Hurriyet Daily News, Turkey
Sept 8 2012
`Turkey needs to grab bull by the horns on foreign policy’
Barçın Yinanç
ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News
Turkey achieved a foreign policy miracle in the last decade but the
aura of this success has been fading fast in the last two years, an
international relations professor says. The country needs to grab the
bull by the horns and alter its course, as many believe it is fanning
the fires of regional polarization, says Kemal KiriÅ?çi
Ankara succeeded in becoming a regional player that was a force for
dialogue over the past 10 years, but its foreign policy has lost its
luster as Turkey has come to be seen as a divisive actor, according to
a Turkish professor.
`There is a feeling that Turkey is encouraging a polarization along
Shiite-Sunni lines in the Middle East. We may cry at the top of our
lungs that this is not what we are doing, but this is what the world
thinks, and we cannot keep blaming the world,’ said Kemal KiriÅ?çi, an
international relations professor.
`We need to take a look in the mirror,’ he told the Hürriyet Daily
News this week.
You argue that Turkey’s integration with its neighborhood began prior
to the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). How, then,
does the AKP differ from others in its foreign policy?
The geography of the integration has widened and deepened. The AKP
introduced a policy with a capital `P.’ For instance, agreements to
lift visas were realized in a more systematic way. But a lot of the
motivation for that policy came primarily from the `Anatolian tigers,’
who were seeking new markets. The integration policy prior to the AKP
was a top-down process, whereas it has become a bottom-up process in
the last decade. Right now, however, we are facing the challenge of
the Arab Spring, and these policies may be, to some extent,
undermining Turkish security for the first time.
In what sense is the Arab Spring posing a challenge?
The Syrian crisis and the way in which Turkish foreign policy
overturned its image of the 2000s in the course of the last two years
[are the challenges].
Whether we accept it or not, Turkey is fanning the fires of
polarization and conflict in the eyes of the Middle East. I think it
will benefit Turkey enormously to take the bull by its horns. I am
afraid the old habits of the 1980s or the 1990s are coming back. [The
old habit of saying] `We are always in the right, we always mean well;
the problem is the others’ [is returning]. Turkey needs to accept that
it has started to be seen as creating anxiety in the Middle East.
Only two years ago, everyone was applauding Turkey. The prime minister
was appreciated for visiting Shiite regions [in Iraq] as a Sunni, and
it was on the verge of bringing Syria and Israel to the table. These
things are very important. Yet Turkey has wasted its capital in the
course of the last two years, and it will be very difficult to build
it up again.
Turkey has achieved a miracle in the last decade. It signed
[reconciliation] protocols with Armenia. The whole world was looking
with their mouths agape at Turkey, thinking it was possible to solve
problems that were thought of as frozen. You had the foreign minister
inventing a term called the `zero-problems’ policy which was adopted
by the international community. Turkey experienced a decade in which
it showed the world that it was becoming a player, encouraging
reconciliation, dialogue and even integration. This, I think, is
changing fast.
There is a feeling that Turkey is encouraging a polarization along
Shiite-Sunni lines in the Middle East. We may cry at the top of our
lungs that this is not what we are doing, but this is what the world
thinks, and we cannot keep blaming the world. We need to take a look
in the mirror. This is also spilling into Turkey somewhat. We have a
prime minister who only two years ago was expressing empathy with the
Kurds. Today he is talking about ensuring the lifting of [Kurdish
deputies’ parliamentary] immunity. I remain baffled as to how this
could have taken place so fast.
If we have to stop pinning the blame on others, what went wrong as far
as Turkey is concerned?
Maybe Turkey was not prepared to play the regional and global role it
aspired to play.
First, maybe we should be modest and recognize the complexities of the
world and of our own country, too.
I think the ambitions were set too high. There had to be a recognition
that many of the problems Turkey so courageously set out to address
have been around for a long time, and many actors have tried to
address these problems but have been unsuccessful. We should have been
a bit more realistic as too how far we could go in resolving these
problems: Be a little bit more humble and scale down your ambitions;
[in doing so, you won’t] experience so much disillusionment, but will
reduce the awkwardness that comes with a world that includes critics
that say, `Oh, you messed it up.’ Do a little bit more thinking.
We were involved with Syria very closely. I happen to believe in the
logic behind this. By engaging Syria, by opening up the borders and by
encouraging interaction, we believed that in the long run Syria would
reform itself. But I suspect a lot more thinking should have gone into
it. A lot more scenario-building should have gone into it.
“We should be modest and recognize the complexities of the
world and of our own country, too. I think the ambitions were
set too high,” says KiriÅ?çi. DAILY NEWS photo, S Emrah GÃ`REL
You said you were baffled by the sudden change.
I think part of the bafflement is a result of what has happened in
Syria. Syria is a real challenge. The stakes are extremely high, and
the ability of Turkey to shape the flow of events is extremely
limited. You realize how unrealistic it is to think of Turkey as a
game setter.
Second, it has to do with Turkey domestically. I believe that in
2005-2006, we were becoming a real pluralist democracy in Turkey,
where diversity was understood and respected, in the sense of ideas,
thoughts, ethnicity and religion. I am coming to recognize that this
is not the case.
There is a Lebanese political scientist called George Salama with a
book called `Democracy without Democrats.’ I think this is our
dilemma. I think we have a democracy of some sort, but we still do not
have our democrats and this is reverberating throughout our domestic
politics, as well as in our foreign policy.
[CNN’s Christiane] Amanpour interviewed our prime minister. She said
that right now, there were more journalists behind bars in Turkey than
in Iran and China, but our prime minister managed to come up with some
explanation. That may seem OK to many people, but the idea that there
are more journalists in prison in Turkey than in Iran and China means
there is a problem for me. We cannot keep sweeping these things under
the rug and find an explanation to minimize its significance. There
are many students behind bars because they have protested in one way
or another. There is something that is not right that needs to be
addressed. We have a prime minister saying that he is going to do
everything to get the immunities lifted for politicians that don’t
deserve them.
I thought we had become a pluralist democracy. [You have to accept]
there are different opinions [and accept] even the most uncomfortable
reality; and there is one ` a picture showing members of the Turkish
Parliament hugging people a good proportion of public opinion consider
terrorists. I know it’s extremely provocative, but this is not the way
a pluralist democracy handles it. I am not naïve; these are very
difficult problems. But a pluralist democracy manages to solve it in a
more peaceful way than others do.
WHO IS KEMAL KÄ°RÄ°Å?ÇÄ° ?
Kemal KiriÅ?ci is a professor in the Department of Political Science
and International Relations at BoÄ?aziçi University. He holds a Jean
Monnet Chair in European Integration and was also the director of the
Center for European Studies at the university between 2002 and 2008.
He received his Ph. D. from City University in London in 1986. His
areas of research interest include European integration, asylum and
immigration issues in the European Union, EU-Turkish relations,
Turkish foreign policy, ethnic conflicts, and refugee movements. He
has previously taught at universities in Britain, Canada, and the
United States.
Kemal Kirisci will be taking up the TÃ`SÄ°AD Senior Fellow position at
the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. from January 2013.
From: Baghdasarian
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