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Regional Security Complex Theory and Turkish Foreign Policy
Abstract
Turkish foreign policy is coming under increasing scrutiny since the election of the ruling Justice and Development Party in 2002. Critiques state that Turkish foreign policy is becoming 'neo-Ottoman' or 'Islamist', arguing that Turkey is moving closer to the Middle East than Europe. Such critiques explain that Turkey's new foreign policy identity derives from its religious identity. This proposed paper however, argues that Turkey's foreign policy is not becoming more Islamist; it is becoming more British. Indeed, those that are not familiar with the British school of international relations and more specifically the ‘regional security complex theory’ (RSCT) miss the constructivist and identity-based rationality model it foresees for a post-Cold War unilateral global system. RSCT asserts that, with the end of the bipolar rivalry of the Cold War, emphasis on the system level power structure (dominant in international relations theory since the rise of neorealism in the late 1970s) has declined. One of the most interesting theoretical developments to have emerged in this context is Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT). Like neorealism, RSCT focuses on security. How- ever, the rationale behind early Security Complex Theory was that for the majority of states, the most relevant scale for conceptualising military and political security functioned at the regional rather than the system level? RSCT has now opened the analysis to a wider range of sectors--including economic, societal and environmental security--and the tendency to refer to 'units' rather than 'states' acknowledges the importance of agencies other than the state in terms of security. Nevertheless, the central idea remains that because most threats travel most easily over short distances, security interdependence is normally patterned into regionally based clusters, called security complexes. Turkish foreign policy’s identity dimension therefore, becomes increasingly apparent as Turkey deals with its immediate neighborhood in security and energy affairs. This proposed paper will argue that Turkish foreign policy is not becoming more ‘Middle Eastern’ or ‘Islamic’, but following a pattern of external affairs in which identity is becoming increasingly more pronounced.
Discipline
International Relations/Affairs
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
Current Events