Developing Peaceful Foreign Policy for Turkey: The Tale of Two Strategies – Murat Çemrek
The
naming preferences of either the Turkish “Cyprus Peace Operation” in 1974 or
the American “Operation Enduring Freedom” during
2001-2014 remind me of Özdemir Asaf’s famous lines, “All colors were getting
dirty fast / They have championed the white” [“Bütün renkler hızla
kirleniyordu/Birinciliği beyaza verdiler”]. Thus, as in George Orwell’s masterpiece 1984,
“War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is power,” the concepts of
peace or freedom have become buzzwords, manipulated as they cannot escape their
fate.
Similarly,
during our formal education from the beginning of primary school to the end of
high school, we learned by heart that Turkey, as a peninsula, is surrounded by
seas (the Black Sea, the Aegean, and the Mediterranean) on three sides by but also
by external enemies on all four sides, not even counting the domestic ones. So,
it is not surprising that realism is a hugely popular approach not only in the
broader country that rose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, devastated by
the Treaty of Sèvres after World War I but also among International Relations
students in Turkey. In understanding the self-help model, which means no friends
at all, Turkey has geographically applied the second half of the wise saying, “Keep
your friends close and enemies closer”.
Despite
being contained by enemies from all sides, Turkey’s unique geostrategic
location, also as a matter of self-pride, had provided the country a golden
opportunity to serve as a bridge between the West and the East, or at least between
the continents of Asia and Europe, embodied in the Bosphorus Bridge whose name
was converted into the 15th of July
Martyrs Bridge like many other public estates after the 2016 coup d’état
attempt.
Of
course, being a bridge, even metaphorically, was also a curse denoting
belonging nowhere, like Edward W. Said’s autobiography book titled Out of Place: A Memoir. This view
forced Turkey to be always on alert to preserve its relatively peaceful domestic
medium and to realize peace regionally and globally, crystallized in Atatürk’s
motto, “Peace at home, peace in the world”. Yet, one should keep in mind that
despite his motto, Atatürk also paid no attention to status quo politics
in the case of Hatay and showed how war could be an option if necessary.
Foreign
policy is mainly equated with peace in the world, especially in Turkey,
although war is always one of the options on the table, either flagrantly or
latently. Thus, foreign policy sounds loftier than its content since it is a
policy among many others but has a greater role even in dominating domestic
politics in general through shaping, e.g., defense or economic policies. This
structural privilege provides foreign policy having a grander shadow than its
size deepened via globalization since the decision-making and implementation
processes have been hit in the rising number of actors besides the
nation-states, their ministries of foreign affairs, and even the international
organizations.
A
devil’s advocate here may question if we must develop a peaceful foreign policy
in general and specifically for Turkey. S/he may refer to how Ministries of War
of the previous century only changed their names but not their functions. At
the same time, the military-industrial complex is an essential trait of
nation-states paying attention to arms sales as the number one issue, or war
drums have never ceased even in the heydays of peace. S/he may lengthen the
list as we had several low-profile violent conflicts and minor wars compared to
two world wars during the Cold War years.
However,
from a liberal perspective, all wars are civil wars at the last instance
because humans execute them against humans, so we must try our best to end
blood feuds among our brethren. That is why the essence of foreign policy is to
realize peace nationally, regionally, and globally by employing diplomacy even
under war conditions. Dialectically, wars teach us the value of peace, which is
worthy because of its fragile nature, like a Chinese vase. There are always
elephants before the China shop making us keep our eyes open for them. Although
Clausewitz depicted war as a duel on a larger scale, I prefer to define it as one
of the age-old maladies of humanity, like racism, in need of rehabilitation
through total eradication. Following Clausewitz’s definition of “war…not merely a political act but a
real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carrying
out of the same by other means,” one may replace peace with war to reach the
same ends. Briefly, peace is the ontological environment we can cultivate
humane traits starting with freedom rather than being challenged by the war
conditions harming such qualities and turning us into savages.
How could Turkey develop a peaceful foreign
policy? Especially
since peace is ontologically fragile and foreign policy is getting more complex
than ever, as explained above. My answer is to turn Turkey into a trading state
and Turkish people into a business nation. Turkey, since the 1980s, has
not been able to repeat the miraculous example of South Korea, barely producing
almost one percent of the global GDP, in parallel weight to its population
share in world demographics. Thus, the more
Turkey develops an economic perspective in decision-making and implementation
processes; the more rationality would form the basis for policy formulation in
every sector.
