Abstract
Following the end of the Cold War, a steady stream of books by academic and think-tank specialists has turned the spotlight onto Turkey’s actual or potential role as a rising regional power.1 Of the three neighbouring regions with which Turkish policy is engaged, the Middle East is easily the most complex and problematic. Since the end of the civil war in former Yugoslavia, Turkey’s relations with its European neighbours have been reasonably stable, although still troubled by the ongoing Cyprus dispute. To the north and east, the revival of Russian power has effectively frozen a series of local contests, with Turkey being little more than an onlooker. This leaves the Middle East as the world’s most persistent trouble spot, beset by inter-state rivalries as well as internal civil turmoil, in which Turkey has been quite deeply engaged.
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Notes
See, for example, Vojtech Mastny and R. Craig Nation (eds) (1996) Turkey between East and West: New Challenges for a Rising Regional Power (Boulder, CO: Westview Press);
Graham E. Fuller and Ian O. Lesser, with Paul B. Henze and J. F. Brown (1993) Turkey’s New Geopolitics: From the Balkans to Western China (Boulder, CO: Westview Press for RAND);
Barry Rubin and Kemal Kirişci (eds) (2001) Turkey in World Politics: An Emerging Multiregional Power (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner);
Graham E. Fuller (2008) The New Turkish Republic: Turkey as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World (Washington, DC: United States Institute for Peace).
Rabia Karakaya Polat (2008) ‘The Kurdish Issue: Can the AK Party Escape Securitization?’, Insight Turkey, 10 (3), 77.
Dietrich Jung (2003) ‘The Sèvres Syndrome: Turkish Foreign Policy and Its Historical Legacies’, American Diplomacy, 8 (2), www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/archives_roll/2003_07-09/jung_sevres/jung_sevres.html, accessed 24 April 2014; and Michâlis S. Michael (2008) ‘Navigating through the Bosphorus: Relocating Turkey’s European/Western Fault Line’, Global Change, Peace & Security, 20(1), 74–5.
Soli Özel (1995) ‘On Not Being a Lone Wolf: Geography, Domestic Plays and Turkish Foreign Policy in the Middle East’, in Geoffrey Kemp and Janice Gross Stein (eds), Powder Keg in the Middle East: The Struggle for Gulf Security (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield), 161–94.
Şükrü Elekdağ (1996) ‘Two and a Half War Strategy’, Perceptions, 1 (1), 57.
Quoted, Malik Mufti (1998) ‘Daring and Caution in Turkish Foreign Policy’, Middle East Journal, 52 (1), 34 (from an article by Şükrü Elekdağ in the Istanbul daily Milliyet, 15 April 1996).
Ahmed Serdar Aktürk (2010) ‘Arabs in Kemalist Turkish Historiography’, Middle Eastern Studies’, 46 (5), 645.
William Hale (2007) Turkey, the US and Iraq (London: Saqi), Chs. 4–5.
Ahmet Davutoğlu (1997–98) ‘The Clash of Interests: An Explanation of the World (dis)Order’, Perceptions: Journal of International Affairs, 2 (4), http://sam.gov.tr/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/AhmetDavutoglu3.pdf, accessed 23 March 2013. For explanations and commentary on Davutoğlu’s ideas, see: Bülent Aras (2009) ‘The Davutoğlu Era in Turkish Foreign Policy’, Insight Turkey, 11 (3), 127–42;
Alexander Murinson (2006) ‘The Strategic Depth Doctrine of Turkish Foreign Policy’, Middle Eastern Studies, 42 (6), 945–64;
Ioannis N. Grigoriadis (2010) ‘The Davutoğlu Doctrine and Turkish Foreign Policy’, Working Paper No. 8/2010 (Athens: ELIAMEP).
Ahmet Davutoğlu (2001), Stratejik Derinlik: Türkiye’nin Uluslararası Konumu [Strategic Depth: Turkey’s Position in the International System] (Istanbul: Küre Yayınları), 104–5, 118).
Tarık Oğuzlu (2007) ‘Soft Power in Turkish Foreign Policy’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 61 (1), 84–95.
Ziya Öniş (2003) ‘Domestic Politics versus Global Dynamics: Towards a Political Economy of the 2000 and 2001 Financial Crises in Turkey’, Turkish Studies, 4 (2), 1–30.
Kemal Kirişci and Neslihan Kaptanoğlu (2011) ‘The Politics of Trade and Turkish Foreign Policy’, Middle Eastern Studies, 47 (5), 706–7, 711.
See Ofra Bengio (2004) The Turkish-Israeli Relationship: Changing Ties of Middle Eastern Outsiders (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), Chs. 3–4; and
Mahmut Bali Aykan (1993) ‘The Palestinian Question in Turkish Foreign Policy from the 1950s to the 1990s’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 25 (1), 91–110; and (1999) ‘The Turkey-US-Israel Triangle: Continuity, Change and Implications for Turkey’s Post-Cold War Middle East Policy’, Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, 22 (4), 6–7.
