The strategic depth doctrine of Turkish foreign policy

Given the boost provided by a promise of admission to the European Union on 17 December 2004, the regional standing of Turkey is bound to increase in the coming decades. This new stature will affect Turkish relations not only with the Arab neighbours and Israel, but also with Iran, Central Asia, South Caucasian and Balkan states. This article analyzes the institutional and intellectual sources of a new vision that animates contemporary Turkish foreign policy. The main sources of the traditional foreign policy of the Turkish Republic are the historical experience of the Ottoman empire (the tradition of the balance of power); the nationalist Kemalist revolution and creation of the republic itself (hence, isolationism); western orientation expressed in the policy of Europeanization and modernization; the suspicion of foreign powers and interests (the Sevres syndrome). There were two other ideological sources of this traditional foreign doctrine, which surfaced in the pre-First World War years: pan-Turkism and pan-Turanism. PanTurkism was a movement to unify the eastern (Central Asia and Caucasus) and the western (Anatolian) Turks. Following Russian expansionism in the Balkans under the banner of pan-Slavism in the later half of the nineteenth century, pan-Turanism arose as a romantic idea to unify Turkic, Mongol and Finnish-Ugorian peoples. It later served for a short time as a basis for the Turkish-Hungarian collaboration during the first two decades of the twentieth century to stem the Russian threat. These movements gained some influence among the Young Turks in the years preceding the First World War. During the cold war Turkey generally avoided any potentially long-term entanglements in the Middle East with the exception of the fiasco of the Baghdad Pact. Since the end of the Cold War, Turkish foreign policy, which had been firmly anchored upon the verities of Kemalism for 70 years, has also undergone a transformation. This transformation hinges upon a growing embrace of the philosophy of neo-Ottomanism. If this philosophy originally was employed as a response to the domestic challenge of ethno-national conflict with the Kurdish separatists led by the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan) it later organically infused the foreign policy thinking of contemporary Turkish policy makers.' As theorists of international relations concur, foreign policy became an extension of domestic policy and the transformation in domestic policy has also affected the foreign policy doctrine.2 Turgut Ozal, the first president of Turkey in the post-cold war era laid the foundations of this new foreign policy concept. However, a new doctrine took its more mature and comprehensive shape