Vol 23, No 4 (2023): 100th Anniversary of the Republic of Türkiye: International Dimension

In 2023, the Republic of Türkiye celebrated its centenary. Standing at the head of republican Türkiye in 1923, the first president of the country, M.K. Ataturk, saw it as independent and free from logic imposed from outside. Nevertheless, Türkiye, whose history included both a pro-Western period and an open struggle against manifestations of the Western neocolonialism based on national interests, has experienced a series of ups and downs over a century-long period. Moreover, a new M.K. Ataturk appeared in its lifetime in the person of the ambitious R.T. Erdogan, who seeks to start the history of the country from scratch. The ideological and foreign policy foundations of Türkiye have undergone the greatest transformation in the last 100 years. Modern Ankara is approaching an important milestone in its history as an independent regional power and a leader who holds a confident course towards joining the “top league” - a group of world actors-members of the UN Security Council. The ideal of the president of the country is a neo-imperial Türkiye, combining the best practices of the past “Kemalism” and modern “neo-Ottomanism,” which is realized through the export of “Turkishness” and the promotion of Turkocentric ideologies into the world, supported by practical actions in a vast geographical space that goes far beyond Türkiye. The study concludes that over the long history of its existence, the Republic of Türkiye has developed a number of ideological and value concepts that serve as a support for the implementation of its foreign policy. As an anthropological state, Türkiye, like a human being, has primary - vital - and secondary needs, related to the perception of other international actors. At the same time, it is important that while the satisfaction of secondary needs is carried out by Ankara quite successfully, the replenishment of primary causes certain difficulties. The economic situation remains particularly difficult, which, in turn, is capable of affecting the general welfare of the state in the future, making it unstable amid general international environment and thereby provoking a certain “existential crisis.”

Educational programs can be a valuable tool in the cultural diplomacy of modern countries. As a soft power tool, organizations seek to expand their geographic reach by opening educational institutions in different parts of the world in order to spread the influence of their state. In Türkiye, such an organization has long been the Hizmet movement, and in recent years it has been a state-owned the Maarif Foundation . In the study, for the first time in Russian Oriental Studies, an analysis of the activities of the Turkish state Maarif educational foundation in the confrontation with the banned in Türkiye and a number of countries’ Hizmet movements is conducted. Since the declaration of this structure as a terrorist organization on the territory of Türkiye, the Maarif Foundation has been reassigning educational institutions around the world. The most important event in this regard is the coup attempt of July 15, 2016, in which Fethullah Gülen, the ideological mastermind of the movement, was accused. As a result, all schools associated with the Hizmet movement were closed in Türkiye. The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that it considers almost the only case in history of confrontation between two organizations, which are instruments of “soft power” of a country. The purpose of the study is to examine the current issues of the Maarif Foundation’s activities as part of the confrontation with the Hizmet movement. The work includes a qualitative analysis of the official documents of the Turkish state foundation, the laws of the Republic of Türkiye, as well as a discourse analysis of Hizmet’s media products. As a result, it was revealed that despite the rather successful work of the Turkish state educational organization in question, it is not necessary to speak about the complete defeat of Hizmet by the beginning of 2023. By now Maarif state foundation regulates the activity of educational institutions in 49 countries, while according to our calculations the Gülen movement retains a high status in 60 states. It has been revealed that Hizmet’s activities directly or indirectly influence Türkiye’s interstate relations with those countries where Gülen schools operate. It has been established that the demands of the Turkish side to close the institutions of the movement have led to short-lived diplomatic crises between Ankara and some of the host countries. It has been shown that the emergence of Maarif in a particular country does not necessarily lead to the closure of Gülen institutions.

