The Limits, Dilemmas, and Paradoxes of Turkish Foreign Policy: A Political Economy Perspective Beyza Ç. Tekin Assistant Professor, Galatasaray University R. Barış Tekin Associate Professor, Marmara University Published by LSEE - Research on South Eastern Europe Managing Editor Tena Prelec Assistant Editor Aleksandra Stankova Cover design Jakub Krupa Reproduction and Printing Reprographics, LSE, March 2015 LSEE is part of the LSE's European Institute, a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence Table of Contents 1. Introduction ……………….……………….……………….……………….……………….……………….……………….…..…..… 1 2. Turkish Foreign Policy Under AKP Rule …………………………………………..…… 6 Globalisation, Regionalisation and the Policy 3. 12 Autonomy of ‘Middle Powers’ ……………….……………….......................................... The Resilience and Continuity of Neo-liberalism in 4. 18 Turkey……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Rethinking Turkish Foreign Policy in the Light of 5. 25 Structural Problems of the Economy.......................................................... Explaining the limits, dilemmas and paradoxes of 6. 38 Turkish foreign policy……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 7. Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..………………….. 48 Acknowledgements Both authors acknowledge financial support by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) - International Postdoctoral Research Scholarship Programme. The authors want to thank to Vassilis Monastiriotis, and the series editors and reviewers, for their insightful comments on the manuscript. Part of this research was published (in Turkish) under the title “Political economy of Turkish foreign policy: an analysis of Turkey’s neoliberal transformation”. About the Authors Dr. Beyza Çağatay Tekin is assistant professor in the Department of International Relations at Galatasaray University, İstanbul. She holds a BA and an MA degree in Economics, and a PhD degree in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University, and a PhD degree in Political Science from Université Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne. She was a visiting fellow at the LSE Centre for International Studies (CIS), between September 2013 and July 2014. Her main research areas include the EU’s international identity, Turkey-EU relations, and foreign policy strategies of emerging powers. She is the author of Representations and Othering in Discourse: The Construction of Turkey in the EU Context (John Benjamins Publishing, 2010), a book on the self/other nexus in international relations and the discursive construction of a collective European identity. Dr. Rıfat Barış Tekin is associate professor in the Department of Economics, Marmara University in İstanbul, Turkey. He holds a BA (Boğaziçi), an MSc. (Warwick), and a PhD (Marmara) degree in Economics. He was a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Research on South Eastern Europe (LSEE) for the period between October 2013 and August 2014. Dr. Tekin specializes in international economics and economic development. 1. Introduction Today, it is widely agreed that a radical and lasting transformation has taken place in Turkish foreign policy in terms of policy-making, priorities, and discourses with the accession to power of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the 3 November 2002 general elections.1 This transformation triggered heated debates, both in academic circles and among foreign policy practitioners, about whether these stark changes represent a ‘shift of axis’ in Turkish foreign policy.2 These debates on Turkey’s foreign policy orientation relate directly to its international identity and image, having important implications for the country’s EU membership prospects, its relations with the United States and other major actors in world politics. Turkey seems to be suffering today from an apparent impasse in its foreign policy, particularly in its relations with its neighbouring states. After Egypt’s declaration of the Turkish ambassador in Cairo as ‘persona non grata’, Turkey no longer has ambassadorial 1 Turkish foreign policy witnessed a substantive change over the course of the past decade, however, the extent to which this should be considered as a totally ‘new’ foreign policy outlook and a structural break in Turkey’s foreign policy making is highly controversial. For differing views on continuity and change in Turkish foreign policy, see Altunışık and Martin (2011), Aras (2009a), Criss (2010), Müftüler-Baç (2011), Öniş (2011) and Sözen (2010), among others. 2 For alternative views on the ‘shift of axis’ argument, see Çandar (2010), Kardaş (2011), Keyman (2009), and Oğuzlu (2008). 