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THE PALGRAVE MACMILLAN SERIES IN
INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION
SERIES EDITOR: ALISTER MISKIMMON
Narrative Traditions in
International Politics
Representing Turkey
Johanna Vuorelma
The Palgrave Macmillan Series in International
Political Communication
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History, Anthropology, Philosophy & Politics
Queen’s University Belfast
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Johanna Vuorelma
Narrative Traditions
in International
Politics
Representing Turkey
Johanna Vuorelma
Centre for European Studies, University of Helsinki
Helsinki, Finland
The Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication

ISBN 978-3-030-85587-1 ISBN 978-3-030-85588-8 (eBook)
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For Zacharias, Rafaela, and Viveca
Contents
1 Representing the International 1
2 From Beliefs to Traditions 23
3 Turkey Getting Lost 61
4 Turkey at a Perpetual Crossroads101
5 Strongmen Embodying Turkey127
6 Continuously Creeping Islamisation157
7 Conclusion: A Long Conversation about Turkey

and the West181
Index195
vii
CHAPTER 1
Representing the International
On 14 September 2006, an Istanbul taxi dropped me in Tophane in front

of the Bosphorus, one of the most spectacular continental boundaries in
the world dividing Europe and Asia. I had arrived in Istanbul as an Erasmus
exchange student to study a semester at Istanbul Bilgi University, which
had a dormitory in Tophane in the district of Beyoğlu. I had spent the
summer reading extensively about Turkish history, politics, and culture,
but what I soon realised after arriving in Turkey and experiencing the
country firsthand was that there seemed to be a discrepancy between what
I had read and what I observed in Istanbul during the study exchange and
later in 2008–2010 as a Turkish language student and a visiting researcher.
It seemed that there was something static and enduring about the con-
temporary analyses on Turkish politics, while what I observed around me
was a rich variety of political movements, beliefs, ideas, and political cleav-
ages that presented a dynamic and fluid picture of political realities
in Turkey.
I arrived in Turkey in the middle of an optimistic and energetic atmo-
sphere, characterised by the European Union (EU) accession negotiations
that officially commenced exactly a year before in October 2005. The
belief that Turkey was rapidly ‘opening’ towards Europe——strengthen-
ing democracy, solving long-term human rights problems, and eventually
Europeanising its policies—was a shared sentiment both in Turkey and the
EU. A few years earlier the government led by the Justice and Development
Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) and its Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan had come to power with a promise to push the EU
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
J. Vuorelma, Narrative Traditions in International Politics, The
Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political
Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85588-8_1
2 J. VUORELMA
membership process forward after Turkey was officially recognised as a

candidate at the Helsinki summit of the European Council in 1999. In the
midst of this enthusiastic atmosphere, various civil society and policy ini-
tiatives were initiated.
At the same time, political commentary, policy analysis, and journalistic
pieces in Europe used dramatic language and a rhetoric of crisis to explain
what was happening between Turkey and the EU. ‘Who lost Turkey?’
asked a headline in Newsweek in October 2016 (Matthews, 2006), a month
after I had arrived in Istanbul to witness an optimistic and energetic atmo-
sphere surrounding the various political reforms that had been introduced
to enhance civil liberties and strengthen democracy. The article warned
that the relations between Turkey and the EU were facing an ‘imminent
breakdown’ and ‘Turkey now risks careering off on an entirely different
geopolitical trajectory’. The article represented the political reality in
Turkey as a battle between secularism and Islam, referring to events in the
early 1900s when the Turkish republic was founded on the ruins of the
Ottoman Empire. It went on to explain that although Turkey remained
‘Western’, the line between the religious East and the secular West had
been blurred in 2002 with the election victory of AKP that had a religious
character.
The following month The Financial Times published an article, simi-
larly painting a menacing picture of the tense relationship between the EU
and Turkey that was possibly ‘getting out of hand’ (Dombey & Boland,
2006). ‘Turkey’s long journey west is in jeopardy’, the headline stated.
Once again, the analysis referred to the founding of the republic in 1923
and went even further in time to describe a potential halt ‘to the country’s
150-year push to modernise and westernise’. The article was similarly
written from a Western perspective, talking about the West not only as an
active agent in international politics but also as a direction that Turkey
should be heading towards, as an identity that can be achieved, and as an
audience that worryingly follows Turkey’s arduous journey towards
modernity. A large number of similar analyses were published in the 2000s,
referring to the founding of the republic, narrating a fundamental battle
between East and West, reducing Turkish politics to one master cleavage
between religion and secularism, and suggesting that Turkey might be
getting lost. It soon became evident that there were some enduring beliefs
that frequently feature in the international analyses concerning Turkey. I
gathered that in order to understand where they stem from required
knowledge that could not be acquired by observing the country firsthand
1 REPRESENTING THE INTERNATIONAL 3
but by examining second-order representations. In other words, the

uncanny feeling caused by the static nature of international analyses on
Turkey was not a question of observation but a matter of representation.
From Observation to Representation

This book focuses on representation, which is a key question in interna-
tional politics, shaping norms, beliefs, and relations between states and
actors in the international sphere. There is a rich interdisciplinary litera-
ture that examines different ways in which the international or particular
regions are represented (e.g. Said, 1978; Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991;
Wolff, 1994; Todorova, 1997; Neumann, 1998; Campbell, 1998; Dunn,
2003; Laffey & Weldes, 2004; Hansen, 2006), employing concepts such
as constructing, imagining, narrating, inventing, and constituting. The
practice of representing the international involves metaphors (e.g. Marks,
2011; Blanchard, 2013), classical narrative types (Ringmar, 2006; Spencer,
2016; Kuusisto, 2019), discourses, and visual images (Hansen, 2011;
Bleiker, 2018). These different ‘systems of representation’ (Hall, 1997)
have become a key focus of study with the emergence of the constructivist
and post-structuralist approaches to the study of International Relations,
challenging epistemic realism (see Campbell, 1998) and mimetic
approaches to the study of international politics (Bleiker, 2001).
The scholarly literature on representation has significantly increased
our knowledge on the ‘what’ question, showing what types of representa-
tions have become dominant depictions of particular actors, regions, or
states, and conversely which narratives or discourses have been margin-
alised or overlooked. There are also valuable studies on the ‘why’ ques-
tion, explaining that the underlying need to represent the world around us
arises primarily from the impulse to construct the self and the other (e.g.
Ringmar, 1996a; Neumann, 1998; Rumelili, 2004), manage ‘normalcy’ in
the international sphere through stigmatisation (Zarakol, 2011; Adler-
Nissen, 2014), and enhance ontological security (e.g. Mitzen, 2006;
Steele, 2008). As Mitzen (2006, 358) has noted in relation to ontological
security: ‘Whatever a state’s private aspirations, the social meaning of its
type depends on whether other states represent that state in a similar way.’
However, less analytical attention has been paid to the ‘how’ question,
focusing systematically on how particular actors are represented in inter-
national politics. This research approach is interested in techniques, styles,
and forms of representation. Tekin (2010) has examined the ‘how’
4 J. VUORELMA
question by studying how Turkey has been represented in French dis-

courses at the level of political elites, intellectuals, scholars, and the media.
In this book, the ‘how’ question is examined by using the concept of
narrative tradition to analyse how Turkey has been represented in interna-
tional politics. These narrative traditions form a type of ‘long conversa-
tion’ (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991) about Turkey in international politics.
The book utilises the interpretative approach, concentrating on beliefs and
locating them in historical traditions (Bevir & Rhodes, 2006; Bevir et al.,
2013). It adopts the concept of dilemma to explain how representations
in international politics are influenced by these narrative traditions but can
only slowly change them. The concept of resistance is used to examine
how narrative traditions are rejected on the basis of local knowledge and
lived experiences (Bevir et al., 2013, 54). In this book, beliefs, traditions,
and dilemmas form a methodological triangle to study representation
practices in international politics.
Interpretations concerning the international are produced, maintained,
and challenged by a loose thought collective that involves a number of
practitioners and experts including scholars, journalists, diplomats, and
political representatives who write about foreign policy in magazines,
newspapers, and journals. This collective is studied as a loose epistemic
community (see e.g. Haas, 1992; Howorth, 2004) that shares metaphors,
beliefs, and dilemmas but also critically reflects on their own practices of
representation. The loose epistemic community produces knowledge that
is based on firsthand observations, reports, prior beliefs, and second-order
representations, shaping an image of Turkey that, for many people, might
be the only encounter with Turkey. As Neumann & Nexon (2006, 6–7)
argue, ‘most of us gain our knowledge of foreign countries from journal-
ists, scholars, and other people who have been to those places, who testify
to the fact that those countries exist, and who tell us about the politics,
beliefs, and customs of the people who inhabit them’. Kuusisto (2009,
602) has similarly noted:
As foreign policy matters often concern distant countries, little-known cul-

tures and abstract values, only very few members of the audience will nor-
mally be able to base their opinions and beliefs on immediate observations
and personal experiences. Instead, on a large number of major questions,
they have to rely on the labels and narratives of (prominent, trust-worthy,
like-minded, well-informed) others and on interpretations they have previ-
ously accepted in similar situations.
Some interpretations concerning the international become more fixed

than others, forming narrative traditions that contain beliefs, which are
passed on from generation to generation. There are beliefs that are strik-
ingly similar in the 1920s as in the 2000s, but this does not mean that they
do not evolve over time. At the same time, analysts in the field of foreign
policy and international politics are not entirely autonomous when writing
about foreign policy but restricted by invisible boundaries and shared nar-
rative practices in the field. The concept of dilemma explains how change
in narrative traditions takes place. As Bevir and Rhodes (2006, 9) explain,
a dilemma arises ‘when a new idea stands in opposition to existing beliefs
or practices and so forces a reconsideration of the existing beliefs and asso-
ciated tradition. Political scientists can explain change in traditions and
practices, therefore, by referring to the relevant dilemmas’.
Narrative Traditions and Knowledge Production

In this book, these interpretations are examined as narratives rather than
as discourse or frames because the focus is on their narrative structure,
which includes (1) a valued endpoint, (2) events relevant to the endpoint,
(3) ordering of events, and (4) causal linkages (Gergen 1999, 40). The
structural components of narrative (e.g. Bruner, 1991) as well as narra-
tives in international politics (e.g. Shenhav, 2006; Suganami, 2008;
Hagström & Gustafsson, 2019) are examined in more detail in Chap. 2.
In prior research, European attitudes towards and images of Turkey as
well different ‘othering’ strategies related to Turkey (see, for example,
Aydın-Düzgit, 2012; Levin, 2011; MacMillan, 2013; Tekin, 2010) have
been often studied by employing discourse analysis and critical discourse
analysis, which partly overlap with narrative approaches but also diverge
from them. Different methods always illuminate some aspects of represen-
tation, while leaving others in the margins. The narrative method is espe-
cially interested in the emplotment of events and the storied form of
representation in international politics.
This book focuses on international knowledge production that is
embedded in a Western tradition, either identifying explicitly as Western
or sharing the notion of ‘us’ in the West. The reason for this focus is that
the narrative traditions that are studied in the book contribute to the
debate on the West and strengthen the idea that an entity called the West
exists. As Jackson (2010, 54; 57) has argued, the West is a very decentral-
ised and disorganised actor with no front office, an organisation or an
6 J. VUORELMA
individual ‘uniquely endowed with the authority to speak and act in its
name’, and it is therefore the act of referring to the West that calls the
community into existence. Heller (2006, 4) has similarly emphasised that
the West
does not refer to a location but a direction; the West therefore invokes a
relational geography rather than a fixed and locatable space. What it names
is therefore not comparable to the name of a nation, which at least can claim
to be bound by recognized borders and by its institutional and legal frame-
works. (see also e.g. GoGwilt, 1995; Gress, 1998; Hall, 1993; McNeill, 1997)
There is something remarkable about the discrepancy between the con-

stantly changing political conditions in international politics and the per-
sistent images that are conveyed in the media, political analysis, and the
public opinion. As Edelman (1985, 12) argues, ‘the continuous bombard-
ment of news about a changing political spectacle contrasts sharply with
the static pattern of value allocations’. The idea of the wide gap between
firsthand encounters and second-order representations as well as its signifi-
cance in ordering social realities was aptly articulated already by Walter
Lippmann (1922, 23) in his classic work Public Opinion in the 1920s
when he noted:
The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight,
out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined. […] Of any
public event that has wide effects we see at best only a phase and as aspect.
This is as true of the eminent insiders who draft treaties, make laws, and
issue orders, as it is of those who have treaties framed for them, laws promul-
gated to them, orders given to them.
Lippmann asked that when France’s Clemenceau attended the Paris