The study deals with the attitude of Russian liberals of the early 20th century to the Eastern question, which occupied a special place in international politics and whose aggravation became one of the factors leading to the World War I. Various political forces in Russia developed their own variants of its solution, realizing that the fate not only of the country, but of the whole world largely depended on the projects they proposed. The analysis of the liberals’ ambiguous perception of the Russian government’s actions in the Balkans, their attitude to the South Slavs, to the problem of the Black Sea Straits, and to the confrontation between the great powers united in alliances, i.e. all aspects of the Eastern question, will allow us to reconstruct and understand the liberals’ understanding of the connection between foreign policy and Russia’s internal development, national interests, and ideological values. Looking at the views of the liberals of the early 20th century on the Eastern question reveals not only the peculiarities of its perception by the ruling elite and representatives of the legal opposition, but also the roots of the growing alienation of the country’s elite from the people. It was this alienation, which intensified during the war years and manifested itself, among other things, in the different perceptions of the importance of the Eastern question by the authorities, the liberals, and the people, that led to the fall of the first liberal Provisional Government in the spring of 1917. As a result, the people tired of the war and unable to understand the meaning of Russia’s struggle for foreign lands, came to support the Bolsheviks, who exposed the “imperialist plans” of the Provisional Government and advocated peace without annexations and contributions. The paper touches upon the problem of the liberals’ attitude not only to the government’s foreign policy, but also to Russian statehood, the conceptual reasons for their transition from a restrained peace-loving position and the desire to prevent war to its unconditional support. The authors identify the ideological and foreign policy factors that influenced this liberal transit. The main attention is paid to the understanding of representatives of various liberal movements of the Eastern question, which, without exaggeration, took a central place not only in their foreign policy program, but also in the project of internal transformations, which envisaged the creation of Great Russia as a result of its solution. The study identifies and analyzes the innovations introduced by the liberals in the interpretation of the Eastern question under the influence not only of the changing international situation, political and economic modernization of Russia, which was becoming a “Duma monarchy,” but also of the development of the ideology itself; the peculiarities of its perception by representatives of various liberal currents in the country are examined.

The Western Balkans has been and remains a particularly dense zone in terms of the number of actors present, where the interests of all the leading actors in world politics are bizarrely intertwined. The Ukrainian crisis has added spice to the Balkan agenda, reviving “frozen conflicts” not only within the borders of the region but also beyond its perimeter. Directly dependent on the outcome of the armed confrontation in Ukraine and separately from it, a clash or, at least, an intensification of external actors in the Balkan direction seems inevitable. The historical-systemic approach used in the study and the paradigm of multipolarity made it possible to trace the probable directions of activity of both regional and external actors. Based on a wide range of sources, the work provides a panorama of the foreign policy positioning of regional capitals; identifies major and minor external actors; shows the transformation of approaches and practical steps of key actors through the prism of the ongoing crisis. External actors - the European Union (EU), China, Great Britain, Russia and the United States - are divided into groups in accordance with their positions regarding the pre-crisis Balkans and the Balkans in the face of the fierce confrontation between Russia and the West. Among Western interests, special attention is paid to Great Britain, whose activity in the Western Balkans after Brexit is affiliated with the West in general, but not with the United States (despite all the history of strategic partnership in the region) and, moreover, with the EU separately. Against the background of the dominance of Western institutions in the region, the paper traces, however, the growing role of China, as well as external actors of the “second plan” with an oriental flavor: Türkiye, Iran, and the states of the Persian Gulf. An analysis of Russia’s prospects in the region has shown that the crisis in the system of international relations has largely nullified the results achieved earlier. The degree of Russia’s involvement in the crisis raises the question of its resource capacity, the ability to further maintain its own positions. Additional difficulties will be associated with the consolidated efforts of the Western allies and other external actors, including China, to balance Russian influence and presence in the Western Balkans.

The study is devoted to the applied analysis of the concept of multi-vector in the foreign policy of Recep Tayyip Erdogan during his presidency from 2014 to 2022. Türkiye’s foreign policy is of particular interest to researchers. Ankara is actively involved in regional and world politics. Turkish foreign policy is characterized as multi-vector, but different approaches to the definition of Turkish multi-vector are used in scientific research. The purpose of the study is to identify the main vectors of R.T. Erdogan’s personal diplomacy during his presidency. The relevance of the work lies in the application of a quantitative method that allows identifying the main vectors of R.T. Erdogan’s foreign policy on the basis of the collected database of his foreign policy contacts. The method is different in that it is free from the influence of the researcher’s personal preferences in analyzing foreign policy and the influence of individual high-profile, but isolated events. The database covers the entire period of the presidency of R.T. Erdogan from 2014 to the end of 2022 and includes all foreign policy contacts published on the website of the President of Türkiye. The developed methodology allows not only to see the main vectors of foreign policy, but also to assess their depth on the basis of mathematical calculations. As a result of the analysis, the main macro-regional vectors and countries in each of the vectors were identified, and the depth and quality of contacts with these countries were measured and presented. It was also found that the Turkish President actively interacts with the local level of government. Moreover, he implements the diplomacy of the second track. It covers the main macro-regional vectors from the side of public diplomacy. The database and the method allow us to assert that the policy of the Turkish president is indeed multi-vector, but the multi-vector nature of this policy is much deeper and goes beyond relations with countries. During the work, promising areas for future theoretical and applied research were identified.

