Turkey’s domestic politics, public opinion and Middle East policy

William Hale

doi:10.1057/palcomms.2016.81

William Hale

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2016.81

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Abstract

AbstractThis article looks at the domestic political conditions that help to shape the Turkey’s Middle East policy. The starting point is that the country’s foreign policy is not self-standing or determined solely by external circumstances, but is often affected by domestic divisions that shape party identities. We can classify these into the following categories: first, historically determined cultural and ethnic cleavages; second, public opinion on foreign policy issues; and, third, current domestic policy considerations that have important foreign policy implications. In tackling this agenda, certain restrictions have to be recognised. First, we have virtually no data as regards public attitudes on economic or social issues, so it has not been possible to say anything about these. Second, time series data are unavailable, as public opinion polls have only recently been made available in Turkey. This article is published as part of a collection on analysing security complexes in a changing Middle East.

Highlights

This article looks at the domestic political conditions that help to shape the Turkey’s Middle East policy
These established the Turkish republic as a secular national state, in place of the multi-national Ottoman Empire, which had based its legitimacy on its attachment to Islam
Since the state did not seek to deny the validity of Islam as a system of personal belief, but tried to accommodate it within a cult of ethnic nationalism, the official discourse sought to de-Arabise Muslim history and culture, rather than exclude the Turks from it (Aktürk, 2010)

Summary

Introduction

This article looks at the domestic political conditions that help to shape the Turkey’s Middle East policy. This confrontation has important foreign policy implications, partly in relations with the western democracies, where human rights groups and liberal opinion generally have been harshly critical of Turkish government policies, and in the Middle East, thanks to existence of large Kurdish minorities in Iraq, Syria and Iran.

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Conclusion