Turkey’s Proactive Foreign Policy under the AKP

Abstract

As we have already demonstrated in the previous chapters globalization has played an important role in shaping the course of Turkey’s transformation in recent decades. Specifically, we have discussed how economic globalization starting in the 1980s affected Turkish society and politics by enlarging and empowering particular socioeconomic groups. We have also analyzed the ways in which the AKP pursued economic globalization after it came to power in 2002 and eventually benefitted from successful neoliberal expansion in consolidating its electoral hegemony. We now turn to the impact of globalization on Turkish foreign policy, which under the AKP takes a new form and involves active globalization through proactive and multidimensional foreign policy and constitutes an integral part of Turkey’s transformation under the AKP. This growing proactivism should be seen as complementary to other elements of AKP’s transformation project, which generates substantial interdependency among domestic, regional, and international politics by integrating security, economy, and democracy.¹