Since the second half of the 20th century the Turkish-Israeli relations have developed in an uneven and unstable manner. Depending on the current situation in the conflict-torn Middle East, these relations tended to normalize, or descended into mutual hostility. During the 21st century, we could observe several rounds of confrontation and cooperation between the two states. Thus, the events of 2010 (the Freedom Flotilla incident) and 2017 (the transfer of the capital of Israel to Jerusalem) finally led to a rupture in relations between the two countries. A new round of stabilization has been marked since March 2022 and is associated with the visit of the President of Israel to Ankara at the invitation of the Turkish President R.T. Erdogan. The authors of the article see this step as the beginning of the process of finding agreements on achieving stability in relations between the countries of the Middle East region. The article attempts to analyze the evolution of the modern Turkish-Israeli cooperation, taking into account the patterns of their development since Türkiye has recognized the state of Israel. Using a comparative historical approach, the authors analyze the political problems of the modern bilateral relations, and consider the impact of such factors as the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iranian nuclear program, the consequences of the “Arab Spring,” the foreign policy activities of the US Democratic and Republican administrations in the Middle East region, as well as the crisis over the status of Jerusalem. The authors underline that despite the pragmatic character of Türkiye’s foreign policy, any tension caused by the Palestinian issue will have an impact on Turkish-Israeli relations, which in turn might start a new round of conflict between the two sides. The authors have concluded that Turkish-Israeli relations are characterized by instability, which depends largely on the current balance of power in the Middle East region. It is obvious that the normalization of Turkish-Israeli interaction is a positive factor for the intensification of integration processes in the Middle East region as a whole.

This study examines the strategic use of soft power as an integral component of Türkiye’s foreign policy in the South Caucasus region. The author explores the strategies and mechanisms by which Türkiye projects it’s cultural, economic, and diplomatic influence in the region. It also examines Türkiye’s purposeful efforts to improve its image, authority and significance in Georgia. Paying special attention to cultural diplomacy, educational exchanges, humanitarian aid and economic partnership, the paper reveals how Türkiye seeks to shape its perceptions, develop cooperation and strengthen its geopolitical position. Methodologically, the study is based on case studies of Turkish soft power in Georgia. In addition, the author analyzes the general framework of Turkish policy in Georgia using the historical-descriptive method. The content analysis of Turkish media and other Turkish cultural agents such as TV shows, films, serials, etc. was used to understand how Ankara uses soft power to promote its cultural and political interests in Georgia. Through empirical analysis, the study examines specific examples of Türkiye’s soft power initiatives, including the promotion of the Turkish language and culture, educational scholarships and humanitarian aid. In addition, the study examines the perception of Türkiye’s soft power initiatives by the local population and assesses their impact on regional dynamics. The findings emphasize the multifaceted nature of Turkish soft power and the consequences of its use for Georgia. Given Georgia’s Christian majority, Türkiye relies on secular instruments of its soft power, while not giving up religious influence on the Muslim communities of Georgia.

Türkiye’s foreign policy has recently taken on a more autonomous trajectory, less directly tied to European Union (EU) or NATO policies. Notably, the Black Sea region stands out as an area where Türkiye has charted an independent and distinctive course. The Black Sea region’s growing importance underscores the need to define Türkiye’s policy that contributes to stability in the region. Recent conflicts involving Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia, as well as the interest of non-regional actors, have heightened the region’s security concerns and energy security risks. Understanding Türkiye’s role in this context is essential for international relations scholars, policymakers, and practitioners. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Cold War environment of military competition was replaced by an environment of cooperation and collaboration in the Black Sea region, combining political, economic, and cultural goals. However, the emerging conflicts between some littorals, such as Russia and Georgia in 2008 and Russia and Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, have caused a change in the perception of security and stability of the region. Thus, the interest of external actors in the Black Sea has increased and their attempts have begun to demonstrate a greater presence in the region. This has induced circumstances that increase the risk of conflict in the region and threaten energy security. Furthermore, the region has attracted the interest of non-littoral states, which has led to new challenges. In light of these developments, the authors seek to provide an objective examination of Türkiye’s Black Sea policy, emphasizing its growing significance within the region’s evolving dynamics and energy security concerns. In addition, the main pillars of Türkiye’s Black Sea policy under the principle of regional ownership will be discussed.

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