Turkish Foreign Policy in the Post-Soviet Space

Part I of Igor Torbakov's The Turkish Factor in the Geopolitics of the Post-Soviet Space. Read part II.

As the US-led war on terror gains momentum and the Bush Administration contemplates military operations against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, regional analysts point to the growing geo-strategic importance of Turkey – America's staunch ally and NATO member since 1953. This is explained, naturally, by the country's unique geographic location. Turkey sits right in the middle of the Southern Caucasus/Northern Mesopotamia region – the area one observer recently termed as "probably the most geo-strategically important piece of real estate in the world."

In fact, Turkey plays a direct role in at least seven different, if overlapping, regions: Western Europe, the Balkans, the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, the Caucasus-Caspian complex, Central Asia and the Black Sea. As the specialists at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy point out, the United States, being a global power, values Turkey "primarily for geo-strategic reasons." Washington's concerns about Balkan instability, Caucasus conflicts, Russia's future direction, Iranian fundamentalism, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and protracted conflict in the Middle East all reinforce the interest of US policy-makers in Turkey.

The importance of Turkey's strategic position is further enhanced by its close proximity to the major oil and gas deposits – those in the Caspian Sea and in Northern Iraq. This makes Turkey a key player – as a prospective energy consumer and transit country – in what was dubbed the "Great Game" of pipeline politics in the region.

Here I will limit myself to discussing only one aspect of Turkey's foreign policy – namely, its relationship with the post-Soviet world. This world is still rife with threats to Turkey but it presents opportunities as well – economic relations with Russia, a hub for energy distribution, new regional cooperation schemes. This paper intends to explore the role the Turkish factor plays in the Black Sea, Caucasus and Caspian geopolitics and, specifically, the nature of the current stage of Turkish-Russian relations. I would argue that despite the unusually active foreign policy in post-Soviet Eurasia in at least the first half of the past decade, Turkey failed to attain the leadership role in the former Soviet periphery.

This failure, exacerbated by Ankara's serious economic and political problems, has influenced the shift in Moscow's perception of Turkey's role in the Caucasus and Central Asian context. Russia and other countries in the region now tend to perceive Turkey in much more neutral terms than they did in the early 1990s, when Ankara was seen as something of a strategic competitor. Thus, the picture portraying Moscow and Ankara as the uncompromising arch-rivals jockeying for position in the former Soviet Union's southern periphery is somewhat simplistic. The assumption that there are rigid, monolithic, and opposing blocs of states (like, say, US-Turkey-Azerbaijan-Georgia versus Russia-Iran-Armenia) also does not correspond with far more complex reality.

To be sure, the Great Game does take place in the post-Soviet space. However, as Gareth Winrow perceptively notes, it "consists of a number of various games being played simultaneously at different levels within states, between states and among firms and businesses." This game involves elements of both competition and cooperation.

The results of the November parliamentary elections in Turkey have introduced a significant amount of uncertainty into the picture. A moderate Muslim party that styles itself on the model of European Christian Democrats but with its roots in Turkey's political Islam has won the majority of seats in parliament. At the moment, the leaders of the winning political force claim their primary goal is Turkey's integration into the European Union. However, the lack of trust on the part of the Europeans and Turkey's own political and economic troubles may well influence a shift in policy orientation.

It is common practice to explain much of Turkey's foreign policy through an appeal to the country's geography and twentieth-century history. Geographically and culturally, a modern Turkish Republic built by Ataturk in the 1920s and 1930s is very much a frontier state. From the very outset Ankara has been preoccupied with the issues of national security and territorial integrity. This necessarily dictated a conservative or defensive approach to foreign policy which has tried to avoid extra-territorial interests or activities extending beyond the country's borders. This type of cautious policy was encapsulated in the Ataturk's famous dictum "Peace at home, peace in the world." Kemalism and the character of the Turkish state have also had an isolating effect on Ankara's relations with its neighbors – the Arab world, and arguably with Europe.

During the Second World War Turkey maintained a sometimes precarious neutrality – in part as an extension of Ataturk's cautious policy of limiting international contact during the years when the Republic was being created. It was Stalin's claims on northeastern Turkey and the Turkish Straits that pushed Ankara into the Western alliance. The Cold War, however, imposed a certain amount of order, regularity, and predictability. During the long Cold War era, Turkish foreign policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union was restricted to just a few basic (if difficult and crucial) questions: how to ward off the Soviet threat and how to maintain and strengthen ties with the United States and NATO.

The collapse of the Soviet empire, the end of the Cold War and the accelerated pace of European integration challenged the very foundations of Turkey's traditional foreign policy. The new geopolitical situation presented Ankara with both new opportunities and new constraints. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Turkey's geo-strategic value to the West was no longer as clear-cut as it had been. Moreover, the rejection of Turkey's bid to become a full member of the European Union was widely interpreted by both Turkey's political class and broader public as exclusion on explicitly "cultural" – i.e. religious and ethnic – grounds. These developments caused a deep sense of isolation and insecurity on the part of Turkish elites and – paradoxically – led to a more activist and assertive foreign policy in the Caucasus and Central Asia as well as in the Middle East and the Balkans.

Turkey's embrace of the "Turkic republics" of the former Soviet Union, argues Professor Ziya Onis of Koc University in Istanbul, embodied an important psychological dimension. A closer bond with people of common historical descent was a means of overcoming Turkey's traditional fear of isolation and insecurity – a feeling compounded by the negative attitude on the part of Europe and the Arab Middle East as well as several ongoing conflicts around the country's own borders. The sense of isolation, contends Onis, is crucial in understanding both the initial euphoria concerning the "Turkic republics" of the Caucasus and Central Asia and the subsequent development of close military and economic ties with Israel in the Middle Eastern context. Ankara also seemed to hope that an active leadership role in both regions would help revitalize Turkey's strategic value to the West and, thereby, enhance its own economic and security interests.

Some commentators also point out the significant changes in Turkey's domestic policy that contributed to Ankara's external activism – particularly in relation to the former Soviet republics. Traditionally, Turkey's foreign policy was shaped by the narrow group of political figures, state bureaucrats and military top brass. Yet the recent resurgence of Islam and nationalism in Turkish politics broadened the circle of those concerned with foreign policy and trying to influence it. A distinct foreign policy orientation emphasizing non-European or non-Western dimensions of Turkish identity became the hallmark of the Islamist and ultra-nationalist parties which gained over the last decade more weight in the highly fragmented party system.

To be sure, the basic tenets of Turkish foreign policy remain pro-Western, but Turkey's position at the edge of the Western world requires it to maintain a separate identity with a definable role in the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East. In fact, one commentator (Malcolm Cooper) suggests, there is a genuine and fluctuating polarization of policy that in many ways reflects the European/Asian dichotomy in Turkish identity. "In practice," he writes, "Turkey's courtship with the European Union and Turkish policy towards its Asian neighbors represent opposing views of the country's trans-regional alignment, and prioritization of one is often a product of lack of progress with the other."

This is part I of a series. Read part II.