Oscillating Between Securitization and Transactionalism: The Everlasting Drama of Turkey-West Relations
Oscillating Between Securitization and Transactionalism: The Everlasting Drama of Turkey-West Relations

Author(s): Alper Kaliber
Subject(s): International relations/trade, Security and defense, Electoral systems
Published by: Transnational Press London
Keywords: Oscillating; securitization; transactionalism; everlasting; drama; Turkey-West; relations;
Summary/Abstract: Turkish foreign policy (TFP) has undergone dramatic changes throughout the decades of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) rule which has been continuing since November 2002. If one should cite a constant feature of TFP, it is its ever-increasing significance for the AKP leaders to promote their political agenda in Turkey’s domestic politics. Once a trademark of AKP’s anti-Kemalist upheaval against the civilian and military wings of the Turkish political establishment, foreign policy has then “become an integral part of the AKP’s conservative social engineering efforts and the main hallmark of its populism, with a range of significant political and economic implications”. While the latest general election in May 2023 paved the way for the third decade of the AKP rule, foreign policy has remained central to its agenda and discourse. The AKP leaders, and most notably President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have deemed foreign policy as integral part of their power struggle against both the secular wing of bureaucracy and the opposition in Turkey, and never shied away from instrumentalizing it for their domestic political ambitions. As populist tendencies increasingly characterised the AKP rule in its second decade, securitization has come to dominate foreign policy making and discourse in the country.

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