Turkish-Greek Relations After the Cold War: Changing Dynamics of Securitisation and Desecuritisation (original) (raw)

Critical Readings of Turkey’s Foreign Policy , 2022

Abstract

Theory of securitisation examines how normal issues are constructed as security issues. Speech-acts of political elites play a crucial role in this construction. With these speech-acts, political elites convince the audience that an issue is an existential security threat and legitimises extraordinary measures against it. On the other hand, desecuritisation indicates a reverse track of securitisation in which issues are taken out of the security realm to political or non-politicised realms. Since the end of the Cold War, Turkish foreign policy has presented shifting securitisation and desecuritisation trends both towards its neighbours and other actors like the USA, EU, and Russia. This chapter aims to present these shifting trends in Turkish foreign policy with a particular focus on its relations with Greece. Therefore, it asks the question how securitisation and desecuritisation trends evolved in Turkey’s relationship with Greece. The relationship between Turkey and Greece is mostly marked with securitisation of different issues including delimitation of territorial waters, airspace and continental shelf, militarisation of islands in the Aegean Sea, and the Cyprus issue. However, this securitisation trend evolved into a desecuritisation in the late 1990s in line with Turkey’s quest of membership status to the EU. Turkey is reverting back from these desecuritisation trends to its default securitisation settings in mid-2010s. Recently, the developments in the Eastern Mediterranean added a novel securitised issue for the bilateral relations. This study’s contribution will be twofold: first is to provide a novel approach by examining the Turkish foreign policy through the lenses of securitisation and desecuritisation; and second is to contribute the existing literature on the politics of securitisation by presenting how securitisation and desecuritisation policies can be transformed even in a very short period of time.

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