Thesis Proposal Assignment | Custom Essay Services

Hi, you can call me Rashi. Short about me, i am a master student, did my bachelor in law, and doing a master in Social Science now. Here is a short infos about my Master program to have a look what’s about “ it is an interdisciplinary two-year program taught in English. It focuses on current debates in social sciences such as modernization and democratization, Europeanization and migration. Looking at the cases of Germany, Turkey and other countries allows students to deepen their empirical knowledge of actual political processes in Europe and its neighboring regions. After graduation students are able to pursue international careers in government agencies, diplomacy, public policy, NGOs, administration, consulting, journalism, teaching or research.” The thesis topic isn’t yet confirmed, the deadline is still not fixed. I need something unique, and kinda high profile and for sure it has to comprehensive topic. Please nothing pretty complicated, something manageable within 50-60 pages … qualitative kinda of research, cuz i don’t wanna get stuck in quantitative thing such as statistics or or etc. Therefore, if you have any suggestions regarding a topic, a title, methodology please be my guest. Further more, on the methodology, something using Process tracing or constructivism?!. I will send you 2 files,thesis, you can have a look at then, they have a very good review and i would be happy if i get such a quality type of research as i already know my professor opinion on them how good they are. Following are the guidelines for the thesis proposal as requested by my university, It has to include the following elements, doesn’t have to be in the same order as mentioned down: -introduction to the topic, -problem statement, -detailed methodology on approaches / theories, -research questions, -literature review of the topic, -a structure/outline -finally a bibliography list of all the references has been cited in in the doc and literature review etc. On the format, i have a attached a file “guidelines on how to write a paper” published by my university that has all the infos regard everything almost. Shortly, 4-5 pages, 1,5 spacing, APA style, 3cm margin. Font (Time, or Arial), Page number right- bottom. I would be grateful to have everything in Doc/word file so that i can add the cover page with name and stuff. finally, i would be happy to get some explanations on the whole topic, methodology part especially, in case if i got asked about anything during my presentation. Lastly, i would like to thank you for taking all of those wishes into consideration and doing it for sure

1. Introduction
In 2009 Turkey’s foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu declared: “Turkey is no longer a
country that reacts to crises, but one that senses crises before they materialize, that
can intervene in them effectively, and that creates order around itself.”1 These are
words that fit the self-confidence of Turkey about its position in the world, less than a
century after it arose from the collapsed remnants of the Ottoman Empire.
On 24 November 2015 Turkey shot down a Russian military plane at the Syrian border,
which was presumably violating Turkish airspace. As Turkey is part of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), such an action does not stand on itself. Article 5
of the alliance’s North Atlantic Treaty considers an attack against any of the members
an attack against all, and requires therefore other member states to come to the aid of
the assaulted member.2 Although Turkey did not call upon this article, the Russian-
Turkish incident contained all the ingredients to further deteriorate the relations
between Russia and NATO. Officials quickly tried to prevent escalation. Foreign Minister
Jean Asselborn of Luxembourg said, “NATO cannot allow itself to be pulled into a
military escalation with Russia as a result of the recent tensions between Russia and
Turkey”3, while NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg stated “I think I’ve
expressed very clearly that we are calling for calm and de-escalation.”4
Turkey’s risky assertiveness is interesting, as is presents us the consequence of the
confidence we encountered in the quotation from Davutoğlu: an internationally
assertive Turkey might fulfil a very different role in NATO than it did in the days of the
Cold War. This is a relevant topic, as not only Turkey has been changing, but NATO
entered a new era as well. In this thesis we will examine how the two will get along
together.
Turkey has been part of NATO since 1952, when the alliance had been in existence for
only a few years. Even though Turkey has been trying to become part of the European
1 Cyprus Press and Information Office ‘Turkish Mass Media Bulletin 1-4/05/2009; Davutoglu explains the foreign policy to be followed after taking
over from Babacan’. For the sake of readability web links will not be displayed in the footnotes, but can all be found in the bibliography s
section.
2 NATO, ‘The North Atlantic Treaty’, 1949.
3 ‘Putin vs. Erdogan: NATO Concerned over Possible Russia-Turkey Hostilities’, Der Spiegel, 19 February 2016.
4 Ibidem.
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Union (EU) for almost as long, it has in a military sense been part of the Western bloc
for over sixty years. During the Cold War the conflict between the Western world and
the communist world strongly shaped Turkey’s security policies and put the country
geopolitically in the west.
After the end of the Cold War and the implosion of the Soviet Union, many questioned
what would remain of NATO.5 Although the alliance expanded into Central and Eastern
Europe and also remained military active, for instance in Kosovo (1999) and
Afghanistan (2001-2014), NATO struggled to find and defend a raison d’être.6 In recent
years however, geopolitics in a changed, multipolar world, from the turmoil in the
Middle East to the increasing assertiveness of Putin’s Russia, has pressured NATO to
reinvent itself. With (military) security back on the agenda in its European member
states, NATO is trying to form an answer to the question how it can and should
coherently act in this new reality.
In this re-energised NATO the role of Turkey is of great importance, as it holds a
special strategic position as the alliance’s easternmost nation. Because of this
geographical characteristic, Turkey cannot but being involved in many of the recent
pressing security issues. It is neighbouring war struck Syria and is very close to the
fighting efforts against Daesh (also known as ISIL or ISIS)7. Moreover, as a host and
transit for millions of refugees, Turkey has a part to play in this crisis as well, which is
having many political and security implications across NATO countries. At the Russian
stage too, particularly tense since the Russian annexation of Crimea in March 2014,
Turkey has been involved, especially after the plane shooting incident which we
mentioned earlier.
With Turkey on the foreground in NATO matters, it is relevant to be able to clearly
understand the country’s NATO membership. By analysing the development of the
relation between the two actors I will seek to fill a gap in the literature, as surprisingly
little has been written about Turkey and NATO since the end of the Cold War. Although
the academic literature has regularly examined Turkey’s (security) relations with the
5 Celeste A. Wallander, ‘Institutional Assets and Adaptability: NATO After the Cold War’, International Organization, Vol. 54, No. 4 (2000), 705–
35; Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘The Emerging Structure of International Politics’, International Security, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1993), 44–79.
6 Andrew T. Wolff, ‘The Structural and Political Crisis of NATO Transformation’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4 (2009), 476–92.
7 While the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is known under several names, I will refer to it as Daesh, which is the name used in the Arab
world, by the Turkish government as well as NATO member states such as France and the UK.
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EU or the US, or its alignment to the idea of European defence, the analysis of its
position in NATO has been rather neglected. Of the academic work that we do find on
the topic, a large part of the studies from the 2000s examined the position of Turkey in
NATO in the context of EU-NATO relations. The gradual establishment of the EU as
international actor raised questions on what would happen to NATO as umbrella for
European defence. Scholars such as Pınar Bilgin, Şeyda Hanbay, Graeme Herd, Ishan
Kızıltan and Antonio Missiroli contemplated on where Turkey would fit in with these
developments.8
More recently, scholars have started to focus on the expanding range of Turkey’s
foreign policy and its consequences for Turkey’s relationship with NATO. Gülnur Aybet
argued that this relationship has especially transformed from 2007 onwards, as NATO
became more technocratic and Turkey more pro-active. She expected that both actors
would be able to adjust to a new relationship in which Turkey could take up a more
driving role.9 According to Serhat Güvenç and S. Özel’s assessment from 2012,
Turkey has increasingly been including NATO in its security calculations, while it at the
same time consolidated its position and agenda-setting capabilities within the alliance.
Although the authors noted that the transformation process in the Turkey-NATO
relationship was marked by some notably independent behaviour by Turkey during
2007-2010 they conclude that “after two decades of deepening ambivalence towards
the Atlantic Alliance and its strategic orientation, Turkey made [especially from 2010
onwards] its final choice for the relevant future to stay in the Western security
community.”10 Tarık Oğuzlu published several articles on the topic, which rather
contradict that conclusion. He observed that ‘interest’ has replaced ‘identity’ as source
of Turkey’s commitment to the alliance. Therefore, Turkey’s cooperation with NATO will
8 Pınar Bilgin, ‘The “Peculiarity” of Turkey’s Position on EU-NATO Military/Security Cooperation: A Rejoinder to Missiroli’, Security Dialogue, Vol.
34, No. 3 (2003), 345–49; Antonio Missiroli, ‘EU–NATO Cooperation in Crisis Management: No Turkish Delight for ESDP’, Security Dialogue, Vol.
33, No. 1 (2002), 9–26; Graeme P. Herd, ‘EU–Turkey Clashing Political and Strategic Cultures as Stumbling Blocks on the Road to Accession?’, in
Perceptions and Misperceptions in the EU and Turkey – Stumbling Blocks on the Road to Accession., ed. by Peter Volten, Centre for European
Security Studies (CESS) Harmonie Paper 23 (Groningen, 2009), pp. 47–68; Ishan Kızıltan, ‘Improving the NATO-EU Partnership: A Turkish Perspective’,
Turkish Policy Quarterly, 2008, 33–46; Şeyda Hanbay, ‘Involvement of Non-Eu European Nato Members in CSDP: The Turkish Case’,
Baltic Journal of Law & Politics, 2010, 1–26.
9 Gülnur Aybet, ‘The Evolution of NATO’s Three Phases and Turkey’s Transatlantic Relationship’, Perceptions, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2012), 19–36 (pp.
