Turkey in Africa

A New Emerging Power?

Elem Eyrice Tepeciklioğlu, Ali Onur Tepeciklioğlu, Elem Eyrice Tepeciklioğlu, Ali Onur Tepeciklioğlu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000391725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary analysis of Turkey-Africa relations.

Bringing together renowned authors to discuss various dimensions of Turkey's African engagement while casting a critical analysis on the sustainability of Turkey-Africa relations, this book draws upon the rising power literature to examine how Turkish foreign policy has been conceptualized and situated theoretically. Moving from an examination of the multilateral dimension of Turkey's Africa policy with a focus on soft power instruments of public diplomacy, humanitarian/development assistance, religious activities and airline diplomacy, it then illuminates the economic and military dimensions of Turkey's policy including trade relations, business practices, security cooperation and peacekeeping discourse. Overall, it shows how Turkey's African opening can be integrated into its wider interest in gaining global power status and its desire to become a strong regional power.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of Turkish foreign policy/politics, African politics, and more broadly to international relations.

Part 1
Historical, theoretical and political foundations of Turkey—Africa relations

1Theorizing Turkey’s Africa policy

Turkey as a rising power

Ali Onur Tepeciklioğlu

Introduction

Turkish foreign policy (TFP) has gained momentum in the last two decades. Traditionally it was known for its status quo seeking and Western-oriented nature. Historically, apart from the Cyprus issue, Turkish governments usually sought to be on the safe side of events for the sake of preserving the status quo, even though this preference sometimes did harm their national interest. The country’s almost blindfolded Westernism during the Cold War years provided it protection from Soviet threat but enabled too few foreign policy options and paths to the incumbent Turkish governments. From an IR theory perspective, this security-focused Cold War period of TFP is relatively less puzzling to conceptualize. As the country was a lesser power in terms of a neo-realist power rankings hierarchy, it did not have multiple options other than following hegemonic powers’ policy preferences. Additionally, a neoliberal perspective can explain why Turkey was on the side of the Western powers but not the Soviet Union in the Cold War strife. As the country’s ruling bureaucratic–military elite were historically possessed with the Western modernization model, when they captured the state apparatus after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, they were at full throttle in adapting the new Turkish state to Western world order.

Compared to Cold War TFP, theorizing post-Cold War TFP is more challenging as well as puzzling. Two interconnected reasons can explain the complexity of conceptualizing TFP. First, the change in the international climate and power distribution with the end of the Cold War resulted in an overpopulated “middle power” group of countries. In many cases, some of these countries are regarded as candidates for challenging United States’ hegemony in the 2000s (Huntington 1999; Patrick 2010; Hurrell 2006). Less commonly, Turkey is also included in that group. The problem with that was there were too many countries falling into the emerging power/middle power/USA hegemony challenger category and sometimes those countries had more differences than similarities with each other. In the end, this kind of categorization possesses a challenge in terms of the abstraction-based nature of theorizing. Moreover, it adds too little analytical value to explaining Turkey’s foreign policy activism in the previous two decades.

The second reason that makes conceptualizing Turkey’s untraditional foreign policy challenging is its two-way nature. The “new” TFP is not a one-way process with its fundamentals blueprinted at home and policies designed based on those fundamentals applied to the international scene. Rather, it is a bidirectional process whereby the policymaking elite reshape the basic principles of the “new” foreign policy vis-à-vis developments in the regions as well as sectors where those principles are applied. In other words, Turkey simultaneously develops its new foreign policy toolkit and implements it. So, conceptualizing TFP by focusing on particular foreign policy behavior would be a better way to understand the country’s activism in international politics.

Within that framework, this chapter aims to conceptualize Turkey’s foreign policy towards Africa. But it does not intend to do so just by concentrating on Turkey–Africa relations. It mainly argues that Turkey’s Africa policy cannot be understood separately from its wider foreign policy agenda. Thus, any attempt to conceptualize and theorize Turkey’s Africa policy would also serve the wider aim of conceptualizing Turkish foreign policy in the Justice and Development Party (JDP) era. In the last two decades, Turkey focused on refurbishing its foreign policy in a way to be more active, independent and responsive for the sake of playing a greater role in world politics. It is primarily for this reason that the country’s Africa policy is not independent from the main ambitions of its wider foreign policy. Indeed, Turkey’s engagement in Africa is highly integrated with its claim for a larger say in the international system. This is because the continent stands as a fruitful platform for using new foreign policy tools of the country such as humanitarian aid, direct investment, capacity building and religious diplomacy.

Adapting non-traditional instruments of foreign policy, establishing new forms of engagement with other countries and focusing on issue-specific areas in international politics are generally associated with “rising powers.” Rising powers are not in the league of great powers in terms of economic and military strength. But they devote many resources to areas in which they have comparative advantage. So, rising powers have particular strengths and advantages in issue-specific areas which can be translated into the capacity of influencing outcome of some specific events in the international environment (Hart and Jones 2010, 71). China, Russia, Brazil, India, South Africa and South Korea are often described as rising powers. Less often Indonesia, Turkey and Mexico are also included in that list. This chapter, among other things, claims that Turkey’s foreign policy towards Africa can be better understood and explained from a rising powers perspective. Such a conceptualization can also help us to place Turkey’s African policy in its wider foreign policy ambitions.

