Turkey’s foreign policy is passing through an important exam. Even though this exam seems to only be related with the region’s equilibriums and Turkey’s benefits at the first glance, at the same time, it is also closely related with the Turkish political system’s general tendency.
Foreign policy is holding an extremely important and identity-forming role for AK Party and AK Party Turkey’s story. In proportion to the settled republic tradition, it is representing a “breaking” and even a “disengagement”.
Plenty of idioms had been used in an attempt to identify AK Party’s foreign policy. Notions like “Playmaker”, “Passive power” and “Zero problems with the neighbors” had been brought forward personally by Prime Minister Davutoğlu. Though, compared to all this, Turkish foreign policy is a carrier of allegations. It wouldn’t be that wrong to name this allegation as “civilizationism”. Civilizationism is actually an old and essential mentality stone, a reverie for the conservative segment within the frame of relations with the West. It is the desire of “passively, but competitively challenging” other civilizations. Then, especially for the present time, civilizationism means to construct the political establishments, notions and model of the cultural and historical world and civilization, which the country belongs to, without disengaging from other civilizations, but rather interacting with them.
It means creating an active and alternative political existence model, which is unique itself and born from its historical data, communal values and traditions, alongside the Western modernity, sensibilities, domination diagram and, most importantly, the institutional values.
This model is giving reference to the “Islamic values”, “recollection that belongs to the Turkish history” and “state, politics tradition”, and within this frame, as much as sitting on “relation and self-reliance politics” directed on the inside, it is describing a “value and life basin”.
As a matter of fact, before everything else, Turkey had stated its civilizationism tendency with the important position it had given to the Middle East, Arabic and Muslim world in its foreign policy, and the role Turkey is trying to play in this world. This tendency, which has many references in the government program and in the speech given by Davutoğlu in congress as the Party Chairman candidate, will become more visible with the Arab spring. The “communal dynamism” and “political surge”, which extends from Egypt to Tunisia, and from Gulf countries to Syria, had provided a new depth to the civilizationism idea.
While this dynamism turns the dictatorship layout in the region upside down, it also reveals the communal energy that is kept under pressure, and starting to experience new contacts between the “community-politics-religion” in the region, in proportion to the fact that Islam is the descriptive factor of the communal energy.
This contact also carries the meaning of the construction of new disintegrations, establishments, layouts and regimes, and forms the splendid configuration field, which the civilizationism tendency in Turkey won’t be able to resist.Under these conditions, in a historical sense it was inevitable for Turkey to enter this political field with some type of “Sunni pluralism idea” within the frame of the Arab Spring, which surrounds the Sunni swelling.
In this sense, these two motives should be underlined. While Turkey was adopting an indirect attitude against both radical and monolithic settlements in the religion-politics encounter at this basin, it was also carrying the claim of the formation of this basin by supporting tendencies like Ikhwan via pluralist idea and by playing an equalizer role against Iran’s Shia corridor policy.
In this way, we had started to watch a more active, assertive and engaged Turkish foreign policy. The bonds of Ikhwan and Hamas had reached significance and profoundness within this frame.
At the first phase of the Arab Spring, in which the authoritarian regimes were overthrown and the mentality that Turkey supports came into power, Turkey had used its claim and reputation of being the model country and its foreign policy had increased in value. Erdoğan was talking about secularity in Egypt, West was regarding Turkey as a model country and movements, like Ikhwan, were casting their eyes on Turkey.
The second phase had consisted of the difficulties experienced by the political movements that came into power such as coups and turnabouts, just like Egypt. Turkey had taken sides in this phase, developed a strict attitude towards the ones who attempted coups and the ones who supported it, especially towards the West, declared some kind of identicalness with Ikhwan. The accusation of Sunnism and the claims of supporting terrorism, crossing the lines and having an authoritativeness air towards Turkey had all emerged at this phase.
The last phase, in certain, is the phase in which the moderate movements had been excluded and a Salafi uprising had occurred through ISIL in the chaos environment, while the Assad regime was resisting. At this phase, Turkey is being forced to be a part of the coalition towards ISIL. The matter is Turkey’s ability to actualize the struggle against ISIL via politics by preserving a specific heaviness, protecting life with democracy, and, actualizing pluralist structure cycles by looking after them within this frame. We are also at a critical point for the civilizationism claim from the point of Turkey’s foreign politics….
