Foreign Policy in the Age of Anxiety: An Existentialist Perspective in Post-2016 Turkish Foreign Policy

This paper develops an existentialist theoretical framework for the analysis of foreign policy and applies it to the analysis of post-2016 Turkish foreign policy. It starts from the premise that international relations is increasingly characterized by radical uncertainty, constituted by a greater awareness of unknown unknowns and their ever-present possibility of materializing. This intensifying uncertainty is activating existential anxieties on part of state actors about their future position, role, identity, and purpose in international politics. The IR literature is yet to identify the foreign policy manifestations of these anxieties. This paper makes a first step by focusing on the case of Türkiye. The paper employs discourse analysis to analyze the speeches of Turkish foreign ministers delivered at the annual Ambassador’s conferences to show how these existential anxieties are experienced in the Turkish context and how the erratic directions that Turkish foreign policy has taken in the post-2016 period are justified.

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