Events

PROGRAM

ABSTRACTS

Linking Internal and External Enemies: National Identity, Democratization and China’s Foreign Relations
The national identity definition of who is the national self, “the People”, vis-à-vis the others who do not belong to the nation, is closely tied to the extent to which democratic rights are enjoyed by average citizens. From late Qing to the early Republican period, and through the Mao and post-Mao eras, opportunities and good intentions to pursue democracy were stymied by an exclusive interpretation of national identity in service of power struggle. When facing severe domestic challenges, Chinese elites frequently aroused internally exclusionary nationalism for social mobilization and power consolidation, which denied various ethnic, socio-economic, political, and religious groups of equal rights and popular sovereignty. Additionally, this domestic exclusion in Chinese identity politics was linked to attitudes to foreign others. Especially when vilifying domestic adversaries was either emotionally unappealing or politically inconvenient, Chinese elites would reinforce it with a nationalist crusade against foreign countries to generate a legitimatory narrative for securing power. Thus, national identity has exerted a significant impact on both China’s trajectory of democratization and its foreign relations.

Historical Myths, Identity and Foreign Policy: Deconstructing Contemporary Anti-European Discourse in Turkey
This paper builds on the results of a recently concluded research on identity relations between Turkey and Europe since early 19th century to deconstruct contemporary anti-European discourse in Turkey. We build on the interdisciplinary literature on myths by stressing the need to integrate historiographical debates over evidence, interpretation and narrative structure into a political critique of myths in terms of the identities they establish and the policies they legitimize. First, through a survey of Erdogan’s post-2014 speeches, we show how contemporary Turkish anti-European discourse builds on the emotional weight and moral lessons of two distinct constitutive myths about the Ottoman Empire’s relations with European states during the nineteenth century, namely the myth of eternal antagonism and the myth of Europe the protagonist. Then, we challenge these two myths. We unsettle the myth of eternal antagonism by tracing the abrupt shifts from conflict to co-operation during the nineteenth century and demonstrating that key events that are placed in a linear sequence are products of widely different domestic and international contexts. We challenge the myth of Europe the protagonist by demonstrating the widely different views about Europe, which emerged as products of the factionalism and rivalry among the Ottoman political elite and how they found reflection as distinct forms of agency in shaping Euro-Ottoman relations. In conclusion, the paper underscores the necessity for the literatures on identity and foreign policy and historical IR to focus more critically on the contemporary populist ‘uses of history’.

Right-wing Populism, Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity: The Discursive Construction of “the People”
This paper theorizes the links between right-wing populism, foreign policy and identity. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau’s discursive approach to populism and poststructuralist International Relations scholarship, it understands populism and foreign policy as distinct discourses that constitute collective identities by drawing political boundaries between Self and Other. Instead of understanding identity as a given or relatively stable property of subjects such as ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’ that constitutes, shapes or impacts on foreign policy behaviour, it considers foreign policy as a potential site for the construction and re- production of ‘the people’ right-wing populists claim to represent and thus as a practice through which the subject in whose name it operates is itself enacted and performed. The article illustrates the interplay between right-wing populism, foreign policy and identity through a comparative analysis of the discourses of Donald Trump in the United States and Narendra Modi in India and shows how they construct a collective identity of ‘the people’ by conjuring up the notion of uprooted and illegitimately powerful elites who conspire with the foreign Other against ‘the people’.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Bahar Rumelili is Professor and Jean Monnet Chair at the Department of International Relations, Koc University, Istanbul. Her research focuses on identity and ontological security theory, processes of European identity construction, conflict resolution, and the interaction between the EU and Turkish politics and civil society. She is the author of Constructing Regional Community and Order in Europe and Southeast Asia (Palgrave, 2007) and the editor of Conflict Resolution and Ontological Security: Peace Anxieties (Routledge 2015). Her articles have appeared in journals such as European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, Journal of Common Market Studies, and Journal of International Relations and Development.

Thorsten Wojczewski is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the India Institute at King’s College London. He holds a Diploma in Political Science from the University of Hamburg and a PhD in International Relations from the University of Kiel, Germany. Before joining King’s, he was a research fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies. In addition, he has held visiting fellowships at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., the University of Oxford and the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi. His research interests are foreign policy analysis, populism, world order, poststructuralist IR and critical security studies. His research has been published in International Studies Review, Foreign Policy Analysis and Third World Quarterly, among others. He is the author of the book India’s Foreign Policy Discourse and its Conceptions of World Order: The Quest for Power and Identity (London: Routledge, 2018).

Yinan He is Associate Professor of International Relations, Lehigh University. Her research focuses on politics of memory and reconciliation, East Asian international security, Chinese and Japanese foreign policy, and national identity mobilization and nationalism in East Asia. She is the author of The Search for Reconciliation: Sino-Japanese and German-Polish Relations since World War II (Cambridge, 2009). She is currently preparing a book-length project, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, to investigate China’s identity politics and its impact on foreign relations since the modern times. She was a Public Intellectuals Program fellow of the National Committee on United States-China Relations in 2011-13, and a visiting research scholar at Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program in 2019-2020.

CONVENOR

Dr Sabina insebayeva
Asia Research Institute, National University Singapore

REGISTRATION

Participation in this workshop is limited and by invitation only. Please write to ariv4348@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend this event.