The structure-identity nexus: Syria and Turkey’s collapse (2011)

Abstract

The relation between Syria and Turkey transformed from enmity in the 1990s to détente in the early 2000s, grew into amity after the rise to power of the Turkish Justice and Development Party (AKP, Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi) in 2002, and reverted to enmity in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. This research suggests that a combination of structural and identity-based factors, at regional and domestic levels, induced the collapse of the decade-long amity. This paper builds on the notion of a “structure-identity nexus”; and determines the orientation of foreign policy outcomes from the 1990s until 2011. The discussion outlines the merits of a hybrid theoretical perspective by elaborating on Barkin’s idea of ‘realist constructivism’, which draws on two rival traditions, realism and constructivism. The structure-identity framework explains the double transformation in the relationship, considering the return to inter- and intra-state conflict in 2011. The research draws on extensive primary and secondary sources, as well as interviews carried out with key figures. In addition to the relationship between Syria and Turkey, the structure-identity nexus provides potential broader explanations that fuel the shift from amity to enmity in the complex network of states found in the Middle East.

1. Introduction: shifts in Syria and Turkey’s moment

‘A common destiny, history and future’—this slogan characterized the relation that linked Syria and Turkey in the years that preceded the Syrian Revolution.¹ Inspired by the Arab Spring, popular protests on an unprecedented scale swept Syria after March 2011. With demands for social justice and equal opportunity, the Revolution spread to other parts of the country; but the dream of change and hope transformed into tragedy when the government repressed peaceful demonstrations and youth activism, and the country went from armed insurgency to counter-insurgency and total war. In the space of a few months, the Turkey–Syria relationship that improved after the Adana Accords in 1998, and evolved into high levels of cooperation between 2004 and 2011, ended in a complete reversal and return to enmity.

This unpredictable turn of events in 2011 raises an interesting theoretical and empirical puzzle: Why did the relationship between the two neighbours and their intensive political and economic ties suddenly collapse? How and why did rapid and unpredictable shifts from cooperation to conflict take place? And what conceptual tools provide the most explanatory power in such cases of rapid and unpredictable shifts from cooperation to conflict? The debate on the evolution of Syria and Turkey’s relationship tackles challenging issues relating to major debates in international relations (IR) theory on the determinants of foreign policy, notably the relative weights of the systemic, regional or domestic levels of analysis. The discussion outlines the merits of a hybrid theoretical perspective by elaborating on Barkin’s (2010) idea of “realist constructivism”, which draws on two rival traditions: realism and constructivism.

This paper suggests that a combination of structural and identity-based factors, at regional and domestic levels, induced the collapse of the amity forged between Syria and Turkey since 2002 and, more broadly, foreign policy outcomes.The interplay between context, identity and policy factors captures interactions at multiple levels of analysis, specifically relating to the weight of ideational and material factors in determining foreign policy choices. From a structural perspective, the relation between Syria and Turkey considerably benefited from the need to find common ground in a changed regional context, after the establishment of an autonomous Kurdish province in northern Iraq after the US War in Iraq (2003). Yet their relation would never have gone beyond détente without a transformation accompanying the rise of new leaders. The Justice and Development Party (AKP, Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi) won parliamentary elections in 2002 and redefined Turkish identity in terms of regional leadership of a shared Islamic civilization. Turkey pursued this policy in the interest of zero problems with neighbours; it also bid for regional leadership on the basis of economic interdependencies and soft power through the “Turkish model” of Islam and democracy. Alternatively, in other periods, political elites reshaped their identities and enmities, over mutually exclusive values farmed around “water rights” and “national security” concerns in the 1990s, and “human rights” in 2011, hence transforming their interactions into negative tit for tat, over border security, Syrian opposition groups and the Kurdish issue. In later years (2012–2016), the re-emergence of contentious issues takes centre stage, such as the shared waters of the Euphrates and Tigris and non-state actors like the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) with its military branch (YPG), the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the Army of Conquest coalition (Jaish al-Fatah) which includes Jabhat al-Nusra (recently self-rebranded as Jabhat Fateh Al-Sham).²

This amity quickly devolved to enmity after 2011, which shows the undeniable importance of human agency and ideas, or the capacity for individuals to act and think independently of structures. The structure of mutual interactions incurred no major shift; rather, domestic agency within Syria created a situation to which leaders on both sides reacted with different policy choices. The mass protests in Syria and the regime’s ensuing repression led Turkey to sacrifice the material advantages of the relation with Syria from profitable trade to the joint containment of Kurdish separatism. This decision stemmed from the particular worldview of the AKP.

The research not only accounts for the changed Turkish–Syrian relations, or the determinants of foreign policy-making in the Middle East, but also paves the way for understanding the sudden shift from cooperation to conflict. This article introduces the theoretical framework, then discusses the merits of a hybrid theoretical perspective, and subsequently deploys the framework to explain the double transformation in the relationship, considering especially the return to conflict after 2011. In order to capture the evolution of elite interactions and policy shifts since the Syrian tragedy unfolded in 2011, this paper draws extensively on official statements on both sides, and the author’s interviews with key figures, as well as secondary sources on Syria and Turkey.

2. The need for a theoretical framework: the structure-identity nexus

Several contributions to the study of Syria and Turkey’s foreign policy explored the rise and practices of cooperation between Turkey and Syria in the 2000s. While the present research elaborates on these findings, it also addresses the sudden collapse in bilateral relations following the Syrian Revolution, and designs a conceptual framework that successfully captures inter-linkages at all levels: systemic, regional and domestic.

Hinnebush and Tur’s (2013) collection of essays provides important insights from a Syrian and Turkish perspective on the economic, cultural and strategic dimensions of amity and enmity. Previous research also explored Syria’s domestic and regional politics (Hinnebusch and al-Taqi 2013; Moubayed 2013), Turkey’s foreign policy since the 2000s (Altunisik 2013; Altunisik and Martin 2011; Aras 2011; Ehteshami and Elik 2011; Han 2013; Parlar Dal 2012), changes in broader regional power (Bank and Aradag 2013) and mutual power asymmetries (Tur 2013), and strategic and economic cooperation (Kirişci 2012). Several authors outlined the impacts on foreign policy decisions of changes at both domestic and systemic levels (Altunisik and Tur 2006; Hinnebush and Tur 2013, 222), concluding sometimes that domestic impacts prevailed (Altunisik and Martin 2011). Han analysed the transformation of Turkey’s foreign policy since the early 2000s from a neo-realist perspective, outlining the importance of domestic elites in congruence with the balance of power in which they interact (Han 2013, 55, 58). His research showed how opposing beliefs and worldviews by AKP and traditional (Kemalist) elites considerably impacted foreign policy choices (Han 2013, 58–59). Whilst accounting for the role of domestic elites in Syria and Turkey, the “structure-identity nexus” establishes links with structural changes at regional and international levels.

