It’s hard to find a “neo-“ ideology that is so utterly detached from the original version than neo-Ottomanism, the political worldview associated with Turkey’s ruling Islamists, driven by a testosterone-filled re-imagination of a glorious imperial past.
In fact, the neo-Ottomanism of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) is not only intellectually unrelated, but also diametrically opposed to the principles of the original Ottomanists, the nineteenth and early twentieth century proponents of pluralism, constitutionalism and parliamentarism in the Ottoman Empire.
There is, of course, a simple explanation for this. The term “neo-Ottomanism” was coined neither by modern-day advocates of Ottomanism, nor by political Islamists, but presumably by journalists or IR scholars more interested in Turkey’s geopolitics than its history. As it called attention to the imperial ambitions of the AKP’s foreign policy, it has been publicly rejected by leading government figures, including Erdoğan and his former foreign and prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, who is credited as being the architect of that policy.