34–35).
10 Serhat Güvenç and S. Özel, ‘NATO and Turkey in the Post-Cold War World: Between Abandonment and Entrapment.’, Southeast European
and Black Sea Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4 (2012), 533–53 (p. 551).
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increasingly depend on the extent to which the alliance is still relevant to Turkey’s
capabilities to reach its own foreign policy goals.11
Although Oğuzlu underlined that the ruling the Justice and Development Party (Adalet
ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) has repeatedly stressed that Turkey’s membership to NATO
(and its EU accession process) have no alternatives,12 his findings do suggest that
differing perceptions of interests between Turkey and NATO could jeopardise relations,
because of the changed nature of Turkey’s commitment to NATO. It seems therefore
worthwhile to examine how in recent years Turkey’s focus on its own direct foreign
policy interests have held up with its membership in NATO.
Although I follow Oğuzlu’s basic assessment of change in Turkey’s approach to NATO, I
would argue that his labelling of an ‘interest’ and an ‘identity’ approach is inaccurate as
it suggests that the latter would not be an attempt to follow Turkey’s interests. Jutta
Weldes wrote on interest formulation that “determining what the particular situation
faced by a state is, what if any threat a state faces, and what the ‘correct’ national
interest with respect to that situation or threat is, always requires interpretation.”13
This means that both the approaches Oğuzlu described tried to follow Turkey’s national
interest, albeit in a different interpretation of what the national interest is.14
The theoretical framework which I will use in this thesis will be suitable to overcome
this structural problem on national interests. I will set about my analysis of the change
in Turkey’s relationship with NATO with the help of theories on strategic culture. This
constructivist approach to security will help us to examine the topic by taking into
account the structures underlying Turkey’s changing ideas on security. Using strategic
culture as a framework will allow us to observe how Turkey’s possibilities for policy
making are conditioned on the basis of longer term path dependency. It will enable us
to describe the way Turkey perceives itself in terms of security, which, in turn, can
explain its behaviour as a NATO member.
11 Tarık Oğuzlu, ‘Turkey’s Eroding Commitment to NATO: From Identity to Interests’, Washington Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3 (2012), 153–64;
Tarık Oğuzlu, ‘NATO ve Türkiye: Dönüşen İttifakın Sorgulayan Üyesi’, Uluslararası İlişkiler, Vol. 9, No. 34 (2012), 99–124; Tarık Oğuzlu, ‘Making
Sense of Turkey’s Rising Power Status: What Does Turkey’s Approach Within NATO Tell Us?’, Turkish Studies, Vol. 14, No 4 (2013), 774–96.
12 Oğuzlu, ‘Making Sense of Turkey’s Rising Power Status’, p. 791.
13 Jutta Weldes, ‘Constructing National Interests’, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1997), 193–237 (p. 279).
14 Weldes, ‘Constructing National Interests’, p. 276. Weldes called this “the national interest as social construction”. What Oğuzlu described as
an interest based approach to NATO can be seen as a formulation of the national interest which focuses on ways to directly strengthen Turkey’s
strategic position as a regional power. See: paragraph 3.2.
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With the gained insights on Turkey’s strategic culture we will look at several recent
cases involving NATO and Turkey to study how Turkey’s sometimes wayward
behaviour and its formal commitment to the alliance create contradictions. The
research question of this thesis will be: how have changes in Turkey’s general strategic
culture manifested themselves in regards to Turkey’s attitudes towards its NATO
membership during 2009-2016? The chosen timeframe reflects the years Davutoğlu
was foreign minister (2009-2014) and prime minister (2014-2016), including the
launch of his ‘zero problems with neighbours’ policy in 2010. Turkey’s assertiveness in
international politics, which Davutoğlu represents, grew markedly during this period,
while the rate of change in Turkey’s strategic culture accelerated. Apart from the
academic literature on these topics, I will rely on news sources and documents and
statements by Turkish officials to spot discrepancies between the line NATO is following
and the Turkey’s behaviour, driven by its strategic culture.
The thesis will be structured in the following way: paragraph 2 will be dedicated to the
concept of strategic culture, its uses, its weaknesses and some ongoing debates. In
paragraph 3 we will examine what strategic culture means in the case of Turkey by
establishing and tracing Turkey’s ‘national unity narrative’ and its ‘regional power
narrative’. Once we understand the development of Turkey’s strategic culture, we will
in paragraph 4 turn to its NATO membership. Turkey’s accession to the alliance and its
position during and after the Cold War will all be contextualised within its strategic
culture. An important observation will be that while Turkey’s changing strategic culture
prompted instances of assertive behaviour on the international stage, as seen in
paragraph 3, formally its commitment to NATO still relies considerably on its older
conceptions of security. This will come apparent by studying Turkey’s reaction to
NATO’s new Strategic Concept in 2010 and to the 60th anniversary of its NATO
membership in 2012. Paragraph 5 will explore three cases in order to show how
Turkey’s alignment to NATO is under pressure from the tendencies of its increasingly
independent foreign policy. We will look subsequently at the cases of the NATO
intervention in Libya in 2011, Turkey’s reaction to the Ukrainian crisis in 2014 and
NATO’s and Turkey’s attitudes towards the Syrian Kurdish rebels in the Syrian Civil
War. Finally, we will discuss the consequences of our findings for Turkey’s NATO
membership in the concluding paragraph.
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2. On Strategic Culture
2.1 What is strategic culture?
In the last decades of the Cold War the dominant (neo)realist views on international
relations were increasingly challenged by theorists who were focusing on matters such
as identity, culture, language etc. In the 1990s this direction in International Relations
became well known as constructivism, a name invented by Nicholas Onuf in 1989.15
However, the rise of strategic culture as a school of thought in security studies started
slightly earlier, in the late 1970s, before constructivism had gathered broad following
through scholars such as Alexander Wendt and Peter Katzenstein.16 Like
constructivists, the strategic culture theorists challenged realism’s characterisation of
actors as ‘black boxes’, identical entities whose behaviour is determined by the
constraints of the system they are manoeuvring in.
According to strategic culture theorists the behaviour of a security actor is led by its
view of security. Notice here that strategic culture theorists, like constructivists, regard
reality as a social construction, in which the behaviour of an actor is formed by its
particular view of reality. This reality builds on the early or formative experiences of a
state, and is to some degree influenced by the philosophical, political, cultural and
cognitive characteristics of the state and its elites.17 The particular construction of an
actor’s view on security then, its strategic culture, encompasses different questions
such as “when is it appropriate to use force?” or “what is the preferred context to solve
security issues: alone or multilateral?”. The actor’s point of view in these issues helps
to explain its perception of threats, its policies etc. Of course, because different actors
have different strategic cultures their interaction can by no means be calculated in a
(neo-)realist way, with rationally acting, undifferentiated units.
The definition of strategic culture that I shall follow in this thesis is the one formulated
by Kerry Longhurst. According to Longhurst strategic culture is “a distinctive body of
beliefs, attitudes and practices regarding the use of force, which are held by a
collective and arise gradually over time, through a unique protracted historical process.
15 Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making (Columbia, 1989).
16 Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen, ‘The Test of Strategic Culture: Germany, Pacifism and Pre-Emptive Strikes’, SAGE Publications, Vol. 36, No. 3 (2005),
339–59 (p. 341).
17 Alastair Iain Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, International Security, Vol. 19, No. 4 (1995), 32–64 (p. 34).
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A strategic culture is persistent over time, tending to outlast the era of its original
conception. It is not a permanent or static feature. Rather, a strategic culture is
shaped by formative experiences and can alter, either fundamentally or piecemeal, at
critical junctures in that collective’s experiences.”18 I will discuss some of the aspects
of her definition below, and will also elaborate on the history of strategic culture and
its advantages and disadvantages.
The first to come up with the term strategic culture was Jack Snyder, in his 1977 study
on the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapon strategy. As American realists failed to explain
the behaviour of the Soviets with generalised game theory, Snyder’s alternative
approach showed that there was a Soviet strategy which was influenced by “a number
of factors unique to the Soviet historical experience”19. He stressed that the Soviet
leaders should not be looked upon as “generic strategists who happen to be playing for
the Red team, but as politicians and bureaucrats who have developed and been
socialized into a strategic culture that is in many ways unique.”20 This exactly shows
how a strategic culture approach can be valuable, and how over the last decades
scientists such as Colin Gray and David Jones could made use of it.
Another example of the successful use of strategic culture is Sophia Becker’s study on
German security politics after its reunification in 1990. Whereas neorealists such as
John Mearsheimer suggested that a unified Germany would bring back the old balance
of power politics to Europe21, Germany’s strategic culture, now firmly cemented in antimilitarism,
multilateralism and an aversion to leadership, defied these expectations.
Again, strategic culture was able to explain something which was a puzzling outcome
for neorealist theory.22
Unfortunately, the concept of strategic culture has its weaknesses as well. Colin Gray
pointed out that although strategic culture is strong at spotting and explaining
tendencies after an event, it fails to predict behaviour (as opposite to game theory or
18 Kerry Longhurst, Germany and the Use of Force (Manchester, 2004), p. 200.
19 Jack L. Snyder, ‘The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Operations’, 1977, 1–41 (pp. 8–9).
20 Snyder, p. 4.
21 John T. Mearsheimer, ‘Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War’, International Security, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1990), 5–56.
