TURKEY BETWEEN EUROPE AND EUROPEANIZATION

The post-Cold War world presents Turkey with radical new challenges an d opportunities: Her membership of 'the West' based on geostrategic im portance was temporarily questioned, Western Europe's newfound love in Eastern Europe increased the distance Brussels-Ankara and the disinte gration of the Soviet Union begot 6 new Central Asian republics of whi ch 5 are Turkish speaking. Turkey, therefore, has been and is in a pro cess of redefining her foreign policy orientation. This goes as deep a s involving a reconstitution of the meaning of state and nation, of 'T urkey'. Especially the new 'Turkish Republics' have questioned the rel ationship between state and nation: the nation obviously stretches fur ther than the borders of 'Turkey'. The dominant policy and identity re sponse has not been to react by extending state borders to match langu age borders (radical pan-Turkism), but a mix of traditional cautious K emalism and soft pan-turkism, where the state still ends at the given borders, but a larger nation is seen in the form of a family of consan guineous states. Such processes of national self-redefinition can not be grasped by traditional geopolitical or international relations anal ysis. It is necessary to work through the national traditions regardin g discourses on state, nation, politics, and religion. Therefore the a rticle consists of a brief first section on the relationship between T urkey and Europe, a large main section on Turkey's political discourse , and a third and final section on emerging re-articulations of concep ts and traditions in the new political setting.