Neo-Osmanismus: Fiktion einer revisionistischen Außenpolitik oder politischer Kampfbegriff?
Neo-Ottomanism: Fiction of a Revisionist Foreign Policy or a Political Battle Cry?

A Conceptual Genesis Attempt

Summary/Abstract: The term neo-Ottomanism has pervaded debates on Turkish foreign policy since the end of the 1980s and increasingly over the past 20 years, often without any further definition. Authors and opinion leaders use the term to describe Turkey’s pro-active foreign policy in neighbouring regions that had been under the influence of the Ottoman Empire. However, the term is misleading because it implies the continuation of a policy under different aus-pices, which can neither be derived from Ottoman history nor traced back to Ottomanism as one central political thought in late Ottoman mentality history. Protagonists of Turkish foreign policy also reject the term. Critics use it as a fighting term and object, among other things, to Turkey’s foreign policy shift away from the West to the East and its Islamist character. The term has thus become part of the “culture clash” that continues to be fought between the conservative-Islamic and secular camps even in the post-Kemalist era.

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