Siyasi aracılar ve Türkiye’nin Balkanlarda Devletten-Topluma Yönlü Diplomasisi

Abstract

The Justice and Development Party governments in Turkey have placed public diplomacy into theservice of foreign policy as a multi-dimensional tool-kit to be utilized in extending the overseascommunication beyond governments towards their publics. And this may be the first time in theRepublican history that by the Justice and Development Party era, people abroad have found Turkey’smission bodies more accessible and reachable in terms of both institutional presence and of institutionalwillingness to involve in their affairs/problems. The Justice and Development Party governments haveaccordingly adopted a comprehensive ‘state-to-society’ public diplomacy agenda, targeting for instancethe so-called ‘kin communities’, by which shared civilizational memories, values and histories areoften recalled and promoted in building relations. The target communities have thus been encouragedto embrace such identity frames and hence to re-negotiate and when possible redefine their senseof belonging in a civilizational sense. This is a development which brings the constitutive appeal ofthe country’s new foreign policy into a brighter light. Based on this, this paper initially questions theconstitutive influences Turkey has possibly posed to the targeted communities abroad. Moreover,in the implementation of such state-to-society public diplomacy, certain political figures in Turkeyhave functioned as intermediaries between the public diplomacy bureaucracy and the communitiesabroad, as facilitators of Turkey’s access to the targeted communities, and vice versa. These politicalelites have mostly been the members of the ruling party in the Parliament, acted as the chairman ofinter-parliamentary friendship groups, accompanied prime ministers and presidents in their visits totarget communities, and used their personal ties and networks to bring the targeted communities closerto Turkey, and vice versa. They therefore have direct involvement in the conduct of overseas stateto-society policy and have personally contributed to the country’s public diplomacy campaigns. Thispaper, at this juncture, secondly aims to unfold this intermediary role of the political elites, whichwould help garner a better understanding of the sources and causes of Turkey’s societal influencesabroad. The paper uses Turkey’s relations with the Bosniak and Albanian communities in the Balkansas case studies to trace the state-to-society diplomacy and the intermediaries’ roles within it. To betterobserve both the influence and the intermediaries’ facilitative role, interviews are conducted with someof the political intermediaries who took part in Turkey’s reach to the kin communities in the Balkans.