In the framework outlined in the following section (Figure 1), these variables interact reciprocally. Structural power distributions at global, regional and also domestic levels when filtered through the identity-shaped notions of enmity or amity determine foreign policy outcomes; these policies range between different levels of intensity in cooperation and conflict dynamics.

Figure 1. The structure-identity nexus: determinants of foreign policy changes in the Middle East

Allowing for the role of agency implies that one recognizes the power of domestic actors to respond to systemic change in various ways depending on identity-shaped perception of threats and opportunities; they also, in turn, affect the systemic structure. In the case of Syria and Turkey, and more broadly the Middle East post-Arab Spring, non-state actors also increasingly impact regional and domestic structures. Domestic policy processes, therefore, also become drivers of foreign policy outcomes, while changing identities congruent with shifts in systemic (global or regional) power distributions tend to precipitate new regional alignments.

Hence, the determinants of foreign policy changes outlined in the framework lead us to examine the role of identity in Syria and Turkey’s interactions before and in the immediate aftermath of 2011. The previous key periods provide the context for understanding the collapse of 2011—a time frame during which conflict had turned remarkably into active cooperation. Figure 2 summarizes key moments in the bilateral relationship since Turkey joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1952 until the Arab Spring, with shifts from enmity to détente, rapprochement, amity and reversion to enmity.³ The latter sections of the study provide a detailed analysis for each sub-period.

Figure 2. A timeline of Syria-Turkey relations (1950s–2011)

Having introduced the framework and timeline, the following section discusses the merits of a hybrid theoretical perspective.

3. The debate: identity, structure, conflict, cooperation and the Syria–Turkey case

The literature on the IR and politics of the Middle East shows that multiple levels of analysis, the intervention of global level actors with varying responses by regional states, and the interaction of identity and security in foreign policy-making drive the emergence of the regional states system (Barnett 1998; Hinnebush and Ehteshami 2002, 7). The need for a multi-layered framework for understanding the rise and fall of Syria and Turkey’s moment remains paramount to comprehend the delicate balance of power between states within the Middle East. In order to explain whether the negotiation of preferences leads to conflict or cooperation, the research draws upon two rival traditions, realism and constructivism. Some may consider that polarization between realism and constructivism belongs to the past. Lively debates continue, however, to characterize discussions on the incompatibilities or compatibilities of these two different schools of thought.

Applied separately, each theoretical perspective fails to provide sufficient explanatory power for the sudden breakdown in Turkey–Syria relations. Broadly speaking, realism tends to focus on the structural distribution of power and state maximization of interests, whereas constructivists identify interrelated sources of change, particularly agency, process, structures and practices (Barnett 2009; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). Norms define standards; they get crystallized in a process of internationalization and internalization (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). They constrain behaviour, but similarly to identity, norms are also connected to a sense of self. As relationships between political elites transform, they, in turn, reshape political identities.

On the one hand, realist insights help us to understand foreign policies by mapping state location in the material power balance at the system level. But the primacy of states and material capabilities limits their applicability to our case study. For structural (neo-)realists, realist interpretations of balance of power do not adequately account for the role of domestic elites and definitions of identity impacting regional changes (Walt 1987). However, by stressing the primacy of the structure of the international system, whether bipolar, unipolar or multipolar, neo-realism tends to lock foreign policy into a fixed interaction between the international distribution of power and national interests (Waltz 1979; Mearsheimer 2001).

On the other hand, an ideational approach that focuses solely on domestic and identity-based drivers without accounting for the impact of systemic change at the global and regional levels falls short of fully explaining the sudden transition to enmity—a contribution made by this research. Constructivism stresses the centrality of inter-subjectivity, or a process in which agents and structure are mutually constitutive. Constructivism tends to characterize identity and interests as socially constructed. For constructivists, identities evolve over time as social interactions develop and contexts change (Teske 1997). While conventional constructivists analyse identity as a stable element driving state behaviour and understandings of security (Katzenstein 1996), identity, in the author’s perspective, is more appropriately seen, as critical constructivists do, as continuously re-interpreted through evolving representations of threats which, in turn, determine security dynamics (Barnett 1998). The politics of identity reflect the revisionist and irredentist processes driven by various ‘frustrated’ ethnic, linguistic, religious and tribal identities (Hinnebusch 2013, 149–158). Within this exceptionally diverse regional system, identity-based narratives define domestic and foreign policies, determining the rise and decline of state power (Barnett 1998).

Proponents of “analytical eclecticism” and pragmatism emphasize the value of combining methods of apparently incompatible research traditions (Sil and Katzenstein 2010). Hence, a third perspective offers promising insights. Barkin’s conceptualization of “realist constructivism” captures the complementarity between these two rival traditions by emphasizing the role of power in the construction of social reality. He compares and contrasts the relationships between agency, embodying ideas and structural constraints; and shows how power relationships produce norms, which, in turn, change existing power structures (2010, 48, 165, 169). This perspective echoes the on-going debates on the sources and nature of ‘power resources’ versus ‘relational power’ (Baldwin 2013, 274; Daoudy 2005, 41–49). Mutual perceptions, rather than simply given material power distributions, are an important part of power and identity; they are shaped by the specifics of history and geography in individual cases (Daoudy 2013, 133–134). In the 1990s, for example, Syria’s support to the Kurdish insurgency represented an exercise in relational power. By resorting to negative tit for tat, Syria managed to temporarily overcome Turkey’s overwhelming structural power in terms of military and economic resources, and upstream position on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers (Daoudy 2009, 365).

This combined perspective offers the opportunity to address strategic factors, while accounting for power based on agency driven by ideational factors. Barkin outlines the potential for overlap between classical realism and constructivism, rejecting the ‘misleading opposition between idealism and materialism’ and the mutual exclusivity of the logics of consequences by actors pursing interests, and the logics of appropriateness of actors playing roles (Barkin 2010, 154, 166). The limits of realism become apparent when it conceptualizes actors as mere recipients of sets of constraints within the system (Barkin 2010, 129). Constructivism, however, tends to ‘over theorise’ when claims for generalizability are made away from historical contextualization (Barkin 2010, 150–151); arguably, it tends to neglect the material realities of power politics. A promising meeting of minds between the two traditions is found in Buzan and Weaver’s joint research, which combined the structural balance of power with identity-rooted patterns of enmity and amity to explain regional conflict and cooperation (2003, 165). Interestingly, this framework served to explain patterns of amity and enmity between Syria and Turkey (Altunisik 2013, 190).

