Geographical Imaginations of the Mediterranean Along Dichotomies of East-West/North-South

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 inspirationof this article comes from the “geographical imagination as a way of thinking about world politicsand considering the relative importance of places and the relationships between contested narrativesof a specific region or territory”. Hence this study will examine different geographical imaginationsof 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 byJ. K. Wright (1946) who assumed that geographical knowledge is not only a knowledge of physicalcharacteristics and natural resources, but is also something being defined and redefined by thepolitical imagination of the perceiver. So in this article a “geosophical” perspective will be applied to theMediterranean region that plays both a historical and strategic role in Euro-Turkish relations.