Kemal Kirişçi, Nathalie Tocci and Joshua Walker (2010) A Neighbourhood Rediscovered: Turkey’s Transatlantic Value in the Middle East (Washington, DC: German Marshall Fund of the United States, Brussels Forum Paper Series), 9.
International Crisis Group (2010) Turkey’s Crises over Israel and Iran (Brussels, Europe Report 208), 4–9.
That it declined to do so was partly due to the Kurdish insurgency in Iran, organised by the Free Life Party of Kurdistan (PJAK) which was itself allied to the PKK. Iran and Turkey thus had a common interest in opposing Kurdish separatism. Daphne McCurdy (2008) ‘Turkish-Iranian Relations: When Opposites Attract’, Turkish Policy Quarterly, 7 (2), 96–9.
For further details, see Bill Park (2005) Turkey’s Policy towards Northern Iraq: Problems and Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, for International Institute for Strategic Studies, Adelphi Paper 374), 29–38; and (2012) Modern Turkey: People, State and Foreign Policy in a Globalized World (London: Routledge), 82–9;
Asa Lundgren (2007) The Unwelcome Neighbour: Turkey’s Kurdish Policy (London: I.B. Tauris), 112–16;
William Hale (2013) Turkish Foreign Policy since 1774, 3rd edn (London: Routledge), 168–9, 235–6;
Henri J. Barkey (2011) ‘Turkey and Iraq: The Making of a Partnership’, Turkish Studies, 12 (4), 666–8.
For details see William Hale and Ergun Özbudun (2010) Islamism, Democracy and Liberalism in Turkey: The Case of the AKP (London: Routledge), 88–95.
Toby Dodge (2013) ‘State and Society in Iraq Ten Years after Regime Change: The Rise of a New Authoritarianism’, International Affairs, 89 (2), 241–2, 245–9.
Data from Financial Times, 26 January 2014; and Robin M. Mills (2013) ‘Northern Iraq’s Oil Chessboard: Energy, Politics and Power’, Insight Turkey, 15 (1), 52, 59.
For example see: Samuel P. Huntington (1991) ‘Democracy’s Third Wave’, Journal of Democracy, 2 (2), 27–32;
Raymond Hinnebusch (2007) ‘Authoritarian Persistence, Democratization Theory and the Middle East: An Overview and Critique’, in Frederic Volpi and Francesco Cavatorta (eds), Democratization in the Muslim World: Changing Patterns of Power and Authority (Abingdon: Routledge), 11–33;
John Waterbury (1994) ‘Democracy Without Democrats: The Potential for Political Liberalization in the Middle East’, in Ghassan Salamé (ed.), Democracy Without Democrats? The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World (London: I.B. Tauris), 24–47.
Ziya Öniş (2014) ‘Turkey and the Arab Revolutions: Boundaries of Regional Power Influence in a Turbulent Middle East’, Mediterranean Politics, 19 (2), 208; and (2012) ‘Turkey and the Arab Spring: Between Ethics and Self-Interest’, Insight Turkey, 14 (3), 46.
Meliha Benli Altunışık and Özlem Tür (2006) ‘From Distant Neighbours to Partners: Changing Syrian-Turkish Relations’, Security Dialogue, 37 (2), 239–43;
Ahmet K. Han (2013) ‘Paradise Lost: A Neoclassical Realist Analysis of Turkish Foreign Policy and the Case of Turkish-Syrian Relations’, in Raymond Hinnebusch and Özlem Tür (eds), Turkey-Syria Relations: Between Enmity and Amity (Farnham, UK: Ashgate), 63–7; Sami Moubayed, ‘“Milking the Male Goat” and Syrian-Turkish Relations’, in ibid., 71–4; Philip Robins (2013) ‘“Victory of Friendship”?: Asad, Erdoğan and Football Diplomacy in Aleppo’, in ibid., 81–94.
Özden Zeynep Oktav (2013) ‘The Syrian Uprising and the Iran-Turkey-Syria Quasi Alliance: A View from Turkey’, in Hinnebusch and Tür (eds), Turkey-Syria Relations, 200.
Meliha Benli Altunışık (2005) ‘The Turkish Model and Democratization in the Middle East’, Arab Studies Quarterly, 27 (1–2), 46–7, 56; Gul’s Tehran speech reported in Hürriyet, 28 May 2003. Altunışık also points out that the ‘democratic role model’ idea had first been advanced in the closing days of the Clinton administration, 45.
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Hale, W. (2015). Reassessing Turkey’s Relationships with Its Neighbours. In: Michael, M.S. (eds) Reconciling Cultural and Political Identities in a Globalized World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-49315-6_9
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