In order to understand sudden shifts in relationships between states, a key discussion here refers to the agent–structure problem, or the need to understand how agents and structures relate to each other. This debate reflects on the extent to which systemic structure constrains state behaviour and how far domestic non-state actors also become agents of change. The framework developed in this paper takes the analysis beyond the (neo-)realist primacy of the international structure by adding regional and domestic layers, and acknowledging the role of identity and ideology. It also moves beyond constructivist perspectives by accounting for material/structural realities in power relations and the need to provide historical contextualization. In an earlier version of this paper, the author explored the role of domestic actors and their power in responding to systemic change through identity-shaped perception of threats and opportunities (Daoudy 2014, 5–7). These, in turn, affect the systemic structure through norm entrepreneurship. The combination of material and ideational factors was also applied to the analysis of Syria and Saudi Arabia’s threat perceptions during the Iran–Iraq War (Darwich 2016).

This debate raises the question of whether exogenous factors constrained Syria and Turkey’s foreign policy choices since 2011, or whether endogenous variables at the level of regional and domestic actors, such as elites and their ideology, and non-state actors, also impacted on decision-making processes. The following sections explore the empirical reality of these different theoretical perspectives through the Syria–Turkey case.

4. The collapse (2011): return to exclusionary identities and negative tit for tat

While studies of the region have traditionally paid more attention to structural factors, whether the constraints on the ambitions of regional states from the power balance with neighbours or the seeming durability of authoritarian regimes, the Arab Spring’s effects brought human agency to the forefront. Domestic factors changed the bilateral relation; they also impacted on domestic and regional structures. The power of agency to remake regional structures thrived in the way the decisions of actors, the Syrian protestors, the Assad regime and the AKP government quickly led to a surprising unravelling of this structure. Not only did the Syrian Revolution put the regime’s survival in question, it also altered the regional balance of power amongst the two main rival alliances, the pro-Western and anti-Western dominated axes. Turkey gradually shifted away from the latter and towards the former.

Starting in March 2011, the popular uprisings in Syria represented another turning point in Syria’s relationship with Turkey. The Syrian uprisings were triggered by the arbitrary imprisonment and torture in the small town of Deraa of school children for drawing graffiti inspired by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions; a chain of unpredicted events spiralled into a full-blown uprising when groups of individuals took action for change and popular protests spread to the rest of the country, countered by increasingly brutal repression from the Assad regime. In the wake of the Syrian uprisings, the amicability with Turkey gradually eroded, and perceptions of identities shifted on both sides of the borders, leading to negative tit for tat over territorial claims, Syrian opposition groups and the Kurds, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. The structure-identity nexus: 2011

Figure 4. The structure-identity nexus: 1950s–2002

Figure 5. The structure-identity nexus: 2002–2011

When Erdogan’s party won another term in the elections of June 2011, the Syrian uprisings had been on-going for more than three months. The main drivers of policy with Syria previously centred on the question of Kurds in Iraq, and later economic interests. However, following the Arab Spring and the initial success of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, norms relating to social justice, human rights and accountability disseminated regionally, which necessitated a response from Turkey; its regional soft power had been damaged by a response to the Libyan revolt that seemed to prioritize economic interests (Kirişci 2012, 327). Ankara rapidly recalculated its position to align with the new normative climate. Confident about his personal ties with the Syrian President and aversion to witness the deterioration of relations with Syria, which had been the centrepiece of Turkey’s regional engagement, the Turkish leader called for political reform and national dialogue with the demonstrators in Syria. He later denounced continuing repression of the peaceful demonstrations. As his warnings failed to be heard, Erdogan took umbrage and the tone of Turkish discourse towards Syria became more hectoring (Han 2013, 67; Robins 2013, 394).⁴

As repression intensified in Syria, Turkey’s main strategy consisted of the dangerous game of playing off rival Syrian factions. Ankara renounced the country’s traditional defence of the principle of sovereignty, and the repercussions resounded both at domestic and regional levels.

4.1 Return to enmity: domestic impacts in Turkey and Syria

The AKP officially adhered to the globally dominant liberal norms of democratization and humanitarian protection. Additionally, however, Turkey anticipated that the rise of kindred moderate democratic Islamists across the region and in Syria would give a major boost to Turkey’s soft power in the region. For Erdogan, Assad became a despot spearheading the deaths of his own people who did not align with his tyrannical agenda.

Negative tit for tat by the respective elites reconstructed exclusionary definitions of identity. Gone were references to a common history and future. Erdogan’s domestic position also mirrored the tangent of his foreign policy, which became contentious in Turkish politics. As such, Erdogan’s policy remains best understood through the altered identity lens by which the AKP calculated the opportunities and risks that Turkey encountered.

For Davutoglu, Assad had ‘come to the end of the road’ (BBC 2011) and, anticipating that his regime would soon fall, Turkey opted to host the Muslim Brotherhood-led Syrian National Council (SNC) leadership in exile with which it had forged a close relationship. Some months later, defectors from the Syrian army were also allowed to use Turkish territory to group themselves into the Free Syrian Army, from where they began to engage with Assad’s forces. Turkey organized the second Friends of Syria meetings in April 2012, which sought international designation of the SNC as Syria’s legitimate government-in-exile.

4.2 The end of “zero problems”

The collapse of Turkey–Syria relations ended the desecuritization of trans-state interdependencies, such as open borders and intensive trade agreements established in the period of amity. While the early success of the zero-problems policy initiated by Turkey’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Davutoglu,⁵ of which Syria was the emblem, helped elevate the AKP’s domestic standing, so the return to conflict and the failure of this policy left Erdogan more vulnerable to his opponents. Domestically, the AKP government confronted a public opinion increasingly concerned by the influx of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, and the potential revival of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan, PKK) insurgency. In addition to their plight, the Syrian refugees in Turkey also became a security concern for their host, raising alarms within public opinions about increased influx and clashes on Turkish territory (Milliyet 2012).

The Syrian Revolution, rather than leading, as Turkish leaders expected, to the removal of Assad, morphed instead into a full-fledged war on Turkey’s doorstep. This outcome became the object of increasing criticism by the Kemalist opposition, the Republican People’s Party. The Kemalists attacked the policy of choosing sides and interfering in Syria’s internal affairs, and the resulting turbulence on the border that empowered Kurdish militants.

Erdogan’s declaration that Syrian affairs were a matter of Turkey’s internal politics, thereby utterly overturning Kemalist traditions of non-interference, created controversy in Turkey. His rivals sought to use the rising toll of his Syrian policy against him. Secularists and Turkey’s Alevi minority, and especially the Alawite Arabs of Hatay province, were also alarmed at Erdogan’s rapprochement with Sunni Islamists in the war in Syria, and tended to support Assad.

