Abstract:

This article endeavours to analyse the European and Turkish discourses regarding the concept of the “Mediterranean” and its variations both in temporal and spatial terms. The theoretical inspiration of this article comes from the “geographical imagination as a way of thinking about world politics and considering the relative importance of places and the relationships between contested narratives of a specific region or territory”. Hence this study will examine different geographical imaginations of the Mediterranean region that are projected onto both Turkish and European political discourse. The perspective which is engaged here involves the historical geography, or geosophy put forward by J. K. Wright (1946) who assumed that geographical knowledge is not only a knowledge of physical characteristics and natural resources, but is also something being defined and redefined by the political imagination of the perceiver. So in this article a “geosophical” perspective will be applied to the Mediterranean region that plays both a historical and strategic role in Euro-Turkish relations.

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