Peace Conference in 1919 to negotiate the peace treaty after the war, did
he see ‘the Germans of 1919, or the German type as he had learned to see
it since 1871? He saw the type, and among the reports that came to him
from Germany, he took to heart those reports, and it seems, those only,
which fitted the type that was in his mind’. This tendency to rely upon
images that have been ‘pre-selected and predetermined for us’ (Carr,
1961, 8) has not disappeared with the increased access to knowledge and
the modern techniques of sharing information but continues to character-
ise our everyday comprehension in international politics. This book shares
the theoretical insight advanced by aesthetic approaches in international

politics, arguing for the importance of approaching international politics
aesthetically, not mimetically: ‘Some of the most significant theoretical
and practical insight into world politics emerges not from endeavours that
ignore representation, but from those that explore how representative
practices themselves have come to constitute and shape political practices’
(Bleiker, 2001, 510).
The book traces the long line of thought that informs the study of rep-
resentation in international politics and links it to the specific question of
how Turkey has been represented, narrated, and imagined in the analysis
of foreign policy and international politics since the early 1900s. It shows
how the case of Turkey is at the same time particular and universal. Turkey
is a particular case because the country has been stigmatised as a latecomer
to the modern state system (Zarakol, 2011) and served as a particularly
significant other in the construction of the European self (see e.g.
Neumann, 1998). As such, the dynamics of representing Turkey reveal
some specific aspects of the narrative process in the analysis of interna-
tional politics. Turkey is also a universal case of the static pattern of value
allocations that Edelman describes.
The loose epistemic community of analysts who write about Turkey is
examined as an ‘audience of normals’ (Adler-Nissen, 2014) that con-
structs, strengthens, and challenges norms in international politics, which
means that the analyses do not only describe and explain but, as shown in
this book, also involve stigmatising (Zarakol, 2011), moralising, securitis-
ing, and ‘personalising of essence’ (Burke, 1969[1950], 15). The book
substantially increases knowledge about the analytical potential of the
interpretative approach to study the formation of narratives in the field of
international politics in general (see Dian, 2017) and in the case of Turkey
in particular (Phillips, 2013). The book shows that the boundary between
representations and the represented is much more blurred than usually
suggested (Morozov & Rumelili, 2012). The narrative traditions are
formed in interaction with Turkish voices, including critical voices of the
Western self (Vuorelma, 2019).
Imagining Turkey in International Politics

The book develops a periodisation of these representation practices, dis-
tinguishing between five different periods. This periodisation partly over-
laps with other periodisations developed to map out Turkey’s domestic
8 J. VUORELMA
and foreign policies (see e.g. Keyman & Gumuscu, 2014, 16–18) but also
diverges from them because representation practices, as argued in the
book, are enduring and often react to political developments only when
dilemmas in representation practices are encountered. One of the lasting
dilemmas has been the nature of the West, which has been debated and
narrated through Turkey. As such, the periodisation developed in the
book also reflects the changing beliefs about the nature of the West.
The first period is in the early 1900s and characterised by the transfor-
mation of the Ottoman Empire into a secular republic. This transforma-
tion provided narrative resources to represent the West as a desirable and
triumphalist entity that even old adversaries are keen to imitate and join.
The key dilemma in that period was that an Islamic empire was unexpect-
edly turned into a secular state that seeks to modernise her state policies,
cultural traditions, and legal norms. This dilemma continues to inform the
analyses on Turkey in the 2000s and provides narrative continuity to inter-
pret Turkish politics in the contemporary era. All the four narrative tradi-
tions that are examined in this book were already evident in the early
1900s, which shows that the beliefs that they carry are deep-seated and
enduring. The first period is called the period of the spectacular
transformation.
The second period is the Cold War era that witnessed, as Foreign Affairs
wrote in 1954, Turkey ‘joining the West’ (McGhee, 1954). During the
Cold War, the idea of the West transformed from a civilisational image to
a political union, which meant that similarities with Turkey were empha-
sised in the analyses on Turkey as part of the Western alliance. It was,
essentially, the fight against the Communist threat that formed a strong
identification between Turkey and the West. Turkey joining the NATO in
1952 institutionalised Turkey’s Western identity, which was reflected in
the analyses. In other words, cultural and historical explanations, which
earlier served as justifications for rejecting the belief that Turkey is part of
the West, were less prevalent than political factors in foregrounding a
united ideological front of the Cold War West. The second period is called
the period of strategic stability of the Cold War.
The third period is the immediate post-Cold War era during which
Turkey began to be represented as a state that is disorientated and unable
to find her strategic location or ‘natural’ neighbours in the new political
landscape. The end of the Cold War brought back the early 1900s idea
that there might be a gap between Turkey’s real Eastern nature and the
pretense of being a Western state. The narrative resources were readily
available to restrengthen the narrative tradition that is based on a belief

that there is a conflict between what Turkey pretends to be and what the
state really is. The ending of the Cold War gave birth to a belief that there
had been a collective ‘amnesia’ in Turkey during the Cold War as regards
her neighbourhood that now needed to be newly discovered. This redis-
covery concerned not only Turkey’s Central Asian neighbours and the
‘Turkic family’ but also the Arab World. The third period is called the
post-Cold War period of disorientation.
The fourth period is the early era of the AKP in the 2000s that was
defined by the hopeful atmosphere created by the EU candidacy but also
by the doubts raised about the ‘true’ nature of the AKP. The concept of
the West continued to feature in representations concerning Turkey in the
early AKP era in the 2000s, but they increasingly reflected the rift between
Europe and the United States. During the Cold War, the idea of the West
as a political union was not widely challenged in transatlantic policy circles,
but as a result of 9/11 and the subsequent Iraq War in 2003 the idea of
‘two Wests’ gained strength (Vuorelma, 2019). The ‘long conversation’
about Turkey began to involve elements of that rift, with the US narratives
accusing the EU of treating Turkey unfairly and European narratives
focusing on the institutional framework of the access negotiations. This
period is called the formative years of the AKP-led government.
The fifth period is the AKP’s turn to authoritarianism in the 2010s that
has been dominated by competing representations concerning the factors
leading to Erdoğan’s authoritarian style of ruling. It was, perhaps para-
doxically, Erdoğan’s turn to more explicit authoritarian measures in the
2010s that narrowed the gap between American and European represen-
tations. European opposition towards Turkey’s EU membership was eas-
ier to justify when political developments in Turkey showed very clear
signs of authoritarianism. At the same time, it became evident in the 2010s
that there no longer existed a commonsensical notion of the West that
could be employed to analyse Turkey in international politics. This was
partly because of the 2016 presidency of Donald Trump in the US and his
attempt to redefine the West as a civilisation that has ‘shared characteristics
based on blood and soil, which brings back older ideas of the West’
(Vuorelma, 2019, 110). The presidency of Trump brought a dilemma to
narratives about Turkey, leading to the distinction between political lead-
ership in the US and Turkey becoming increasingly blurred. As Friedman
(2016) wrote following the failed coup attempt in Turkey: ‘Erdogan and
Donald Trump were separated at birth.’ The belief that Turkey
10 J. VUORELMA
represented an entirely different political reality than the US was no longer

as credible as before. As Friedman continued: ‘If you like what’s going on
in Turkey today, you’ll love Trump’s America.’ The fifth period is called
the authoritarian turn in the 2010.
From Crossroads to Strongmen

The main set of empirical data is collected from Foreign Affairs, which has
an extensive archive dating back to the 1920s. Foreign Affairs provides a
rich set of data that can be used to map out the narrative traditions in a
systematic way. Furthermore, it publishes analyses that often assume an
explicitly Western perspective and as such provides an analytical horizon to
the idea of the West in knowledge production in the area of international
politics. There is a tendency in these analyses to envisage a collective ‘we’
in the West——an audience of normals——who observe the develop-
ments in international politics and seemingly describe them in ways that
do not include notions of what ‘we’ represent. In this book, these texts are
read not only as descriptions of the international but also as descriptions
of the Western self. These descriptions contain moral and aesthetic judge-
ments about the self and others. Burke argues that a ‘nationalist “we” is at
least as dubious as an editorial “we,” which generously includes writers,
readers, and owners under the same term’ (Burke, 1969, 108).
The same can be said about a Western ‘we’ that is even more dubious
because the meaning of the West is so widely contested. Nevertheless,
there are frequent references to ‘Western values’ or ‘Western observers’,
assuming that the reader knows who represents that collective. Burke con-
tinues that newspapers ‘will talk rather of “liberty,” “dignity of the indi-
viduals,” “Western man,” “Christian civilization,” “democracy,” and the
like, as the motives impelling at least our people and our government, and
to a less extent the “nations” that “we” want as allies, but not the small
ruling class, or cliques, that dominate countries with which “we” are at
odds’ (Burke, 1969, 108). This tendency to obscure agency and responsi-
bility is evident in the loose epistemic community of journalists, scholars,
diplomats, and politicians who represent Turkey. At the same time, there
is resistance to this tendency and attempts to highlight ‘our’ responsibility
in the production of those very events that are described, but agency often
remains equally blurry in these resisting narratives. In the former,
Westerners are represented as having nothing to do with the events they
judge, while in the latter it is solely Westerners who are blamed for these
events with their prejudiced and hostile actions. The core question of who
these Westerners are often remains unanswered in both the cases.
In addition to Foreign Affairs, the book’s data are collected from pub-
lications such as Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate, The National Interest,
Politico, Newsweek, Time, The Economist, and The Guardian. There are
two main criteria for collecting data. Firstly, the book focuses on influen-
tial publications that shape public opinion globally. This means that more
marginal blogs or social media discussions, for example, are not included.
Secondly, the research focus in the book is on analyses that reflect ideas of
the West through Turkey. This means that the data set only includes arti-
cles that contribute to Western debates on Turkey. This intersubjective
nature of representation in international politics means not only that the
idea of ‘othering’ is a far more complex phenomenon than usually sug-
gested (see Hymans & E.C., 2006) but also that Turkey’s political devel-
opment cannot be understood separately from these representation
practices. The line between first-order and second-order representations
(Bleiker, 2001) is equally fluid and cannot be clearly drawn (Neumann &
Nexon, 2006, 8). Finally, these narrative traditions are theorised as repre-
sentations that are intertwined with notions of trust and distrust in inter-
national politics (Vuorelma, 2018).
The focus on periodisation means that although the empirical data con-
sist of single articles by particular authors, the analysis does not examine
their individual preferences and motives. Instead, the book maps out wider
narrative traditions and illustrates them through a selection of texts. As
such, the book should not be read as a study of the beliefs that particular
analysts carry but as a study of narrative traditions that carry beliefs.
Analysts in the loose epistemic community that study Turkey do not arrive
at a tabula rasa field when they begin to examine Turkey in international
politics but at a knowledge field that is densely populated by prior beliefs,
meanings, metaphors, and ways of speaking. They are inevitably influ-
enced by what they encounter in the field even if they resist those repre-
sentation practices. Furthermore, analysts as situated agents do not
embody any narrative traditions as their approach towards Turkey is often
contingent rather than fixed. Dilemmas that they encounter in their analy-
sis can make them change their beliefs. The narrative traditions that are
studied in the book do not rely on individual analysts but provide a much
more enduring set of vocabulary to understand Turkey. They are passed
on from one generation of analysts to the next also through resistance
12 J. VUORELMA
because the very act of referring to a particular set of belief——even in a

critical manner——keeps the narrative tradition going.
The empirical data is analysed with a narrative method that Polkinghorne
(1995) calls the paradigmatic analysis of narrative data, differentiating the
method from narrative analysis. In the paradigmatic analysis of narrative,
the research data consist of narratives that are analysed paradigmatically
‘to identify particulars as instances of general notions and concepts. The
paradigmatic analysis of narrative seeks to locate common themes or con-
ceptual manifestations among the stories collected as data’ (Polkinghorne,
1995, 13). This is different from narrative analysis that is grounded in
narrative reasoning, collecting descriptions of events or happenings and
synthesising them into a narrative format. History writing, for example,
often takes the form of narrative analysis in which the data are, for exam-
ple, archival materials or oral interviews, later synthesised into a coherent
narrative. As Polkinghorne writes, the paradigmatic method of analysing
narratives ‘moves from stories to common elements, and narrative analysis
moves from elements to stories’ (Polkinghorne, 1995, 12).
There are two types of paradigmatic search that Polkinghorne identi-
fies. In the first one, ‘the concepts are derived from previous theory or
logical possibilities and are applied to the data to determine whether
instances of these concepts are to be found’. In the second search ‘con-
cepts are inductively derived from the data’ (Polkinghorne, 1995, 13). In
this book, a combination of these two types of search is employed. Firstly,
the concepts of belief, tradition, dilemma, and resistance are derived from
previous theory (Bevir & Rhodes, 2003, 2006; Bevir et al., 2013) to form
the theoretical backbone of the study, which guides the paradigmatic anal-
ysis of narratives concerning Turkey in international politics. Secondly, the
narrative data are examined to search for particular narrative traditions
that carry enduring beliefs about Turkey.
As a result of this search, four narrative traditions were inductively
derived from the data: Turkey as a country that (1) ‘we’ are potentially
losing, (2) is standing at a decisive crossroads, (3) is led by strongmen who
embody the state, and (4) is constantly threatened by a creeping
Islamisation. The first case is connected to stigmatising, the second to
moralising, the third to personalising of essence, and the fourth to securi-
tising. The empirical cases that are examined in the following chapters
share the same characteristic of narrating Turkey as a state that is con-
stantly either moving or at the risk of moving instead of being a stable
actor in international politics. This feature of ‘being on the move’ is
connected to notions of trust and distrust, representing Turkey as a state

that cannot be fully trusted as a stably located member of international
society (see Vuorelma, 2018).
Chapter 2 traces the long line of thought that informs the study of
representation in international politics and links it to the specific question
of how Turkey has been represented, narrated, and imagined in the analy-
sis of foreign policy and international politics since the early 1900s. It
introduces the analytical framework that is developed to study second-
order representations in international politics, showing why the interpre-
tative approach provides the most fitting tools to unpack them. The third
chapter focuses on the ‘losing’ metaphor, analysing its manifestations,
meanings, and implications in the analysis of foreign policy and interna-
tional politics. When reading analyses on foreign policy in publications
such as Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy, one cannot avoid coming across
the metaphor of ‘losing’ in various articles on Turkey.
The chapter argues that the metaphor of ‘losing’ denotes a particular
direction that the state in question should take, raising questions about the
perspective from which the normative judgement is voiced. When Turkey
is represented as getting ‘lost’, the focus is more on Western moral and
aesthetic considerations than on Turkish interests or cultural conditions.
Burke (1969, 11; 17) has brought up ‘losing’ as an image that is employed
to localise the principle of transformation. As such, to represent a country
as being ‘lost’, narrators depict a movement from one location towards
another. The metaphor suggests that the state is in the process of becom-
ing, not in a state of being, which often produces a sense of ownership or
even ‘infantilising’ of the ‘lost’ state in international politics. There are, in
order words, metaphorical children and adults (Chilton & Lakoff, 1989,
7) in world politics, with the former being at the risk of getting lost and
the latter being securely and responsibly situated actors. The chapter
shows that the ‘losing’ metaphor is connected to stigmatisation in that it
represents Turkey as a state that is deviating from the ‘normals’ in interna-
tional society.
Adler-Nissen (2014) has developed a typology of stigma management
strategies in international politics. There is, firstly, stigma recognition that
involves ‘maturing’ through good adjustment as well as self-discipline.
The consequence of stigma recognition for international society is a stron-
ger moral cohesion. The case of Germany and how the country handled
its controversial past illustrate stigma recognition in international politics.
Adler-Nissen writes that ‘the gradual rehabilitation of Germany was made
14 J. VUORELMA
possible because Germany accepted the stigma and embraced interna-

