Turkey and the Arab Spring

Abstract

Turkey's neighbourhood has been volatile and is coming to shape the broader parameters of Turkey's foreign policy. While its location has offered opportunities and threats, especially during the Cold War, the recent drastic transformations in Turkey's immediate neighbourhood are again prompting major changes in its foreign policy priorities. In the last year or so, not only has the Arab Spring disrupted the long-established regional order in the Middle East and North Africa, but the hegemonic decline of the United States has presented Turkey with both opportunities and threats.In the newly unfolding strategic environment, which Zbigniew Brzezinski has called global turmoil, the most significant systemic trend has been the hegemonic decline that has created room for maneuver for other regional powers.1 Hegemonic decline allows a new order to develop in areas that were previously kept stable by the hegemon. Turkey's regional activism and the Arab Spring are occurring simultaneously in this broader geopolitical context. On the one hand, this hegemonic decline gives Turkey an unprecedented amount of freedom and autonomy in its regional bid for influence. On the other hand, the instability and ambiguity created by the popular uprisings in the Arab world have created challenges. In short, once again opportunities and threats coexist for Turkey. To meet these challenges, Turkey has come under pressure to revise its zero problems with neighbours policy. In this new era, with US hegemonic decline as the background, Turkey's struggle to sustain its activism remains at the fore.In this article, we analyze the new context of Turkey's foreign policy activism. We argue that despite Turkey's initial difficulties in coping with the transformations in its environment and its partial failure to realize its ambitions, it has been adapting its foreign policy to the new realities and is becoming an effective actor. Although ambiguities do exist, a role for Turkey as an influential regional power is within its grasp.THE ARAB SPRING2The greater Middle East, including North Africa, has long been a subject of interest, due to its chronic problems with repressive regimes, incomplete state structures, and institutionalized corruption. This grim state of affairs appeared to be the destiny of the Arab people, who were apparently living with a learned helplessness under authoritarian regimes. However, following the first spark in Tunisia, which toppled its regime, and in defiance of Orientalist accounts, Arabs began to believe that popular will could lead to change in their part of the world. What we have been witnessing, from Tunisia to Egypt and from Libya to Syria, is unprecedented in the sense that Arabs are now claiming their own destiny in a quest for dignity for the Arab individual.As Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Ahmet Davutoglu has argued, this is about the future of a region that has lagged historically behind the rest of the world.3 To a large extent, this was not the result of the Arabs' own will, but rather was the result of external factors. Following the First World War, Arab countries, including Iraq, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, were under the mandate of western powers. After the Second World War, they had to cope with decolonization while the rest of the world was experiencing waves of democratization. The following Cold War period was a seemingly stable era during which history was frozen in the Middle East and North Africa. While eastern Europe and east Asia started to democratize in the aftermath of the Cold War, the artificial - if not virtual - stability in the Arab world survived thanks to such concerns as oil, Israel's security, and the maintenance of the status quo based on pro-western monarchic rulers. Furthermore, in the last decade, the war on terror had the effect of strengthening authoritarian regimes in the region, which was coupled with the traditional setbacks of rentier states that were not accountable to the people. …