Once Turkey burned its bridges with Assad, “zero problems” could not be restored without regime change in Syria. Turkey now considered the Assad regime to be an obstacle to its ambitious programme of regional leadership and economic expansion (Altunisik 2013, 190). The post-Arab Spring official discourses by Davutoglu and Erdogan reflected this ambition, when they advocated Turkey’s achievements and leadership in the Middle East.⁶ Now Turkey’s soft power would take the form of robust, coercive-backed regime change in Syria which, if successful, would set renewed future economic integration on more solid foundations. The Turkish leadership perceived a rise across the region of various avatars of the Muslim Brotherhood with which the AKP had an affinity, and expected the Syrian Brothers could bring a friendly and identity-congruent regime to power in Damascus.⁷ Strategic concerns for increased regional leadership through the export of a “Turkish model” of Islamic/Sunni type of democracy reinforced the Turkish/Islamic identity promoted by the AKP inside and outside Turkey, accentuating, in that respect, a growing identity divide from the Syrian regime and its Iranian ally. As a result, the Syrian crisis also reignited Turkey’s competition with Iran for regional leadership (Hokayem 2012, 10).

Similarly, Turkish scholars and former politicians criticized Erdogan’s strong stance against Assad from the early stages of the uprisings. Analysts also outlined the dilemma for the AKP-led government in providing ethical support to the Arab Spring at the cost of decreased trade-generated incomes in the unstable regional environment (Kirişci 2012, 327; Parlar Dal 2012, 257). Annual losses for the severance of relations with Syria were estimated at US $7–8 billion per year.⁸ Trade targets for the sole year of 2012 mounted to US $5 billion, and the bulk of Turkey’s southeastern business was invested in the main Syrian cities. Rather than adopting a cautious step-by-step approach to the Syrian crisis, insiders within the ranks of AKP warned against the adoption of seemingly dangerous strategic choices, rooted in the ‘failure to grasp the intricacies of the Syrian crisis which relates back to a general misunderstanding of the Arab world despite a decade of AKP rule’.⁹ Turkey also forfeited its chance to act as a potential mediator and power broker between the warring factions in the Syrian opposition.¹⁰

4.3 Syria: regime survival first and foremost

In Syria, regime survival became the priority for ruling elites. In an interview with Turkey’s Cumhuriyet newspaper in July 2012, the Syrian President blamed Turkey for the collapse of their relationship:

During the past fifteen months, i.e. since the crisis began, we tried to work on more than one front. First, to solve the internal crisis in Syria and confront the terrorists. Second, to try and maintain what we have achieved in the Syrian-Turkish relations. We found that with every speech, with every step, with every decision taken by the current Turkish government there was an attempt to destroy these relations. (SANA, 5 July 2012)

As reinforcing identity divergences mounted, the material interdependencies painstakingly constructed in the period of amity unravelled. Turkey suspended the High Level Strategic Council and ceased all trade with Syria, effectively ending a decade of economic integration. Borders that had just been de-securitized and turned into joint economic zones were re-militarized. Although not specifically mentioned in official discourses, territorial claims over the previously claimed Sanjak of Alexandretta or Hatay province re-emerged in Syrian official media (Lundgren Jörum 2014). Turkey was again a “neo-Ottoman imperialist” power with an Islamist agenda favouring the exiled Syrian Muslim Brothers against the secular Syrian regime (Cebeci and Ustun 2012, 18; Moubayed 2013, 75–76; Oktav 2013, 199).

For Assad, Erdogan promoted an extremist Sunni-Islamist agenda that threatened the very survival of his secular Alawite-dominated regime. In the beginning, religious wars drove neither the Syrian Revolution nor the deterioration in Turkey–Syria relations, although they would later acquire more salience. Assad, however, quickly relied on the support of Alawi core supporters in the security services and blamed demonstrations and opposition to the government on foreign-led Jihadi and Islamic groups with whom he indiscriminately classified all opposition, thereby justifying the brutal repression of protesting unarmed civilians. This propelled an increasing sectarian discourse on both sides; many within the armed resistance turned to Islamic discourse to mobilize support. Over time, Islamic militias took the lead in the uprising and conquered areas in the north and northeastern parts of the country, where they imposed a practice of religion quite foreign to the country’s tradition of moderate and tolerant Islam.

The Islamization of the armed insurgency intensified with external funding originating from Arab Gulf states. The alteration in alliances—with Syria’s regime dependent on Iran, Hizbollah and Iraq, and Turkey in alignment with Saudi Arabia and Qatar—followed a region-wide discourse of Shia against Sunni which began to re-shape identities and enmities, not only at the level of leadership but also at popular levels. Sectarian identity did not drive elite relations but rather emerged from geopolitical games; yet the use of this tool risked creating enduring enmities, a new structural situation that threatened to lock Syria and the Middle East into an era of protracted conflict.

The collapse of the relationship triggered a revival, on each side of the Syrian and Turkish border, of hard balancing through inter- and intra-state dynamics. Initially, Bashar al-Assad hinted to possible restoration of relations with Turkey ‘if in the interest of the Syrian people’ (SANA, 20 January 2014), but his Minister of Foreign Affairs later accused Turkey of instigating the Syrian conflict (SANA, 26 September 2014) and contributing to a ‘triangle of conspiracy’ (SANA, 8 October 2013), by supporting ‘terrorists’ (SANA, 13 September 2013).

Assad’s regime proved to be more resilient than Erdogan had expected. More than four years after the Syrian Revolution, Turkey continues to deal with a turbulent and insecure border, with warring Kurdish and Islamist factions on both sides. As in the 1990s, the Turkey–Syria conflict transformed the Kurdish question into a bargaining chip; Kurds situated within both countries took advantage of it for their own agenda in the period that followed the collapse. The Syrian President officially denied the accusation of supporting PKK and blamed ‘security failure in Turkey’ on ‘the policies of the Turkish government’ (SANA, 8 October 2012). But as Turkey hosted the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Syrian Muslim Brothers, Syria provided carte blanche to PKK’s Syrian affiliate, the PYD, after Assad withdrew his forces from the Kurdish-populated northeastern parts of the country. In November 2013, the PYD established effective military and administrative control in three border areas (Afrin, Kobani, Jazira), and declared an autonomous Western Kurdistan (Rojava) region. In the process, the Syrian regime’s strategic ties to Iran, Hizbollah and Iraq intensified, and left the four on the defensive against the rising Arab Gulf concert.