tional cooperation. By recognizing the past, German leaders reduced and
transformed the stigma significantly over the next decades’ (Adler-Nissen,
2014, 158). Secondly, there is stigma rejection, which can be illustrated
through the case of Austria when the country rejected the stigma imposed
by the EU for its extremist right wing at the turn of the century. Adler-
Nissen argues that Austria employed a scapegoat mechanism to reject the
stigma, transforming criticism of Austria’s past into a plot against Austria.
Austrian leaders chose a different strategy than the German leaders to deal
with the stigma that was imposed upon them by the audience of normals
who manages the normative underpinnings of the international.
Thirdly, one can also engage in counter-stigmatisation, which means
that ‘the stigmatized selectively devalue the performance dimensions that
suggest that their group fares poorly and selectively value those dimen-
sions on which their group excels. In other words, they turn vice into
virtue (Adler-Nissen, 2014, 165). This can also lead to a ‘boomerang
effect’ where the stigmatizer is perceived as the transgressor. The stigma
can be turned to an emblem of pride. Adler-Nissen (2014, 166–167) anal-
yses the way in which the United States tried to isolate Cuba, showing
how ‘the aggressive attempts at imposing a global stigma on Cuba in the
1990s proved futile. The United States desperately attempted to persuade
dissenting governments to support the embargo, thus trying to mobilize
an “audience of normals”’. Instead, states rejected these attempts, which
meant that by ‘aggressively stigmatizing Cuba, the United States has ulti-
mately made itself the transgressive state’ (Adler-Nissen, 2014, 167).
When the stigma is successfully rejected or challenged, the moral cohesion
of the international is questioned, resulting in competing visions and
norms in international politics. In this book, it is argued that it is not only
states that impose stigma on other states or international actors but also
the loose epistemic community that evaluates international politics in nor-
mative terms.
One of the enduring narrative traditions in the analysis of foreign policy
forms around the metaphor of ‘being at a crossroads’. Chapter 4 shows
that the narrative tradition of placing Turkey at a crossroads includes what
White calls a ‘moralising impulse’ (White, 1987, 24), presenting two pol-
icy options to Turkey: a triumphant road and a repugnant road. The chap-
ter argues that the ‘crossroads’ metaphor is employed to represent Turkey
in international politics in various ways. Firstly, the metaphor offers an
opportunity to guide Turkey, which means that the narrator assumes the
role of a policy advisor. Secondly, the metaphor represents Turkey as a

state that is standing at a crossroad but not moving anywhere, which
means that others can only wait for her to make the right decisions. The
metaphor lacks specificity, is slippery, and can be constantly reasserted to
claim that Turkey still has not made its definite choice. The chapter analy-
ses how policy practice and policy analysis are often interconnected, shar-
ing ways of knowing and narrating. Foreign policy practitioners also
produce analyses, which means that the boundary between first-order rep-
resentations and second-order representations is often blurred. A minister
for foreign affairs, for example, might analyse his or her firsthand observa-
tions by writing analyses in influential publications. The metaphor of
‘being at a crossroads’ provides a fitting tool to practice this double role of
seeking to objectively analyse Turkish political developments and at the
same time politically engaging with Turkey through moralising.
In Chap. 5, the popular practice of explaining foreign policy through
individual leaders is analysed as a narrative tradition that can be under-
stood as Burke’s ‘personalizing of essence’ practice or Lakoff’s (1999, 27)
‘State-as-Person’ metaphor (see also Ringmar, 1996b). The narrative tra-
dition relies on a belief that political leaders such as Trump, Erdoğan,
Putin, or Merkel play a decisive role in international politics, determining
the direction of world politics. Such an interpretative frame often empha-
sises psychological factors over structural explanations, leading to debates
over the mental state of state leaders rather than increasing knowledge
about historical, political, cultural, and economic conditions that shape
international politics. This chapter examines the personification of foreign
policy through different generating principles that underpin the interpre-
tative practice. One can argue that the leader embodies and performs the
essence of the state or, in contrast, that the leader is an exceptional rather
than a traditional leader in the state in question.
When Turkey is represented through Erdoğan, all the four classical
tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony (White, 1973) can
be identified in the analysis. There are strong metonymical divisions drawn
between Erdoğan and his predecessors, representing Erdoğan as a rupture
in Turkey’s political culture. There are also narratives that rely on synec-
dochal elements, representing Erdoğan as a leader that has a universal
character trait, a hunger for power. In this case Erdoğan embodies univer-
sal human attributes that are shared among many political leaders. The
ironic trope is used to argue that it is only natural for him to act the way
he does because Turkey has been subjected to unjust treatment in
16 J. VUORELMA
international politics, which hurts Turkish pride—any leader would act the
same way if his country was subjected to similar humiliating treatment.
Finally, there are narratives that posit Erdoğan as a product of Turkish
political culture that brings up strongmen and is authoritarian in nature.
In other words, he simply personifies the line of authoritarian regimes that
have always characterised the country’s politics.
Chapter 6 examines the long narrative tradition of representing Islam
and its political manifestations as a creeping force in international politics,
which also ties in with the collective identity of being European (Boukala,
2019) as well as the idea of the West. The chapter analyses how this narra-
tive tradition provides an enduring image through which Turkish politics
has been represented. The decisive dividing line is drawn between a secu-
lar Turkey and a religious Turkey, often representing it as an age-old battle
that has characterised the republic since the founding of modern Turkey
in the 1920s. In the 1920s, Foreign Affairs published an essay that
described the transformation of the Ottoman Empire into a secular repub-
lic as a ‘bewildering change’, which meant that ‘the atmosphere of the
country is still that of the fairy tale’ with the traces of the Empire ‘dis-
solved in the whirl of a fantasy as unreal as is the Turkish conception of it
all’ (F, 1925). The dilemma of whether the changes in the early 1900s
were genuine or simply ‘fantasies’ and ‘fairytales’ has shaped this narrative
tradition for generations.
The election victory of the AKP in 2002 constitutes a formative moment
in the narrative tradition with references to the strengthening role of the
Millî Görüş movement in the preceding decades as well as the electoral
success of the Welfare Party in the 1990s. This narrative tradition carries a
persistent belief that Islam and democracy are not compatible (see for
example Bayat, 2007). The main dilemma in the early 2000s that shaped
this narrative tradition was the ‘real’ political strategy of the AKP. The
dilemma was that the AKP might, after all, move Turkey in a more demo-
cratic and progressive direction, making it impossible to maintain the
belief that political Islam cannot genuinely advance democracy. As recently
as in 2011 Erdoğan appeared on the cover of Time magazine that described
him as ‘a moderate Islamist and steadfast advocate of secular democracy’
who is becoming one of the world's most influential leaders. Only a few
years later the dilemma of whether an Islamist leader can genuinely pro-
mote democratic values had lost its power as Erdoğan’s authoritarian style
of ruling became all too apparent. As a result, the explanatory power of
the narrative tradition gained further strength, undermining other
interpretations such as the long line of authoritarian leadership in Turkey’s

political history, the rapidly changing political landscape in international
politics in the 2010s, and the shifting ideological orientation within the
AKP. In the chapter, it is shown how this narrative tradition is intertwined
with securitisation, treating ‘creeping Islamisation’ in Turkey as a threat
both to Turkey and the West.
In the concluding chapter it is discussed how the constant wave of news
about international politics might obscure the fact that there are persistent
representation practices in the analysis of foreign policy and international
politics that are shared among journalists, foreign policy analysis experts,
and political representatives. Different analytical fields rely on ‘distinctive
methods of inquiry and modes of communication, but every field does its
work through argument. Fields use various devices of speculation, assump-
tion, definition, evidence, inference, testing, reporting, and criticism. Yet
all conduct inquiries through persuading people’ (Nelson, 1998, 5).
Similarly, representation practices in international politics rely on particu-
lar ways of knowing and narrating the international with the intent of
persuading the audience. The powerful nature of narrative traditions
becomes apparent in moments of extraordinary events such as the 2016
attempted coup in Turkey. One might have thought that an extraordinary
event would trigger unique interpretations through the dilemma of trying
to understand what was going on in Turkey, but in contrast many analyses
relied on existing narrative traditions. What could be witnessed immedi-
ately after the coup attempt in Turkey, then, was a discursive movement to
familiar representations.
Rebecca West famously noted in relation to the Balkans: ‘I derived the
knowledge from memories of my earliest interest in liberalism, of leaves
fallen from this jungle, of pamphlets tied up with string, in the dustiest
corners of junkshops, and later from the prejudices of the French, who use
the word Balkan as a term of abuse, meaning a rastaquouere type of bar-
barian’ (West, 2006[1942], 21). The epistemic field of analysing foreign
policy and international politics is not quite as messy a field of knowledge,
but it is also a complex blend of beliefs, facts, prejudices, observations,
academic findings, moralising impulses, policy advice, and narrative tradi-
tions. In addition to being informative and analytical, international poli-
tics as a field of knowledge also teaches moral lessons about the international
and its actors. Students in International Relations are taught that
Thucydides is the father of scientific realism, and that the Melian dialogue
in his History of the Peloponnesian War represents a prime example of the
18 J. VUORELMA
Realist logic of reasoning. Cornford (1907) showed in his eloquent book

Thucydides Mythistoricus in 1907 that instead of being a textbook in strat-
egy as usually suggested, Thucydides’ magnum opus is more a lesson in
morality. This line of thinking is as relevant today as it was 100 years ago.
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CHAPTER 2
From Beliefs to Traditions
The most famous case that illuminates the question of representation is

ancient philosopher Socrates. We only know about the life and philosophy
of Socrates because others have represented them in writing. As Socrates
did not write down his teachings, there are no first-order representations
that we could access, which means that we have to rely on second-order
representations to understand his philosophical thinking. The most well-
known second-order representations were written by his students Plato
and Xenophon who produced their oeuvre on Socrates after his death.
The lack of first-order representations has resulted in intense scholarly
debates on the real character of Socrates. These debates have given rise to
what is called the Socratic problem, which refers to the difficulty of recon-
structing Socrates’ historical images by relying on writings of others that
are often contradictory and open to various interpretations. As such, the
figure of Socrates is a literary construction that cannot be authenticated by
referring to Socrates’ own writings about himself and his philosophy.
Although the writings of Socrates’ contemporaries such as Plato and
Xenophon have more authenticity than the scholarly works of the follow-
ing centuries because they knew him personally and constructed the liter-
ary tradition of representing him, their works are nevertheless second-order
representations.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 23

Switzerland AG 2022
J. Vuorelma, Narrative Traditions in International Politics, The
Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political
Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85588-8_2
24 J. VUORELMA
The Socratic Problem in International Politics

