Chuto Dokobunseki

Turkish Foreign Policy: Its Potential and its Impact

Dr Philip Robins
University Reader, University of Oxford
(09/17/2010)

In the nineteenth century, Turkey’s forebear as a state, the Ottoman Empire, acquired the sobriquet of ‘the sick man of Europe’. The nickname caught the atmosphere of the moment. So much so that more than a century later, the phrase is still occasionally trotted out as part of discussions about Turkey and its future. It is, however, far from appropriate today. Before his death in 2008 the noted Turkologist, Geoffrey Lewis, used to say that in the twenty first century Turkey was actually ‘the well man of Europe’. And that was before the financial meltdown in neighbouring Greece!

The notion of Turkey as the sick man of Europe also jars with the self-conception of the country seen through the eyes of its principal foreign and security policy strategist, Prof Ahmet Davutoglu. Although only appointed as foreign minister in May 2009, Prof Davutoglu has exercised the influence of a privileged insider not only since the establishment of the current Justice & Development Party (AKP) government in November 2002, but personally upon the leading lights of the movement going back to at least the mid 1990s.

Prof Davutoglu is best known for his highly seductive ‘zero problems with neighbours’ policy. Given that Turkey had problems with all but one of the eight countries with which it had a land border some 15 years ago, the strategy was beautifully simple in its conception, and a worthy goal. But Davutoglu is not just a ‘one trick’ ad man’s dream in his thinking about foreign policy. It was he and his team that came up with the idea of a complete cognitive shift: taking Turkey, so often conceived of as being on the periphery of things, and placing it at the centre. In doing so, the AKP was restoring Istanbul as a creative and social hub, as it had been not only during the Ottoman Empire but also during the earlier empires of Byzantium and Eastern Rome.

It took some audacity to rethink the nature and presence of Istanbul and of its political hinterland, Turkey. With the Ottoman state only just now beyond living memory, it was somewhat of a gamble to emphasise a neo-Ottomanism the emergence of which many of Turkey’s neighbours, from Balkan Christians, through the Arab World to the new states of the Caucasus had, at least until recently, instinctively resented and even feared. Though it is still early days, Davutoglu seemed, at least until 2009, to have got away with it. Newly minted political initiatives with Armenia, the Caucasus more generally, and in the Middle East over Iranian nuclearisation, and with Israel and Syria all suggest to what extent Turkey’s diplomacy now has currency.

Before going on to discuss some of these aspects of Turkish foreign policy it is as well to reflect on certain key factors – domestic institutional, ethnic and economic –– that might determine the relative health of the Turkish state, and hence its ability to prosecute a coherent and effective foreign policy. The dangers of what Davutoglu has called ‘a negative domino effect’ remain. Turkey needs to be strong and sure enough to secure the successes made so far if they are not to unravel.

Institutional Politics

At face value the AKP government, often referred to as ‘post-Islamist’, seems to be well entrenched. It has won two national election victories, in 2002 and 2007, achieved further local election success in 2009 and captured the presidency of the republic, in the form of its victorious candidate, Abdullah Gul, also in 2007. The AKP won nearly half of the popular vote in the second of the two general elections, and for the second time running succeeded in forming a single party government. The AKP prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, does not have to go back to the country for a renewed mandate until the end of the five year parliamentary span in 2012, although governments prefer to seek renewals after four years in order to maximise their political manoeuvrability.

This impressive record somewhat belies the AKP’s current predicament. The party has been sliding in the opinion polls, and currently stands at just above the 30% mark. The parliamentary opposition, having been moribund through most of the 2000s, has been rejuvenated by the election of a new leader for the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Suddenly, polling organisations are putting the CHP up near the 30% mark as well, although this is probably near the limit of its potential. The probability that the AKP would win a third solo term is now seriously contested. Erdogan will be mindful that in Turkey no prime minister has served more than a decade in power since the introduction of the democratic process in 1946. And no party has won more than three election victories.

Even if the AKP wins a third term and Erdogan remains as premier it is debatable whether foreign policy will feature quite in the way that it has hitherto. Erdogan will have to fight hard just to keep the parliamentary opposition at bay. After nearly eight years in office, Erdogan is in any case tired, and is believed to covet the more cerebral office of the presidency when Gul’s mandate expires, possibly as early as 2014. If such events come to pass, Erdogan would most likely be replaced from within the party. But noone else has built up his authority or shares his popular touch. Gul and Davutoglu are intellectuals; the economy minister, Ali Babacan, is more at home with economics than politics; the deputy prime minister, Bulent Arinc, is regarded as too much of an Islamist for mainstream electoral tastes.