The post-2011 collapse offered a sharp contrast with previous decade. Regional developments linked to 9/11 and the US-led War in Iraq had initiated a shift in regional power balances, which impacted Turkey–Syria relations. The following sections start by outlining the structure and identity-based factors that fuelled enmity during the Cold War until 1998: and the shifts propelling amity after the rise of Syria’s new leadership under Bashar al-Assad and Turkey’s elected AKP.

5. Before 2011: from enmity to amity, negative to positive tit for tat

Analysts of Turkey are divided over whether structural factors primarily shaped Turkey’s foreign policy during the Cold War (Aydin 2000, 104) or whether a dual process transpired in which domestic factors interacted with regional developments in the post-Cold War era until the late 2000s (Altunisik 2013, 178; Bank and Aradag 2013, 291; Hinnebusch and al-Taqi 2013, 105). This research argues here that during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, structural shifts from bipolarity to unipolar US power in the Middle East intertwined with domestic factors to determine the nature of mutual relations between Turkey and Syria.¹¹ The impacts of shifts in structure and identity and foreign policy outcomes from the 1950s to 2002 are outlined for each actor in the following figures (Figure 4; and the next figure, Figure 5, for the subsequent period).

5.1. Cold War and beyond: enmity to détente

During the Cold War, the two states of Turkey and Syria were on opposing sides. Domestic concerns over sovereignty and elite survival arguably oriented Turkey’s foreign policy towards the West in the Cold War and post-Cold War era (Ehteshami and Elik 2011, 645). In part due to their contrary identities leading them to opposite strategic alignments, Turkey’s pro-Western Kemalist military establishment and Syria’s pan-Arab/Baathist identity induced the two neighbours to balance against each other and seek support from their respective allies in Washington and Moscow.

In the post-Cold War era, alignments became more complex; they were driven by regional and international structural shifts. Turkey’s increased alignment within NATO, its active participation with a US-led coalition against Iraq in 1991, and its Military Training Agreement with Israel in 1996 seemed congruent with Syria’s similar decision to bandwagon with the US in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War (Altunisik 2013, 185; Hinnebusch and al-Taqi, 2013, 95). This new foreign policy focus contrasted with Syria’s mid-1990s effort to counter perceived Turkey–Israel encirclement by joining Iran and Hezbollah on a common front. Turkey’s active deployment in Northern Iraq aimed at containing spill over of Kurdish fighting in Iraq. Syria, on the other hand, worried particularly about Israel, especially from 1982 to 2000 when Israel occupied South Lebanon. As of 1984, Syria supported Kurdish insurgency within Turkey, through the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK, Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan) and its leader Abdullah Öcalan, to force an agreement over the shared waters of the Euphrates and Tigris resisted by upstream Turkey (Daoudy 2009). Syria’s decision to back the PKK did not stem from a sense of shared identity, but rather constituted a card in its power struggle with Turkey. The latter, in turn, perceived Syria’s support to PKK as a threat to its border security. Hence, trans-state interdependencies between Turkey and Syria over the shared Euphrates waters and Kurdish insurgency through the PKK in Turkey gradually locked them into conflictual inter-relations. Securitization through negative tit for tat, with back-and-forth retaliatory strategies, became the dominant strategy across their mutual borders (Daoudy 2013).

In 1998, empowered by its alliance with the US and Israel, Turkey threatened military action over Syrian backing of the PKK and mobilized troops at the border. Syria moved against Kurdish militancy on its soil, and expulsed PKK’s leader, Abdullah Öcalan from Syria.¹² Thereafter, the two rival neighbours reached an understanding over security and borders by signing the Adana Security Treaty (Daoudy 2009, 380; Aras 2011, 598). They initiated a period of mutual détente as soon as the Kurdish issue and the Euphrates waters no longer stimulated negative tit for tat in their mutual interactions (Daoudy 2013). In July 2000, Turkish President Sezer attended Hafiz al-Assad’s funeral.

So far, the narrative is congruent with realistic assessments: structural changes led to power balancing and, at best, détente between rival powers. But the nascent cooperation between Syria and Turkey deepened as changed domestic elites rose to power in Turkey; and a new vision for its foreign policy developed.

Figure 5 outlines shifts in identity and structure from 2002 to 2011, with policy outcomes evolving from rapprochement to amity.

5.2. From rapprochement to amity

On 1 March 2003, the Turkish Parliament’s historic decision to reject any military attacks on Northern Iraq by Anglo-American troops from Turkish territory represented a turning point in its strategic relationship with the US. Following the US-led invasion of Iraq, a shared fear of a US-backed new regional Kurdish separatism intensified normalization between Syria and Turkey. The Tripartite Alliance between Turkey, Syria and Iran aimed to balance against the perceived destabilization of the region brought on by the US policy in close alignment with Israel under the Bush Jr. administration.

By the second half of the 2000s, the structural shift away from unipolarity created conditions that transformed the initial normalization into rapprochement between Turkey and Syria. This trend intensified when Turkey declined to join Western pressures in 2005 to isolate Syria over the killing of Lebanese Premier Rafiq al-Hariri (al-Taqi and Hinnebusch 2013, 95). Contestation of American hegemony deepened, as a result, in good part, of the failure of the US policy in Iraq. The recession of US power left a vacuum in which its unipolar hegemony over the region started to be contested by the emergence of rival poles of regional power, and especially by a “trilateral” alignment through which Turkey, Syria and Iran counterbalanced US policy and its destabilizing consequences in the region. In addition to Iran becoming Turkey’s second major supplier of natural gas after Russia, Erdogan also aspired for Turkey to act as a mediator in the Iranian nuclear issue (Barrinha 2014, 9).

Alterations in identity at the domestic level, combined with regional structural changes, led further to a deepening amity between the two states. Both sides expressed ambitions to integrate into a common regional space, opening the door to intensive trade relations and open border policies. Tourism flourished in Damascus, Aleppo and Ankara, and positive media images and soap operas replaced negative ones.

5.3 Turkey’s new elites: soft power, cultural and economic integration

This change in the relationship with Syria came about as new foreign policy goals were designed by Turkey's new elites along cultural and ideological lines, in parallel with ambition to find markets for the soaring export capacity of AKP’s constituencies, mainly the ‘Anatolian Tigers’ or merchants, through economic integration with neighbours. Foreign policy choices helped to promote domestic legitimacy, winning, in particular, the support of middle-class business networks in Anatolia (Altunisik and Martin 2011, 571). More broadly, AKP wanted Turkey to reach the status of one of the ten largest economies in the world by 2023 (Barrinha 2014, 2). Personified by its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the new Turkish leadership promoted a system of government based on the representation of Islamic values and democratic rule.