We can start mapping out the question of representation in international
politics through the figure of Socrates. International politics has its own
Socratic problem that is intertwined with representation. If the ontologi-
cal status of state is taken seriously, it becomes questionable to talk about
first-order representations that states produce. As Ringmar (1996, 439)
aptly notes,
the state is much less unified and much less coordinated than bodies gener-
ally are supposed to be. Its parts are not only disjointed, but often enough
also connected to other parts which in turn are connected to other bodies.
If the state is a body it is surely very much like the bodies of the Women of
Avignon, the prostitutes of Pablo Picasso’s well-known cubist masterpiece.
Treating states as if they were persons who have feelings, identities, and
cognitive capabilities is one of the paradoxes in the field of International
Relations and beyond. It is common to talk about Russia getting angry or
the United States being satisfied with a deal even though it is clear that
states are not agents who can think and feel the same way as persons. The
problem of anthropomorphism is an enduring question in the study of
international politics and raised by Wells in his 1935 essay in Foreign
Affairs: ‘I can't make myself think of Japan as an individual who is plot-
ting against Russia and who is preparing to form an alliance with Germany
which would threaten Anglo-Saxon interests.’ (Wells 1935). Wendt
approaches the paradox from the perspective of states’ psychological rather
than legal or moral personhood and argues that states are intentional
actors with a sense of self (Wendt, 2004). Wight (2004, 280) emphasises
that ‘when we talk of the state acting what we mean is individuals acting
in a particular structural context. And both context and agents acting are
necessary for any social explanation’.
Ringmar writes about the ‘two-way vanishing trick’ of states that
includes realist assumptions about rational states that have an a priori exis-
tence in international politics and pluralist assumptions about states as ‘a
bundle of ever-changing wills, desires and preferences, lacking any real
coherence or persistence over time’ (Ringmar 1996, 448). In both the
realist and pluralist approaches, state as an object of analysis vanishes and
is treated as something that either is or is not. Ringmar argues that states’
existence should not be formulated as a question of ‘being’ but as ‘being
2 FROM BELIEFS TO TRADITIONS 25
as’, which means that instead of trying to define what states really are we
can analytically examine what they resemble. For Ringmar, this approach
leads to narratives and a narrative concept of the self because state is not a
static metaphor but a rich collection of stories. Ringmar (1996, 452)
argues that while a state ‘may consist of all kinds of bureaucratic struc-
tures, institutional mechanisms and other body-like organs, it is—as an
entity endowed with an identity—necessarily at the mercy of the interpre-
tations given to it through the stories in which it features’. Neumann
(2004, 265) further theorises the narrative self of the state and argues that
the key question is which metaphors constitute the state and with what
effects. Jackson (2004) emphasises that it is social activity that constitutes
the state and never produces the ‘real’ essence of it. Instead of trying to
identify the constitutive essence of states, we can analyse the practices that
maintain boundaries and a shared sense of a national self.
Given the difficulties in defining the state in an unproblematic way, the
question of who represents the state needs to be raised. The most obvious
answer is that the head of state is the official and legitimate representative
who, in Hobbes’ formulation, personates the state (Pitkin, 1964). In
Hobbes’ thinking, it is the sovereign who has the legitimacy to represent
the state (Skinner, 1999). However, when this rule is examined in empiri-
cal terms, it becomes much fuzzier. In 2017, President Trump made
explicit statements about Qatar funding extremism, while the US State
Department assured that the relations between the US and Qatar were
strong. Such contradicting statements were a defining part of Trump’s
presidency and showed how the narrative unity of the state can quickly
crumble if the sovereign represents the state in ways that are in conflict
with state bureaucracy. Similarly, sovereign representation of the state is
often challenged if other state actors or interest groups successfully chal-
lenge the official narrative that the head of state represents. It is therefore
impossible to impose a rule stipulating that it is always the officially recog-
nised state leader who expresses the first-order representations of the state.
It is equally impossible to properly evaluate whether those representations
are more authentic images of the state’s political reality than representa-
tions of civil society actors, other state actors, or citizens who contest the
official narrative.
As such, the Socratic problem in international politics arises already
when examining first-order representations of states because states cannot
represent their feelings and beliefs the same way as persons. The Socratic
problem becomes more prevalent when we begin to scrutinise
26 J. VUORELMA
second-order representations of states in international politics. These rep-

resentations are not about narrative construction of the state’s self, but
about others narrating the state. In international politics, the picture of
states is drawn primarily through second-order representations that nar-
rate states in various ways and provide states with thin or thick recogni-
tion. Thin recognition is about the legal status of a sovereign state, which
is needed to gain legitimacy for declaring independence or redrawing state
boundaries (Strömbom, 2014). Kosovo’s declaration of independence
from Serbia in 2008, for example, did not result in the international com-
munity providing thin recognition to it. Still more than a decade later,
only about half of the member states of the United Nations recognise
Kosovo as an independent state. There are various intractable conflicts
where thin recognition is not granted by the majority of states, including
the status of Northern Cyprus, Crimea, and Republic of Macedonia.
Thick recognition, on the other hand, is about others recognising the
state’s identity narrative (Strömbom, 2014). The state can be a legitimate
and legally existing entity that is recognised as an institutional actor in
international politics but not in terms of its identity as represented by the
sovereign. In such cases the stories that the state tells about its values,
objectives, and interests contradict with the interpretations that others put
forward. The ways in which North Korea appears in the representations of
the sovereign, Kim Jong-un, contradicts with the threatening images that
dominate in international politics. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán repre-
sents Hungary as a sturdy defender of democracy and European values,
which is in stark contrast with the dominant EU narrative of Orbán as a
severe threat to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in Hungary
and beyond. In other words, state leaders crave thick recognition that
grants legitimacy and coherence to their national sense of the self but are
not always granted that. The time of national elections is also a moment in
which recognition becomes relevant. When Trump was competing against
Joe Biden in the presidential election in the United States in 2020, some
state leaders recognised Trump’s narrative that he was the real election
winner. For example, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša congratulated
Trump when millions of votes were still being counted, declaring that it is
‘pretty clear that American people have elected Donald Trump [and] Mike
Pence for 4 more years’ (Janša 2021). A close ally of Orbán, Janša contin-
ued: ‘Congratulations GOP for strong results across the US.’ Janša was
part of an alliance of politicians such as Brazil’s Bolsonaro, the UK’s Nigel
Farage, and Italy’s Matteo Salvini who publicly stood for Trump and his
re-election, providing recognition to Trump’s ‘hostile media’ narrative

and claims about ‘stolen elections’.
Second-order Representations
in International Politics
Second-order representations do not only concern particular events but

also form an everyday practice in international politics where states are
continuously narrated and imagined by diplomats, journalists, politicians,
policy analysts, and researchers who form loose epistemic communities
that produce knowledge about the international. This knowledge produc-
tion does not take place in a vacuum but in a context that is deeply layered
with existing narratives, preconceptions, historical metaphors, and partic-
ular ways of knowing. In his work on Orientalism, Said wrote about
‘knowing the Oriental’ and how it was produced and maintained through
various kinds of power: (1) power political, (2) power intellectual, (3)
power cultural, and (4) power moral (Said 1978, 12). Orientalism is main-
tained through second-order representations that are passed over from
generation to generation of scholars, journalists, diplomats, travellers, and
observers who cannot be divided in terms of whether they represent
‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ perspectives.
Orientalist knowledge and imagination penetrate interpretative prac-
tices across geographical boundaries and epistemic fields, including those
regions that have been labelled as Oriental. To analyse Orientalist repre-
sentations is not to proclaim that there are true and genuine depictions
behind the veil of distorted and politically charged Orientalist images
(Said 1978, 322). Said showed how in the language of Lord Cromer,
England’s representative in Egypt (1882–1907), and Arthur Balfour,
British Conservative statesman, the Oriental was depicted as something
that one (1) judges, (2) studies, (3) disciplines, and (4) illustrates, arguing
that ‘in each of these cases the Oriental is contained and represented by
dominating frameworks’ (Said 1978, 40, emphasis in original). This
enduring and powerful practice of representation led Said to ask: ‘What
specialized skills, what imaginative pressures, what institutions and tradi-
tions, what cultural forces produce such similarity in the descriptions of
the Orient to be found in Cromer, Balfour, and our contemporary states-
men?’ (Said 1978, 49).
28 J. VUORELMA
The same question has intrigued various other scholars who have stud-
ied forms of second-order representations depicting geographical loca-
tions, nationalities, states, and cultural entities. Todorova examined the
tradition of representing the Balkans, declaring: ‘A specter is haunting
Western culture—the specter of the Balkans. All the powers have entered
into a holy alliance to exorcise the specter: politicians and journalists, con-
servative academics and radical intellectuals, moralists or all kind, gender,
and fashion’ (Todorova 1998, 3). Todorova showed how the Balkans as a
pejorative and threatening image were constructed, maintained, and
strengthened in second-order representations in various epistemic fields
that produced knowledge about them. Balkanism was not only an imita-
tion of Orientalism but developed independently and served not only as
an outer Western gaze but also as a self-designation that over time pro-
duced its own regional hierarchies (Bakić-Hayden, 1995).
The ways in which the whole continent of Africa has been rendered
‘knowable’ through enduring representations have been similarly studied
by focusing on frozen discourses, stereotypes, and attitudes that are passed
on from one generation to the next (see e.g. Comaroff & Comaroff 1991;
Gabay 2018; Korang, 2004; Logan, 1999, McAleer, 2010). Such repre-
sentations can be analysed as discourses, rhetoric, frames, narratives,
speech acts, images, and language among other categories. These different
categories illuminate particular aspects of representations while leaving
other elements in the margins. For example, a focus on language can leave
the role of visual representation unexamined. A focus on discourse empha-
sises structure over agency. Framing does not pay attention to the process
of emplotment.
In this book, the interpretative triangle of beliefs, traditions, and dilem-
mas is brought to the study of representation. Mark Bevir and Rod Rhodes
developed their interpretative approach to study British governance (Bevir
& Rhodes, 2003, 2006), locating their approach in the wider ‘interpreta-
tive family’ that includes discourse analysts, post-structuralists, and some
social constructivists, among others. This interpretative approach has been
later expanded to provide theoretical and methodological tools to exam-
ine foreign policy (Bevir et al., 2013b) and global security (Bevir et al.,
2013a). In this book, their interpretative approach is further developed to
study what the book calls narrative traditions in international politics.
Social Heritage and Loose Epistemic Communities

The starting point in the interpretative triangle is that a ‘social heritage is
the necessary background to the beliefs people adopt and the actions they
perform’ (Bevir et al., 2013a, 39). The existence of a social heritage is at
the centre of studying a loose epistemic community in international poli-
tics, which is loose because it includes various different actors that hold
both unofficial and official institutional positions and engage in knowl-
edge production in various different arenas (see e.g. Scott, 2015;
Romanova, 2019). Haas’ famous definition of epistemic community as
‘the transmission belt by which knowledge is developed and transmitted
to decision-makers’ (Haas 2004, 587) assumes a strong distinction
between experts and policymakers. To Haas, epistemic community is ‘a
network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a
particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge
within that domain or issue-area’ (Haas 1992, 3).
In this book, the intergenerational and international knowledge pro-
duction concerning Turkey, grounded in a social heritage, is not limited to
recognised experts but analysed as an epistemic practice that also includes
policymakers. This is why the nature of this epistemic community is loose
and much blurrier than the relatively neat model that Haas proposes. The
loose epistemic community is an ‘audience of normals’ that is needed to
bring stability and order to international politics that forms a society lack-
ing normative certainty: ‘International society is a modus vivendi, which
operates only insofar as different “communities of practice,” including
governments, diplomats, journalists, companies, and organizations, bother
to keep it going’ (Adler-Nissen 2014, 152). Various policymakers have a
role in maintaining and strengthening the social heritage before, during,
or after their careers in politics. For example, Henry Kissinger (United
States National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State during the
1960s and 1970s), Joschka Fischer (foreign minister and vice chancellor
of Germany from 1998 to 2005), and Ahmet Davutoğlu (foreign minister
from 2009 to 2014, and prime minister of Turkey from 2014 to 2016)
were also prominent academics and foreign policy commentators who
have frequently contributed to scholarly debates.
The stream of knowledge is not linear, flowing from expertise to policy,
but rather non-linear and complex. Said wrote that it is ‘natural for men in
power to survey from time to time the world with which they deal. Balfour
did it frequently. Our contemporary Henry Kissinger does it also’ (Said
30 J. VUORELMA
1978, 46). Said went on to analyse Kissinger’s essay ‘Domestic Structure

and Foreign Policy’, published in American Foreign Policy: Three Essays
(Kissinger 1969), arguing that Kissinger advanced Orientalist representa-
tions by conceiving ‘of the difference between cultures, first, as creating a
battlefront that separates them, and second, as inviting the West to con-
trol, contain, and otherwise govern (through superior knowledge and
accommodating power) the Other’ (Said 1978, 47–48).
The prominent role that policymakers play in these loose epistemic
communities also means that the line between first- and second-order rep-
resentation is not clear. As Neumann & Nixon (2006, 8) argue, they
‘interact in a variety of ways. Moreover, sometimes one person’s second-
order representation is another person’s first-order representation’. When
a political leader analyses a speech he has given or a deal he has signed, we
can conceptualise it as a first-order representation as he writes about own
experiences as a witness. When, however, she begins to analyse how the
speech or deal was interpreted abroad, we move to second-order represen-
tations. There is a tendency to prioritise first-order representations, but
these orders cannot be organised in a hierarchical fashion. In fact, as
Neumann & Nexon (2006, 8) emphasise, ‘for many people, second-order
representations are often more significant sources of knowledge about
politics and society’.
If one hears about a diplomatic deal that has been signed between two
countries, one might ‘understand’ its meaning only after reading an article
that examines its significance to the wider region and situates it in a his-
torical context. The analysis is a second-order representation, but it can
influence the reader’s basic assumptions not only about the diplomatic
agreement but also about the two countries—their histories, characters,
and intentions—a lot more than a first-order representation by a state
leader who explains the significance of the deal firsthand in a press confer-
ence. Mills has argued this eloquently:
The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in
second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they personally
experienced; and their own experience is always indirect [...] Their images of
the world, and of themselves, are given to them by crowds of witnesses they
have never met and never shall meet. (Cited in Neumann & Nexon 2006, 7)
This is because, as Lippmann (1922, 14–15) put it, ‘the real environ-
ment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct
acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much

variety, so many permutations and combinations’. But as we ’know’ the
world through second-order representations, we also subject ourselves to
the moral or aesthetic preferences of the ‘witness’, because interpretation
is never value-free. In Wittgenstein’s terms, it is our ‘tendency to assume
a pure intermediary between the propositional signs and the facts’ that
defines the interpretative nature of knowledge (Wittgenstein, 1997, 44).
If we only listen to President Barack Obama’s speech in Istanbul, we
‘know’ very little about the United States’ foreign policy in the region. A
report in Newsweek about Obama’s visit makes it more understandable,
not least because it is usually told in a narrative format. As Said wrote
about Kissinger’s essay: ‘The drama he depicts is a real one, in which the
United States must manage its behavior in the world under the pressures
of domestic forces on the one hand and of foreign realities on the other’
(Said 1978, 46). A reader gains knowledge about Obama’s visit in a con-
text that is already saturated with a social heritage, often including ele-
ments that judge, study, discipline, and illustrate the political reality in
Egypt and beyond. Lippmann (1922, 20) continues that ‘what each man
does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made
by him or given to him’.
A reader might have a closer cultural, political, and moral proximity to
a Western scholar writing in Foreign Affairs that ‘Turkey is lost’ than to a
Turkish political leader declaring in Istanbul that Turkey is firmly commit-
ted to Western values. In such cases, it is often the second-order represen-
tation that takes precedence. Furthermore, the acts of political elites that
form most of our first-order representations can be paradoxically consid-
ered less reliable sources because of their strategic nature. As Mearsheimer
(2010) argues, foreign political elites speak one language in public, but act
according to a different logic. This is paradoxical because first-order rep-
resentations are often perceived as more ‘truthful’ accounts of reality in
the same way as witnesses to an accident supposedly ‘know’ what hap-
pened. As such, Obama explaining the significance of his visit to Egypt
provides a very different horizon to its interpretation than a Newsweek report.
Firsthand accounts are, of course, interpretations, but our tendency to
assume a pure resemblance between language and reality is stronger in the
case of first-order representations. A typical analytical approach to the
issue outlined by Mearsheimer is to work out what the political leader
really meant. For example, a Western scholar writing in Foreign Affairs
might be analysing the speech given in Istanbul and may argue that
32 J. VUORELMA
although the leader proclaims that Turkey is committed to the West, he