22 Sophia Becker, ‘Germany and War: Understanding Strategic Culture under the Merkel Government’, Paris Papers, No. 9 (2013), 1–80. See also:
John S. Duffield, World Power Forsaken: Political Culture, International Institutions, and German Security Policy after Unification (Redwood
City, 1998).
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rational choice theory). Moreover, there is a risk to use an actor’s strategic culture not
as a framework for behaviour, but to see it as too deterministic, explaining anything
and everything.23
Scholars have tried to counter this last point by stating that strategic culture is not
mechanically deterministic, but that it rather creates tendencies to a particular
strategic behaviour. Insights in an actor’s strategic culture can thus rule out certain
types of behaviour as very unlikely and others as possible and this way “map a
corridor of ‘normal’ and ‘probable’ behaviour of states” which can be integrated into
more comprehensive analyses of strategic choice.24 Johnston observed that in that
case the literature insufficiently explains through what logic the status or probability of
these tendencies is decided.25
He is right about this: when assigning different levels of probability to behaviours for
an actor, it is up to researchers to categorise these behaviours on the basis of criteria
which are not standardised and which still fully depend on the creativity of the scholar.
This is not to say that this stands in the way of good research; however, the lack of
method makes it hard to compare studies and fully estimate the objective value of
claims about strategic culture. For the time being the debates on many aspects of
strategic culture continue.
2.2 The relation between strategic culture and behaviour
One of the prominent strategic culture debates is about the relation between culture
and behaviour. For first generation scholars such as Colin Gray the two are
inseparable, as the culture functions as context for the behaviour. This was later
challenged by Alistair Johnston, who sought to formulate a falsifiable theory of
strategic culture. Johnston noted that if behaviour is an expression of the culture,
there is no longer anything valuable to say about strategic culture: everything can be
explained by and brought back to culture, which in itself does not explain anything.
One can, for example, explain away a defensive posture of a militarily weak European
23 Longhurst, p. 9; Alan Bloomfield, ‘Time to Move On: Reconceptualizing the Strategic Culture Debate’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 33,
No. 3 (2012), 437–61 (p. 441).
24 Christoph O. Meyer, ‘Convergence Towards a European Strategic Culture? A Constructivist Framework for Explaining Changing Norms’, European
Journal of International Relations, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2005), 523–49 (p. 8).
25 Johnston, p. 38.
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Union and a more offensive, strong United States, by producing a near-mystical
connection under the label of strategic culture. According to Johnston, if strategic
culture becomes an all-encompassing concept, it cannot be used as an independent
variable on strategic behaviour and cannot lead to meaningful research.26
Although Johnston was correct when he pointed out that falsification is being hindered
by the indivisibility of culture and behaviour, I see this as an inevitability. Gray
convincingly argued that behaviour cannot be seen free from the influences under
which it comes into existence.
“Everything a security community does, if not a manifestation of strategic culture, is at
least an example of behaviour effected by culturally shaped, or encultured, people,
organisations, procedures and weapons. […] Although each dimension of strategy can
be discussed in isolation, all dimensions function synergistically to constitute the
whole. […] Even when a security community is performing missions that traditionally it
has not much favoured, if not actually alien, it must behave in a culturally shaped
manner.”27
The debate between Gray and Johnston has never been solved and was more recently
picked up again by Alan Bloomfield. Bloomfield attacked the work of Carnes Lord, who
is regarded, like Gray, as a strategic culture scholar of the first generation. Bloomfield
noted that Lord in his work, confusingly, first found the United States’ strategic culture
an outcome of “all things strategic”, while later describing it is as a cause of strategic
policy and behaviour. Bloomfield thus concluded that Lord failed “to untangle the lines
of causation” between his variables. This way strategic culture had become a
tautology, being both cause and effect.28
I would argue, however, that the relation between strategic culture and many of the
things strategic is one of mutual influence. It is true that strategic culture is formed by
strategic factors, but this in turn causes behaviour by actors that shapes the strategic
variables by which it was first formed. The feedback loop this creates is sometimes
neglected by scholars, which overly or solely focus on strategic culture as an outcome.
26 Toje Asle, ‘Strategic Culture as an Analytical Tool History, Capabilities, Geopolitics and Values: The EU Example’, No. 14 (2009), 3–23 (p. 7).
27 Collin S. Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford, 1999), pp. 132–35.
28 Bloomfield, pp. 439–41.
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In this thesis I will try to consider both the elements that formed a strategic culture
and their consequential behaviour, and especially the dialogue between the culture and
the behaviour.
The issue Bloomfield raised, points basically at the same problem Gray and Johnston
argued about. The inability to falsify strategic culture and to describe how it relates to
strategic actors is an important unresolved issue, that will keep dividing strategic
culture scholars. However, there are more questions to ask when dealing with strategic
culture and trying to characterise it.
2.3 Measuring strategic culture
Once a strategic culture is defined, it is important to keep in mind that it is not static.
Strategic cultures change, causing security actors to opt for different solutions in
different points in time. The difficulty is how to determine the process that drives
change in strategic culture. Scholars have not yet decided on a standard procedure to
map this and have come up with different methods.
Longhurst, for example, identifies two ways in which strategic culture can change:
fine-tuning and fundamental change. The first form manifests itself as behaviour of a
security actor reacting to external or internal events which challenge the security
culture as it is established at that moment. Challenges press the actor to fine-tune
security policies in such a way that its ‘core values’ suit the new situation.
Fundamental change, on the other hand, is a rarely occurring, radical change in
security culture which can take place when a severe or traumatic event obsoletes the
existing strategic culture. The subsequent quick acceptance of new core beliefs, can in
a short period of time lead to the establishment of fundamentally new practices and
policies.29
Alternatively, the workings of strategic culture can be approached in terms of long and
short-term changes. This is not the same as Longhurst’s method, for she was rather
looking at the pervasiveness of changes in strategic culture (gradual change by slight
fine-tuning or thorough change through milestone events). Thus, for example, the
process of change in strategic culture can be described with a focus on slow
29 Longhurst, p. 18.
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movements such as demographic changes or long term economic tendencies.30 Such
approaches remind of Fernand Braudel’s view of history as a series of stacked time
layers. “Event history” happens only within the structures of the long-term frame of
the longue dureé.31 Although there are different factors to highlight in these time
structure views on strategic culture, they all have in common that they stress the stern
resistance of strategic culture against change. In doing so they play down the power of
agency in strategic culture, as they suggest actors have a limited ability to try to
establish changes in strategic culture as they will always to some extent have to rely
on the (external) movements of the larger structures.
The issue of agency comes with its own problems. Apart from the question how much
strategic culture is externally driven (by external processes or actions of other actors),
it is not clear who is responsible for the formation of a strategic culture. Although it
seems generally accepted that strategic culture is “an aggregate level of the most
influential voices in terms of attitudes and behaviours”32, and thus consists of some
interplay between elites, its precise realisation is an unclear process. Sometimes
scholars also try to include other factors such as the role of the media and mass
movements into the mixture.33
Bloomfield advocates the use of “strategic cognitive schemas”, or subcultures, for the
analysis for strategic culture. According to him an emphasis on the subcultures, which
coexist and compete for influence, would clarify many current problems about the
interpretation of strategic cultures. Changes in what strategic subculture is dominant
could explain changes in strategic policies of state actors.34 This is an important aspect
to take into consideration – also in the Turkish case, which has a strong ideological
divide between the ruling Islamist AKP and the strongly secular Kemalists.
However, I would contest the idea suggested by Bloomberg that a state’s security
policy is fully dictated by the subculture that is dominating the strategic culture. The
30 For example: Jeannie L. Johnson, ‘Strategic Culture: Refining the Theoretical Construct’, Comparative Strategic Cultures Curriculum, 2006, p.
25; Rodney W. Jones, ‘India’s Strategic Culture’, Comparative Strategic Cultures Curriculum, 2006, p. 6; Thomas Gomart, ‘Russia Alone Forever?
The Kremlin’s Strategic Solitude’, Politique Étrangère, 2008, 23–33.
31 Fernand Braudel, ‘Histoire et Sciences Sociales: La Longue Durée’, Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, Vol. 13, No 4 (1958), 725–53.
32 Asle, p. 4.
33 Meyer, pp. 22–23, 27.
34 Bloomfield, pp. 451–56.
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way the dominant subculture manifests itself and which of its characteristics are
highlighted should be related to the subcultures it is competing with. It is not as simple
as saying a state is from that period to that period ‘possessed’ by one subculture, while
the next is “waiting in the wings”35, ready to take over. Rather, a dominant subculture
might be reacting against of being influenced by other subcultures. It might anticipate
on its competitors by ‘lending’ certain characteristics, or it might be highlighting
attributes especially contrasting with the preferences of its competitors. This in turn
might move the state’s strategic culture in one or another direction. Therefore the
interplay between the subcultures and the way they ultimately reflect on the strategic
culture should not be neglected.
The analysis of subcultures is a complicated matter. Although one subculture can be
dominant, it is hard to nail down what groups or what actors are part of this subculture
and are driving it, beyond the obvious leading party officials. In the case of the AKP
single-party government, for example, we could confidently include the party’s local
officials and members and the government aligned press as part of the subculture. But
as we draw the circle broader, including NGOs with ties to the government or the civil
servant apparatus, it becomes increasingly precarious to understand the mechanics of
the AKP government as dominant subculture. These actors, which stand further from
the subcultures elite, influence the workings of the subculture through indirect
processes. The composition of the AKP subculture forms a worthy topic for analysis in
itself, from which I unfortunately will have to refrain. In this thesis I will therefore have
to refer to the AKP elite without further investigation of subculture mechanics.
