Abstract
As the world order has been passing through major changes, Turkey tries to find a compass that will fulfill its foreign policy goals in a manner commensurate with its emergent stature as an important sovereign state with major engagements in the Middle East, Europe, and increasingly, with the rest of the world. The electoral dominance of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) since 2002 has supported the expansion of Turkish foreign policy ambitions and provided a continuity of leadership. This chapter will first consider three major developments, namely increasing fluidity of alignments, personalist leaderships and ambitious foreign policy agendas, and changing structural order at the global level, as well as briefly assess specific dimensions of Turkey’s evolving relationship with the United States, Europe, Russia, China, and the Middle East.
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Notes
- 1.
Samuel Huntington articulated the most basic challenge. It was premised on the expectation that the rise of civilizational identities will supersede statist identities and provide new fault lines generative of global conflict. See (Huntington 1993, 1996). If Huntington’s conceptions had become dominant, then we would definitely redescribe the world order as post-Westphalian.
- 2.
The period of exception was the presidency of Mohamed Mossadegh, an elected leader who championed Iranian nationalism, crossing a red line by nationalizing the oil industry, thereby generating a process that culminated in a CIA-facilitated coup in 1953. See narration and assessment of Stephen Kinzer, (Kinzer 2003).
- 3.
One elaborate attempt to call attention to the need to accord a new legitimacy to state-centric world order is set forth by Kissinger. See (Kissinger 2014).
- 4.
Although not discussed here, it is important to distinguish between Westphalia from 1648 to 1945 when it was primarily a European, Western framework, given a hierarchical character during the era of European colonialism and Westphalia since 1945, when the state-centric character of world order became universalized as a result of the collapse of colonialism. This has meant that geopolitics in the post-colonial Westphalia has not been as explicit as during the colonial era but also that its West-centric character has shifted away from Europe, centered in the United States, then shared with the Soviet Union, then asserted in a unipolar format, and now confused and complicated by the rise of China, the emergence of the BRICS, and the reassertion of Russia.
- 5.
This embodiment of Westphalia in the UN Charter did not, at the outset, question the legitimacy of European colonialism nor did it acknowledge and recognize the significance of the role and relevance of non-state political actors.
- 6.
Economists are more inclined to talk about the difficulty of promoting global collective goods in venues, including the UN, where political actors accord primary attention to the promotion of their distinct national interest.
- 7.
For influential conceptualization of this supposedly benevolent leadership role associated with ‘Great Powers’ see (Bull 1977).
- 8.
By ‘classic Westphalianism’ is meant not only a state-centric world order but also a West-centric world order.
- 9.
These premises included the ideological postulates of capitalism. The US interventions in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and Chile (1973) were directed at nationalist governments that sought to mobilize indigenous resources to benefit the domestic population at the expense of foreign investment. Cold War rationales for these interventions were invoked, but the better explanations of these events relate to the radical nationalist turn in domestic politics.
- 10.
Compare the political panic that the prospective deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba caused in 1962 that brought the world uncomfortably close to a nuclear war.
- 11.
Turgut Özal, while prime minister in the period preceding the end of the Cold War (1983–1989) prefigured the kind of activism that Turkey embraced after the AKP came to power.
- 12.
For an insightful and sympathetic interpretation of Davutoğlu’s views, see (Aras 2009).
- 13.
It is notable that the spark that ignited Turkey’s tensions with Israel occurred in 2009 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, when the then Prime Minister Erdoğan had an angry exchange with Israel’s President Shimon Peres about the latest Israeli attack on Gaza. Turkey’s declaration of geopolitical independence can also be traced back to 2003, when it withheld permission to the United States to launch its attack on Iraq partly from Turkish territory much to the annoyance of the then neoconservative Republican leadership.
- 14.
Such a reaction presupposes the legitimacy of geopolitical criteria for determining the appropriate outer limits of foreign policy on the part of ordinary or normal states, that is, those lacking a global geopolitical status.
- 15.
This American anti-Assad push was part of its post-Cold War ‘democracy promotion’ geopolitics, centered in the Middle East, that contended that democracies are less inclined to fight one another and are more efficient participants in a neoliberal world economy. In the background, were political forces associated with Israel that seemed intent on breaking up anti-Israel authoritarian regimes in the region, starting with Iraq and Syria. See a neoconservative report prepared by a group working with Benjamin Netanyahu entitled “Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” prepared for Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in Jerusalem (Perle et al. 1996).
- 16.
There are indications that Syrians are returning to Syria from Turkey to areas that have been cleared of Daesh domination, but it is unclear how extensive this process will be.
- 17.
For an analysis suggesting that accommodation with Russia is increasingly favored by European political leaders and governments, see (Fisher 2016).
- 18.
See, for instance (“Erdogan Thinks There Should Be No Permanent UN Security Council Members” 2016).
- 19.
For an intelligent expression of this outlook, see (Kupchan 2013).
- 20.
It can be argued that the Turkish approach to the Arab World after the uprising of 2011 epitomized a turn toward principle (anti-authoritarianism) and ideological affinity (sectarian support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Gaza, and Syria; solidarity with the Palestinian struggle). In the last several years, Turkey has followed a more pragmatic line, including normalizing relations with Israel at the partial expense of the Palestinians and even making overtures to Egypt despite the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood by the Sisi government. The pragmatic orientation does not pertain across the board. Erdoğan has recently reaffirmed his affirmation of the Palestinian struggle and supported UNESCO’s criticisms of Israel’s failures to protect Muslim sacred sites in Jerusalem.
- 21.
Contrast Kissinger, note 1, who insists that there is no viable alternative at present to a universalized acceptance of the Westphalian framework with Falk, note 4, who argues that there is emergent for a variety of reasons, especially the declining historical agency of military power and the rise of non-state actors and transnational market forces, a ‘new geopolitics’ that cannot be usefully fit within the Westphalian framework. For global implications of networking, see (Slaughter 2004).
- 22.
Putin’s receptivity to such cooperative diplomacy was set forth in his annual address to the Russian nation. See (Higgins 2016).
- 23.
This is the central thrust of the Çavuşoğlu interview, note 16, stressing interregional impacts of establishing positive relations in any important regional domain. See note 16.
- 24.
For both quotations, see Note 16. The Shanghai Five are China, Kazakhstan, Kirgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan.
- 25.
Overall, Trump’s ‘America First’ apparent withdrawal from present levels of global involvement would likely be first felt in the Middle East, where the failed post-Cold War diplomacy of ‘democracy promotion’ and accompanying regime-changing interventions have been most tested. One major shift in American management of geopolitics after the Cold War was a renewed strategic emphasis given to the Middle East as the region where energy resources, proliferation prospects, and Israeli security posed threats to vital interests of the West. In this regard, Europe, the former nexus of geopolitical commitment, was left to evolve on its own. This may change in the coming years as the European Union seems likely to be confronted by a series of difficult challenges.
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Falk, R. (2018). Through a Glass Darkly: The Past, Present, and Future of Turkish Foreign Policy. In: Parlar Dal, E. (eds) Middle Powers in Global Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72365-5_2
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