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This article draws attention to some surprising similarities between the recent political trajectories of Turkey and Thailand in order to argue that international norms strongly shape domestic cleavage formations. The timing and the manner of incorporation of particular states into the international system affects not only their political and economic development, but also the way various domestic groups see their mission, their identity, and their opposition. In both Turkey and Thailand, what development has brought is neither the opposition between traditional status groups and the market generated social forces, nor the tradition/religion-based opposition to modernization and democracy that is typically assumed to mark developing societies. What we find in both cases instead is a modernization-generated statist/bureaucratic social middle class that justifies its skepticism of democratization on the basis of norms upheld by the international society itself. Adapted from the source document.

Given its economic success and the political transformations of the last decade, it is not surprising that Turkey is now charting an ambitious course in foreign policy. This article provides a sober assessment of some of the shortcomings becoming evident in Turkish foreign policy, and argues that if these problems are not addressed, Turkey is due to fall short of its regional leadership ambitions.

AbstractThis article aims to understand the phenomenon of international terrorism by wedding a constructivist understanding of terrorism with an overview of the historical evolution of the state. The Westphalian state has replaced three types of authority: religious, personal and local. Political challenges to the modern international system inevitably derive their claim to legitimacy from one of these other forms of authority. I argue that there is a correlation between the kind of legitimacy claim a 'terrorist' cause is based on and how threatening we find the activities based on that claim. The less the distance between the unrecognised legitimacy claim on the one hand and the principles conferring legitimacy in the modern states system on the other, the less ontologically threatening we find the claimants to be. All historical variants of modern 'terrorism' fall into one of two categories of disruptive activity. They are either based in claims to local authority and target only particular states, or in claims to personal and/or religious authority and reject the modern states system altogether. Groups labelled as terrorist can therefore be classified as system-affirming or system-threatening. The former is a contained problem, but the latter has followed geographically broadening spread pattern throughout the international system.

This article joins the growing scholarship on the ontological security needs of states. By focusing on state denial of historical crimes, the article will address the main point of contention among scholars who study ontological security, i.e. the question of whether identity pressures on states are mostly endogenously or exogenously generated. Through a study of the Turkish state's reluctance to apologize for the Armenian genocide, and the Japanese discomfort over the WWII atrocities, I argue that we can avoid tautology in our generalizations by introducing temporal and spatial dimensions to the argument. Inter-subjective pressures matter more at times when traditional routines defining the self are broken and are more likely to create ontological insecurity outside the West. The review of the Turkish and Japanese cases demonstrate that both social and individualistic approaches to ontological security are partly right, but also incomplete because neither takes into account the uneven expansion of international society or the effect this expansion has had on the identity of outsider states who were incorporated into the system at a later date.

In anthropology, the concept of cultural intimacy expresses those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of international criticism for the state, but are nevertheless used to provide insiders with a sense of national comfort, understanding, and self-reflexive, ontological security. Cultural intimacy helps illuminate how states present themselves internationally and how they understand themselves domestically. It can also explain the seeming discrepancies and contradictions between a state's domestic and international identities. Cultural intimacy, in other words, explains the mutual reproduction of different levels of identity. Using the concept of cultural intimacy as a departure point, this article develops a framework for understanding incongruities in the domestic and international facades of state identity. We argue that there is a structural component to the level of discomfort caused by negative international appraisals of a given state. Structural position determines whether the domestic sources of cultural intimacy will cause shame, embarrassment, or guilt, and therefore also indicate how that negative international image will be handled by the state. The theoretical argument is illustrated with reference to the cases of Serbia, Croatia, and the Netherlands, and their distinctive responses to the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Sage Publications Ltd. & ECPR-European Consortium for Political Research.]

This article compares recent political developments in two seemingly different countries: Turkey and Thailand. The similarities between the trajectories of Turkey and Thailand date back to their similar manner of incorporation into the modern international system in the late nineteenth century. In recent years, the rise of new societal groups based upon urbanized villagers has produced charismatic populist leaders who preach democracy, but practise electoralism. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Thaksin Shinawatra are locked in parallel confrontations with traditionally interventionist military/bureaucratic elites. A comparison between Thailand and Turkey provides insights that are generally applicable to our understanding of democratization outside the West.