Likewise, for the sake of attainability, I will in paragraph 3 on Turkey’s strategic culture
not get into a detailed account of all the Turkish governments and their specific
subcultures and counter-cultures. Instead, a general outline of the developments in
Turkey’s strategic culture will have to do. The later paragraphs will focus on the AKP
subculture, for I regard it as vastly influential in Turkey’s contemporary strategic
culture. Additionally there will be references to the Kemalist subculture, which forms
an important opposition force.
35 Bloomfield, p. 452.
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The way I will be handling the characteristics which a strategic culture consists of, is by
referring to ‘narratives’. Margaret Somers explained that narratives can present
different versions of the past, the present or the future of a social group to depict a
coherent version of what a group is. These narratives have a strong forming influence
on social relations between individuals and in constructing social organisations.
Eventually they can shape social life itself.36
In the next chapter I will present two narratives which give two very opposite
interpretations of security. Different subcultures can adopt these narratives, or parts of
them and to varying degrees. Although not usual in strategic culture analysis, I regard
it necessary to add this extra layer on top of the previously described contest of
subcultures: different subcultures can by times borrow from the same narratives,
sharing certain believes with some subcultures, while differing on other points.
Moreover, we can point out in this way that subcultures, like global strategic culture,
are not static either: the importance of certain narratives within subcultures can grow
and diminish over time.
Figure 1. depicts how the strategic culture mechanism works. Different subcultures
hold different ideas on security. The beliefs of a subgroup is a particular composition of
narratives, which have different degrees of influence. The country’s strategic culture is
shaped by the subgroups, one of which might be dominant. The strategic culture, then,
provides a certain range of possible behaviours which we can expect from a country.
36 Margaret R. Somers, ‘The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach’, Theory and Society, Vol. 23, No. 5 (1994),
605–49.
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Figure 1. How strategic culture, subcultures and narratives relate (figure by author)
3. Turkey and Strategic Culture
Now we have studied the theory of strategic culture, let us look at the case of Turkey.
As we examined in the previous paragraph, strategic culture is an amalgam of the
preferences of different groups that possess power in Turkey, where any dominant
group will be especially conclusive. While the groups can refer to different narratives,
constructions of the world which contain a set of preferences, they might never fully
align with the ‘ideal type’ version of the narrative. In our discussion of Turkey I will
bring forward two different narratives.
We will first see how Atatürk’s idea of “peace at home and peace in the world”
connected the ideas of national state security at the domestic front with Turkey’s
foreign policy behaviour through the national unity narrative. We will then see how the
strategic culture under this national unity narrative, which was held up by the
Kemalists (those inspired by Kemal Atatürk), has increasingly been challenged by a
narrative that presents Turkey as an assertive regional power. Especially under the
rule of the AKP, which came into power in 2002, this narrative gained strength. Once
we understand this shift in strategic culture we can see how this reflected on Turkey’s
role in NATO.
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3.1 National unity narrative
The Ottoman defeat in the First World War, the collapse of the empire and the
subsequent establishment of the Kemalist Turkish state led to a sudden change of
course for Turkey’s strategic culture. It was a rare instance of fundamental change, as
we saw described by Longhurst, in which Turkey’s core values were reshaped. The new
republic opted for a strong state and a weak civil society37, and composed a strategic
culture which was obsessed with the territorial integrity of the state and which followed
what I will call the national unity narrative.
An important determinant for this was the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), in which Western
powers partitioned the lands of the Ottoman Empire. The treaty caused a deep
suspicion towards the intentions of foreign powers about Turkey up to the point that it
has been described by scholars as the Sèvres Syndrome. Sèvres fuelled a narrative
among the Turkish elites that foreign powers were trying to undermine Turkey and
were tirelessly attempting to further interfere with its domestic politics through
aggregating internal (ethnical) conflicts. In fact, causes of Turkey’s internal problems
were often sought and found in external factors, such as plotting foreign countries.38
Therefore Sèvres is of great importance to understand Turkey’s strategic culture. The
focus on national unity and territorial integrity kept a firm control on any possible
domestic disturbances. In the early years of the republic several Kurdish rebellions
were harshly suppressed. In addition, the Kemalists continuously tried to curb what
they perceived as political extremism from both the communist and socialist Left and
the religious Right. The sceptic attitude towards Western powers stemming from
Sèvres is something that we will encounter later in the context of Turkey’s NATO
membership as well. Thus Sèvres links the Kemalist strong state with Turkey’s foreign
policy behaviour and general strategic culture.39
Another characteristic of the national unity narrative which was dominating Turkey’s
strategic culture in this phase was a reluctance to get involved in the conflicts of
others. We can trace a long period in which Turkey tried to stay unaligned, as was the
37 Metin Heper, The State Tradition in Turkey (Beverley, 1985), p. 16.
38 Dorothée Schmid, ‘Turkey: The Sèvres Syndrome, or the Endless War’, Franco-Turkish Paper, No. 13 (2015), pp. 10–11.
39 Philip Robins, Suits and Uniforms: Turkish Foreign Policy since the Cold War (Seattle, 2003), p. 109.
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case in the Second World War, and during which it largely lacked foreign policy
initiatives. There are some notable exceptions to this, such as the Baghdad Pact of
1955 and the invasion of Cyprus in 1974.40 And of course Turkey was as a member of
NATO involved in the Cold War in general. We will see, however, that it had several
reasons to join the Western camp. Meanwhile, other regions, especially the Middle
East, were almost neglected for decades. After being in a semi-constant state of war
from the first years of the 20th century until the Liberation War in 1923, Turkey’s
strategic culture rarely produced appetite for grand foreign endeavours.
3.2 Regional power narrative
Against the national state security narrative we can formulate a strategic culture based
on what I will call the regional power narrative. The narrative presents Turkey as a
potential regional powerhouse, which ought to play a more assertive role in
international politics, especially in its neighbourhood. The regional power narrative is
closely connected to Turkey’s neo-Ottoman overtures, but not necessarily the same. In
order to make a strong case for Turkey’s necessity to play a regional role, a period is
sought and found in Turkish history and put in the narrative. Where the regional power
narrative works for Turkey by using the Ottoman past, other countries could make
their own variation of the same principle. It would be like Spain building ambitions
based on its imperial past, or Hungary by reflecting on the old Kingdom of Hungary.
Thus in my view neo-Ottomanism is a tool for this particular regional power narrative.
However, neo-Ottomanism comes with its own particularities, such as its multinational
outlook and its appreciation of Islam as a binding feature. Because of this it was the
Ottoman past that was attractive for the AKP and the political tide of parties based on
the tradition of Islamism, and not a regional power narrative based on, for instance,
pan-Turkism or the Byzantine past. Still, Turkey’s activities, from deepening its ties
with South America41 to expanding strategic cooperation with China42, should rather be
viewed as part of its quest to rise on the international stage, than having to do with
Ottoman peculiarities. I therefore chose to name the narrative a ‘regional power’
40 The Cyprus conflict is somewhat different because it involved the Turkish community on the island state. It was therefore depicted as a national
cause and defended by Turkey so fiercely that it did not waver in the face of economic sanctions by its own allies such as the United States.
41 ‘President Erdoğan Visits South America, Hails Stronger Trade Ties’, The Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry Investment Support and Promotion
Agency, 11 February 2016.
42 ‘China, Turkey Upgrade Ties to Strategic Cooperative Relationship during Wen’s Visit’, Xinhua News, 9 October 2010.
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narrative, in which neo-Ottomanism is used as a tool. Let us now look at neo-
Ottomanism, and at exactly how the argument for regional power is fuelled.
A central figure in neo-Ottomanism (yeni Osmancılık), whose words opened this thesis
and whom we recurrently will encounter, is Ahmet Davutoğlu. Before becoming foreign
minister (2009-2014) and prime minister (2014-2016) for the AKP, Davutoğlu had
already published many academic works on international relations and had advised the
party during the 2000s. He can be regarded as an important constructor of Turkey’s
security narrative.
Davutoğlu presented his ideas most clearly in his 2001 book Stratejik Derinlik:
Türkiye’nin Uluslararası Konumu (Strategic Depth: Turkey’s International Position). He
used the military term ‘strategic depth’ to refer to the hidden strategic potential Turkey
has to improve its geopolitical situation. As a country which is according to Davutoğlu
part of both the Middle Eastern, Balkan, Caucasian, Central Asian, Caspian,
Mediterranean, Gulf and Black Sea regions, Turkey has a special and rare ‘central
power’ position. This geographical advantage makes it possible through strategic depth
to play a leading role in many regions at the same time through the use of soft power.