Kurdish Inclusivity

The AKP government’s problems are not exclusively institutional. It faces even more basic challenges in the form of political inclusivity, especially as far as the country’s Kurds are concerned. The AKP has always eyed the ‘Kurdish vote’ covetously in south-east Turkey. Its inability to wrest this support from the Kurdish nationalist party, the Democratic Society Party (DTP), at the local elections resulted in a new manoeuvre from the prime minister. In autumn 2009, Erdogan launched a ‘Kurdish opening’, designed to woo the Kurds, especially those based in the south-east of the country. As in the past, the initiative was big on fanfare, but short on tangibles. The strategy eventually morphed into a ‘democratic opening’, as other parts of Turkey complained at governmental favouritism.

Rather than find itself in a cycle of virtue, as must have been his hope, Erdogan was soon on the back foot. Kurdish nationalists who had come down from the mountains in a gesture of reconciliation were packed off to jail by the courts. Turkey’s judiciary closed down the DTP in December, triggering shows of indiscriminate resentment against Ankara. The Kurdish insurgency movement, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), brought a self-declared ceasefire to a close, and recommenced attacks from their bases on the Iraqi-Turkish border. Hopes that the AKP might preside over electoral reform, and reduce the national party threshold from 10% to around 6%, an effective enfranchising of Kurdish national opinion, receded, as did the AKP’s own medium term electoral hopes.

The ability of Turkey to pursue a coherent and credible foreign policy while grappling with renewed Kurdish nationalist attacks is questionable. It is incongruous for the AKP to preach the ‘peace value’ in its foreign relations, while effectively fighting a war against a significant part of its own citizenry. Moreover, it is tricky for Ankara to develop relations with Baghdad, while there are no longer zero problems between the two. Indeed, with a political vacuum having emerged in Iraq, post-March elections, the upsurge in the PKK-Turkey war hardly helps the cause of stability at such a delicate time. To quote Prof Davutoglu back at himself, if there is going to be a negative domino effect on Turkey’s borders it is more likely to begin in Iraq than anywhere else.

The Economy

Much more successful for the AKP’s Turkey has been the fortunes of the national economy since the global credit crunch. By and large Turkey has coped much better than most, and certainly much better relative to the countries in its backyard. Turkey’s secret has been its large informal economy, which has kept growth buoyant (a reported 11.4% in first quarter 2010) and provided work, hence slowing the overall rise in joblessness. Turkey has also benefitted from its position outside the Euro-zone, which has allowed it to respond to market forces in order to retain competitiveness. Witness, for example, the performance of the Turkish real estate and tourism sectors, relative to the Euro-zone countries of Greece, Portugal and Spain. Of course, relying on the importance of a thriving informal economy is hardly macro-economic orthodoxy. The more so, if one considers that some of these new jobs will have been taken by children, while others are located in a zone of criminality, embracing such areas as illegal drugs. No doubt the Turkish retort to such finger wagging would be: ‘needs must!’

The relative improvement in the Turkish economy will further bolster Istanbul as the centre of regional economic gravity, especially as Athens implodes. It will also increase economic self-confidence, as Turkey prospers and the outer ring of the EU does not. But one has to remember that Turkey is hardly a mature, diversified, consolidated economy. It remains vulnerable to jarring currency fluctuations. Inflation has been creeping up again, and stands at 8%. Structural problems like the current account deficit remain. Turkey may be navigating effectively, and enjoying its lucky status, but it hardly possesses the economic scale or sturdiness necessary to dominate the collective economies of the states all around it.

Generally, economic factors remain central to Turkish foreign policy. Turkey’s need for imports of natural gas drives its commercial relationship with Russia, and has been a major part of stable bilateral relations over the course of the last 25 years. If Russia is Turkey’s most important source of gas imports, Iran is its second. This makes it problematic for Ankara to consider splitting with Tehran.

