TURKEY AS A REGIONAL POWER: NEO-OTTOMANISM IN ACTION

Dr. Srdja Trifkovic (An expert on foreign affairs, is the author of The Sword of the Prophet and Defeating Jihad. His latest book is The Krajina Chronicle: A History of the Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia) Copyright: www.rieas.gr Over the past decade Prime Minister Rejep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government and his AKP (Justice and Development Party) have been successful in undermining Mustafa Kemal’s legacy and the character of the state founded upon that legacy. What remained, until the 2010 referendum on constitutional amendments, was an increasingly empty shell of constitutional secularism. That shell was nevertheless an obstacle to the formal grounding of the new legitimacy in Islam at home and neo-Ottomanism abroad. Erdoğan and his team were determined to remove such vestiges, however, and on September 12, 2010, they succeeded. On that day Turkey’s voters approved, by a large margin, a 26-article package which ended the role of the Army as the guardian of secularism. In 2011 Erdoğan was duly reelected with a substantial majority for a third term. Davutoglu’s Strategic Depth What has become known as Turkey’s neo-Ottoman strategy became prominent with the appointment of Ahmet Davutoglu as foreign minister in 2009. As Erdogan’s long-term foreign policy advisor, he advocated diversifying Turkey’s geopolitical options by creating Turkish zones of influence in the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Middle East. On the day of his appointment Davutoglu asserted that Turkey’s influence in “its region” will continue to grow: Turkey had an “order-instituting role” in the Middle East, the Balkans and the Caucasus, he declared, quite apart from its links with the West. In Davutoglu’s own words, Turkish foreign policy has evolved from being “crisis-oriented” to being based on “vision”: “Turkey is no longer a country which only reacts to crises, but notices the crises before their emergence and intervenes in the crises effectively, and gives shape to the order of its surrounding region.” He asserted that Turkey had a “responsibility to help stability towards the countries and peoples of the regions which once had links with Turkey” — thus referring to the Ottoman era, in a manner unimaginable only a decade ago: “Beyond representing the 70 million people of Turkey, we have a historic debt to those lands where there are Turks or which was related to our land in the past. We have to repay this debt in the best way.”.......more see:www.rieas.gr