Turkey's and Egypt's foreign policies in the 1950s present a puzzle, with the Turkish Democratic Party pursuing NATO membership and sponsoring the pro-Western Baghdad Pact, while Egypt's Free Officers promoted neutralism and pan-Arab alliances. Abou-El-Fadl argues that the answer to this lies in the two leaderships' contrasting nation making projects.
'In this empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated study, Reem Abou-El-Fadl shows that the diametrically opposed positions Egypt and Turkey assumed vis-à-vis the west in the 1950s derived directly from their respective projects of nation making. El-Fadl's book is an essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the link between domestic and international politics in Global South, both in the twentieth and in the twenty-first century.' Resat Kasaba, University of Washington
