Prof. Dr. Necmettin Erbakan in Turkish Foreign Policy (Idendity, Policy and Foreign Policy)

Modern Turkish Politics was built upon the absolute power of dominant military-civil-bureaucrat and elite class that inherited from İttihat Terakki Partisi (Party of Union and Progress). These dynamics upon which Turkish modernization was based formed a secular field and did not allow faith and moral preferences to be a political actor. The training of faith and moral determinants was tried to be carried out over bureaucratic tools. In this sense, it is likely to say that bureaucratic transcendentalism lies in the basis of the ongoing conflicts in Turkish political life. In the administration of national identity, the sense of despite the public for the public starting with the army-national will unity and the bureaucratic elite moving together with the public in the war of independence after that conflicting with the national values was adopted. The insufficiency of Kemalist paradigm in 1970s increased the emergence of Milli Görüş in Turkish political life. In the Kemalist national state system where religious identity was marginalized from social and political arena, the movement of Milli Görüş exhibited a case getting stuck between the religious identity and his roots with a political discourse. Milli Görüş appeared in the political arena together with a new language and “conceptualization” that could protect its political legitimization and transmit its message to the community within “the repressive limits”. Within this content, the architect of Milli Görüş movement, Necmettin Erbakan, developed a line comprising a multi-dimensionality and versatility with his political discourse paradigm. The language, expressions and party slogans Erbakan used in politics had a reference to the roots forming a nation as a subject rather than vague and uncertain discourses. In the current study, the political sense and leadership characteristics of Necmettin Erbakan, who determined the ideal of “The Greater Turkey Once Again” and “A New World” in the construction of Turkish political identity as a direction and target in Turkish Foreign Policy, and also the founder of D-8s (Developing Eights), was analysed in a multi-purposed way and the foreign policy in the period of Erbakan’s prime ministry was investigated.

Keywords

Necmettin Erbakan, Milli Görüş, Turkish Foreign Policy, Identity, Politics, Leadership, Just Order,