Rejecting Kemalist perceptions of Turkey’s historical and geo-strategic location within the West, and moving away from previous aborted attempts to join the European Union, the AKP-ruled government sought to engage with its non-European neighbours, especially in the post-Ottoman Arab areas (Han 2013, 58). Based on a sense of ‘historical responsibility and geographical continuity’ (Davutoglu 2010, 41), as well as ‘exceptionalism’ drawn from the Ottoman heritage (Han 2013, 58) and its identification with the Ottoman-Islamic history, culture and values, Turkey aimed to address the power vacuum and ingrained instability left behind by the fall of the Ottoman Empire (Oktav 2013, 197; Robins 2013)—the latter being greatly exacerbated, as the AKP saw it, by the policies of the Bush Jr Administration through a sustained US-led destabilization of the region from 2003 until the withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 by the Obama administration. However, Foreign Minister Davutoglu, the intellectual figure behind AKP’s new foreign policy vision, publicly rejected the label of ‘neo-Ottomanism’, possibly to appease Arab sensitivities on the issue (SETA 2009).¹³ In place, Turkey promoted a Middle Eastern identity, as well as a ‘civilizational self-perception’, as per his own words in 1997.¹⁴ A new language of cooperation shaped Davutoglu’s “zero-problem policy” enshrined in his aim to resolve all pending and potential conflicts with Turkey’s neighbours.¹⁵ The objectives consisted of stability, security and “soft power” in the region (Davutoglu 2008).¹⁶ Turkey, therefore, projected itself as one of the region’s main powers, actively engaged in regional and economic integration, as well as mediation (Davutoglu 2013). And for this purpose, Syria became the entry point to the wider Arab world. This alteration in perceived self- and mutual identities favoured movement well beyond the mere rapprochement between the respective elites that Pax Adana (1998) had allowed. Now, negative tit for tat was transformed into positive trade-offs, and past territorial claims were put to rest (Daoudy 2013, 137, 142). The change of leadership on both sides paved the way for new ties. A combination of structural changes, such as the rise of US hegemony in the Middle East post the 2003 Iraq War, and the rise to power of an apparently modern heir to the Syrian presidency allowed for a shift in mutual interactions.

5.4 The rise of new elites in Syria: neo-liberal reforms for major urban centres

At the bilateral level, the new Syrian President initiated a series of contacts with Syria’s powerful neighbour. Benefiting from a positive image as former president of the Syrian Computer Society and public advocate of modernization, Bashar al-Assad conducted, in January 2004, the first Syrian President’s visit to Turkey since Syria’s independence in 1946. His visit included a trip to the Sanjak of Alexandretta or Hatay province, traditionally claimed by Syria which had considered its annexation by Turkey in 1939 as illegal (Daoudy 2005, 134). In December 2004, Prime Minister Erdogan reciprocated with a visit to Damascus.

Domestically, however, Bashar al-Assad’s personal popularity in the early 2000s allowed the regime to limit the scope of internal reforms and preserve the power of the security services over society. In addition, insiders thought that the new Syrian leader shared ideological affinities with Syrian rather than Arab nationalism.¹⁷ In 2005, the “new” Assad regime opted to move away from a centrally planned statist type of economy by liberalizing major sectors such as banking and education, to the detriment of Baathist social constituencies in the rural peripheries. In doing so, the regime privileged the urban middle classes, favouring the rise of new governmental and business elites from all religious affiliations, but also increasing levels of poverty in marginalized communities.¹⁸

The secret services gained enhanced control of administrative and economic decisions, and new monopolies emerged (Daoudy 2011; Haddad 2012). The regime’s new focus on political economy motivated the search for enhanced economic relations with Turkey. Whilst Hafez al-Assad’s power drew mainly on security services and the army, Bashar al-Assad’s grip on all economic sectors impacted many levels of society, from the richest Damascus and Homs merchants to shopkeepers and ordinary citizens.¹⁹ Similar levels of corruption weighed on daily life within rural areas in the years that preceded the 2011 Revolution.²⁰ And further crackdowns targeted intellectuals involved in the “Damascus Spring” campaigns of the early 2000s, as well as activists and the private press.

5.5 Amity: inclusionary inter-state and transnational processes

Increased business networks between merchants in the major cities of Aleppo, Damascus and Anatolia brought the two neighbours to de-securitize their trans-state interdependencies and sign, in December 2009, over 50 protocols (Daoudy 2013; Oktav 2013; Tur 2013). As its oil revenues began to be depleted, Syria, for its part, chose to overcome regional isolation and the decline in economic rents by increasing strategic cooperation and strengthening cultural, economic and strategic ties with its powerful northern neighbour (Hinnebusch and al-Taqi 2013, 104–105, 108).

Turkey coupled its regional economic integration with free movement of people from the Arab world. In 2009, visas for Syrian (and Jordanian and Lebanese) nationals were lifted, increasing entries from the Arab world by 62 per cent within two years (Kirişci 2012, 323). Turkey became Syria’s biggest trading partner when trade rose from US $797 million in 2006 to $2.3 billion in 2010 (Robins 2013, 394; Tur 2013, 165). In 2010, the Syrian President referred to links with Turkey as ‘the birth of [a] new alliance based on common interests’ (SANA, 26 May 2010). The construction of opposing Turkish and Arab nationalist identities undertaken at the collapse of the Ottoman Empire deteriorated, and a shared cultural identity was recognized in both capitals. In parallel, Syrian media redefined the Ottoman period from one of regression and domination to one of shared history (Moubayed 2013).

Assad’s regime also sought to use the relation with Turkey to muster support among, in particular, Sunni merchants, especially those in Aleppo with its traditional business relations with Turkey. The Arab street acclaimed Turkey as an Islamic democracy and for its defence of the Palestinians against, notably, Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2009–2010. Erdogan’s popularity reached peaks in Syria where public opinion cheered him as another Abdel Nasser (Moubayed 2013, 72).

In parallel, Turkey developed a ‘quasi-alliance’ with Iran through a set of strategic, intelligence and mutual defence agreements (Oktav 2013, 194–196). As a result, Turkey started navigating a delicate balance between rival alliances. Turkey’s efforts to mediate Syria and Israel’s peace negotiations in 2007–2008 were pursued and links developed with Iran at the societal and economic levels—to the point that Turkey abstained for the first time during the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) vote on sanctions against Iran in 2006. Despite the changed rhetoric that followed the Israeli attack of a Turkish flotilla in Gaza in June 2010, Turkey maintained its alliance with the US, as well as military ties with Israel (Bank and Aradag 2013; Ehteshami and Elik 2011; Han 2013). Turkey’s strategy to become an Islamic regional power proved quite successful until the Syrian uprisings in 2011.

