Analysis

January 30, 2012

Summary: The quest for autonomy is not a new phenomenon in the conduct of Turkish foreign policy. The question is not whether or not Turkey, or its current rulers, will continue to seek autonomy in foreign policy even in an environment that brings them, once more, closer to their Western partners. The real question is whether or not Turkey will be able to consistently have the capacity to pursue an autonomous foreign policy and simply instrumentalize its alliance relations. Turkey faced three waves of environmental challenges since the end of the Cold War. Not coincidentally, these periods also corresponded to the discovery and then twice to the resurrection of a Turkish model that could be put to use to safeguard mainly Western interests.

Waves, Ways and Historical Turns: Turkeys Strategic Quest

by Soli zel
In his critique of Ian Lessers analysis of the successive waves in Turkish foreign policymaking,1 aban Karda2 warns against determinism and rightly emphasizes the role of agency. For Karda, a merely geopolitical or structuralist understanding of Turkish foreign policy would do injustice to the architects of that policy. Understanding the shifts in Turkeys foreign policy solely as a function of a changing strategic environment, he argues, would blind observers to the great quest for Strategic Autonomy that underpins it. In light of Turkeys growing security needs in an increasingly uncertain and unstable environment, Lesser argues that (T)he scale of the security problems facing Turkey suggests that only Turkeys traditional Western partners can fill this need over the longer term. Karda agrees that Turkeys relations with its Western partners, and most importantly with the United States, will get closer because of the changing security environment in Turkeys near abroad. However, he insists that relations with the West will mainly have an instrumental value.
Turkeys Third Wave And the Coming Quest for Strategic Reassurance, Dr. Ian O. Lesser, On Turkey Series, October 25, 2011 2 Quest for Strategic Autonomy Continues, or How to Make Sense of Turkeys New Wave, Dr. aban Karda, On Turkey Series, November 28, 2012
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In Karda view, Partnership with the West, at this current juncture, is a valuable instrument as long as it enhances Ankaras ability to meet new challenges and expands the room to maneuver, not because of its inherent value. The quest for strategic autonomy still instructs Turkish leaders thinking on international affairs, and is unlikely to disappear. Yet this quest for autonomy is not a new phenomenon in the conduct of Turkish foreign policy either. It has been there as a powerful vein even during the Cold War, evidenced by Turkeys intervention in Cyprus and the enormous political costs that successive governments were willing to bear by refusing to assent to a less than satisfactory settlement or any settlement at all. In fact, this quest for autonomy can be generalized for almost all states that have the capacity to act so in varying degrees. The tension between structural determinism and agency is an age-old problem in social sciences and historical analyses as well as international relations theory. In a frequently quoted passage in the introduction to his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Karl Marx presents an eloquent if somewhat imprecise formula on the matter:

