Turkey's Foreign Policy: Opportunities and Constraints in a New Era

Abstract

Turkey's Foreign Policy:Opportunities and Constraints in a New Era Evren Balta (bio) and Soli Özel (bio) writing in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the soviet Union and the reshuffling of regional and global alliances, Malik Mufti took note of how Turkish political elites confronted this new world. He wrote, "those responsible for determining its foreign policy—motivated by considerations of fear, honor and profit—are casting their eyes back in time in search of clues on how best to proceed" (1998, 32). According to Mufti, what shaped the elites' response to the changing circumstances was a combination of external threats and opportunities coupled with domestic constraints. Focusing on strategic culture, he identified two competing lines among the foreign policy elites: daring and caution. Until the 1990s, Turkey's foreign policy establishment continued to err on the side of caution based on lessons learned from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. According to this view, the Ottoman Empire collapsed mainly as a result of Ottoman elites' adventurous foreign policy and their expansionist and greedy outlook. More importantly, during the Cold War, the hallmark of Turkish foreign policy was an approach that prioritized a stable national interest defined by the sanctity of Turkey's borders and a predominantly Western orientation (Aydın 2000). This high degree of continuity and uniformity was not just limited to Turkey, as the foreign policies of small and middle-sized countries mostly reflected the bipolar nature of the international system that left little room for developing an independent [End Page 539] foreign policy. In such a polarized international setting, multilateral institutions enhanced the negotiation power of small/middle powers (Matarrazzo 2011, 55). Not atypically for such countries, Turkey sought to adhere to membership in the key multilateral frameworks of the Western camp (the Council of Europe 1949, the OECD 1948, and NATO 1952) in order to intensify its negotiation power and security, enhance its international status, and compensate for its relative lack of independent foreign policy (Aydın 2000; Yılmaz 2012). As the Cold War came to a close, a persistent call for a more assertive foreign policy emanating from the newly established political parties, emerging leaders, and public intellectuals occupied the public sphere in the 1990s. Exaggerating the passivity of Turkey's foreign policy establishment, this new orientation asked for a more dauntless outlook and wanted to replace the status-quoism of Turkish foreign policy with a search for missed or new opportunities. In fact, the end of the Cold War had fundamentally altered the context within which Turkish foreign policy was conducted, and it gave way to multiple waves of foreign policy activisms (Öniş 2011, 15). Yet Turkey's foreign policy remained predominantly Western-oriented until the mid-2000s. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the pendulum shifted more towards the daring side, what Mufti called the "Imperial tradition," after the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) took office in 2002. Initially, the party adopted extensive reforms that aimed to democratize Turkey's political system with hitherto unmatched political will and popular support. These moves, which were also in response to the European Union's "harmonization packages" that could qualify Turkey for EU membership, received strong and sustained support domestically, as they did from Turkey's democratic allies and even some neighboring publics (Akkoyunlu, Nicolaïdis, and Öktem 2013, 22). Beginning with the AKP's second term (2007), however, Turkey's foreign policy veered sharply away from the EU. Instead, enhancing Turkey's hegemonic role in the Middle East replaced the goal of integration with the West [End Page 540] and became the central aim of foreign policy particularly after the series of protest movements that engulfed much of the Arab World in 2011. Frequent crises and abrupt shifts in Turkey's foreign policy outlook have heightened the debate between the AKP and its critics, the latter criticizing the AKP for pursuing a mostly adventurous foreign policy. The debate intensified after 2011, when not just the Middle East but the international system entered a period of flux and uncertainty. It was a period in which traditional verities of international and regional norm setting...