Resetting Turkish foreign policy in a time of global turmoil

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315143842

Our globalising world is increasingly shaped by risk, uncertainty, and insecurity giving rise to global turmoil with enduring quality. While felt everywhere in the world, it is the Middle East in general, and Syria and Iraq in particular, where the meaning and the implications of the global turmoil and multiple crises have recently coalesced. No society, including those of the hegemon and great powers, is immune from the global crisis; Turkey does not constitute an exception. Not only is Turkey not immune from the unprecedented challenges generated by the global turmoil, but it is, in fact, at the epicentre of the global turmoil, affected immensely by the multiple crises of globalisation, and also regarded as one of the pivotal actors with the potential to play a key role for the possibility of regional and global stability. This chapter provides a critical analysis of how Turkish foreign policy has evolved since the beginning of the 2000s in terms of its modus vivendi, its identity, and its transformative capacity; and, how this process has been over-determined by globalisation. More specifically, it shows how Turkish foreign policy was proactive through regional and global engagements at the beginning of the 2000s, then faced an impasse with the beginning of the Arab Spring in 2010 and needed to be reset, and finally how Turkey has become a sceptic of globalisation, paving the way for the increasing power of the nation state through realism and security thinking.