6. Conclusion: how and why the moment started and ended—amity to enmity

Syria–Turkey relations illustrate how interactions between material structure and idea-driven agency determine foreign policy outcomes in the Middle East. By embedding the interplay between structure, identity and policy outcomes, the dual framework, which draws on “realist constructivism”, captures the multiple layers and inter-linkages leading to the collapse of their relations in 2011.

Changes in both structure and identity weighed on mutual interactions similar to the post-World War I de-construction of shared Ottoman Islamic identity and the construction of mutually antagonistic Arab and Turkish nationalist identities, buttressed by Cold War bipolarity. In the 1990s, Turkish and Syrian foreign policies responded to structural distributions of power. Hard-power balancing led the two neighbours to each use their interdependencies from transnational populations (Kurds) and regional resources as leverage over the other.

In 1998, the movement towards rapprochement started in a near-military showdown, which led Syria, facing the military power of Turkey, to abandon its support for the PKK. These domestic structural changes within Turkey triggered a period of détente between the two previous foes. And the two neighbours reversed their negative tit-for-tat dynamics. From a realist perspective, the ensuing rapprochement between Ankara and Damascus in the early 2000s resulted from US behaviour in Iraq, the threat posed to Damascus as the possible next target of the Bush Jr. administration, and the parallel shift from a bipolar to a unipolar world.

Yet, when political identity remained unchanged, foreign policy outcomes tilted between cooperation and conflict but they fell short of producing sudden changes towards either amity or enmity. If elites within Turkey had remained Kemalist (or strongly nationalist), the post-1998 détente might have evolved into a temporary alignment but not into the amity and deepening cooperation that took place. It required both a structural and identity transformation at Turkey’s domestic level, which in turn was favourably received by Syrian elites, for this rapprochement to lead to amity. New leaders and elites, together, de-constructed antagonistic identities in favour of more inclusive ones centred on visions of shared historical, cultural and religious values. In this case, the rise to power of the AKP in Turkey, drawing its constituencies from the pious merchant elites of southeast Anatolia, induced a positive change in foreign policy discourses and mutual elite interactions since 2002.

The analysis also shed light on the process by which Syria’s new identity under Bashar al-Assad—geared towards neo-liberal reforms for the benefit of predominantly new urban elites—intertwined with regional structural changes to foster political ties and economic integration. Elites across the border started engaging with each other by developing mutually inclusive processes over economic and cultural integration. This transformation allowed interdependencies to evolve into opportunities for mutual gain rather than vulnerability to each other, as the two former foes de-securitized their borders, initiated free trade, established cooperation over shared river waters, and developed people-to-people relations until 2011. Syria’s new regime, which had hitherto seen its much larger neighbour as a source of conflict, started, after their amity grew in the 2000s, to see Turkey’s superior power as an asset that could benefit his regime in buffering against the attempts of the US and Europe to isolate it. And Turkey, which once prioritized the demands of its NATO partners in dealing with Syria, now instead protected its relation with Syria.

The paper’s dual framework also offers explanations for the sudden collapse of 2011. When the Syrian uprisings erupted, Turkey’s regional soft power had been damaged by a response to the Libyan revolt that seemed to prioritize economic interests. The AKP officially adhered to the globally dominant liberal norms of democratization and humanitarian protection. And Ankara aligned with the new normative climate, quickly adapting to structural and identity changes within the region. Erdogan’s foreign policy decisions contradicted Kemalists’ traditional preference for non-involvement in the turmoil of the Middle East combined with defensive and hard power balancing against potentially threatening neighbours. Had Kemalists ruled Turkey, they would have followed Ataturk’s injunction to eschew active involvement in Syria’s crisis.

Additionally, however, Turkey anticipated that the rise of kindred moderate democratic Islamists across the region and in Syria would give a major boost to Turkey’s soft power in the region. For Assad, Erdogan promoted an extremist Sunni-Islamist agenda that threatened the very survival of his secular Alawite-dominated regime. As reinforcing identity divergences mounted, the material interdependencies painstakingly constructed around cultural and economic integration in the period of amity, unravelled. Similarly to the 1950s and 1990s, elites mutually excluded each other and clashed over water, borders, Syrian opposition groups and the Kurdish issue. Impacted by structural factors, such as Turkey’s alliance with NATO since 1952 and Israel in 1996, or the eruption of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya in 2011, such negative elite perceptions induced a sudden change towards enmity.

Since the collapse of the relationship in 2011, the Syrian regime lost control of wide swathes of its territory to Kurds, Islamist opposition fighters and, since 2013, to Jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In parallel, Turkey experienced increased border turbulence from a spillover of the conflict with an influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees, and an emboldened Kurdish militant movement which spread from its remote mountains to the heart of south-eastern cities such as Diyarbakir and Cizre, and was re-empowered by the proclamation in November 2013 of Western Kurdistan (Rojava) in northern and north-eastern Syria, to cross-border operations perpetrated by ISIS. While Turkey initially sponsored the moderate Syrian opposition groups, beginning with the Syrian National Council (SNC) and its military affiliate the FSA in their various incarnations, its move to tolerate Islamic Jihadists contradicted the former policy: notably, by facilitating arms transfers from supporters in the Arab Gulf states, it allowed extremist factions to marginalize and even militarily attack the moderates on the ground in Syria.

Suspected of tolerating, if not directly supporting extremists from ISIS on Turkish and Syrian territories, Turkey initiated closer ties to the United States, albeit frustrated by US inaction on Syria. In October 2014, the battle against ISIS for the capture of Ayn al-Arab/Kobani led Turkey to reconsider its position on international intervention against the Islamic State, and precipitated its alignment with US-led air strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Turkey also officially recognized its incursions in Aleppo (Anadolu Agency, 24 February 2015). In late July 2015, in retaliation to the suicide attack perpetrated on its territory in Suruç, the Turkish government officially joined the coalition troops by bombing both the Islamic State and PKK’s positions in the northern parts of Syria (BBC 2015).

In 2016, Turkey pursued a parallel military and diplomatic strategy: to increase military support to Syrian opposition groups in the northern Aleppo province to counter the PYD/YPG-led and US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF); and to seek new international partners by mending relations with Russia. According to Turkish experts, this foreign policy change by Erdogan was motivated by the two ‘domestic terrorist threats of ISIS and PKK’.²¹ Adding to these domestic security concerns, the military coup attempt of 15 July 2016, attributed to the Gülen Movement with US support, prompted the activation of meetings between Erdogan and Putin. Meanwhile, Turkey had also sought to weaken the PYD as America’s main security partner in northern Syria and coordinated efforts with Saudi Arabia to set up a coalition of rebel groups in the Idlib province, the so-called “Army of Conquest”, to fight both regime and Kurdish forces (Associated Press 2016). In August 2016, led by a Syrian offshoot of al-Qaida, the newly rebranded Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, these forces proved successful in breaking the siege imposed on Aleppo by regime forces and their allies (Associated Press 2016). Following this strategic victory, Turkey committed to coordinating efforts with Russia to reach a ‘political solution on Syria’ (Abdul Razzak 2016), going so far as to offer to join Russia’s operations against ISIS (Ozerkan 2016). In August 2016, Turkey escalated its involvement in the Syrian conflict by launching direct military operations in northeastern Syria with Free Syrian Army fighters.

