NATO’s Meaning and Existence

NATO’s Meaning and Existence

Within the Interstate Intersubjectivity

by Yunus Emre Ozigci (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Turkiye (Turkey))

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This is the most anticipated book of 2026, capable of reanimating NATO’s true potential: With its strong contextual framing and deeply contemplative and ontologically sound analysis, it has the potential to become a point of reference and a game-changer in the foreign policy community. Clearly, Turkey has more to offer than Ahmet Davutoğlu’s “Strategic Depth”, as Yunus Emre Ozigci's NATO’s “Meaning and Existence” (2026) is about to take the policymaking community by storm. Ozigci’s analytical prowess in policymaking and diplomatic pursuits resonates with his strategic insights. This publication can save NATO from its current Heideggerian phase of thrownness in the world by offering a profoundly contemplative inquiry into how this organization's identity is affected by an unstimulating, predictable bureaucratic status quo that still rewards obedience over originality despite facing geostrategic disaster.
This can be a playbook that might save NATO from drifting into irrelevance; ultimately, his diplomatic experience and philosophical insights have given Ozigci a rare capacity to playfully engage with, reformulate, and reconceptualize ideas in ways that should encourage future NATO leaders to embrace diverse, outside-the-box thinking to freely question policy and focus on its true defensive nature. The author grounds NATO’s existence in intersubjective meaning rather than material objectivity, potentially reintroducing it to the broader academic and policymaking community worldwide.
This profound, artful reflection also offers a practical cognitive innovation that should surprise NATO’s adversaries, even those who assume they can think nine steps in advance. Ultimately, this is also potentially the best philosophical insight into NATO’s enduring capacity for adaptation to multilayered existential dilemmas arising from bipolar, unipolar, and multipolar systems of power.

Dr. Piotr Pietrzak
In Statu Nascendi Think Tank, Sofia, Bulgaria

Entities, events, phenomena and states of affairs of the sphere of international relations/ interstate interactions are purely intersubjective recognisances. Their “subjects”, in particular the States, are themselves pre-theoretically, intersubjectively co-constituted and temporalised, ascribed with subject qualities especially in their “interactions” and experienced as such through intentional acts of perceiving, defining, remembering, anticipating, judging and so on. The said ascription includes their own community-building dynamics within an also intersubjectively given environment of interstate interactions. NATO is one of the most prominent State-communities. It has not only been defined by but has also been a constituent of the environment in which it existed. It gained its meaning from its existential relationship with its constituent State-subjects, its interactional counterparts and the meaningful appearance of its “environment”, and also made part of their meaningful appearances. NATO existed through transformations of environment and counterpart(s), continuing to be valid and viable in different identities and temporalisations. It is currently being re-identified and re-temporalised face to a new transformation of the interstate environment.

Studying NATO requires co-studying its constituents, counterparts and environment in their substances and temporal states as they are given pre-theoretically, immediately, intersubjectively, which form parts of an expanded, existential kind of reality lived and lived-within by true subjects, replacing the objectivity in its narrow sense with meaningfulness, appearing as objectivity itself on the ground of a universal, pre-theoretical, immediate familiarity and intelligibility ground. Studying NATO “as is” in its identities and temporalisations with its environment, constituents and counterparts requires access to that pre-theoretical ground of meaningful, intersubjective appearances. Here, phenomenology and the phenomenological ontology offer useful concepts and tools which, due to the particular nature of the IR field, complement each other for conducting such a study of the “being and time” of NATO.

Yunus Emre Ozigci holds a PhD degree in Political Sciences from the Université Catholique de Louvain. He graduated from the Galatasaray University (International Relations) and completed his MA studies at the University of Ankara (International Relations). His research interests and publications -academic journal articles and chapters in edited books- cover the IR theory, phenomenology and its use in IR studies, nature of and transformations in the international structure, the US’s, Russian, German and Chinese foreign policies, NATO and the Western alignment in general, specific subjects such as “appeasement”, “intervention and disengagement” and “interactions between regional and global systems”.
Since 2000, he has been working as a diplomat in the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and served in Algeria, Belgium, Switzerland, Russia and Kenya (UNON). Between his duty tours, he served in the directorates of the Council of Europe and Human Rights, Cyprus, Western Europe and Environment. Currently, he is working as a Head of Department in the Directorate-General of Africa.

International relations, NATO, Phenomenology, Russia, International relations theory, unipolarity, bipolarity