Turkish foreign policy in the Balkans amidst ‘soft power’ and ‘de-Europeanisation’

ABSTRACT

Since the beginning of the 2000s, extensive academic research has echoed one popular opinion, ‘Turkey is back to the Balkans’. These studies have been scrutinizing the complicated role of Turkey in the Balkans, usually drawing upon the use of soft power by the former. This impact in the region remained intact during the 2010s, although the overall Turkish foreign policy in the 2010s has been highly securitized and de-Europeanized, losing its soft power character that had been its trademark starting from the early 2000s. In this regard, this paper aims to decipher different dimensions of Turkey’s foreign policy in the Balkans through a more general exploration of the de-Europeanization of Turkish foreign policy in the 2010s. Through more than 80 semi-structured interviews, which were conducted between 2016–2020, with political actors, diplomats, religious leaders, scholars and journalists in Turkey and the Balkans, we address the question of whether the divergence of Turkish foreign policy from a soft power perspective and its concomitant de-Europeanization tendency had been crystallized in its policy towards the Balkans within the context of the 2010s.

KEYWORDS:

• Turkey
• Balkans
• de-Europeanization
• soft power
• Turkish foreign policy

Acknowldgement

Authors would like to thank Senem Aydın-Düzgit and Kemal Kirişçi for their valuable comments on the earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Deal, which was announced by the European Council and Turkey, aimed to end irregular migration from Turkey to the EU, stipulated that ‘all new irregular migrants crossing from Turkey into Greek Islands as from 20 March 2016will be returned to Turkey’ and ‘for every Syrian being returned to Turkey from Greek Islands, another Syrian will be resettled from Turkey to the EU taking into account the UN Vulnerability Criteria’ (European Council 2016).

Additional information

Funding

For this research, Başak Alpan benefited from funding offered by the Jean Monnet Network, ‘Linking the Europe at Periphery (LEAP)’, supported by the European Commission (Project number: 612019-EPP-1-2019-1-TR-EPPJMO-NETWORK).

Notes on contributors

Başak Alpan

Basak Alpan: Associate professor of politics and international relations at Middle East Technical University, Ankara Turkey.

Ahmet Erdi Öztürk

Ahmet Erdi Ozturk: Associate professor of politics and international relations at School of Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University and Marie Curie Fellow at CTPSR Coventry University, England.