does not actually mean it and is simply trying to cover other interests that
are on a direct collision course with Western values. The scholar then out-
lines the real interests that the leader harbours, concluding that Turkey is
not committed to but, in fact, abandoning the West. In such cases, then,
utterances by Turkish state leaders can be subsequently interpreted from
the perspective of this ‘cover up’ rather than as first-order representations
that can increase knowledge about the real intentions of the state elites.
A social heritage that influences perception and interpretation is at the
core of the interpretative triangle and can be understood as a ‘first influ-
ence’ on agents who represent events in international politics. The inter-
pretative model based on tradition, beliefs, and dilemmas allows for an
analytical focus on the role of agency, which is conceptualised as situated
rather than autonomous. As Bevir et al. (2013a, 39) argue:
It is this commitment to the possibility of agency that makes tradition a

more satisfactory concept than rivals such as structure, paradigm and epis-
teme. These later ideas suggest the presence of a social force that determines
or at least limits the beliefs and actions of individuals. Tradition, in contrast,
suggests that a social heritage comes to individuals who, through their
agency, can adjust and transform this heritage even as they pass it on
to others.
When the practice of representing international politics is studied as a

tradition, it opens up research avenues that allow turning the analytical
gaze from structure to situated agents who are influenced by traditions in
the field but can also slowly change them. Individuals can reflect on and
adjust their contingent heritage, but cannot operate outside of it. Beliefs
and practices are rooted in traditions that have been forming in various
eras and circumstances to judge, study, discipline, and illustrate particular
actors or regions. This is the case with both scholarly communities and
loose epistemic communities that include agents from various fields,
including diplomacy and journalism. When it comes to scholarly tradi-
tions, Kuhn (1962) famously showed how ‘normal science’ disciplines in
ways that produce a strict understanding of accepted practices in research
traditions.1 This applies to foreign policy analysis where assumptions ‘are
1
Fuller (2009, 20–21) warned against using Kuhn’s thesis in the social sciences because it
easily becomes its caricature. Kuhn was trained only in physics and was never concerned with
paradigms in the social sciences.
not to be questioned, concepts are already well defined and accepted. We

are even encouraged to limit the kinds of research questions we ask’
(Schafer, 2003, 19). It is about agents in the field getting socialised into a
particular way of thinking, interpreting, and framing the international.
Narrative Traditions Carry Beliefs

There are various ways in which the ‘stuff’ that traditions carry can be
conceptualised and analysed. Here the key concept is belief, which does
not arise independently as a manifestation of personal preferences but is
strongly influenced by the social heritage. Analysts who study interna-
tional politics do not operate in a vacuum but in a deeply layered context
that influences the way in which the political field is interpreted. For Bevir
and Rhodes (2006, 6–7), an interpretative framework that focuses on
beliefs acts ‘as a counter to the lukewarm positivism of much political sci-
ence. Equally, it helps to remind us that meanings arise not as parts of
disembodied quasi-structures like paradigms and epistemes, but rather as
subjective and inter-subjective understandings’ (cf. Glynos & Howarth,
2008; Smith, 2008). Roberts (2006, 711) reminds us that ‘individuals are
unique and particular while at the same time being inseparable from their
conditions and contexts. There can be no agency without structures and
no structures without agency’.
If the ’stuff’ that interpretative traditions carry is analysed as ideas in
line with ideational approaches (e.g. Blyth, 2003), agency becomes much
more blurry. If the analytical focus is on institutions that represent particu-
lar interpretative traditions such as the EU or the WTO, the analysis pro-
duces more structural and static accounts on international politics.
Institutional approaches are well equipped to explain order and continuity,
but less so to explain change and rupture (Lieberman, 2002). If one seeks
to study the very act of representing the international, the concept of
belief provides a fitting tool as it takes into account the situated agent who
is socialised into particular beliefs, inherits an interpretative tradition, but
can also rethink the beliefs and traditions in the field. Traditions are con-
tainers that transport beliefs through time and to different contexts.
The third concept in the interpretative triangle, dilemma, explains
change in traditions and shows that interpretation is fundamentally a cre-
ative act of agents in a loose epistemic community. There are dilemmas
encountered in the field of international politics that simply cannot be
integrated into the existing narrative tradition. Such moments of
34 J. VUORELMA
dislocation act as catalysts for change. When change in the narrative tradi-
tion occurs, the first task of research is to identify which dilemmas have
made it difficult to maintain the existing tradition. The second task is to
map out the contradicting beliefs that pushed towards a new framing. In
the early 2000s, for example, the narrative tradition of analysing Hungary
in international politics was dominated by the belief that the country was
on an inevitable path towards Europeanisation. However, the dilemma
posed by the increasingly anti-EU rhetoric of the Hungarian leadership
made it impossible to continue the narrative tradition, paving the way
towards a new belief that Hungary was instead on a path towards de-
Europeanisation (Ágh, 2015; Hettyey, 2021).
Some narrative traditions are more static and enduring than others,
only slowly responding to dilemmas that arise in the empirical field. For
example, after the Second World War the norm against capital punishment
was gradually internalised across Europe through a paradigm shift towards
prioritising human rights and using legal instruments to enforce the norm
change. Today, the norm against death penalty is one of the core values of
the European Union and a prerequisite for joining the Union. Turkey
abolished capital punishment in 2004 as part of the EU reform package.
Although the norm against death penalty is internalised in Europe and
treated as an indicator of a fully developed state, the fact that the United
States has not abolished death penalty has not affected the narrative tradi-
tion that the United States is a state that Europeans can strongly identify
with and perceive as ‘one of us’.
In other words, the United States upholding capital punishment with
over 1500 executions from 1976 until 2021 is not a potent enough
dilemma to change the belief that there is a transatlantic alliance that is
based on shared values and normative underpinnings. The presidency of
Trump in 2016 represented a dilemma that challenged the narrative tradi-
tion of a unified West (Vuorelma, 2020), but instead of leading to analyses
on whether we are ‘losing’ the United States, Trump began to be repre-
sented as an exception that disturbed the enduring belief that a shared
West exists and is worth defending. As such, the end of Trump’s presi-
dency meant that the dilemma of Trump could be left behind and a return
to ‘normalcy’ was possible: ‘Biden presidency marks a return to normalcy
after chaotic Trump years’ (Klassen, 2021).
In contrast, Turkey is one of those states in international politics that is
continuously on the verge of being ‘lost’ to the West with an enduring
dilemma that dates back to the very founding of the republic in 1923. The
dilemma that still continues to influence narrative traditions concerning

Turkey in international politics was already present in the analysis of for-
eign policy in the early 1900s. In its July 1925 issue, Foreign Affairs pub-
lished an article titled ‘Turkish facts and fantasies’ by an author named
simply F. The article paints a picture of a torn country that is remarkably
similar to the image of Turkey in the 2000s. The article starts by pointing
towards the contradiction between the ‘true’ nature of Turkey and the
political changes that were taking place in the country, representing the
process as an artificial one that was hiding the ‘real Turkey’:
In the past decade Turkey has passed through three periods of swift trans-
formation. So bewildering have been the changes brought about by them
that the atmosphere of the country is still that of the fairy tale. Look at the
modern Turkish Republic, purged of Sultan and Khalif and foreign domina-
tion—where are the traces of the old Ottoman Empire? Or of the beaten
Turk who was to be driven from Europe? Or of the Defender of Islam to
whom the Moslem world, from Morocco to India, was supposed to rally
four years ago? Gone, vanished, dissolved in the whirl of a fantasy as unreal
as is the Turkish conception of it all. (F 1925, 589)
The reform process in which the leaders of the new republic introduced
policies that were secular and based on the idea that Turkey needs to
reform along the lines of other European states was represented as a ‘fai-
rytale’ that was simply unreal, ‘the whirl of a fantasy’. The reform process
was represented as unrealistic because it allegedly ignored the persistent
realities of Turkey that cannot be changed. As the article continues: ‘This
decade is a kaleidoscopic picture of changing forms in front of which has
been suspended one screen after another of camouflage. And back of all
the shifting scenes the phlegmatic old Turk has remained, one of the most
unchanged and unchangeable types in Europe.’ The dilemma was how to
analyse modernisation reforms that were taking place in Turkey when
there was an enduring belief that these changes are only artificial and can-
not change the true nature of Turkey. This ‘true’ nature was Eastern and
resistant to modernisation, significantly differing from ‘us Westerns’ that
Turkey—‘a land of camouflage’ (F 1925, 596)—was trying to imitate.
The dilemma has been integrated into the traditions of interpreting Turkey
in international politics and represented through metaphors. White (1978,
184) aptly argues that metaphors are ’crucially necessary when a culture or
36 J. VUORELMA
a social group encounters phenomena that either elude or run afoul of

normal expectations or quotidian experiences’.
The expectation that Turkey represents Europe’s significant other that
is fundamentally different in terms of religion, culture, history, and politics
was ruptured in the early 1900s when the Republic of Turkey was founded
along Western lines. The reform process had begun already decades ago
but the formative event of establishing the new republic made the change
tangible and institutional. Turkey’s attempt to identify with Europe and
the West was not reciprocated in the epistemic practices that produced
knowledge about the international, instead focusing on division, doubts,
and dilemmas. There are dilemmas in Western traditions of representing
Turkey that are not empirical puzzles encountered in everyday political life
but beliefs that are inbuilt in the traditions; this is a deep social heritage
that analysts encounter when they enter the field of analysing Turkey in
international politics. In addition to the belief that there is an unchanging
national character that remains unchanged despite political reforms, there
is also an enduring belief that the West–East dividing line remains a pro-
foundly meaningful framing to understand Turkish politics. The idea of
the West and its fundamental difference to the East remains an integral
part of knowledge production concerning the role of Turkey in interna-
tional politics in the 2000s. In the 1925 article, the belief that our Western
way of life is fundamentally different from the East formed the core of the
analysis:
We Westerners have become realistic and individualistic to a degree beyond

anything ever attained in the East. Quite aside from any handicaps that may
arise through Turkish retention of the Moslem religion, the amalgamation
of Turkish culture and Western civilization would appear to be, on the face
of it, a considerable undertaking. So far the Turks have to their credit little
constructive work which would indicate future success along this line. (F
1925, 600)
A third belief that was present in the 1925 article and continues to
influence the way in which Turkey is represented in international politics
is the assumption that there is an inevitable tendency towards strongmen
in Turkish politics (see Chap. 5). As the article concludes: ‘What is there,
then, in this fantastic play of unrealities? Are all the shapes one sees on the
stage just phantoms? No. There is in Turkey what there has often been in
the past—a strong man. He at least is no sham. He knows exactly what he
wants, and he gets it’ (F 1925, 602). The ‘strongmen’ narrative tradition
has for a long time been accompanied by a belief that the population of
Turkey is reactionary, clinging to traditions, and anti-Western, which
enables the rise of strongmen and makes genuine political reforms diffi-
cult. ‘A few doctrinaires strive to ram Western ideas, including laicism,
down the throats of a people essentially anti-Western and intensely reac-
tionary’, the Foreign Affairs article argued (F 1925, 602). The language
in the 1925 article is such that in 2020 it would not be possible to use it
without getting accused of racism and prejudices. In the early 1900s it was
common to talk about, for example, racial characteristics in a research
article or in an analytical text. The article concluded:
The Turk’s labors to construct a nation on ultra-Western lines are wholly

foreign to his blood and to his traditions. Our Western foundations become
in his hands mere camouflage for the things which are to him racially
inborn—the personal struggle of the few, the political indifference of the
many. (F 1925, 603)
It is worth examining more closely the article from 100 years ago
because it illuminates some key characteristics in the traditions of repre-
senting Turkey in international politics. It also provides an illustration of
how the triangle of beliefs, traditions, and dilemmas will be employed in
the following chapters. The beliefs that were part of the narrative resources
in the early 1900s continue to influence the way in which Turkey is anal-
ysed in international politics. The founding of the republic in 1923 con-
tinues to serve as the formative moment in the analysis on Turkey’s EU
candidacy and to provide explanatory power to interpret events in the
2000s. As the earlier cited Financial Times article on EU–Turkey relations
argued in 2006:
This large, poor, secular-but-Muslim nation of 72m people has been knock-
ing on Europe’s door since at least 1923, when the republic was founded
from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Wednesday, when the European
Commission publishes what is set to be a damning report on Turkey’s prog-
ress in accession negotiations, the problems in Ankara’s relations with
Europe will laid out for the world to see. (Dombey and Boland 2006)
The division between the West and the East continues to serve as a
meaningful bifurcation alongside the religious divide between Christianity
38 J. VUORELMA
and Islam, which are such commonsensical features in the study of Turkey
that they require no further emphasis. The belief that Turkey is prone to
be led by strongmen is also still present. Essentially, the way in which
Turkey as an EU candidate member has been represented in the 2000s
reflects a deeper and persisting doubt over whether Turkey is really com-
mitted to European values and genuinely reforming her policies or only
using the EU candidacy framework as a camouflage that hides the true
nature of the state and her political leadership. The turn towards authori-
tarian measures in the 2010s has, paradoxically, solved the dilemma of
whether Turkey as an EU candidate is ‘a land of camouflage’ and justified
the enduring belief that there is a ‘true’ authoritarian nature that lurks
behind the artificial reforms.
A Narrative Approach in International Politics

