Debating Turkey in the middle east: The dawn of a new geopolitical imagination?

Insight Turkey

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 83-96

  Kalin, Ibrahim ^a  

^a SETA ^*  (Japan)

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EID: 63749118189     PISSN: 1302177X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. "Turkish Drama Series Gain Popularity in Arab World", al-Sharq al-Awsat, April 27, 2008; http://www.aawsat.com/english/news. asp?section=7&id=12568.
2. Roula Khalaf, "Arab Women Fall for Soap's Turkish Delight," http://www.ft.com/cms/ s/0/ldl4872c-762a-lldd-99ce-0000779fdl8c.html?nclick- check=l.
3. The Daily Star, http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition-id= l&categ-id=4&Article-id=95379.
4. Hassan Hanizadeh, "Turkish Soaps not so Clean," Tehran Times, Aug. 28, 2008.
5. See for instance, Alice Amsden, The Rise of "The Rest": Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
6. Robert Kagan, "End of Dreams, Return of History: International Rivalry and American Leadership," Policy Review, No. 144, (August & September 2007), http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/8552512. html.
7. I say "perception" because the economic and military disparity between the West and the Rest remains huge. As Paul Collier demonstrated in his The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), global poverty and the problems associated with it continue to cause major rifts in the present world-order. One may say with Tom Friedman that the "world is flat"; but what really comes out as the dominant feeling is that the world has been flattened at the expense of the weak.
8. The former Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer's official visit to Syria in 2005 is an example that disproves the commonly held view that Turkey's Middle East initiatives are due solely to the AK Party's Islamic roots and special ties in the Arab world. Sezer, who, far from being an impartial president, was openly opposed to the AK Party on key policy issues, did not cancel his visit to Damascus in spite of American pressure. Another example is a 1995 United States Institute of Peace (USIP) report on Turkey in the post-Cold War era. The report summary reads as follows: "The end of the Cold War seemed to portend a decline in Turkey's strategic importance to the West; however, the political changes in the world since 1989 have also loosened the constraints within which Turkey can act. As a result, Ankara's foreign policy has been redirected from its strictly western orientation to one in which the countries of the Middle East have become potentially more significant. The changing relationship between Turkey - uniquely positioned in both the West and the East - and its neighbors in the Middle East was examined at a United States Institute of Peace conference entitled "A Reluctant Neighbor: Analyzing Turkey's Role in the Middle East" held on June 1-2,1994." For the report, visit http://www.usip.org/pubs/peaceworks/pwksl.pdf.
9. "Turkey seeks to boost East-West role," Kuwait Times, April 01, 2007, http://www.kuwait-times.net/read-news.php?newsid=MTY2NTUzODY4Mg.
10. Basheer M. Nafi, "al-'Adala wa'l-Tanmiyya Yukhrij Turkiya min al-'Uzla al-Ataturkiyya ila al-'Uthmaniyya al-Jadida," al-Quds al-'Arahi, Sept. 28, 2006.
11. Here is one recent confession: "The emphasis on democracy, liberalism, and human rights has strategic relevance in part because it plays to American strengths and exposes the weaknesses of the autocratic powers." Kagan, "End of Dreams, Return of History."
12. The three principles of Kant's "Perpetual Peace," published in 1795, are also the conditions upon which a just world order can be established: 1. "The Civil Constitution of Every State Should Be Republican"; 2. "The Law of Nations Shall be Founded on a Federation of Free States"; 3. "The Law of World Citizenship Shall Be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality." See Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
13. For an assessment of these initiatives, see Omer Taspinar, "Turkey's Middle East Policies: Between Neo-Ottomanism and Kemalism," Carnegie Papers, No 10 (September 2008).
14. Ghassan Charbel, "Turkey and the Troubled Lake," Al Hayat, 25/02/2008, http://english.dar-alhayat.com/opinion/OPED/02-2008/ Article-20080225-51443145-c0a8-10ed-017c-43245454376c/ story.html.
15. "A tale of two cultures," al-Ahram Weekly, No. 879 (10 - 16 January 2008) http://wcckly. ahram.org.eg/2008/879/re63.htm.
16. For an assessment of Turkey's increasing role in the Middle East, see Stephen Larrabee, "Turkey Rediscovers the Middle East," Foreign Affairs (July/August 2007) http://www.foreignaffairs.org/ 20070701faessay86408/f-stephen-larrabee/turkey-rediscovers-the-middle-east.html.
17. See, for instance, the essays by Bilgin and Elis, Beng, Altunisik and Altinay in the special issue of Insight Turkey, Volume 10, No 2 (April-June 2008) on Turkey's soft power.
18. Ahmet Davutoglu, "Turkey's Foreign Policy Vision: An Assessment of 2007," Insight Turkey, Vol. 10, No. 1 (January-March 2008), p. 79.
19. A major study of the image of Arabs in Turkish society by SETA, the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research, has shown that contrary to the common view, positive images of Arabs outweigh negative perceptions among the Turks today.
20. Dr. Radwan al Sayyid, "Turkey and the Arabs... the Equilibrium of a New Middle East," al-Sharq Al-Awsat, 14/08/2006, http://www.aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=2&id=5998.
21. 'The authoritarian secularism of the Turkish state and such symbolic battlegrounds of religious freedom as the headscarf ban in Turkish universities are puzzling, to say the least, to Arab audiences. See, for instance, Omer Taspinar, "An Uneven Fit: The 'Turkish Model' and the Arab World," The Brookings Project on US Policy Towards the Islamic World, No 5 (August 2003), p. 7.
22. "Islamist Lessons in Turkey," Al-Ahram Weekly, Aug. 16-22, 2007.
23. Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, "Turkey and Its New Islamic Rulers," Al-Ahram Weekly, Jan. 16-22, 2003.
24. Speaking to Al-Ahram in 2004, Ahmet Davutoglu rejects the 'model paradigm': "Turkey does not want to be a model for anyone. What we do we do for the sake of our own society beacause our only source of legitimacy is the people of Turkey." Al-Ahram Weekly, Nov. 11-17, 2007.
25. Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, "Turkey and Its New Islamic Rulers," Al-Ahram Weekly, Jan. 16-22, 2003.