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Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. This passage can be used to reconcile Lessers more structuralist and perhaps more deterministic view of the imperatives of Turkish foreign policy and Kardas emphasis on the voluntarism of the policymakers. Undoubtedly, the actors do shape their environment, but not at will. They are circumscribed by their capacities, by other actors relative power, and the conditions created by major shifts in that environment. The responses to these shifts will be determined by existing modes of interaction, alliance commitments, and structural realities on the ground. Whether or not it will be structure or agency that will override the other depends on the case and circumstances that shaped it. The question therefore is not whether or not Turkey, or its current rulers, will continue to seek autonomy in foreign policy even in an environment that brings them, once more, closer to their Western partners. The real question is whether or not Turkey will be able to consistently have the capacity to pursue an autonomous foreign policy and simply instrumentalize its alliance relations. For Turkey to succeed in this endeavor it would have to have the means not just to respond to its environment but to transform it as well. The developments in regions surrounding Turkey, particularly the Middle East since the Arab uprisings began and pointedly since the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, indicate that Turkeys influence over the behavior of its neighbors or countries like Syria in which it invested heavily in the past is either negligible or not substantive. Furthermore all of Turkeys major neighbors Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are scrambling for influence in the same neighborhood. They mobilize all the tools available to them, including the sharpening of sectarian divisions, to shape and control the strategic environment of the Middle East region in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Alliances are shifting and recourse to ties with kindred communities is becoming dominant. Such a dynamic, particularly in the absence of a balancing EU accession process that is robust, risks sucking Turkey into its debilitating rationale. Under these circumstances, it becomes more difficult as well as more critical to maintain the consistency of a secular foreign policy on the part of Turkish policymakers. This is especially true at a time when the European Union, paralyzed by its economic troubles and the political fragility of many member states, continues to generate a political-strategic vacuum. This vacuum, combined with some Union members unfair, irresponsible, and outright hostile treatment of Turkey and its candidacy, damage Turkeys quest for equilibrium between its alliance interests and values on the one hand and its Greater Middle Eastern vocation on the other. Three Waves Since the End of the Cold War Turkey faced three waves of environmental challenges since the end of the Cold War. Not coincidentally, these periods also corresponded to the discovery and then twice to the resurrection of a Turkish model that could be put to use to safeguard mainly Western interests. 1989-1999 When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Cold War practically came to an end, Turkey was left for dead strategically, at least as a member in good standing of the Western Alliance. Not only did an important figure such as then U.S. Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger tell a Turkish interviewer that perhaps Turkey should concentrate more on the Middle East because after all it was not really a European country, but within Turkey there was concern that with the security axis disappearing, there was not much that tied Turkey to Europe. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 put Turkey back on the strategic map but not without a serious crisis of intra-alliance confidence. Some NATO members, notably Germany, refused to assume their responsibilities under Article 5 if Turkey were attacked by Iraq and were unwilling to send Patriot missiles for Turkeys defense. Then with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, a whole new strategic and cultural geography opened up as Central Asian Turkic republics and the countries of the Caucasus gained their independence. This led to the first allusion to the Turkish model, whereby the Central Asian republics would be expected to emulate the secular, democratic Turkish political system and Turkey would in turn play a role in the integration of these new

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states into the Western political order. That period was short-lived, since it soon became clear that these countries resented the advent of a new big brother and Turkeys capacities to shape their developments were limited. Still, during this decade, a number of developments such as the Yugoslav wars, Turkish militarys increasingly useful participations in various peacekeeping operations, and the strategic alignment with Israel helped re-establish Turkeys importance in U.S. strategic thinking. This happened just when the United States was reconfirmed as both a needed and an unreliable, if not dangerous, ally for many Turks following developments in Iraq, notably the de facto creation of an autonomous Kurdish political entity in the North. The challenge for Turkey in this period was to ameliorate its democratic credentials, reform its administrative structure, and liberalize its legal system. Yet upon the death of the reformist President Turgut zal, the custodians of a semi-democratic Turkey, notably the military, used the Kurdish insurrection and the alleged Islamist threat to turn the country inwards and increase the tone of authoritarianism. This trend would only come to an end after the United States delivered the PKKs leader Abdullah calan to Turkish authorities in Kenya in February of 1999. 2001-2011 Apprehending calan was just the beginning of a number of important developments in Turkish foreign policy as well. Relations with Syria and Iran, thoroughly poisoned during the 1990s, took a decisive turn for the better. U.S. President Bill Clinton visited Turkey, and Turkish-U.S. relations were defined as a strategic partnership. The EU, with the help of a lot of pressure and lobbying by the United States, reversed its ill-advised decision of 1997 and extended candidate status to Turkey. At the same time, under the stewardship of Foreign Minister smail Cem the first theoretical and practical underpinnings of a multidimensional foreign policy started to take shape, later to be expanded and theorized by current Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutolu and consistently pursued under the AKP governments. Within the traditionally Atlanticist Turkish security establishment, fear of the EU-related process of democratization, which might undermine the authoritarian system led to the growth of a wing with a Eurasianist outlook. Many of those associated with this foreign policy preference were later charged with conspiracy against the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government. The attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, resurrected the talk of a Turkish model. Against the Jihadist dystopia of al-Qaeda, market-oriented, secular, democratic, Muslim Turkey, a member of the Atlantic Alliance, with warts and all, looked much more attractive. When the AKP came to power, it gave more pizzazz to the model since the party, rooted in Turkeys Islamist movement, undertook a relentless program of reformation, demilitarization/civilianization, and democratization of the Turkish polity. This was done with the help of the EU accession process, which was supported by the overwhelming majority of the Turkish public. There was at last, with a decades delay, harmony between Turkish foreign policy, the values of its security community, and the countrys domestic political arrangements. The multiple failures of the U.S. misadventure in Iraq, which Turkey objected to from the beginning and ultimately refused to be a part of, shook the regional balance of power. The Arab state system remained paralyzed and Iran gained enormous strategic advantages. As the U.S. invasion empowered Iraqi Shia and the Kurds, it also broke the centuries old strategic balance between Shia Iran and the Sunni world. In this environment, Turkey formulated a policy of engagement with all its neighbors by accepting the existing status quo as given. Lesser identified these conditions as a benign environment whereby none of the major actors would be able to counter Turkeys designs and policy moves. In fact, Ankara pursued policies towards Iran and Syria that were objected to by Washington. As the militarys influence over the making of foreign policy waned, Ankara gradually dropped its perennial fears concerning the assertion of Iraqi Kurdish political identity. The governments policies channeled the exploding economic energy of the nascent provincial entrepreneurial classes towards trade and market creation all around, thereby transforming Turkey from a national security state to what Professor Kemal Kirici would call a trading state. 3
3 TurkeysDemonstrative Effect and the Transformation of the Middle East, Insight Turkey, Volume 13, Number 2, 2011