The concepts of tradition, belief, and dilemma provide tools to properly
tap into these elements in the representation of Turkey in international
politics. However, it is not enough to identify beliefs as we also need to
look more closely what they actually contain. As already pointed out, they
contain metaphors such as ‘losing’ or ‘crossroads’. But it is not enough to
only identify metaphors because metaphor, as Ringmar (1996, 451)
argues, ‘provides a single picture of life—a Still-leben—but it cannot deal
with life as it unfolds over time’. We need the concept of narrative to anal-
yse how metaphors are used to create causal linkages, historical continu-
ities, and moral interpretations of events in the international. As Ringmar
(1996, 451–452) continues, when metaphors are tied into a narrative
structure, they form more coherent interpretations, which often include a
plot that ‘is characteristically structured around a couple of metaphors
which tell us what the main characters are like, on what terms they inter-
act, and what kinds of situations they are facing’. These narratives do not
only represent Turkey but also the collective self:
In this way stories come to indicate which action are, or are not, worth
undertaking. This is also the case for the stories we tell about our collective
selves. The narratives we construct about our state will specify who we are
and what role we play in the world; how our ‘national interests’ are to be
defined, or which foreign policy to pursue. (Ringmar 1996, 455)
Turkey’s EU membership has been a channel through which European

identity has been debated. Tekin (2010, 3), for example, shows how the
‘possibility of Turkish membership has triggered an intense and unprece-
dented debate regarding the (re)definition of European identity’ (see also
Neumann, 1999; Rumelili, 2004; Levin, 2011; Aydın-Düzgit, 2012;
MacMillan, 2013; Boukala, 2019). Narratives in the study of international
politics are not spontaneous and arbitrary but form traditions that are
passed on from one generation to the next within the loose epistemic
community. This is why the book introduces the concept of narrative tra-
dition to analyse those interpretative traditions that carry beliefs in inter-
national politics. If the language employed in the loose epistemic
community that studies Turkey or some other actors in international poli-
tics is examined as discourse, its storied structure remains unexamined.
Discourse analysis is a fitting approach to examine representation prac-
tices in international politics, but it illuminates different aspects than a
narrative approach. Although they both focus on language and meaning-
ful accounts, a narrative approach studies how events are organised into a
plot structure, which is a process called emplotment. It is worth examining
narrative approaches in more detail in order to map out what the concept
of narrative does in the study of the ‘how’ question in representing the
international. Somers and Gibson (1994, 59) note that ‘it is emplotment
which translates events into episodes’, which is a central feature of narra-
tivity. Gergen (1999) defined the narrative process as one in which events
are causally linked. Ricoeur (1981, 278) has shown how explanation is
‘woven into the narrative tissue’.
The relational aspect in narratives is their key feature, which is about
connectivity: ‘Narrativity demands that we discern the meaning of any
single events only in temporal and spatial relationship to other events’
(Somers & Gibson, 1994, 59). According to Somers and Gibson, narra-
tives feature temporality, sequence, and place. Their definition is similar to
Gergen’s ordered arrangement and a valued endpoint where the former is
about sequencing the events and the latter about creating temporality—an
ending. Somers and Gibson (1994, 59) summarise their narrative model
as ‘constellations of relationships (connected parts) embedded in time and
space, constituted by causal emplotment’. Gerger’s emphasis is on the end-
point; other features in narrative gear towards or support the endpoint.
Polkinghorne (1995, 7) emphasises the plot structure in narratives, argu-
ing that plot is ‘the narrative structure through which people understand
and describe the relationship among the events and choices of their lives’.
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CHAPTER V
THE DELTA BARRAGE AND THE ENGLISH ENGINEERS
At the date of the English occupation the Delta Barrage was

