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* Associate Professor, Galatasaray University, Istanbul [
]. The author would like to thank Jean d'Aspremont, Aydin Gülan, Mehmet Karli, Ilber Ortayli, Füsun Türkmen, and Vladimiro Zagrebelsky, who all contributed to this article in various ways.
1.
Introduction
[A] musical tune consisting of the same notes we call a different tune if at one time it is played in the Dorian mode and at another in the Phrygian. Therefore if this is the case, it is clear that we must speak of the state as being the same state chiefly with regard to its constitution; and it is possible for it to be called by the same name or by a different designation both when its inhabitants are the same and when they are entirely different persons. But whether a state is not bound in justice to discharge its engagements when it has changed to a different constitution, is another subject.
Aristotle1
In 1923, the Turkish Republic, a new nation-state, was born from the ashes of the old, multi-confessional, and multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire, following the Independence War (1919-22) during which Istanbul, the Ottoman capital, and Western Anatolia were under foreign occupation. The monarchy was abolished in 1922, as was the Caliphate, which had previously been conceptually separated from the Sultanate to become a kind of Muslim pontifical dignity, in 1924.
Nowadays, this is precisely the aforementioned 'interregnum' twilight period of the final years of the Empire and the early years of the Republic that provokes the surge of popular interest and unleashes a passionate debate on the legacy of those decades, with the rise of 'neo-Ottomanism'.2 This concept was first articulated in the early 1990s, under the presidency of Turgut Özal, by emphasizing linguistic, cultural, and religious ties with newly independent states in the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as with former Arab dominions. The rise to power of the AKP in 2002 reinvigorated neo-Ottoman doctrine through a new proactive regional policy and geostrategic thinking. The author of neo-Ottomanism's geopolitical bible,3 the 'Strategic Depth' (Stratejik Derinlik), Prof. Davutolu, foreign-policy adviser to the prime minister (2002-09) and foreign minister (2009-), combines pan-Islamist, post-colonial, and pragmatic geostrategic rationales in order to argue that a...