In the book he also stresses the importance of path dependency, which means that
Turkey cannot deny its historical, Ottoman experiences for the formation of its
policies.43
Davutoğlu’s neo-Ottomanism (a term he always rejected himself) should not be
confused with the ideas advocated by Necmettin Erbakan, the leader of several Islamoriented
political parties which in a way preceded the AKP. Erbakan, who had a strong
influence on Turkey’s former prime-minister and current president Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan, represented a vision in which Turkey should actively break with the West in
favour of an Islamic alliance with countries such as Libya, Iran, Malaysia and
Indonesia. Rather than to shift away from the West, Davutoğlu looked for a way to let
the East and West form complementary parts of Turkey’s outlook. This reflects his
appreciation of the Ottoman past, in which the Turks were at the centre of a large
multinational empire.44
43 Ahmet Davutoğlu, Stratejik Derinlik: Türkiye’nin Uluslararası Konumu (Istanbul: Küre Yayınları, 2001); Iohannis N. Grigoriadis, ‘The Davutoğlu
Doctrine and Turkish Foreign Policy’, Hellenic Foundation for European 7 Foreign Policy Working Paper, No. 8 (2010), pp. 4–5.
44 Ömer Taşpınar, ‘Turkey’s Middle East Policies: Between Neo-Ottomanism and Kemalism’, Carnegie Papers, No. 10 (2008), pp. 14–15.
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According to Ömer Taşpınar, neo-Ottomanism means a “willingness to come to terms
with Turkey’s Ottoman and Islamic heritage at home and abroad.” Because the
Ottoman heritage and Islamic religion have in this framework become important
shared characteristics of Turks with other peoples (contrasting with the Kemalist
narrow view on national unity), neo-Ottomanism takes up a new mindset on many
issues, including security and citizenship. On citizenship Taşpınar explains:
“neo-Ottomanism sees no major threat behind Kurdish cultural rights and the
expression of Kurdish national identity, as long as Kurds maintain a sense of loyalty to
the Republic of Turkey. Similarly, when faced with Kurdish demands for cultural and
political rights, the neo-Ottoman mindset prefers to accommodate such demands in
the framework of multiculturalism and Muslim identity. In other words, unlike Kemalist
hardliners who insist on assimilating the Kurds, neo-Ottomanism allows Islam to play a
greater role in terms of building a sense of shared identity.”45
The stress on these commonalities is very important for Turkey’s regional power
narrative. By using neo-Ottomanism, strategic culture under the regional power
narrative looks back at the pre-republican period and the times the Ottoman Empire
was exercising far-reaching control across the region. More than just a concern with
the Ottoman Empire itself, the regional power narrative comes with a general attitude
that suits an empire. Fundamentally, it acknowledges Turkey’s own potential to play a
leading role in the region. Moreover, its pursuit of regional dominance comes with a set
of characteristics that contrasts with the national security narrative. It guarantees a
more outward looking strategic culture, as Turkey’s active pursuit to dominate the
neighbourhood as its regional power presses it for decision making that has impact on
other countries.
One can argue this quest for regional power, fits in with larger trends in which new
geopolitical centres of gravity challenge the unipolar, US-driven world system that has
been in place since at least the end of the Cold War. Important representatives of this
efforts are the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), which as emerging
economic powers seek a larger role in international affairs. The idea that Turkey should
play an independent, regional role fits with the emergence of a multipolar system
45 Taşpınar, ‘Turkey’s Middle East Policies’, p. 15.
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which challenges the dominance of the West in general and the US in particular.46 We
will see later that Turkey can in a sense be related to the BRIC countries because of
this.
Turkey’s self-confidence in foreign policy can be traced further back to the 1980s,
when president Turgut Özal engaged in initiatives that opened up economic ties with
several (Middle-Eastern) countries, as part of a broader process of liberal economic
reforms.47 Under the AKP government, however, it is much more clearly present, as is
shown by Turkey’s many and diverse foreign policy initiatives. Since the 2000s we
have seen many initiatives underlining Turkey’s new belief it can and should expand its
international influence. Apart from its zero problems policy in the Middle East and its
engagement with Russia (both of which we will discuss below), the last decades have
seen periods of effort to solve problems with neighbours Armenia, Cyprus and Greece.
Apart from the confidence to make Turkey a regional power, we can find reasons in
this narrative as to why it should do so. This is where neo-Ottomanism is brought in.
In his writings Davutoğlu criticised Turkey’s past policies under the national unity
narrative. He wrote that “during the Cold War Turkey pursued a foreign policy that was
resting on a military strategy that only aimed to protect its borders rather than resting
on a strategy that would realize the full potential of its international position. Turkey
interpreted its international position within the narrow parameters of its defence
strategy.”48
Instead of focussing on its territorial integrity, Davutoğlu suggested that because of
historical and geographical reasons Turkey was obliged to take a regional approach in
foreign matters. According to him, “historical factors force Turkey to develop a defence
strategy that goes beyond the contextual influence of its current borders. It is
impossible for a country like Turkey, which was founded on the historical and
geopolitical basis of the Ottoman state and inherited a legacy from the Empire, to
design a defence strategy that is confined to its current borders. This historical legacy
46 Emre Erşen, ‘Rise of New Centres of Power in Eurasia: Implications for Turkish Foreign Policy’, Journal of Eurasian Studies, Vol. 5 (2014),
184–91.
47 Sedat Laçiner, ‘Turgut Özal Period in Turkish Foreign Policy: Özalism’, USAK Yearbook, Vol. 2 (2009), 153–205.
48 Davutoğlu, Stratejik Derinlik, p. 73. Original quotation: “Turkiye Soğuk Savaş donemi boyunca uluslararası konumdan çok, sınırlar boyu bir
guvenlik anlayışına dayalı dış politika ve askeri stratejiler oluşturmuş ve uluslararası konumu bu güvenlik anlayışının dar kapsamı içinde yorumlamaya
calışmıştır.”
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can generate de facto situations which Turkey has to step in at any moment.”49
Although Davutoğlu does not illuminate what “situations” he means exactly, it is clear
from his argument that the Ottoman heritage demands Turkey to play an active role in
the matters of its smaller neighbours. Indeed, an important asset of the regional power
narrative is the idea that it is natural for Turkey to take up this role in the region. This
idea can be an important determiner for its foreign policy behaviour.
To sum up, a strategic culture under the regional power narrative approaches Turkey’s
security in a very different way than the national unity narrative does. National
security is not confined to Turkey’s own borders, but because of historical,
geographical and cultural reasons, reaches across the whole region. As consequence of
these ideas this strategic culture thus gives a broad space for the pursuit of regional
power status, a rebalancing of policies from a western orientation towards an
independent, multifaceted outlook and international activism. The regional approach is
domestically linked to a different image of the Turkish nation, in which national
unitarity is abandoned in favour of a more inclusive, heterogeneous approach. After all,
the Ottoman Empire too existed of many ethnicities and religious groups.
3.3 The change from national unity narrative to regional power narrative
As we concluded previously, Turkey’s security behaviour at no point corresponds fully
with one of the narratives. One reason is that, as discussed earlier, a strategic culture
characterised by, for example, a focus on national integrity and a lack of international
assertiveness can still produce seemingly contradictory behaviour50, although these
instances are expected to be rare. Another reason is that different narratives on
security might be competing at the same time. Even if, for instance, the national unity
narrative is dominant, counter-narratives might still influence the security behaviour of
an actor. This means that at no time a strategic culture will consist of some pure
version of one of the previously described narratives.
49 Davutoğlu, Stratejik Derinlik, p. 41. Original quotation: “Turkiye’yi cari uluslararası sınırların konjonktürel etkisinin ötesinde bir savunma
stratejisi geliştirme zorunluluğu ile karşı karşıya bırakmaktadır. Osmanlı Devleti’nin tarihi ve jeopolitik zemininde doğmuş bulunan ve o mirası devralan
Türkiye’nin savunmasını sadece sahip olduğu sınırlar içinde düşünmesi ve planlaması imkansızdır.”
50 For instance, Turkey’s alliance forming initiative of the Baghdad pact in 1955.
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This is important to keep in mind when examining the change in strategic culture
Turkey has witnessed. At no time Turkey’s strategic culture was monolithically
consisting of the national unity narrative, nor does or will the regional power narrative
completely replace the previous narrative. However, we can say that in the last
decades the regional power narrative has become more prominent and is being
propagated by the AKP government, which forms a dominant subculture in the Turkish
political system. We can find this push to adjust the strategic culture widely in the
discourse of the party.
We saw how Davutoğlu provided a theoretical base for an active Turkish policy in the
region. The duty of Turkey to live up to its role as heir of the Ottoman Empire is put
into practise with a discourse that actively promotes a positive image of the Ottoman
era and the role the empire played. By calling on shared histories under the former
empire (in which the Turks were of course holding a centre position, not only
geographically but also politically) he suggests that it is natural for Turkey to continue
its friendly (but directing) ties with its neighbours.
In regards to the Balkans, for example, growing Turkish regional influence is
accompanied by Davutoğlu’s message that “We have a common history and cultural
depth with the Balkan countries [..] The Balkans had its golden age of peace during
the Ottoman reign. This is a historical fact. Those who blame the Ottoman period for
the region’s economic backwardness and internecine fights are under the influence of
historical prejudices and stereotypes”51 We can see here how Davutoğlu paves the way
for re-engagement with the region by alluding that “economic backwardness and
internecine fights” could be prevented if only the Balkan countries would stay close to
Turkey’s harmonising influence.
