Understanding Oscillations in Turkish foreign policy: An Unusual Middle Power Activism (Türkiye)

Mustafa Kutlay from Department of International Politics, City University of London, London, UK.
Ziya Öniş, Department of International Relations, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey

ABSTRACT
The conventional literature on the role of middle powers emphasises the importance of soft power, niche diplomacy and coalition building. This article explores a case of unusual middle power activism with a focus on recent Turkish foreign policy behaviour. It demonstrates how the interaction of domestic politics and external dynamics produced an unusual degree of foreign policy activism, going well beyond conventional middle power behaviour, with the current government increasingly employing coercive diplomacy and militaristic methods.
We demonstrate that unusual middle power activism in a shifting international order has yielded “populist dividends” to the ruling elite in the short run but such policy has led to a ‘triple governance crisis’ in the economy, politics and foreign policy of Turkiye, with each element feeding into the others in a path-dependent fashion.

Introduction

Global power shifts constitute one of the big debates in contemporary politics. The bulk of the research aims to explain how the relative decline of US hegemony and the emergence of non-Western great powers are likely to reshape the nature of cooperation and conflict in the international system.
Although perspectives on the resilience and accommodative capacity of the rule-based multilateral framework diverge significantly, it appears the current international order is in the midst of significant transformation, putting enormous strain on states’ established alliance patterns and foreign policy preferences.
This article focuses on Turkey as a significant and increasingly coercive middle power in the context of a shifting international order. Middle powers strive hard to carve out an autonomous role in contemporary international politics (Cooper and Flemes 2013; Gilley and O’Neil 2014). Global transformations, Ikenberry points out, are likely to ‘give weaker and secondary states more options […] for manoeuvring and bargaining’ (Ikenberry 2016, 34).
However, power transitions at the international level can be dangerous for middle powers, calling for prudence and self-restraint in their foreign policy behaviour. Middle powers should act in a way that matches their material capabilities – as benign regional or global actors capitalising on their soft power capabilities.

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