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Are foreign policy initiatives best conceived as outcomes of domestic identity politics or as contributing factors to them? Why do elites choose to politicize national identity debates at the foreign policy level, and with what consequences? Despite numerous studies by comparativist and IR scholars on identity politics and foreign policy, the relative disconnect between the two literatures creates a gap in understanding the relationship between them. In teasing out this complex link, this article conceptualizes foreign policy as an alternative arena in which supporters of particular proposals for national identity compete in a struggle for hegemony. Highlighting various strategies of contestation aimed at achieving hegemony of one's own proposal, this article argues that political elites choose to take this identity contestation "outside" when identity gambits at the domestic level are blocked. The article draws its analysis from an in-depth study of Turkey, a case offering a promising empirical window onto these dynamics because of its recent and dramatic shifts in the dynamics of its public identity debates and its multiple international roles such as NATO ally, EU-candidate country, and regional powerbroker. The recent upsurge of Ottoman- and Islam-based public discourse at both the elite and society levels, for example, evidences a politics of identity that is fundamentally at odds with Turkey's previously dominant, Western-oriented understanding of Turkishness. This rapid increase in public support of what I term an Ottoman Islamist proposal takes place, however, during the rule of a party that pursued EU membership as a primary foreign policy objective. While this disconnect seems to suggest discarding arguments linking identity and foreign policy, this article demonstrates, counterintuitively, that the rise of Ottoman Islamism was made possible through Turkey's EU-oriented policy. Examining evidence collected from archives, interviews, surveys, news and entertainment media, and ethnographic observation, I employ intertextual analysis to identify three main identity proposals held within contemporary Turkish society, parsing out the domestic and foreign policy interests generated by each. Utilizing a cohesive framework to specify points of incommensurability among proposals, I demonstrate how the ruling AKP strategically utilized the foreign policy goal of EU accession to reduce the threat of domestic challengers supporting competing identity proposals. By taking its fight outside, the AKP was then able to consolidate support for Ottoman Islamism at home while opening space for deeper engagement to the south and east abroad. The framework developed here fills a gap in existing scholarship by closing the identity-foreign policy circle, analytically linking the means by which national identity debates spill over into foreign policy with the means by which foreign policy serves as a strategy for advancing a particular group's position in these debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A core premise behind NATO and EU enlargement has been the notion that the rational, pluralist economic and security community that the West created and strengthened during the Cold War could help stabilize the East in the post-Cold War world and squelch potentially dangerous nationalisms that might emerge. We argue that despite a common belief that nationalism has been submerged in Europe, at least four types of nationalisms have emerged across the continent as states and groups develop strategies in the shadow of an enlarging Union. We discuss in depth one of these types - what we call virtual nationalism - as it has developed in Hungary over the past decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]