We may measure anything based on numbers; anything
measurable is controllable and open to checks if we made a mistake earlier. Historically,
any state must provide welfare, after security, to its citizens to keep its legitimacy
among them and its survival. Thus, equating the state with a charity
organization to distribute the welfare from taxes to the whole society in a
just way makes sense. However, the state is more than
that; any state is not only a profit-maximizer. This is a paradox as it must
perform all its functions in a capitalist medium, at least since Wallerstein’s
“the long 15th century”. In such a context, any state should look forward to increasing its profits as in
microeconomics rather than equating the macroeconomic formula to zero. A
trading state as a profit maximizer would pay attention to its long-term
benefits more rather than short-term gains, so it would try its best to disseminate
such benefits first to its neighbors and then to the whole world rather than
consuming its total energy on regional and global problems beyond its limited
power and abilities.
Turkey is a middle-sized regional power but consumes
most of its energy extravagantly to find solutions to either regional or global
problems. For example, Turkey’s open-door policy for people fleeing from the civil
war in Syria has cost a lot not only in economic terms but also socially and
politically. The then Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Ahmet Davutoğlu admitted
that -as a government- their red line was to accept 200K refugees at most.
Still, Turkey today hosts about 4M Syrian refugees, not even counting the Afghans
and others, which has dramatically burdened the Turkish economy and transformed
its demographics while harming social harmony with the rise of xenophobia in Turkey.
The more Turkey improves its economy, so it will be
able to enlarge the cake and minimize its problems. Turkey has already proven
that it could succeed in the first ten years of the Justice and Development
Party governments by applying the trading state model while attracting further
foreign investment and opening its doors to the world through its possible
membership to the European Union after its candidacy was accepted in 2004. This
is a tested and affirmed way in that Turkey would have more profound effects on
global politics rather than focusing on its heavy rhetoric that results in
nothing, as in the case of “the world is larger than five” (the permanent
members of the United Nations Security Council) rhetoric.
Turkey could also develop a peaceful foreign
policy paying further attention to diplomacy. It is the fifth country in the
number of embassies worldwide. It is time to deepen these networks in the number
of locations and their staff and transform them into liaison offices for more
business in line with my first proposal. Although Turkish shuttle diplomacy efforts as an honest broker between
Israel and Palestine earlier have not borne fruit, and even Turkish and Israeli
ambassadors were withdrawn for a long time due to several conflicts,
Turkish-Israeli relations are improving today after the reciprocal assignments
of ambassadors. Similarly, Turkey’s strained
relations with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are being eased thanks
to cozy efforts on both sides.
Last but not least, Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s
relations with both Russian and Ukrainian counterparts have opened the path for
the grain corridor agreement despite the ongoing war between these countries and
even signaled Turkey would have a role in a possible peace or at least a
ceasefire. Thus, much as Turkey pays attention to developing its diplomatic
potential, it would improve its soft power potential. The rationality mentioned
above would drive Turkey towards becoming a smart power after that. Moreover, it
would benefit Turkey to strengthen its relations with the West without damaging
its relations with China and to develop its ties with India, another potential
actor in the global economy.
Following
the end of the Cold War, Turkey rose as an oasis of peace amid a desert of
several ethnic conflicts and bloody wars in the Caucasus, Balkans, and the Middle
East. While preparing this piece, Turkey was on the eve of the 99th
anniversary of the Turkish Republic’s establishment, and President Erdoğan declared
the Republic’s next century as “the Turkish Century.” Just after the Cold War,
we heard such a phrase-mongering from President Turgut Özal, indicating that
“the 21st century would be the Turkish century,” and later President
Süleyman Demirel declared the emergence of the “Turkish world from the Adriatic
Sea to the Great Wall of China.” However, though almost a quarter of this
century is over, there seems even no clue yet to indicate any development
paralleling such glaring discourses. As a result, for Turkey to achieve a peaceful
foreign policy, it should become a trading state with more diplomacy.
Prof. Dr. Murat Çemrek is a faculty member at Necmettin Erbakan University, Department of International Relations. He completed his BA in Political Science and Public Administration at METU, and his MA and PhD in Bilkent University, in Political Science and Public Administration, and his post-doctoral research at Budapest College: Institute of Higher Specialization. Globalization, Turkish Foreign Policy and the Middle East are his fields of study.
To cite this work: Murat Çemrek, “Developing Peaceful Foreign Policy for Turkey: The Tale of Two Strategies” Panorama, Online, 16 December 2022, https://www.uikpanorama.com/blog/2022/12/16/mc/
This article has been prepared with the support provided to the International Relations Council and the Global Academy by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Association Turkey Representative within the scope of the project titled ‘Foreign Policy for the 21st Century; Peaceful, Equitable, and Dynamic Turkey’.
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