A Turkish Model for the Middle East: Deconstructing a Discourse, (Unpublished Work in Progress) (original) (raw)
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CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research - Zenodo, 2022
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After the end of the cold war, the international system and security parameters in the region where Turkey is located have changed and bipolar system and security policy based on east and west axis have become dysfunctional. Turkey had some difficulty to integrate itself into the new international system after Cold War era. It has needed to redefine and adapt its former international policy as a result of some crisis especially after 2000s. Moreover, it has had to exercise a more active and flexible foreign policy due to its improving economic potential and democracy. In this new international policy period, political leadership and national politics have played an essential role. Its former international policy, which involved soft power and having no problems with her neighbors, was considered utopic and romantic by some and functional by some others. However, this policy has become dysfunctional due to some regional and national crisis after 2000s.This study involves Turkish and ...
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“The Changing Face of the Middle East” Conference 2012
In the past decade, Turkey has been going through the most significant transformation since the foundation of the Republic, reshaping and restructuring its domestic politics and political system as well as its foreign policy. The Erdoğan government, inspired by Davutoğlu’s Strategic Depth Doctrine, has ended the decades-old Kemalist foreign policy and turned Turkey to face its neighborhood, particularly the Middle East. Ankara has been a staunch supporter of the democratization processes of the Arab Spring from Tunisia to Libya to Egypt to Syria. Providing encouragement and assistance to the newly forming Arab democracies, Turkey also pursues a Neo-Ottoman policy through which it has been expanding its regional and international role. Played right, Turkey, as the only Muslim society in the region with a functioning secular democracy, may serve as an inspiration for the democratic movements of the Arab world and can eventually emerge from these tumultuous times as the leading power of the region.
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This special issue on Turkish-American relations with a specific focus on the Middle East aims to analyze a complex web of relations at a critical regional and global juncture, with important implications well beyond bilateral relations. The idea for this special issue emerged during the "Turkish-American Alliance in a Volatile Region: Challenges and Opportunities" Conference organized by the Center for Globalization and Democratic Governance (GLODEM) at Koç University, İstanbul, on March 29, 2012. The insightful and well-rounded nature of the presentations and the extensive interest they received from the academic community compelled us to examine several important points and intriguing questions which were raised during the conference in a much more comprehensive and systematic manner. The articles in this special issue highlight the complexities of the Turkish-American partnership in an age of acute global and regional turmoil. The future of the Arab Revolutions is surrounded by a great deal of uncertainty. Progress towards a political opening in the Arab world is not likely to be a smooth, uni-linear process. We may expect significant crises and reversals on the way, as the events in Libya, Egypt and Syria clearly testify. Similarly, the Western world has still not emerged from deep financial and economic crises, which clearly limit their ability to make a positive impact on the transformation of the Middle East on a scale comparable to the transformations that occurred in the post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe some twenty years ago. Moreover, the increasing importance of new and powerful
The transformation and power struggle in the Middle East after the Arab Spring and actual withdrawal of the USA in December 2011 from Iraq and therefore from the Middle East caused serious changes in the dynamics and balances of the region. The aim of this paper is to investigate evolving foreign policy strategies, activities of both regional and global actors on Middle East from the perspective of Turkey. The changes in the Middle East policy of Turkey after such changes and the effects of regional and systemic actors on such changes were studied comparatively with the foreign policies of Iran and Saudi Arabia. The national powers of Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the effective power centers in the region, were measured and compared to each other. Within this context, it was attempted to reveal the roles that these countries assumed in the changes in the region based on their powers from the perspective of Turkey. Furthermore, the critiques of relations of Turkey with the region countries and the foreign policy approaches it abortively produced against the regional changes were assessed within the new atmosphere developing in the Middle East.
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2016
One of the most important side-effects of the turmoil in the Middle East has been the crisis in Turkey’s relations with its Western partners. However, the events taking place in the Middle East or the Syria war are not the root causes of this friction; merely a triggering factor. The real reasons lie in the multileveled transformation, a sort of “revolution”, that Turkey has been going through over the past years and particularly since the election of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP) to power in 2002. These domestic changes usher in a new era for Turkey’s political scene that has many similarities – as well as differences – with Iran’s Islamic revolution of 1979. As a result, its national identity and ideological orientation shifts, something that undoubtedly impacts its foreign policy preferences, and as such will pose significant challenges to Western ac-tors that try to work Turkey and secure their interests in the region.
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Over the last few years a political transformation period has been started in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. An unfortunate event of a street vendor's death in Tunisia initiated the period of " Arab Spring " , " Arab Awakening " or " Arab Uprisings " (Brownlee, Masoud& Reynolds 2015: 10). In addition to that, problems among Israel and Palestine, and crisis in Syria and Iraq have made the things more complicated in this part of the world. Although it seems difficult to find a solution to stabilize and ease the tensions in the short run, there are needed new kinds of power(s) or coalitions. In order to achieve peace and tranquility how should be formed a new balance/nodes of power in the region and what should be the role of the United States in this unstable environment? This article attempts to find out feasible solutions and alternative suggestions by focusing on hard and soft power resources of the regional states and shifting alliances in MENA.