Turkey needs to maintain reasonable relations with countries like Britain or Germany, or otherwise face a decline in tourism. Foreign direct investment in Turkey tends to flow from the leading European economies and Japan, although Middle Eastern states, notably in the Gulf, have been showing a new found interest, on the back in part of Erdogan’s trenchant criticism of Israel’s attitude towards the Palestinians. This shows that amid powerful economic relationships of continuity there are opportunities for new business, and that this can be leverage through political means.

Foreign Policy Constraints

In spite of some of the limitations discussed above the last two years have been a period of unprecedented activity for Turkey’s foreign relations. In part, this has been driven by Turkey’s election as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council. The sweeping nature of that victory not only gave Ankara a thundering mandate for activism, but also encouraged a Third Worldism, evocative of Turkish foreign policy once the country had become more independently spirited after the mid 1960s. Such an approach may be coming back into fashion. With the Brazil of President Lula holding a non-permanent seat along with Turkey, there is evidence that the two countries, regional powers frustrated at having punched below their weight for so long in the past, may have egged one another on, especially as far as mediating in the Iranian nuclear issue has been concerned.

With Turkish activism visible but elusively intangible at the Security Council, Turkish foreign policy has been all dressed and looking for a place to go. Stability in the Caucasus seemed to have potential, but the short war between Georgia and Russia was too asymmetical. Ankara, which had been until the point of conflict a supporter of the former and a trainer of its military, was uncomfortably exposed to a resurgence in Russian militarism. A lower profile was preferable to a higher. Another opportunity seemed to emerge with Turkey’s soccer mediated overtures to Armenia. Improved relations with the US and France appeared to beckon as a consequence, while Ankara would have gained commercially with the opening of the borders. This time Turkey proved to be too much of a protagonist to follow through on its own diplomacy. In the face of Azarbaijan’s complaints, Erdogan got cold feet, and the protocols negotiated between the two sides have remained unratified in Ankara.

The Middle East has, however, obligingly stepped in to provide Turkey with a willing context for activism. In part, this opportunity has been a reflection of the paralysis of many of the regimes in the region. Thus Turkey emerged as a mediator between Israel and Syria in spring 2008 without even having to try very hard. The fact that it had good working relations with both sides was sufficient. By increasingly engaging with the Middle East, the AKP and its leading lights soon discovered that there were other potential benefits. Foremost among these was the chance to put its values into practice. This included a neo-Ottoman paternalism towards those unable effectively to help themselves, notably the Palestinians, both in the form of the Islamist Hamas and the nationalist Fatah. More importantly, though less visibly, it included an assertion of a Sunni Islamic identity, at a time when the Middle East’s most important Sunni state, Egypt, was no longer playing any significant regional role.

With the Israeli onslaught on Gaza in December 2008/January 2009, Turkey instinctively mediated to help bring the conflict to an end. But the AKP’s will to mediate was only matched by its own Sunni Muslim sense of revulsion at Israel’s murderousness. Erdogan could not contain himself when he clashed with Israeli President Shimon Peres at the Davos conference in 2009. Further signs of Turkish dissatisfaction came through the year, as Ankara pushed Israel further away. The popularity of the Palestinian cause on the Turkish street was no check on Erdogan’s quietly building fury. When Israel attacked an aid flotilla bound for Gaza in international waters in June 2010, killing nine Turks, that fury boiled over, the more so because the dead were associated with an Islamist charity close to the AKP. It has been bolstered in the form of an ultimatum from Prof Davutoglu to the Israelis: apologise for the tragedy and pay compensation or face a complete bilateral rupture.

Conclusion

Turkey is undoubtedly a formidable country, with a growing sense of self-confidence. This strength is being bolstered relatively by the weaknesses of comparably sized states like Egypt and Iran. The economic problems being suffered by Europe’s periphery have also contributed to this sense of Turkey as a growing centre of gravity. Those that expect the rise of Turkey to be irresistible may be getting ahead of themselves, though. In less than six months Turkey will have vacated its place on the Security Council. Turkey is doing well economically, but it is misguided if, having worked so closely with Brazil over the last few months, it fancies itself as the newest member of the BRICs. Domestic developments, from the re-eruption of the Kurdish issue to the sunset hours of the AKP in government, may impair the Davutoglu strategy, while generally distracting Ankara from the business of foreign affairs. It will be interesting to see how the AKP reconciles a declining position domestically, with the adulation that has come its way abroad, especially in the Arab World.