Revisionist, Resurgent Power, Breaking with the West, Sailing with Eurasianist Winds

Abstract

Included in the Concert of Europe in the mid-nineteenth century along with the rest of the Western powers – France, Habsburg Austria and Great Britain; espousing the Western as its civilisational project in the aftermath of the First World War and founding a secular nation-state in the early 1920s; one of the founding countries of the Council of Europe following the Second World War; a member of the transatlantic alliance since the 1950s; declared a candidate for full membership of the European Union at the turn of the twenty-first century: all this defined what Turkey was. And Turkey, with such historical credentials, set itself on the road to gradually break with the West. It had to adopt, internally, a repressive, authoritarian regime and a revisionist foreign policy to resurrect the imperial glory that it claimed it had in the past. At the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century and on the eve of the centenary of the Republic’s foundation, it emerged as a revisionist power, if not on a global scale but no doubt in very broad geopolitics. Whether or how long such a status will be sustainable remains to be seen.