Turkey's Maturing Foreign Policy

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On June 12, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the most popular Turkish prime minister of the last half century, marked his third straight electoral win by averring his leadership over not only Turkey but the entire region. “Believe me,” he said in a victory speech, “Sarajevo won today as much as Istanbul; Beirut won as much as Izmir; Damascus won as much as Ankara; Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, the West Bank, Jerusalem won as much as Diyarbakir.” The speech reaffirmed the foreign policy that Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has pursued since it came to power in 2002. As the AKP’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, puts it, Turkey’s goal has been to have “zero problems” with its neighbors. And over the past decade, Davutoğlu has dramatically improved Ankara’s relationships with capitals across the region through constant diplomatic engagement, fostering mutual trade, and opening national borders.

Some in the West have seen Turkey’s new foreign policy as a shift Eastward. Indeed, Turkey has drawn closer to authoritarian governments in Iran and Syria. And Erdogan and his team’s Muslim identity have influenced some of their foreign policy rhetoric, such as their strong stance in support of Palestine. Accordingly, some, including the British historian Niall Ferguson, even suggest that Turkey might be heading toward “a revived Ottoman Empire” that would dominate the whole Middle East.

But warnings about Turkey’s neo-Ottomanism are more sensational than factual, and miss a broader point. Like any major power, Turkey bases its foreign policy on calculations of hard national interests, and coats it in value-laden rhetoric that reflects popular sentiments. Moreover, even as the AKP has supported friendly autocrats, it has positioned itself as a model democracy for the rest of the Muslim world. At a May 2003 summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Tehran, Abdullah Gül, who was then Turkey’s foreign minister and is now its president, argued for “a vision of accountability, transparency, fundamental rights and freedoms, and gender equality.” And in 2006, in remarks before a meeting of AKP members in support of President George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda, he said, “Had there not been freedom and democracy in Turkey, we would not be in power right now.”

The popular protests that swept the Middle East this spring put the dual nature of the AKP’s foreign policy to the test. At times, especially in the case of Libya, Turkey’s reaction to events seemed haphazard. According to Steven Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Erdogan and his team looked like “stumbling politicians afraid of a new regional order.” But a closer look at events reveals that Turkish foreign policy was actually the result of careful balancing between hard policy and values. In fact, as Ibrahim Kalin, the chief policy adviser to Erdogan, argued recently, the Arab Spring might have “vindicate[d] the new strategic thrust of Turkish foreign policy.”

The first two stages of the Arab Spring -- Tunisia and Egypt -- were fairly unproblematic for Turkey’s foreign policy. Tunisia’s President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali had been dictatorial but fiercely secularist and, like the AKP’s opponents in Turkey, had banned headscarves and suppressed religious movements. AKP party leaders found it easy to publicly sympathize with the protesters who took to Tunisia’s streets in December. Pro-AKP media in Turkey even drew parallels between the protests and the AKP’s own fight against what they see as Turkey’s excessively secularist Kemalist order.

Similarly, the AKP viewed President Hosni Mubarak’s February 11 ouster from Egypt as a welcome development. Mubarak had also been a secular dictator, suppressing Islamic parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood. In addition, his regime resented Turkey’s rising regional influence, which seemed to have sidelined Egypt’s role in negotiating Israeli-Palestinian peace. No wonder that when thousands gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Erdogan publicly lauded their efforts and called on Mubarak to “listen to the wishes of the people.” In the same speech, Erdogan reminded Mubarak that every Muslim would go to the grave “as neither a president nor a prime minister” but as a humble man or woman who would be measured only by his deeds.