Nowadays, the international media are obsessed with the question of who “lost” Turkey and what that supposed loss means for Europe and the West. More alarmingly, some commentators have likened Turkey’s neighborhood policy as a revival of Ottoman imperialism. Recently, a senior Turkish columnist went so far as to quote the country’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, as saying that “we are indeed neo-Ottoman.”
As someone who was present when Davutoglu made his presentation to the parliamentary faction of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), I can attest to the fact that he did not use such terminology. In fact, Davutoglu and all of us in the AKP foreign-policy community never use this term as it is simply a misrepresentation of our position.
Turkey’s neighborhood policy is devised to reintegrate the country into its immediate neighborhoods, which includes the Balkans, the Black Sea area, the Caucasus, the Middle East, and the Eastern Mediterranean. We in Turkey aim to deepen our political dialogue, increase our trade relations, and multiply our people-to-people contacts with our neighbors in the form of sports, tourism, and cultural activities. When the German Social Democratic politician Egon Bahr formulated his Ostpolitik in the 1960s, no one asked the chancellor, Willy Brandt, whether Germany was lost.
God bestowed upon Turkey a geographical position that fundamentally requires us to engage with East and West as well as North and South. This is neither a choice Turkey has made nor a luxury – it is a necessity.
The symbol of the Byzantine and then the Seljuk Empires, which occupied roughly the same geographical area as Turkey does today, was a double-headed eagle looking in the directions of both east and west. It should be no wonder that Turkey is also seeking to engage both ends of its geographical extensions, and feels that its security is best consolidated by minimizing ambient risks together with its neighbors.
So, we find that the current debate on Turkey’s orientation is rather superfluous, and in some cases ill-intentioned. Our neighborhood policy needs support, not criticism. Turkey has become an invaluable asset in the make-up of our surrounding regions, and it is already changing the status quo in favor of more stability and predictability. Turkish efforts at normalization with Armenia, for example, are destined to bring about change in the entire South Caucasus. We are doing our part in terms of burden-sharing. Sensible Europeans can understand that.
To be sure, some of our neighbors are more difficult than others. But no country has the luxury of choosing its neighbors. Turkey’s neighborhood policy is a very realistic one, based on a genuine interests; it does not represent some form of romantic neo-Ottoman nostalgia, as more than a few international commentators have mistakenly suggested.
True, there is a neo-Ottoman revival in the cultural field, and our citizens are eager to rediscover Ottoman life, culture, and practices. As Turkey is normalizing domestically, it is also reinterpreting its national historical narrative. This is a natural byproduct of our efforts to consolidate our democracy. However, trying to paint our carefully constructed foreign-policy initiatives with overtones of an imperialism past is not only a stark misrepresentation of reality; it also does gross injustice to our well-intentioned efforts to stabilize our surrounding region.
In Roman mythology, Janus was the god of gates, doorways, beginnings, and endings. Turkey today has a Janus-like geography that offers gates and doorways to the East and to the West. It offers beginnings and it offers endings to the Caucasus, the Black Sea, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean.
In this capacity, Turkey compliments and contributes to creating a unique transitional passage between otherwise difficult regions, for it embodies and signifies centuries-old co-existence and adjustment. Turkish foreign policy contributes to that coming together as well as helping its immediate neighborhoods to connect with one another.
Contrary to the recent charges, Turkey’s foreign policymakers are not seeking to revive the Ottoman Empire. Instead, we seek Turkey’s historical reintegration into its immediate surroundings, thereby correcting an anomaly created during the Cold War years. Such re-integration could only benefit the European Union and our other Western and NATO allies. None of them, therefore, has any reason to express discomfort with Turkey’s approach.
Suat Kiniklioglu is the Justice and Development Party’s deputy chairman for external affairs, a member of the party’s Central Executive Committee, and member of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Turkish Parliament. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with Project Syndicate © (www.project-syndicate.org).
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