructs. It concludes by saying that the continuous use of "bridge" metaphor might reinforce Turkey's "liminality," placing Turkey in a less classifiable category than the regular "othering" practices. When the subject is Turkish politics, one frequently encounters books or articles that contain the words "Turkey," "between," "East" and "West" in their titles. 1 Even if the title does not contain any of these words, it is very likely that, be it an article, a book or a monograph, there will be a reference to how "important," "troubled," or for that matter, "difficult," Turkey's geography is. 2 Such titles are so abundant that sometimes rather than saying something new about Turkey's politics, they end up bolstering Turkish geographical "exceptionalism.

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