Turkey and Germany in the interregnum: new foreign policy strategies for a multipolar world

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2025.2497526

There is an emerging consensus that the existing international system is deteriorating. The world is no longer unipolar, and multipolarity seems to be the next system in line. Within this context, regional powers have experienced shifts in their foreign policies, including Turkey and Germany. This article seeks to not only offer a comparative conceptualisation of how these shifts affect Turkey’s and Germany’s foreign policies but also how they influence the Turkey-Germany-EU triangle. It first conceptualises the decline of the post-war liberal international order and the emergence of a new order to better locate Turkey’s and Germany’s place in it. It then identifies parallel and differing patterns in Turkey’s and Germany’s foreign policies that have emerged in response to the decaying international order. Turkey’s relative independence as a non-EU member and Germany’s relative leadership constraint as the ‘hegemon’ of the EU have set forth their foreign policy paths–thus also defining their priorities of regime security versus multilateralism, respectively. At the same time, both have adopted transactionalism as a central point of their foreign policy strategies. The article concludes with recommendations to increase bilateral cooperation between Turkey and Germany as well as Turkey and the EU in the coming order.