In the Middle-East too, the AKP government relies on Ottoman heritage to legitimate
its increased engagement with the region. Its discourse on the Arab World contrasts
with that from the Early Republican period, in which the region was depicted in a
negative and backward way.52 The view that rebelling Arabs had betrayed the Turks in
the final years of the Ottoman Empire was corrected by Erdoğan. He stated about the
51 Altin Raxhimi, ‘Davutoglu: “I’m Not a Neo-Ottoman”’, Balkan Insight, 26 April 2011.
52 Ahmet Serdar Aktürk, ‘Arabs in Kemalist Turkish Historiography’, Middle Eastern Studies, 2010, 633–53 (p. 636).
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Early Republican period that “Turkey’s relations with the Middle East were cut with the
extremely incorrect and improper slogan, “the Arabs betrayed us””.53 Instead he
continuously gave (historical) reasons why Turkey should engage with Arab countries.
Following the regional power narrative Erdoğan contended that it is for Turkey “very
natural to be in touch with Middle Eastern countries” and that “Turkey has a lot to do
in the Middle East. We are aware of this responsibility. We are here for this.”54
The historical perspective is applied by other officials as well. For example, when AKP
deputy Fahri Keskin talked about the trade agreement between Turkey and Yemen and
the relations between the countries he said that “Yemen has a special and important
place in the hearts and memories of the Turkish people. Located in the south of the
Arabic Peninsula, it stayed under Ottoman rule for centuries. This period was a time of
peace, stability and welfare for Yemen. Historically, Yemen was a close witness to the
magnificence and power of the Ottomans as well as how it was betrayed by others.”55
In other words, the Yemenis have good reason to long for the Ottoman era. Moreover,
the Turks Yemen is dealing with now, have a direct connection with the Ottoman
relations of the past. Just as the Ottomans made a positive impression on them, the
Yemenis (naturally) translocated their sympathy to contemporary Turkey.
Similarly, at the African Day in 2011 president Abdullah Gül approached the
establishment of relations between Turkey and African countries from an Ottoman
angle. By saying that “the Ottoman Empire always supported the African people in
their struggles against the colonial powers. [..] Historical relations with North and
Northeast Africa have an exclusive place in the memories of our people”56, he
establishes a connection with the Ottoman Empire and in that way hints to the political
significance of contemporary Turkey. As if the current Turkish Republic is no different
or less significant than the empire that once (arguably) stood by the African people.
53 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, ‘Changing Balances and Rising Importance of Turkey, Speech at USAK’, 3 February 2010.
54 ‘Turkey Ready to Take Role in Mid-East Process’, Hürriyet Daily News, 2005.
55 ‘Minutes of the Proceedings of the Turkish Grand National Assembly, Fahri Keskin, 2003 Vol. 27, Session 6, 56’, Turkish Grand National Assembly.
Original quotation: “Bizim milletimizin kaderinde, halkımızın zihninde, halkımızın gönlünde Yemen’in ayrı yeri ve önemi vardır. Yemen,
fıziken Arap Yarımadasının güneyinde olan ve Osmanlı hâkimiyetinde yüz yıllarca kalmış bir vatan parçasıydı. Bu dönem Yemen için bir istikrar,
huzur ve refah dönemi olmuştur. Tarihte ise, Osmanlının gücünün, Osmanlının ihtişamının, Osmanlının ihanete uğrayışının yakın tanığı ve şahididir
Yemen.”
56 ‘African Day – President Gül Underlines Turkey’s Interest in Africa. Speech at Bilkent University.’, SeaNews Turkey, 27 May 2011.
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In another example, Yaşar Büyükanıt, chief of the general staff, as well propagated
indirectly Turkey’s involvement in the neighbourhood through the Ottoman heritage.
He said that “In the Middle East, various ethnic and religious groups lived under the
reign of the Ottoman Empire. We should ask why there had not been any conflict
between them for centuries”57
Finally, the following example on the Syrian crisis by Erdoğan shows how the regional
power narrative is fuelled by history and how it forms a rhetorical base for
assertiveness in the region. Erdoğan said: “We do not see the Syrian issue as an
external affair; the Syrian question is our internal affair. We share with them a border
of 850 kilometres. We have ties of kinship, history and culture. Therefore we cannot
passively watch what is happening. We need to do whatever is necessary.”58
All these examples provide an idea of how the AKP government puts forward a new
view on security. Sometimes the earlier republican conceptions of security and
international policies are directly challenged. The many efforts by AKP officials to
establish a positive link between the Ottoman times, the Ottoman region and the role
contemporary Turkey can play there, nudge Turkey’s strategic culture in a new
direction.
However, as argued before, the change in strategic culture in Turkey is not complete.
Oppositional groups may share different ideas about security. For example, the
oppositional Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP), which received
over 25% of the votes during the November 2015 parliamentary elections, holds on to
Kemalist principles and additionally is opposed to neo-Ottoman thinking.59 Moreover,
the dominant governing party’s own views might be ambiguous. One can for instance
point to the fact that, notwithstanding the emancipative reforms the AKP brought,
groups such as the Alevi religious minority and the Kurdish ethnic minority are in legal
terms still held back. This means that the thought from the early-Republican national
57 Yaşar Büyükanıt (2008), ‘Speech delivered at the 5th Symposium titled “Middle East: Ist Future, Uncertainties and Security Issues” at War
College’, Istanbul, 06/05/2008.
58 ‘Erdoğan, Davutoğlu’nu Şam’a Gönderiyor’, Habertürk, 6 August 2011. Original quoation: “Çünkü biz Suriye konusunu dış sorun olarak
görmüyoruz. Suriye meselesi bizim bir iç meselemizdir. Çünkü Suriye ile 850 kilometre sınırımız var. Akrabalık, tarih, kültür bağlarımız var.
Dolayısıyla burada olanlar, bitenler asla bizim seyirci kalmamıza fırsat vermez. Gereğini yapmak zorundayız.”
59 Serkan Demirtaş, ‘AKP’s Adventurist Policies Turning Turkey into an Incompetent Country in Mideast: CHP’, Hürriyet Daily News, 26 June
2014.
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unity narrative, which stressed (among other things) the uniformity of the Turkish
nation, still endures at some level.
4. Turkey and NATO
We will now look at Turkey’s NATO membership, from its early years and the Cold War
to the recent decades and the restructuration of the alliance. We will encounter
different grounds for Turkey’s behaviour, sometimes based on identity, sometimes on
interest. Our gained insights in Turkey’s strategic culture will help us to analyse
aspects of its NATO membership and recognise that the grounds for its behaviour are
connected to the earlier examined security narratives.
4.1 Establishment of NATO and Turkish membership
How we should see NATO and its founding has been a topic of extensive writing.
According to Sireci and Coletta, the foundation of NATO was based on purely realist
arguments and should be seen as a power balancing act by the United States.60
However, Sean Kay insists that over time embedded community values in the alliance
such as “reinforcing democracy and free market economies” became of growing
importance. These characteristics put their mark on NATO even stronger because they
contrasted with the ideology of the Soviet bloc.61
One can argue that throughout the Cold War the continuing existence of the East-West
divide increased the importance of mentioned normative component. While realist
reasons brought the allies together, the continuing projection of the NATO members as
the ‘self’ versus the ‘others’ of the Warsaw Pact amplified the existing associations.
Shared perceptions of threat, resulting from the similarity of identities among the
members determined the success of the alliance. According to Risse-Kappen this
common identity came into being through the members’ shared norms and regulative
practices, such as consultation and consensus-building. In this sense, “common values
60 Jonathan Sireci and Damon Coletta, ‘Enduring without an Enemy: NATO’s Realist Foundation’, Perspectives, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2009), 57–81 (pp.
58–59).
61 Sean Kay, ‘What Went Wrong with NATO?’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2005), 69–83 (pp. 70–71).
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and a collective identity of liberal democracies”62 did play an important role in fuelling
the raison d’être of NATO as they led to common threat perceptions.63
However, in any discussion of NATO, we cannot underestimate the importance of the
US within the alliance. Not only was the US the strategically determining factor to
establish the alliance, up to this day it is highly dominant in military terms. It is
responsible for over three-quarter of the combined military budget of all members.64
Because the American predominance in NATO’s actions and influence on its course, in
many recent issues that we study actors alternate in their comments between calling
on NATO’s actions and the US’ actions. This is especially the case in campaigns based
on a ‘coalition of the willing’, such as is the case in, for instance, the effort against
Daesh. While all NATO member states expressed support for the campaign, only a few
actively participated (and especially the US). Although the dynamics between Turkey
and the US play without a doubt a role in Turkey’s ties with NATO, I will try to keep all
observations centred on just the alliance as much as possible.
At the time of NATO’s birth in 1949, Atatürk’s rule and the establishment of the
republic still lay fresh in Turkey’s memory and its strategic culture was very much
dominated by the national unity narrative. Therefore joining a military alliance to
counter Soviet power was for Turkey not the most expected thing to do. There was,
however, a mix of realist and identity motives that drove Turkey into the alliance.
While joining NATO fitted in with Turkey’s Westernisation effort (see below), Soviet
aggression gave even stronger, realist arguments. After the Second World War, while
the map of Europe was being divided in American and Soviet spheres of influence,
Stalin also made claims on Turkish territory. He demanded the Kars and Ardahan
provinces in the east and wanted permanent Soviet bases in the Bosphorus and
Dardanelles. This would give the Soviets joint control over the Turkish Straits, and
strategic access to the Mediterranean Sea. Stalin stepped up his claims with troop
movements at the Turkish borders with Bulgaria and the Caucasus.65 These particular
62 Thomas Risse-Kappen, ‘Collective Identity in a Democratic Community The Case of NATO’, in The Culture of National Security, ed. by Peter
Katzenstein (New York 1996), 357–99 (pp. 369, 395).
