From De-Europeanisation to Anti-Western Populism: Turkish Foreign Policy in Flux

ABSTRACT

Recent Turkish foreign policy (TFP) under the successive AKP governments has seen different populist turns. A clear distinction can be made between the thin and thick populisms of TFP, based on the status of the West. The first decade of AKP rule, when foreign policy was thinly populist, was characterised by steady de-Europeanisation, increasing engagement with regional issues and a decentring of Turkey’s Western orientation. The turn toward thick populism has been characterised by anti-Westernist discourses in which the West is resituated as the ‘other’ of Turkish political identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Turkish foreign policy
• populism
• populist foreign policy
• anti-Westernism

Acknowledgments

This research has been conducted with the support of the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

Notes

¹ Our distinction between thin and thick populism is related to the degree populism penetrates foreign policy discourse and making in Turkey. This should not be confused with Mudde’s (2004) definition of populism as a “thin-centered ideology”.

² De-Europeanisation is broadly defined as the loss or weakening of the impact of the European Union (EU)/Europe as a normative/political context for TFP.

³ Kemalism can be defined as the state ideology of the Turkish Republic named after its founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

⁴ The concepts of securitisation and de-securitisation were introduced by the Copenhagen School. Securitisation is defined as a speech act whereby issues political in nature are classified as existential threats “requiring emergency measures and justifying actions outside the normal bounds of political procedure”. Desecuritisation refers to moving “issues out from the threat-defense sequence into the ordinary public sphere”. See Buzan et al. (1998, 24, 26 and 29) and Kaliber (2005).

⁵ For a detailed discussion on the role of foreign policy in the constitution of the national self and its other/others, see Kaliber (2019).

⁶ Large public protests sprang up spontaneously after plans to uproot the trees in Gezi Park in the centre of Istanbul became public, and later engulfed the whole country. These protests were reciprocated by police brutality and harsh discourses against the protesters on the part of AKP leaders. The EU and some of its member states stressed their concerns over the worsening level of democratic rights and freedoms, and criticised the Turkish government and police in particular for its disproportionate use of force against demonstrators.

⁷ The authors are thankful to the referees for bringing this point to their attention.

⁸ PKK stands for Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and FETO is the acronym for the Fethullah Gülen Terrorist Organisation, the name officially assigned by Turkey to the Gülen Movement, named after Fethullah Gülen.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alper Kaliber

Alper Kaliber is an associate professor of International Relations at Altınbaş University, Istanbul, Turkey.

Esra Kaliber

Esra Kaliber is a lecturer in the Department of International Relations at Altınbaş University, Istanbul, Turkey. Email: [email protected]