Competing Variables in Turkey’s Multi-Vector Foreign Policy

Abstract

A certain shift in the Turkish foreign policy has been noticeable over the last decade, especially after the AKP (Justice and Development Party) came to power in 2002, which manifested in closer relations with its Arab neighbors and simultaneously a more aggressive stance towards Israel. These developments have led many researchers to say that Turkey’s activism in the Middle East represents its return towards the East, at the expense of its Europeanization aspirations. The current research paper aims to study the validity of this claim by looking at different sets of interactions between Turkey and its neighbors, through a constructivist lens of competing yet complementary variables.The ascending multilateralism manifested in Turkey’s foreign policy discourse and initiatives has been interpreted by some (Reynolds 2012) as a consequence of the exhaustion of the Kemalist project, while others (vom Hau et al 2012) see it as the logical result of the complex internal and external interactions of modernization and globalization at the level of the Turkish society. The conceptual categories proposed for assessing Turkey’s conduct in relation to other states open up perspectives for exploring further cooperation interactions between Turkey and the EU, on the one hand, and with countries in their shared neighborhood as well.