63 For the ideological power of NATO see also: Oğuzlu, ‘Turkey’s Eroding Commitment to NATO’, p. 153; Aybet, ‘The Evolution of NATO’s Three
Phases’, p. 20.
64 NATO, ‘Interview with Hüseyin Diriöz, NATO Assistant Secretary General for Defence Policy and Planning’, 2011.
65 Meliha Benli Altunışık and Özlem Tür, Turkey: Challenges of Continuity and Change (London, 2005), pp. 102–3.
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Soviet threats took place directly after the Second World War and had started to fade
by the time Turkey actually joined NATO in 1952. Nevertheless, the geographic
proximity to the Soviet Union, at the time still under the capricious Stalin, and its
offensive capabilities, made the realist arguments still relevant.66
The issue of Turkey’s identity was more complicated. Identity-wise choosing for NATO
membership was for Turkey a show of commitment to a Western identity. The years
after the Second World War were an active time for Turkey’s political westernisation.
Before Turkey’s NATO membership was achieved under the newly elected Democratic
Party (Demokrat Parti), it had already taken part in the Marshall Plan of 1947 and had
become a member of the Council of Europe in 1949 under the CHP. Moreover, Turkey’s
earliest attempts to become part of the European Union (then the European Economic
Community) stem from the late 1950s. With these actions, Turkey acknowledged that
it regarded its identity as part of the Western system. This is in line with the quest for
Westernisation that had been started under Atatürk, but which roots can be traced
further back to Ottoman times.67
But while being part of NATO was, apart from all its security concerns, a sign for
Turkey that it was both politically and culturally part of the West, there was at the
same time a certain ambivalence towards the alliance. While we saw earlier that
NATO’s coherence was strengthened by processes of shared identity building against
the ‘other’ Soviet bloc, Turkey’s case shows a counter-mechanism, working against
Turkey’s smooth integration into the alliance. As Karaosmanoğlu points out, Turkey’s
identity formation builds upon the centuries old role of the Ottoman Empire in the
European system.68 For centuries, the Turks had been projected by European states as
‘the other’ themselves. From the times in which the Ottoman armies were besieging
Vienna and threatening the Christian world to the later years in which it got the
reputation as the ‘sick man of Europe’, the Ottoman Empire had been an outsider. At
best the Ottoman Empire could be “an irregular and peripheral member of the
66 Ali L. Karaosmanoğlu, ‘Turkey’s Alignment with NATO. Identity and Power Politics’, in NATO’s Retirement? Essays in Honour of Peter Volten,
ed. by Margiet Drent, Arjan van den Assem, and Jaap de Wilde (Groningen 2011), pp. 37–48 (pp. 43–44).
67 Altunışık and Tür, Turkey: Challenges of Continuity and Change, pp. 5–6.
68 Karaosmanoğlu, ‘Turkey’s Alignment with NATO’, p. 39.
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European framework”69 The suspicion of Turkey, with its complicated mix of Western
and Islamic and Eastern identity, to be ‘otherised’ by the West, and the enduring
Sèvres Syndrome (discussed previously) put a damper on its enthusiasm to try to be
part West.70
There was therefore something odd about Turkey’s NATO membership. On the one
hand did the national unity narrative, which was important in this period, provide a
reason to join the alliance, as it strengthened the Westernisation project which Atatürk
used as part of his nation building process. On the other hand, however, the same
narrative also opposed integration into NATO, because of its isolationist tendencies and
the particular historical suspicion towards the West.
As for Turkey’s behaviour within the organisation during the Cold War, Tarık Oğuzlu
observes that the country behaved rather passively within the organisation. Whereas
its elites were prone to think of Turkey as an influential strategic actor on its own,
whenever NATO adopted decisions Turkey acted as if it did not take part in their
formulation. “The prevailing discourse used to be that decisions within NATO were
made in Brussels between the USA and other important European allies and that
Turkey responded to them”.71 As Turkey was not only the alliance’s south eastern
stronghold against the Soviet Union but also was the member state with the second
largest army, it clearly had the potential to take part more actively. Of course
Turkey’s attitude fits with the influence of the national unity narrative on its strategic
culture as it kept the country uninterested in an assertive membership.
4.2 After the Cold War
After the Cold War it was not clear what was going to happen with NATO. From a
realist perspective alliances should not outlive the threats they were created to
address. With the disappearance of the common goal it was expected by many that the
alliance would fall apart, as reasons for cooperating ceased to exist.72 With the
69 Edward Vose Gulick, Europe’s Classical Ballance of Power (New York, 1967), pp. 10–18; Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology
and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876-1909 (New York), pp. 5–7.
70 We will later on revisit this important issue in a more contemporary context.
71 Oğuzlu, ‘Making Sense of Turkey’s Rising Power Status’, p. 786.
72 Wallander, ‘Institutional Assets’; Waltz, ‘The Emerging Structure’.
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collapse of the Soviet Union, therefore, NATO faced the daunting task of reinventing
itself in order to have a raison d’être in the upcoming years.
While NATO was busy reorienting itself, Turkey stayed part of the Western military
bloc. Though with a scent of resignation, it kept following the alliance’s course as NATO
transformed into a security community which directed itself to threats such as
international terrorism. It supported the enlargement of NATO into Central-Europe and
was particularly devoted in NATO’s military missions to Bosnia, Macedonia and
Kosovo.73
In the 2000s new dynamics emerged both in international context (after the 2001
terrorist attacks in the United States) and because of domestic developments (2002
marks the beginning of AKP rule in Turkey). Following the assertiveness of the George
W. Bush administration, Turkey joined NATO’s missions to Afghanistan and other non-
European places, although simultaneously a more critical or sceptical view emerged.74
We can follow the Turkish (government) perspective on this development by looking at
the writings of Davutoğlu.
We already noted that Davutoğlu constructed ideas which are leading for Turkey’s
regional power narrative. He also presented his vision on NATO and the future of the
organisation. In a 2012 article he fully subscribed to its continuing importance. He also
underlined the importance of identity to NATO by writing that the alliance was
“determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisations of their
peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and rule of law. So
long as our common values need protecting, NATO would continue to have a raison
d’être.”75 Elsewhere he wrote about that Turkey’s membership to NATO “is a solid
symbol of Turkey’s Western vocation and her choice of joining with democratic
societies governed by universal values.”76
However, as the last decade saw action by NATO in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and at the
Somalian coast, Davutoğlu expressed his concern that the alliance’s character was in
73 Ali L. Karaosmanoğlu, ‘NATO Enlargement and the South: A Turkish Perspective’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 30, No. 2 (1999), 213–24 (pp. 213–
15); Aybet, ‘The Evolution of NATO’s Three Phases’, p. 29.
74 Oğuzlu, ‘Turkey’s Eroding Commitment’, p. 154.
75 Ahmet Davutoğlu, ‘Transformation of NATO and Turkey’s Position’, Perceptions, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2012), 7–17 (p. 8).
76 Ibidem, p. 15.
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danger of shifting to a military tool, “imposing and implementing political decisions
taken elsewhere”77, specifically hinting at the military dominance of the US. He argued
that this was bad for the legitimacy of NATO. Here we can trace arguments that have
been made by scholars that put limits to Turkey’s commitment to NATO. Two major
components of Turkey’s foreign policy under AKP were not antagonising Russia
(although this point was abandoned in 2015, later more on that) and keeping its
“hard-gained positive image across the Islamic world”.78 These preferences, with their
implications for Turkey’s look on NATO, can be found in Turkey’s official foreign policy
of ‘zero problems with neighbours’.
The zero problems doctrine was presented by Davutoğlu in early 2010 and was aimed
at solving Turkey’s strained relations with countries in the (Middle Eastern)
neighbourhood, including Syria and Iraq. More in general, the idea behind the policy
was for Turkey to diversify its focus. By directing itself more towards the Middle East it
would gain more economic and political opportunities to establish itself as a regional
power.
This raised some concerns among Western observers, as Turkey had traditionally
avoided the complicated Middle Eastern intrigues in favour of engagement with Europe.
It was therefore claimed that the zero problems doctrine, rather than an attempt to
catch up with neglected neighbours was a turn away from the West. It was, moreover,
perceived as a proof of the AKP’s reorientation towards the Islamic world as part of a
general Islamisation policy. Finally, it was said that Davutoğlu’s vision was a neo-
Ottoman one, aimed at reviving the glory days of the former empire. All these claims
were denied by the Turkish government.79
Initially the zero problem doctrine surprised with its successes. Turkey saw its relations
improve with countries such as Iraq, Iran and especially Syria, and it actively mediated
in conflicts all over the region. The revolutionary wave in Arab countries that started in
December 2010 for a moment seemed a golden opportunity for Turkey to promote
77 Ibidem, p. 10.
78 Şule Nişanlı, ‘Turkey’s Role in NATO in the Post-Cold War Security Environment’, NATO Defence College Research Paper, No. 16 (2005), 2–8
(p. 7); Oğuzlu, ‘Making Sense of Turkey’s Rising Power Status’, pp. 782–84.
79 ‘I Am Not a Neo-Ottoman, Davutoğlu Says’, Today’s Zaman, 25 November 2009; Ihsan Bal, ‘Expansion, Not Shift in the Turkish Foreign Policy
Axis’, Turkish Weekly, 10 November 2009.