generally thought to be like the whole fabric of Egyptian
Government, rotten to the core. And so indeed it seemed. No one
had ever dared to use, or apparently even to think of using, the
Barrage on the Damietta or right-hand branch at all. The history of
the Barrage on the Rosetta branch was hardly less inglorious. In
1863 its gates were closed for the first time, but about ten of its
arches began to settle, and ominous cracks showed. Eventually the
threatened part was surrounded by a coffer-dam, and from 1872 to
1883 it managed to hold up about 1 metre. But even that was
precarious. Commission after Commission had condemned the
structure; it was felt that at any moment it might give way, especially
if called upon to bear a greater strain, and it was actually the settled
policy of the Government to rely on huge and costly pumping-
stations instead. It was a paltry result after the expenditure of
£4,000,000 and so much labour.
Then, not for the first or last time, the Anglo-Indians came to the
rescue of Africa. Sir Evelyn Baring himself (now Lord Cromer) during
his service as Financial Member of the Council in India, must have
been impressed by the enormous importance of irrigation. It would
not be difficult to find many points of resemblance between his
character and that of one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the
rulers of India, Lord Lawrence, different as were their spheres of
work; but certainly they were alike in this. As Lord Lawrence
supported Arthur Cotton in his engineering work, so Lord Cromer
supported Colin Scott-Moncrieff and the band of trusty lieutenants—
Willcocks, Garstin, Ross, Brown, Foster, Western, and Reid—who
came with him. Fortunately for Egypt, these men, trained in the best
school of irrigation in the world, possessed not only the highest
scientific skill and knowledge, but were also animated by the best
spirit of the empire-building Englishman. Deep in them lay the
earnest wish and determination, far stronger even than their
enthusiasm and love for their profession, to alleviate the lot of the
unhappy peasantry of Egypt. It was this heartfelt sympathy for the
wrongs of the fellaheen, ground down by the intolerable burden of
the corvée, that sustained them in their ceaseless labours and
enabled them to pass successfully through those dark days, when
the air was full of forebodings of failure and disaster, whose fulfilment
would have pleased so many.
The Barrage is situated, as has been said, a little way back from
the point of the Delta. It is really two Barrages, one on the left or
Rosetta branch of the Nile, with sixty-one arches, 465 metres in
length, and the other on the Damietta branch with seventy-one
arches, 535 metres in length. Between the two runs a revetment wall
across the intervening tongue of land, 1,000 metres in length. From
a distance it resembles a bridge of rather fanciful design, with the
arches set unusually close together, and, indeed, for a great part of
its career the functions of a bridge were the only ones it performed.
The tongue of land between has been converted into beautiful
gardens, planted with shady trees and many shrubs and flowers, and
even a greensward resembling grass. Altogether, it is one of the
most delightful and beautiful spots in Egypt, besides being one of the
most useful. Here is the starting-point of the great feeder canals
which irrigate the Delta provinces. On the left, facing north, is the
Rayah Behera, which supplies the province of Behera, to the left of
the Rosetta branch. Between the two Barrages is the head of the
Rayah Menoufia, the canal which feeds the two provinces of
Menoufia and Gharbia, lying between the two arms of the river; while
on the right is the Rayah Tewfiki, which, with its supplementary
canals, Ismailia, Sharkia, and Basusia, supplies the three eastern
provinces of the Delta, Kalyubia, Sharkia, and Dakalia. All these
canals are navigable, as well as the branches of the river, and
provided with locks for that purpose. These great waterways are free
to all, and few of the results of British occupation are more
appreciated in Egypt. Formerly all craft upon the Nile had to pay toll
on passing under a bridge, which did nothing but hinder their
progress, while those for whose convenience it was made passed
without charge overhead.
A Barrage, as its name implies, is designed to completely bar the
bed of the river, so as to enable it to feed the canals at a higher level
than would otherwise be the case, and also to allow the flood to pass
through it easily. It needs, therefore, a very solid foundation from
bank to bank, on which the arches which hold the movable sluice-
gates can be securely planted. Its construction is, therefore, a very
different and much more difficult matter than merely throwing a
bridge over the stream, even a bridge with several spans. The
difficulty is all the greater when, as here, the bed of the river offers
nothing more substantial than shifting sands to build upon. It was for
this reason that Linant wished to build the Barrages at leisure in the
dry, and then divert the river from its old channels, and lead it
through when they were completed. But Mougel chose to build his in
the existing bed of the river, thereby increasing the difficulties of
actual construction, though from other points of view there was much
to be said for this plan. At the site of the Rosetta Barrage the bed of
the river was not of uniform depth; he therefore filled up the deepest
part of the channel, which lay on the right, with loose stones, so as to
bring it up to the level of the bottom on the left-hand side. No cement
was used in laying down this barrier, but the Nile mud filled the
interstices and made it water-tight; when finished, this barrier was 60
metres wide and 10 deep at the deepest part. On this and on the
natural sand he built a platform 46 metres in width and 3·5 metres
thick, composed of concrete overlaid with brick and stonework. On
the platform he raised his arches and piers, all built of brick. Each of
the openings for the sluice-gates, sixty-one in number, was 5 metres
wide. Like an iceberg, that part of the Barrage which is visible above
water is much less than the invisible part below. To further
strengthen the structure and keep it in its place, a mass of rubble
pitching or loose stones was thrown into the river on the downstream
side. This talus was 3 to 16 metres in depth, and at one part
extended 50 metres downstream in a kind of tongue, narrowing
down to 2 metres. The Damietta Barrage was built on a similar plan,
but its downstream talus was not so large. Unfortunately, the
concrete used for the platform was inferior, chiefly owing to the fact
that Mehemet Ali, growing impatient at the slow progress of the
work, ordered a certain amount of material to be laid down every
day, and laid down it had to be in defiance of all engineering
requirements. The consequence was that, as soon as the Rosetta
Barrage was subjected to strain, ten of the arches on the left-hand
side, where the platform was laid down on sand only, settled and
cracked. It was patched up by surrounding the injured arches with a
coffer-dam; but the Damietta Barrage never even had its gates put
in.
Such was the structure with which the English engineers had to
deal. Even as it stands to-day, it cannot, of course, compare in
magnitude with many works upon the Indian rivers; but as regards
the difficulties to be overcome, it can compare with almost any in the
world. It would have been far easier to rebuild the whole thing from
the beginning, but at the time the necessary funds were not
forthcoming. They had to take the old structure, with all its
imperfections, and screw it up to work as it was. The country could
not afford to cut off the summer water-supply of the Delta while the
repairs were in progress. The cotton-crop had always to be thought
of. And the period of the year during which the summer canals
required to be supplied was the only period during which work could
be done, for once the flood came down all operations were at an
end. It is the glory of the English engineers that, working under these
conditions and with untrained workmen, they succeeded in their task.
The Government was already paying many thousands a year to a
company for pumping water out of the Rosetta branch into the
canals during the summer, and the first thing Sir Colin Scott
Moncrieff had to do on his arrival was to decide upon a scheme
which had been prepared for erecting new pumping-stations at an
initial expense of about three-quarters of a million, and involving an
annual expenditure of at least another quarter of a million. So
hopeless were the prospects of the Barrage assumed to be, that
even this expenditure, with a doubtful result, was thought preferable
to repairing it. Sir Colin’s arrival was only in the nick of time. He
determined to see what could be done with the resources at hand.
The new pumping-station scheme was set aside, and Mr. Willcocks
was put in charge of the Barrage.
There was much literature on the subject. During the last sixteen
years nothing had been done, but much had been written, and more
said. Commissions, expert and inexpert, had issued voluminous and
condemnatory reports, and had even prepared expensive schemes
of repair. Mr. Willcocks (now Sir William) is an indefatigable reader,
and could hardly have been encouraged thereby, till an examination
of the structure itself showed that all the later reports had been
drawn up without reference to facts. It had been observed that
whenever the gates were let down there was very severe action of
the water on the downstream side. The authors of the reports
concluded that the foundations were honeycombed. It is
characteristic of the Looking-glass days of Ismail that no one ever
thought of trying to find out by actual observation whether there
might not be some other cause. But Mr. Willcocks, looking for
himself, found that this action of the water was caused, not by
honeycombed foundations, but by open gratings which intervened
between the bottom of the sluice-gates and the platform. They had
been put down originally to keep the silt away from the bottom of the
gates. Someone had fixed them so as to prevent the gates from
being lowered to their full extent and then they had actually been
forgotten. Measures were at once taken to close these gratings, and
eventually to remove them altogether. 20,000 cubic metres of rubble
pitching were added to the talus. The Damietta Barrage was likewise
strengthened with various ingenious expedients, improvised to meet
the demands of the moment. Sluice-gates were put in for the first
time and gradually closed. Part of it was closed by a temporary stone
dam. Eventually in the summer of 1884 2·2 metres of water were
held up on the Rosetta branch, and 1 metre on the Damietta. Next
year the same nursing process was continued. The coffer-dam round
the weak arches was strengthened, the talus of rubble pitching
below each Barrage was completed, and this year 3 metres were
held up on the Rosetta branch and 1·6 on the Damietta. The effect
was extraordinary. The acreage under summer cultivation was
doubled, rising from 600,000 to 1,200,000 acres. Not only was the
supply of water in the Delta canals greatly increased throughout the
summer, but, as it was delivered at a higher level, there was a great
saving of expense in lifting it on to the land. For the first time the
Egyptians thoroughly realized that a new power had come amongst
them.
The experiment had been successful, but temporary expedients
could not last for ever. The more water held up, and the greater the
area of the summer cultivation, the more necessary it became to
insure the stability of the structure. A thorough repair would cost
money. Fortunately, this was now forthcoming. Mr. Willcocks’
success had settled the claim of the Barrage to a share in the
famous Irrigation Million borrowed in 1885.
At the end of 1886 the work was begun, under the charge of
Colonel Western and Mr. Reid, sent specially from India for the
purpose. The operations were spread over four years. In the first
year the left half of the Rosetta Barrage was taken in hand and
finished before the flood, next year the right half. In 1889 and 1890
the Damietta Barrage was similarly taken in hand and finished. Each
year the part to be repaired was enclosed by earthen dams, and the
water pumped out so as to lay the foundations dry. The whole of the
existing floor was raised, both on the upstream and downstream
side, and it was also considerably lengthened. It was, in fact,
enclosed in a new and reliable suit of armour. The dangers and
anxieties of the work were incessant. The protecting dams were
always liable to be breached. Spring after spring burst out through
the treacherous bed of the river, and threatened the destruction of
the year’s work; and again and again each of them was successively
stopped by a number of ingenious devices. There is no enemy so
persistent and so insidious in its attacks as running water. It is
always feeling for and finding out the weak spots. It never sleeps or
slackens by day or by night. It can only be met successfully by a
corresponding activity. While work was possible, it was carried on
unceasingly by night as well as by day. Sometimes as many as
1,600 men worked through the night. The upper brickwork was
generally sound, but new iron sluice-gates moving in special grooves
were fitted throughout. The whole of the repairs cost £465,000. It
was money well laid out. Not only was the safety of the Barrage
assured, but it was found possible to hold up yet another metre of
water. The area of summer crops matured rose once more from
1,200,000 to 1,520,000.
It might have been thought that the work was now complete. Both
in 1891 and 1892 (a year of specially low summer supply) all the
water in the Nile was held up, and diverted into the canals. Not a
drop reached the sea during the summer without having done duty.
But the engineers were now looking forward to a time when the
supply would be greatly increased. The idea of a reservoir had
become an affair of practical politics. It was necessary to make
assurance doubly sure. Accordingly, in 1896 a new experiment was
tried—namely, stock-ramming with clay.
Certain arches in the Damietta Barrage were selected, and in
them five-inch holes were bored right down through pier and platform
alike. When the bore-holes were complete, they were lined with iron
tubes. Clay was then forced through the tube by means of an iron
rammer, and as much as could be made to spread out at the bottom
of the hole was put in and rammed. As far as the clay went, the
experiment was not an entire success; but the boring brought to light
a condition of things in the very vitals of the Barrage which
demanded drastic treatment, for the bore-holes proved the existence
of large cavities in the original platform, and in some places there
was free water communication between one bore-hole and another.
Some piers in the Rosetta Barrage were therefore chosen for a
similar experiment, but this time liquid Portland cement was used
instead of clay, and the results were entirely satisfactory. Few
discoveries have been of more signal service than the invention of
Portland cement. It is not too much to say that it has revolutionized
hydraulic engineering by the facilities it affords for constructing solid
works in water. Its strength and resisting power is enormous, but its
greatest quality is that it hardens and solidifies under the action of
water, and, so far as is known, only goes on getting harder and
harder with time. The borings in the Rosetta Barrage having
revealed similar deficiencies to those in the Damietta, it was decided
to apply to both a thorough dose of this invaluable and invigorating
medicine.
In 1897 five holes were bored in each pier of the Rosetta Barrage
(their united length amounted to very nearly 6 kilometres), and into
each was poured a quantity of liquid cement. The necessity for the
treatment was proved by the fact that in some cases the cement
travelled right through from the bore-hole in one pier and rose
through the bore-hole in an adjoining pier till it reached the top. One
pier actually swallowed 439 barrels of cement, while its neighbour
took a lesser but still gigantic draught of 327 barrels. There was no
doubt that the cement thoroughly explored and filled all the cavities
existing in the foundations under the bridge. In all, 3,254 barrels
were used in the Rosetta Barrage alone. In 1898 the grouting
process, as it is called, was applied with equal success to the
Damietta Barrage.
To use Sir Hanbury Brown’s homely but expressive image, the
process applied to the Barrage was exactly that followed by a cook
who wishes to finish off a cold pie with its proper complement of jelly.
The jelly is introduced into the pie in the form of warm gravy, which
penetrates into and fills every recess of the succulent interior, and
then solidifies as it cools.
And still the engineers were not satisfied. So treacherous is the
river’s bed that no possible safeguards seemed superfluous. It
speaks volumes for the courage and skill of those who in 1885 held
up 3 metres of water with the old unreformed Barrage, that in 1897,
after the successful execution of such great and costly repairs, it was
still thought advisable to undertake completely new works to assist in
the task of holding up 4, or at the most 5, metres.
It is a principle in hydraulics, not easily understood at first by the
layman, that the pressure upon a weir or barrage in a river depends
entirely upon the difference in level between the water on the
upstream and on the downstream side, and not on the mere volume
of water in the river behind it. In December, 1897, the Caisse de la
Dette voted £530,000 for the construction of two subsidiary
downstream weirs, with the object of relieving the pressure on the
Barrage by raising the level of the water on the downstream side,
thus dividing the head of water to be held up into two—in other
words, by making two steps instead of one. Each weir was to consist
of a core of rubble masonry set in cement, sunk well below the bed
of the river, and protected up and down stream by a long slope of
rough stone blocks or pitching. To make the masonry core
thoroughly watertight, a mass of clay puddle was to be put on either
side of it. The weirs were thus to be a solid dam, blocking the course
of the stream up to such a height that the head of water on the
Barrage, at that time amounting to 4 metres, would be reduced to
2·5 metres. The flood would pass freely over the top of the weirs. At
the same time the sluice-gates of the existing Barrage were to be
heightened, so as to permit the upstream level to be raised 1 metre
more in June and July, so as to take full advantage of the rising flood
and facilitate the early sowing of maize, a great point with the
Egyptian cultivator.
By the summer of 1900 this programme had been completed. The
building of the weir on the Rosetta branch was an especially fine
performance, for which great credit was due to Sir Hanbury Brown
and Mr. Brooke, who were in charge of it. Five hundred metres in
length, it was begun at the end of December, 1899, and actually
finished before the flood began to come down in July. The same
Portland cement played a great part in its construction. It may now
fairly be said that the Barrage is complete at last, and fully equal to
every strain that it can be called upon to bear.
The weirs were constructed not a moment too soon. It so
happened that the summer supply of 1900 was lower than in any
previous year of which records have been kept. In 1889 the river
sank to a level of ·60 metre below zero on the Assouan gauge. In
1878 it fell to ·71 metre below zero, and this was the lowest known
before the summer of 1900. But on three days in that year, May 15,
16, and 26, the river fell to a level of ·91 metre below zero. The
position was aggravated by the extension of summer cultivation. The
total extent of summer crops had risen still further to over 1,700,000
acres.
To save the valuable cotton crop was the earnest preoccupation
of the Irrigation Department. They were able by the most strenuous
efforts, not merely to save the crop, but so to treat it that it gave a
yield which, only a few years before, would have been considered
perfectly impossible even in a good year. But all their efforts would
have been in vain had it not been possible, thanks to the new weirs,
to raise the level of the water upstream of the Barrage to an extent
which would have been exceedingly dangerous without their
assistance, and so to take full advantage of the rising flood. The
mere enumeration of the special measures which were put into force
gives a very good idea of the difficult duties which devolve on those
who control the water in Egypt:
1. Earthen dams were constructed in both branches of the river to
prevent the inrush of salt water from the sea.
2. Special programmes were laid down for ‘rotations’ on the
canals.
The system of rotations, which was introduced from India, is that
the land-owners are only allowed to pump water on to their lands at
certain intervals. There are several advantages in this. The water is
economized, and as it can thereby be kept at a lower level in the
canals, there is less danger of the soil becoming deteriorated by
excessive saturation. The pumps are allowed to work for a certain
period, according to the district, and then an interval is prescribed,
until the expiration of which they are not allowed to work again. In
1900 the pumps were allowed to work for a period of six days at a
time, and at first twelve days was the interval until the next pumping.
But as the summer wore on, and the river continued to fall, the
interval was gradually extended to twenty-two days—a very severe
measure indeed.
3. All land-owners were warned not to sow rice.
4. They were also forbidden to sow maize until a date should be
announced.
5. Special pumping arrangements were made.
6. There was more than usually careful regulation at the heads of
the canals above the Barrage, so as to insure a proper distribution of
the water available to all the provinces.
7. A special staff was appointed to see that all these regulations
were carried out.
Could any government be more paternal than this—it might even
be said, more despotic? But countries which depend on irrigation
have a natural tendency towards despotism. When water is plentiful
they may be as republican and democratic as you please; but when
the crisis of scanty water comes they must have a strong hand over
them, just as the Roman Republic had to have its Dictator in times of
national peril. It speaks well for the good sense of the Egyptians, and
it proves their implicit faith, built up by sixteen years’ experience, in
the English engineers, that even those stringent regulations were
unhesitatingly obeyed, and that breaches of them were so rare as to
be almost non-existent. They had their reward; for while 1878 is still
remembered as a year of black disaster and distress, in 1900 the
cotton crop amounted to no less than 5,250,000 kantars,[5] and the
maize crop, in spite of its late sowing, was also very good. Only the
rice, a comparatively insignificant item, was sacrificed to its more
important rivals. Thanks mainly to the good work done by the
completed Barrage, neither the public nor the private finances of
Egypt suffered the least shock from a year of unprecedented scarcity
of water, even when this was coupled with most unseasonable cold
and fogs in September, which considerably diminished the output of
cotton. Lord Cromer had indeed good reason to write in 1901:
‘Had it not been for the labours of the eminent hydraulic engineers, who for the
last seventeen years have placed their services at the disposal of the Egyptian
Government, the most skilful financial assistance would not have availed both to
place the Egyptian Treasury in a position of assured solvency and to meet in any
adequate degree the constant demands which are the necessary accompaniment
of a policy of reform.’
Such are the outlines of the long history of the Barrage, designed
by Frenchmen and brought to perfection by Englishmen. Both
nations can share in the credit of the work, and it is pleasant to
record once more the generous and graceful act by which the chief
of the English engineers recognised and acknowledged the merits of
his predecessor. Sir Colin Scott Moncrieff discovered Mougel Bey
living in obscurity and oblivion, weighed down by poverty and
neglect. It was owing to his intercession that the poor old man was
rescued from want, and, by means of a pension granted by the
Egyptian Government, enabled to spend his remaining days in
comfort and honour. Both nations are entitled to be proud of this act
of poetic justice, which added a lustre of its own to the glory of the
completed Barrage.
CHAPTER VI
THE CORVÉE
From time immemorial the peasantry of Egypt have been liable to

the corvée in some form or other. In a country depending for its
existence upon the proper maintenance of its dykes, it was only
natural that the whole population should turn out to perform the
necessary work. But a useful custom very easily degenerated into a
galling slavery under Oriental despotism. Rulers with absolute power
of life and death over their subjects, who regarded the land they
ruled as their own personal property, could not be expected to make
much distinction between works carried out for the general good and
those designed merely for their own convenience and
aggrandisement. The Pyramids and others of the mighty remains of
ancient Egypt stand as monuments of the greatness of the
Pharaohs, but no less of the miseries of countless generations under
the system of forced labour, which is known in our time as the
corvée, a term applied sometimes to the forced labour itself, and
sometimes to those who perform it.
In the early chapters of the Book of Exodus there is a brief but
pregnant description of the sufferings of the Israelites when
subjected to the burden.
‘And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigour:
‘And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in morter, and in brick, and
in all manner of service in the field: all their service, wherein they made them
serve, was with rigour.’
‘And Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people, and their officers,
saying, Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, as heretofore: let
them go and gather straw for themselves. And the tale of the bricks, which they did
make heretofore, ye shall lay upon them; ye shall not diminish ought thereof. Let
there more work be laid upon the men, that they may labour therein.’
‘And the taskmasters hasted them, saying, Fulfil your works, your daily tasks,
as when there was straw. And the officers of the children of Israel, which
Pharaoh’s taskmasters had set over them, were beaten, and demanded,
Wherefore have ye not fulfilled your task in making bricks both yesterday and to-
day, as heretofore?’
‘And the officers of the children of Israel did see that they were in evil case.’
‘And the Lord said, I have also heard the groaning of the children of Israel,
whom the Egyptians keep in bondage.’
‘But the children of Israel hearkened not unto Moses for anguish of spirit, and
for cruel bondage.’
Doubtless the amount of forced labour varied from time to time,