1 representation today in three Middle Eastern states: Egypt, Syria and Israel. Relations with the al-Assad regime in Syria have consistently worsened after 2011, bringing the two neighbouring countries very close to military confrontation, following Turkey’s toughening of its ‘rules of engagement’ in reaction to the shooting down of a Turkish aircraft by Syrian armed forces in June 2012.3 Borders with Armenia are still closed, there are no direct flights between the two countries, and the long-awaited opening of bilateral relations which started following the Yerevan visit of the Turkish President in September 2008 has seemed to lead nowhere after more than six years. Bilateral relations with Israel - once, one of Turkey’s closest allies in the Middle East - are still far from being fully normalised even though the apology crisis related to the Gaza Flotilla raid has been partly settled down after a phone call by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in March 2013. Turkey’s joint mediation initiative with Brazil in May 2010 did not develop into a diplomatic breakthrough to bring an end to the Iranian nuclear programme crisis. Similarly, Turkey did not take part in the Geneva interim agreement signed between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany on 24 November 2013. The fact that Turkey, after unsuccessful attempts to seek a peaceful end to the Syrian crisis, failed, once again, to assume a leading role in finding an effective solution to a 3 ‘Başbakan Erdoğan: Türkiye'nin angajman kuralları değişmiştir’ (Prime Minister Erdoğan: Turkey’s rules of engagement have changed), Zaman, 26 June 2012. 2 crisis in its immediate vicinity, has severely undermined its claims of having the capacity to play a more constructive role to provide security, order and stability in the Middle East. Following these developments, ‘truth conditions’ for Turkey’s international identity claims - of representing a (normative) centre of gravity, or a central power capable of order-building in the Middle East - are considerably weakened. It is evident that Turkey’s recent active foreign policy engagements proved to have limited influence and in most cases caused friction between Turkey and its traditional Western allies. With mounting uncertainty in regional and world politics, Turkey is struggling to adapt itself to the changing international and regional political reality. It can be said that the limits, paradoxes and dilemmas of Turkish foreign policy have become even more acute today with the continuing stalemate in its EU accession negotiations, deteriorating relations with Iran, the Iraq’s Central Government, Egypt and Israel, and relations with Syria going from bad to worse. Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan’s statement ‘Allow us into the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and save us from this trouble (of trying to join the EU)’4 on 22 November 2013, in Moscow refuelled debates on Turkey’s ‘shift of axis’. With the highly critical remarks of AKP’s leading figures about the EU and the US, during the Taksim Gezi Park protests of June 2013 and following the political crisis which erupted on the 17th of December 2013, Turkey’s 4 ‘Turkish PM Erdoğan to Putin: Take us to Shanghai’, Hürriyet, 22 November 2013. 3 foreign policy orientation has become even more difficult to identify or predict. This study examines the transformation in Turkish foreign policy under AKP rule from a political economy perspective, in an attempt to better understand the limits, dilemmas, and paradoxes of Turkish foreign policy which have become more discernible following the mass protests and swift political transition in the Middle East, referred to as the ‘Arab Spring’. For this aim, we conduct a multi-level and multi-dimensional analysis, paying equal attention to global, regional, and domestic dynamics and structures influencing the Turkish economy, and conditioning Turkey’s foreign policy decisions. Recently, a series of academic work analysing Turkish foreign policy from a political economy viewpoint has been published.5 Following Kemal Kirişçi’s (2009) pioneering study characterising Turkey as a ‘trading state’, most of these works explain recent foreign policy transformation by emphasising the growing significance of economic interdependence for Turkey’s blossoming economy. While accepting that this conceptualisation of Turkey as a ‘trading state’ provides a useful analytical framework through which AKP era foreign policy can be examined, the present study tends to place the emphasis more on the deep-seated structural problems of the Turkish economy, the shrinking of the economic and development policy space in Turkey, and the limitations 5 See Kirişçi (2009, 2012), Kirişçi and Kaptanoğlu (2011), Kutlay (2011, 2012) and Öniş and Kutlay (2013) among others. 4 of the AKP’s too-narrow neo-liberal, conservative economic policy as