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itself.80 However, as civil war broke out in Syria and the Arab Spring turned into a
Winter, the gains of Turkey’s foreign policy were quickly offset. By 2016, after a
decade of zero problems with neighbours, Turkey found itself in a position in the
Middle East where it arguably was “more isolated than ever”.81
Although not in the Middle-East, Turkey’s engagement with Russia is definitely related
to Davutoğlu’s attempt to expand the reach of its foreign policy well. Instead of staring
itself blind at the West, as often happened in Turkey’s old Kemalist policies, the AKP
government considerably intensified relations with Putin’s Russia. Although we will
explore in chapter 5.2 how this diplomatic path clashed with NATO’s preferences with
the outbreak of the Ukrainian crisis in 2014, it for now suffices to say that engagement
between the two countries had been intensifying. That year, Russia was Turkey’s
number one import country, and seventh largest export partner.82 In the same year
Turkey and Russia rolled out plans to increase their trade volume threefold by 2020.83
Moreover, the personal chemistry between Putin and Erdoğan and their critique on the
West brought Russia and Turkey together, up to the point that there were hints in
2013 that Turkey might want to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.84
Although rhetoric about joining this Russian-Chinese security bloc possibly just served
for Erdoğan to gain diplomatic leverage against the West (especially the EU), the very
fact that he was prepared to bring it to table is a sign of how loose Turkey’s alignment
with its traditional Western allies had become at the time.
Until the breaking of Russian-Turkish relations in December 2015 Turkey and Russia
were mentioned together and compared with each other. Significantly, when prime
minister Erdoğan took up the function of president in 2015, many were reminded of
Putin’s institutional acrobatics in which he swapped the presidency for the prime
ministership and back, each time taking with him the executive powers to rule the
country.85
80 More on this in paragraph 5.1 on Libya.
81 Jonathan Schanzer and Merve Tahiroğlu, ‘Ankara’s Failure: How Turkey Lost the Arab Spring’, Foreign Affairs, 25 January 2016.
82 Numbers on Turkey’s 2014 foreign trade at: http://globaledge.msu.edu/countries/turkey/tradestats.
83 ‘Turkey, Russia to Seek New Ways to Deepen Economic Ties despite Disagreements in Syria, Ukraine’, Hürriyet Daily News, 1 December
2014.
84 Kadrı Gürsel, ‘Erdogan Serious about Turkey’s Bid for Shanghai 5 Membership’, Al-Monitor, 31 January 2013.
85 Merve Tahiroğlu and Boris Zilberman, ‘Vladimir Erdoğan: How The Turkish Premier Is Consolidating Power, Russia-Style’, Forbes, 2014.
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Turkey’s engagement with Russia, just like its independent endeavours in the Middle
East, were clear signals of the new self-confidence on the international stage Turkey
gained under AKP rule. Whatever the AKP’s real intentions of the increased focus on
the East and the zero problems doctrine were, the consequence was in any case a
more diversely orientated foreign policy with the potential to clash with the interests of
NATO.
Like Turkey befriending Russia became problematic when Russia and NATO clashed
over Ukraine, the fact that the AKP was being very active to establish a good image in
the Muslim world, could lead to disagreements with the NATO line. Ankara was careful
to point out that “NATO should not be considered as an instrument forcing regime
changes in predominantly Muslim countries”86, an echo of which we encountered in
Davutoğlu’s article. The dilemma of how to combine Turkey’s NATO membership duties
with the preservation of its reputation in the Islamic world is shown, for instance, by
Turkey’s preference to perform only civilian and crisis management tasks in
Afghanistan, instead of combat action.87 This would prevent the suggestion of Turkey
being involved in some anti-Islamic effort by NATO. Another sign is Turkey’s full
support for the enlargement of the alliance into the Balkans. The inclusion of
Montenegro and Macedonia, with large Muslim minorities, and Albania, a Muslimmajority
country, would help to make NATO’s image more multi-religious and to proof
that it is not an army of Christian imperialists.
These are just a few examples of how Turkey’s behaviour within the alliance is
influenced by the fact that NATO’s direction and Turkey’s foreign policy preferences
often did not align well. From Davutoğlu’s argumentation we can understand how an
assertive NATO with business in the Middle East or with Russia could spoil Turkey’s
own foreign policy. Oğuzlu explained how Turkey’s behaviour in NATO is purely based
on strategic determination. As his main principle is that Turkey, as a rising power, is
trying to gain geopolitical importance, he sees for Turkey two basic ways to behave
within NATO. In the first way Turkey would try “counterbalancing the most influential
members of the alliance by making use of intra-alliance cleavages and by spoiling the
alliance by contributing to its irrelevance”. This way Turkey would be able to exploit
86 Oğuzlu, ‘Making Sense of Turkey’s Rising Power Status’, p. 783.
87 Oğuzlu, ‘Turkey’s Eroding Commitment to NATO’, p. 157.
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the alliance for its own interest. Alternatively it could try to co-opt with the main
players within NATO and shape its own national interests and foreign policy in line with
the priorities of the alliance. In this second scenario Turkey would use NATO as a
“force multiplier” of its preferences.88
Oğuzlu finds examples of both co-opting and counterbalancing behaviour in the 2000s,
giving a mixed picture of Turkey’s role in NATO. A closer look at Turkey’s
counterbalancing against the US or other influential NATO forces shows that it mainly
involved attempts to mitigate relations with Russia and issues that harm Turkey’s
“hard-gained positive image across the Islamic world”.89
This behaviour is in line with what we would expect, as it is specifically directed against
NATO behaviour that would be contradicting the preferences of Turkey’s strategic
culture. As the regional power narrative aims for an independent geopolitical position
for Turkey in which it can actively reshape its neighbourhood, it is not surprising that
Turkey plays a more interest based role within NATO. Especially at topics that directly
concern Turkey’s regional power status we can count on direct clashes with NATO
there where the alliance has different interests.
Turkey’s changed strategic culture explains therefore that Turkey does only moderately
share the interests of the United States and the EU countries in their confrontation with
Russia, and that it is careful when a NATO policy can damage its plans in the Middle
East. We can also see why it makes sense for Turkey’s regional power narrative
incorporating Balkan countries into NATO. Having a group of friendly satellites with
common cultural and historical (Ottoman) ties within the alliance would obviously
improve Turkey’s position. The very fact that Turkey is concerned about how it can
bend NATO to its will is a consequence of its desire to be a regional power and is
inspired by its strategic culture.
All these, however, are policy specific considerations. As we will see now, Turkey’s
formal rhetoric on NATO does not really reflect the change in strategic culture which
we just marked.
88 Oğuzlu, ‘Making Sense of Turkey’s Rising Power Status’, pp. 779–80.
89 Ibidem, 782–784; This is also underlined by Şule Nişanlı, ‘Turkey’s Role in NATO in the Post-Cold War Security Environment’, No. 16, 2005,
2–8 (p. 7).
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4.3 NATO’s new Strategic Concept and 60 years of NATO Membership:
Contemplating on Turkey’s NATO position in the 2010’s
The new Strategic Concept is NATO’s most recent ten-year plan and has been a
milestone in its post-Cold War functional modernisation and transformation. The
document contained not only a reconfirmation of the old core tasks of territorial
defence, but also defined how to handle new focuses such as cyber defence and nontraditional
forms of terrorism. Finally the document reiterated a commitment to
cooperation with prospective members and with Russia.90 When the alliance adopted
the new Strategic Concept on 20 November 2010, Turkey’s foreign policy had already
been guided by Davutoğlu’s ideas of strategic depth for several years. Turkey’s “zero
problems with neighbours” policy had been launched half a year earlier.
At the time journalists observed in this period an increasing frequency of
disagreements between NATO and Turkey, indicating an axis shift of Turkey’s foreign
policy.91 However, we do not recognise this image at all when we examine the article
published by Turkish Defence Minister Vecdi Gönül (in function 2002-2011) in the
Turkish Policy Quarterly, in which he explains his views on the new Strategic Concept.
In positive wordings on the alliance, he encourages further evolution towards a more
political organisation and a continuation of the expansion of the alliance. According to
Gönül “NATO has played a central role in the security of Turkey for 58 years. The
Alliance has made significant contributions for Turkey to be integrated in the Euro-
Atlantic community. Turkey has made significant contributions to the Alliance as well.
It adopted the common values the allies share, and defended them keenly.”92 In his
article there seems to be a lack of any connection with Turkey’s neo-Ottoman
ambitions and possible reservations these could raise towards NATO. Gönül does not
seem to share Davutoğlu’s concerns about NATO as an interventionist tool, also when
commenting on far away missions such as Afghanistan and the anti-piracy missions off
the Horn of Africa. If anything, he seems to encourage a more active alliance.
90 NATO, ‘Active Engagement, Modern Defence: Strategic Concept for the Defence and Security of the Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
Adopted by Heads of State and Government in Lisbon’, 2010.
91 Oya Dursun-Özkanca, ‘Turkey-NATO Relations at a Crossroads ahead of NATO’s New Strategic Concept’, Hürriyet Daily News, 15 October
2010.
92 M. Vecdi Gönül, ‘Turkey-NATO Relations and NATO’s New Strategic Concept’, Turkish Policy Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2010), 15–21 (p. 17).