according to the ambition or the caprice of the rulers of the country.
But the annual necessity for watching the dykes during the flood, and
repairing them when it was over, never permitted the custom to fall
into disuse, and the knowledge that this great instrument was always
ready to hand must have been a powerful incentive to any King or
Caliph who wished to send his name down to history as the author of
a mighty work. No wonder that after so many centuries of practice
the Egyptians are the most patient and efficient spade-workers in the
world. The wretched peasantry of Egypt must have blessed the
accession of the undistinguished Sovereigns who had no desire to
add to their fame either by building at home or by conquest abroad.
To them the glories of a Rameses or an Amenemhat must have been
small compensation for their ‘anguish of spirit and cruel bondage.’
So long as basin irrigation continued to be universal, there was
much to be said on behalf of the corvée, if the system was justly and
impartially administered. During the months of the flood, and those
preceding it, when the land was lying dry and baked, there was little
or nothing for the agricultural population to do except to clear the
shallow flood canals, repair the dykes, and protect the river-banks. If
the labour was compulsory, it was, at any rate, everybody’s interest
to perform it. The work lay at their own door; they were not dragged
away to a distant province. There must always have been abuses in
practice. The humbler folk did more than their share, and so on, but
in theory it was not bad.
All this was changed with the introduction of perennial irrigation
and the digging of the summer canals. Owing to their depth, and
sometimes, also, to their faulty construction, the silt deposits in them
were very great, and the whole corvée was called out to clear them,
though very few were interested in them. More than that, a man’s
own home was no longer the scene of his labours. The labourers of
one province were called in to work in another. Each year the corvée
worked from January 15 to July 15, clearing the canals and repairing
the banks. From August 1 to November 1 they guarded the Nile
banks in the flood. Every year an extensive programme of work was
sketched out, but before it was finished they had to hurry off to flood-
protection duty. Not only unpaid, they had to find their own tools, and
provide their own commissariat, a double hardship on men out of
their own neighbourhood. During the flood, when they lived in booths
built for themselves on the Nile banks, they had to find their own
lanterns, and even, like the Israelites of old, their own straw and
brushwood, to save the dykes from the action of the waves. New
works were carried out in the same fashion.
Nor was this the sum of their grievances. The increase of summer
irrigation made the months immediately preceding the flood a very
busy instead of a very slack time of year. The value of the cotton
crop made everyone most anxious to secure it, so the larger
proprietors kept their tenants at home for that purpose. The numbers
of the corvée decreased, and the burden of it fell more and more
upon the poor fellaheen. Ministers and high officials from the
Khedive downwards employed the corvée to work on their own
private estates. Other persons, influential by station or by bribery,
secured the like advantage, and robbed their humble neighbours of
their labour, their last remaining possession. Under Said Pasha the
corvée dug the Suez Canal. Under Ismail they dug the Ibrahimiyah
Canal, the sole object of which was to benefit his private estates in
Upper Egypt. Even the splendid carriage-road that runs from Cairo to
the Pyramids of Gizeh was raised on the same foundations that the
Empress Eugénie might travel there in comfort after the opening of
the Suez Canal.
Only a nation inured to slavery could have endured it. Many,
indeed, labouring under the burning sun, unpaid, unfed, and
unclothed, succumbed. But what did that matter when other human
beasts of burden were there to take their place? The activity of the
survivors was kept up by the whip, the traditional motive-power in
Egypt. Nominally, all between the ages of fifteen and fifty were liable
to serve, but there were a multitude of exceptions, including
teachers, holy men, students, certain classes of tradesmen, and
others. The law of 1881 laid down that anyone might exempt himself
by providing a substitute or by paying a cash ransom. But as there
was no penalty imposed for not paying, every man of any position
freed himself from the obligation without paying the tax, and the
whole burden of the corvée fell more than ever on the poorer
classes. The régime of the kurbash, or whip, and the grosser abuses
of the system, vanished immediately upon the English occupation,
but all the earthwork maintenance was still performed by this unpaid
labour.
It was, as I have said, the spectacle of the dumb misery of the
fellaheen that particularly stimulated the English engineers in their
task of repairing the Barrage. The first relief came in 1884, when the
Nile was held up to a higher level at the Barrage. This had a twofold
effect, for the canals did not require to be cleared to so great depth;
and the higher level of the water enabled them to be laid on a better
slope, which diminished the deposit of silt. In fact, the partial use of
the Barrage in 1884 reduced the amount of silt deposit by 26 per
cent. In 1885 the first step was also taken in a new direction:
£30,000 were advanced towards the experiment of clearing some
canals in the provinces of Menoufia and Gharbiah by contract. As
usual, the gloomiest forebodings were uttered on every side. It was
said the fellaheen would not work voluntarily. The whip alone was
the only stimulus to which they were sensible. The experiment was
bound to fail.
Once more the croakers were wrong. The fellah justified the
confidence of Mr. Willcocks and his colleagues, that he was not
unlike other men, and would work gladly for a wage. And so the
struggle for emancipation went on with increased vigour. In 1886
£250,000 were provided by the Caisse for the reduction of the
corvée, so that while in 1883 107,000 men had been called out in the
Delta alone, in 1887 the number had been reduced to 27,500.
Finally, December, 1889, saw the last of the system, and the
performance of earthwork maintenance by the corvée was finally
abolished. The Government supplemented the £250,000 a year
received from the Caisse by another £150,000. In former days the
labour required to clear the canals was estimated in the Delta alone
at £530,000. For the sum of £400,000 Egypt got rid of the burden
throughout the whole country. It was a bargain well worth making at
a far higher cost. No greater boon could have been conferred upon
the fellaheen. No longer are their lives made ‘bitter with hard
bondage, in morter, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the
field.’ That ‘evil case’ is ended. They labour indeed, but it is voluntary
labour, without ‘groaning and anguish of spirit.’
The Government, of course, retains the right to call out the corvée
in case of any grave national emergency, and every year, too, it is
called out to guard the banks in flood-time. But the flood-corvée is
cheerfully borne. It entails no hardship on the people. Its incidence,
too, has been very much diminished, as the following figures show
(the period of service is 150 days):
Number of Men
Year. State of River.
called out.
1888 59,000 Low flood.
1889 50,000 Medium flood.
1890 48,000 „
1891 45,000 „
1892 84,000 Very high flood.
1893 33,000 Low flood.
1894 49,000 High flood.
1895 37,000 Medium flood.
1896 26,000 „
1897 11,000 Low flood.
1898 19,000 High flood.
1899 8,000 Very low flood.
1900 14,000 Low flood.
1901 9,000 „
1902 5,000 Very low flood.
The figures tell their own tale. Experience and good organization
have enormously decreased the number of men called out, so that it
is now but a very slight burden upon the people. The date of calling
out has also been altered to August 15 instead of August 1. The
possession of the Soudan, and an accurate record of the state of the
gauges in those regions, will also assist in making more accurate
forecasts of the nature of the flood. In 1900 more men were called
out than were required, because the flood came down early and
promised to be a high one, but failed to fulfil expectations. The levels
in the Soudan were known, but, there being no previous experience
to judge them by, no inferences could be drawn from them. But the
Soudan readings will be more and more useful as time goes on.
But even apart from this, there is great hope of a steady
diminution in the numbers called out, and even that, except in years
of high flood, the corvée may not be required at all. The record of the
year 1901 is of remarkable promise in this respect. North of Cairo no
corvée was called out at all, for the first time in the history of Egypt.
The flood was low, but not exceptionally low. In any year Upper
Egypt is responsible for far the greater number, and this is largely
due to the extent of the basin banks which have to be guarded. It is
remarkable that the two districts in which the greatest number were
called out were in charge of native Egyptian inspectors, who were no
doubt influenced by the old tradition that vast numbers of men
should be employed. At any rate, as perennial irrigation increases in
Upper Egypt, fewer men will be required, concurrently with the
disuse of the basin dykes. And it seems likely that in years to come
the whole task will be performed by contract labour; though the
power of calling out the corvée will always be held in reserve in case
of any specially dangerous flood. But in such a case the difficulty will
be rather to prevent the work from being hindered by excessive
numbers. There will be no doubt of the willingness to serve of
practically the whole population.
CHAPTER VII
RESERVOIR PRELIMINARIES
In dealing with the history of the Barrage I have somewhat

anticipated the order of events. It was the prospect of the coming
Reservoir and an increased water-supply in summer that urged on
the engineers to make assurance doubly sure by placing the
strength of that structure beyond all doubt. It is time to pass from the
Delta to Assouan.
No country in the world tells its story more readily to the traveller
than Upper Egypt. As he passes up the broad waterway of the Nile,
he may survey the whole life of the land without stirring from the
deck of his steamer. If he has been in Egypt before, he cannot fail to
be struck by the growth of its prosperity; it forces itself upon him in
the bearing of the people, and in the number of their flocks and
herds, now as ever the outward and visible sign of material well-
being. Even the squalid clusters of mud huts, often roofless, or
covered only by a few loose canes, dirty and miserable as they seem
to Western eyes, with nothing substantial among them except the
tomb of some sheikh or the inevitable pigeon-houses, are only
proofs of the genial climate, which makes a roof overhead, and
clothing as well, among the least of the necessities of life. The
people themselves, hard workers as they are, have a happy and
prosperous aspect, and the crowds of naked children, brown as the
waters by whose edge they play, look as cheerful and contented as
the vast colonies of pigeons, which live under very similar conditions
to their owners.
On each side of the river-valley, here and there, especially on the
eastern side, coming right to the water’s edge, rise the hills of the
desert. Where the domain of the water ceases a man may stand with
one foot in the bare and barren sand and the other in the most fertile
soil in the world. Everywhere along the bank, hour after hour, day
after day, the traveller may see the peasants lifting the water with the
primitive shadoofs, tier upon tier, up to the level of the fields, or the
oxen turning the sakieh. A hundred times a day he will have borne in
upon him the fact that all he sees, from the kid upon the dykes to
those obelisks of modern Egypt, the tall chimneys of the sugar
factories, owes its existence absolutely to the water. Close behind
the teeming villages and the luxuriant crops, the palm-trees and the
acacias, the sugar-canes and the maize-fields, rise the gaunt
limestone rocks and the sandy desert, fit emblems of the famine that
is ever ready to swoop down should the water fail.
Even as late as December, steaming up the 550 miles of river,
often half a mile or more across, between Cairo and Assouan,
against the strong current, watching the majestic sweep of those
wide waters pouring irresistibly towards the sea, it is hard to realize
the anxiety of later months. But May or June has a very different tale
to tell. To take and store the precious water, which now during the
flood and winter rushes down in untold volume, to be lost and
squandered in the sea, and use it to feed the lean summer months,
is almost absurdly obvious. No wonder that since Mehemet Ali gave
so great a stimulus to the cultivation of cotton and sugar the idea of
the Reservoir has been constantly in the minds of the rulers of
Egypt. The strange thing is that so many hundreds, even thousands,
of years should have elapsed without any attempt of the kind being
made. Perhaps it was due partly to the reverence felt for the mighty
and inscrutable power of the great river, partly to the passive fatalism
innate in the Oriental mind. A few years ago Sir Benjamin Baker
asked a prominent and representative land-owner in Egypt, a Pasha,
and a descendant of the Prophet, what he thought of the prospects
of a Nile Reservoir. With a shrug of his shoulders, he replied that ‘if it
had been possible it would have been done 4,000 years ago.’
He reasoned wiser than he knew. At the second cataract above
Wadi Halfa there are marks upon the rocks and other indications
which go to show that a Dam once existed at that point, used to
regulate the flow of the Nile. Swept away by some unrecorded
disaster, no other direct knowledge of it remains. But it is far from
unlikely that Herodotus, in his account of Lake Mœris in the Fayoum,

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Narrative Traditions in International

Politics: Representing Turkey 1st ed.

More information about this series at

The Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication

Cover illustration: EXTREME-PHOTOGRAPHER/gettyimages

1 Representing the International 1

2 From Beliefs to Traditions 23

3 Turkey Getting Lost 61

4 Turkey at a Perpetual Crossroads101

5 Strongmen Embodying Turkey127

6 Continuously Creeping Islamisation157

7 Conclusion: A Long Conversation about Turkey

Representing the International

On 14 September 2006, an Istanbul taxi dropped me in Tophane in front

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

membership process forward after Turkey was officially recognised as a

but by examining second-order representations. In other words, the

From Observation to Representation

question by studying how Turkey has been represented in French dis-

As foreign policy matters often concern distant countries, little-known cul-

Some interpretations concerning the international become more fixed

Narrative Traditions and Knowledge Production

There is something remarkable about the discrepancy between the con-

Lippmann asked that when France’s Clemenceau attended the Paris

the theoretical insight advanced by aesthetic approaches in international

Imagining Turkey in International Politics

available to restrengthen the narrative tradition that is based on a belief

represented an entirely different political reality than the US was no longer

From Crossroads to Strongmen

because the very act of referring to a particular set of belief——even in a

connected to notions of trust and distrust, representing Turkey as a state

possible because Germany accepted the stigma and embraced interna-

role of a policy advisor. Secondly, the metaphor represents Turkey as a

interpretations such as the long line of authoritarian leadership in Turkey’s

Realist logic of reasoning. Cornford (1907) showed in his eloquent book

Kuusisto, R. (2019). International Relations Narratives: Plotting World Politics.

From Beliefs to Traditions

The most famous case that illuminates the question of representation is

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 23

The Socratic Problem in International Politics

second-order representations of states in international politics. These rep-

re-election, providing recognition to Trump’s ‘hostile media’ narrative

Second-order representations do not only concern particular events but

Social Heritage and Loose Epistemic Communities

1978, 46). Said went on to analyse Kissinger’s essay ‘Domestic Structure

acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much

although the leader proclaims that Turkey is committed to the West, he

It is this commitment to the possibility of agency that makes tradition a

When the practice of representing international politics is studied as a

not to be questioned, concepts are already well defined and accepted. We

Narrative Traditions Carry Beliefs

dilemma that still continues to influence narrative traditions concerning

a social group encounters phenomena that either elude or run afoul of

We Westerners have become realistic and individualistic to a degree beyond

The Turk’s labors to construct a nation on ultra-Western lines are wholly

A Narrative Approach in International Politics

Turkey’s EU membership has been a channel through which European

At the date of the English occupation the Delta Barrage was

From time immemorial the peasantry of Egypt have been liable to

Doubtless the amount of forced labour varied from time to time,

In dealing with the history of the Barrage I have somewhat

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1 Representing the International 1

2 From Beliefs to Traditions 23

3 Turkey Getting Lost 61

4 Turkey at a Perpetual Crossroads101

5 Strongmen Embodying Turkey127

6 Continuously Creeping Islamisation157

7 Conclusion: A Long Conversation about Turkey