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Both at the economic and political levels, as Karda argued, the government pursued its own goals with great intensity, trying to transform the environment within which it operated. It presented itself as a side in all the unresolved problems of the surrounding regions and made strenuous efforts to mediate between Iran and Ankaras alliance partners to find a way out of Irans nuclear program impasse. It was a pity that the resourceful Brazil-Turkey-Iran swap agreement was immediately undercut by the U.S. administration. That, and the ill-advised no vote at the UN Security Council on new sanctions against Iran, strained relations between Washington and Ankara. Since then, Turkeys Iran policy took a sharp turn on the nuclear issue as Ankara signed on to NATOs missile shield project and accepted one of the radar systems to be on Turkish soil. While maintaining close relations with Israel, the government pursued policies on the Palestinian issue that generated friction in the relations between Ankara and Tel Aviv. These culminated in the tragedy of Mavi Marmara when the Israeli Defense Forces killed eight Turkish citizens and one Turkish-American and the Israeli governments ultimate refusal to apologize. That Turkey could be so active and autonomous was partially a function of its ability to simultaneously pursue EU accession, strengthen its economy, and engage in a careful policy of creating a zone of interest in the vicinity. The precondition for the success of the policy was the existing status quo, particularly in the Middle East, that came to an end with the Arab uprisings and the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. 2011-Present The Arab uprisings of 2011 brought a second resurrection to the Turkish model. Turkeys credentials as a secular, democratic, and economically successful country were invoked as a sensible model to emulate by those Arab countries that successfully overthrew their regimes. As in earlier cases, the debate that ensued was more reflective of a Western desire not to face Islamists in power than being a historically appropriate expectation. Events in 2011 also changed the environment within which Turkey operated once more. The conditions in this new environment would be less conducive to autonomous action than before. It may well be that even Kardas suggestion that Turkey would cooperate with the West but maintain an anti-Western discourse domestically would no longer be tenable. So far, what is clear is that in the absence of a strategically acting EU, Turkey builds closer relations with the United States, is in stiff competition with Iran both in Iraq and Syria, and will have to deal with a more assertive Russia eager to prove its great power credentials in the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean.

About the Author

Soli zel teaches at Istanbul Kadir Has University. He is a columnist for the national daily Haberturk and is senior advisor to the chairman of the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmens Association.

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