This rapprochement with Russia, Assad’s main ally, initiated a change in Turkey’s official language and approach to the Syrian regime. For the first time since 2011, an official statement called for ‘the Syrian leadership to take part in the negotiation process’ (Reuters 2016). At the time of writing, it is yet too early to assess whether recent foreign policy re-alignments, combined with strategic developments in the battle for Aleppo, will initiate a new chapter in Turkey and Syria’s relations; what consequences lie ahead for Syrian opposition groups and refugees in Turkey; and whether this turning point will lead to détente, rapprochement or amity between the two rival neighbours.

Ironically, the Syria–Turkey relationship, which had in the 2000s been promoted by its advocates as the key to an indigenous stabilization of the region against the US hegemon and a prototype of soft power integration, became after 2011 the opposite: a main driver of regional instability, which was fuelled by structural and identity-based factors.

Notes on contributor

Marwa Daoudy is Assistant Professor in International Relations at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) and the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Prior to arriving at Georgetown, she taught at the University of Oxford’s department of Politics and International Relations and was a fellow of Oxford’s Middle East Center at St Antony’s College (UK). In 2011-2012, Princeton University invited her to join the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs as visiting lecturer and research scholar. Her research and teaching focus on international relations, Critical Security Studies, the environment, peace negotiations and Middle East politics. Daoudy’s book, The Water Divide between Syria, Turkey and Iraq: Negotiation, Security and Power Asymmetry (CNRS Editions, 2005) was awarded the Ernest Lémonon Prize. In addition, she published her research in International Negotiation, Journal of International Affairs, Journal of Peace and Security, The World Today, and Water Policy amongst others. Email address: [email protected]

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Raymond Hinnebusch at St Andrew’s University for his feedback and invaluable inputs during all stages of this research project. I offer my sincere thanks to Kirsten Ainley for hosting me during my sabbatical leave from Georgetown University at the London School of Economics (LSE). This research greatly benefited from outstanding research provided by my assistants, Ryan Folio at Georgetown University and Max Thompson at Oxford University. My colleagues and graduate students at the Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies (Georgetown University) offered useful critiques of an earlier version of this paper presented at the Faculty Seminar series. Finally, my sincere thanks extend to the anonymous reviewers who took time to read the manuscript and provide excellent comments. All omissions and mistakes are mine.

Notes

¹ Al-qadar al-mushtarak, ettarikh al-mushtarak, al-mustaqbal al-mushtarak (in Arabic). Quoted in Oktav (2013, 197).

² See details on the PYD and Army of Conquest in section 6. For interactions over the Euphrates-Tigris, see Daoudy (forthcoming 2016).

³ The definition of détente relates broadly to ‘the relaxation of strained relations or tensions (as between nations)’, whilst rapprochement refers to the next level of interaction, with the ‘development of friendlier relations between countries or groups of people who have been enemies’ (Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2015).

⁴ This became a matter of ‘personal disillusionment’ for Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Interview by author with Turkey’s former Foreign Minister Yasar Yakis, 25 November 2013.

⁵ See section 5.3 on the formulation of this policy.

⁶ See Erdogan’s post-victory speech on 12 June 2011: ‘The Middle East, the Caucasus and the Balkans have won, just as Turkey has won’. See also Davutoglu at the 6th al-Jazeera forum in Doha in March 2011: ‘Our future is our sense of common destiny. All of us in the region have a common destiny’ (quoted in Parlar Dal 2012, 245–246).

⁷ Interview by author with Turkey’s former Foreign Minister Yasar Yakis, 25 November 2013: ‘Turkey’s policy is tainted by sectarianism; despite developing relations with the Assad regime, AKP had long-standing affinities with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, dating back to the previous Refah Islamist party under Erbakan’s rule.’

⁸ Interview by author with Turkey's former Foreign Minister Yasar Yakis, 25 November 2013.

⁹ Interview by author with Turkey’s former Foreign Minister Yasar Yakis, 25 November 2013: ‘Turkey was not equipped to deal with the Middle East since it turned its back to the Arab world in the aftermath of the “stab in the back” of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in 1916’.

¹⁰ Interview by author with Turkey's former Foreign Minister Yasar Yakis, 25 November 2013.

¹¹ Refer to Figure 2 for a detailed timeline.

¹² In 1999, Turkey arrested Öcalan in Nairobi (Kenya) with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Israel’s secret services.

¹³ Interview carried out by author with Turkey’s former Foreign Minister Yasar Yakis (co-founder of the AKP): ‘Despite official denials, neo-Ottomanism is present in the hearts and minds of many within the ruling AK party and the Turkish population’ (Oxford, 25 November 2013).

¹⁴ Quoted in Parlar Dal (2012, 251).

¹⁵ Interview by author with Turkey’s former Foreign Minister Yasar Yakis: ‘the zero-problem policy represented an ideal rather than a road map’ (Oxford, 25 November 2013).

¹⁶ Soft power refers to the ability to get other countries to 'want what you want', whereas hard power mobilizes 'tangible resources like military and economic strength' (Nye 1990, 31-2).

¹⁷ This comment was made to the author by Manaf Tlass, recently defected former Brigadier General of the Syrian Republican Guard’s 104th brigade and close friend to the Syrian President, during interviews carried out in Damascus in 2005. Other interviewees included the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Walid al-Moallem, and the Minister of Social Affairs Butheina Shaaban. See Daoudy 2008.

¹⁸ This gap between the new urban elites and populations in rural areas is believed to have significantly contributed to the eruption of the Syrian Revolution in 2011. See Dahi, and Munif 2012

¹⁹ Interview by author with Bassam Barabandi, former diplomat at the Syrian embassy in Washington DC who defected in June 2013 (Washington DC, 8 November 2015).

²⁰ Interview by author with Raed Fares, President of the Union Revolutionary Bureaus (URB) and prominent Syrian civil society activist based in the town of Kafranbel in the province of Idlib (Washington DC, 7 November 2015).

²¹ Personal communication, after the attempted military coup, with Mensur Akgun, Chair of the Department of International Relations at Kültür University (Istanbul), and regular contributor to Karar, a pro-AKP newspaper. Istanbul, 16 July 2016.