In order to assess Turkey’s rising power status, this chapter will first concentrate on the particular characteristics that are associated with rising powers. It will elaborate the various ways rising powers deal with Africa in order to provide a clearer picture of the rising power concept. Then, the chapter will turn its focus on Turkey’s changing foreign policy strategies and discuss the ways TFP have been conceptualized in the extant literature. Following, the chapter will explore to what extent Turkey’s involvement in the region fits the rising power conceptualization.

Conceptualizing rising powers

As noted at the outset of this chapter, international relations scholars offered various concepts to define the role played by significant powers in the newly emerging world order. Following the end of the Cold War, concepts such as middle powers (Jordaan 2003), regional powers (Godehardt and Nabers 2011), pivotal states (Chase, Hill and Kennedy 1996) as well as rising powers were coined to grasp the behavior of states that have the potential to influence the world order to a degree but not as much as great powers are able to do. Despite the similarities among these conceptualizations, the term “rising power” differs from others for defining the non-Western countries which are uncomfortable with the current Western world order. Rising power conceptualization is increasingly employed to define a group of countries that aspire to have greater status in international politics (Alden and Vieira 2005), however, the concept is mildly elusive when it comes to defining particular characteristics of the countries that fall into that category. Asking for reform in global governance mechanisms and being critical of USA hegemony and neoliberal norms that underpin that predominance can be regarded as denominators of rising powers in general. But, in particular, rising powers are typically defined by their similar foreign policy behavior (Kenkel and Cunliffe 2016, 3). Foreign aids without political conditionality, development aids to enhance peacebuilding in conflict zones, trade and investments to improve bilateral relations as well as new forms of security engagement are trademarks of rising power foreign policy behavior. All these new forms of engagement are also reflected in rising powers’ involvement in Africa.

Having high ambitions to play a greater role in world politics, rising powers aim to change or reform the existing order. Most of those powers are not passionate about Western values such as democracy and human rights and normally put their national interest and sovereignty in front of international norms. These countries usually do not share neoliberal political and economic grounds of the current world order and ask for reform in international governance mechanisms such as United Nations Security Council (UNSC), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Bank (Patrick 2010, 44). For Hurrell, rising powers possess significant economic and military capabilities to contribute to international order and based on that, they ask for more influential roles in world politics (Hurrell 2006, 1–2). Cornelissen (2009, 12–14) defines rising powers’ demographic and economic size, their capacity to influence international economy based on that size, Southern multilateralism embodied in international organizations such as BRICS, MIKTA and IBSA, and their aspiration for more power as common characteristics. Stephen (2012, 292–293) additionally underlines these powers’ desire to have a different kind of world order and defines rising powers by their qualification of being “at the center of non-Western multilateralism.” Similarly, Kahler (2013, 711) stresses the rising powers’ ambitions to play greater roles in a changing world order. Following the liberal interdependence theory path, some scholars argue that rising powers have leverage in some issue-specific areas thanks to the effects of globalization and interdependence (Hart and Jones 2010, 71; Larson 2018, 2). Others extend this argument and define rising powers by their characteristic of having established political ties with potential threats for Western neoliberal world order such as North Korea and Iran. For them, these ties give them an upper hand in producing regional order and acting as intermediaries between the West and those countries (Larson and Shevchenko 2010, 61).

Among other characteristics, rising powers are often described vis-à-vis their potential to play significant roles in the emergence of the new world order after the envisaged USA decline. Usually, the fundamental question about rising powers is the USA’s possible ways of dealing with those powers. Although it is not the primary focus of this work, explaining rising powers’ perspectives on the USA-dominated world order can shed light on their ambitions and prospective roles in a new world order. For rising powers, Western world order is exclusivist and hegemonic, and these are two interconnected unsettling characteristics.

Rising powers criticize the existing setting of the world order for being highly exclusivist because international governance mechanisms are generally restricted to countries other than the established powers. It is a club with exclusive membership and that membership largely depends on how much a country embraces democratic institutions as well as a neoliberal ideological standpoint. That is why at the center of rising powers’ criticisms lies a civilizational basis. Western values that underpin current international governance mechanisms are regularly in question for rising powers (Vezirgiannidou 2013, 638; Alexandroff and Cooper 2010; Patrick 2010). Rising powers’ leaders often characterize the tension between their countries and traditional powers within the framework of a “civilizational strife” (Acharya 2020, 139–140, 153). Even some featured democracies among rising powers such as Brazil and India are described as half-hearted in their approach to one of the core tenets of current order such as democracy promotion (Stuenkel 2013). Russia and China are exceptions for being UNSC members even though they are not committed to Western values. However, they are also mostly excluded from global economic governance mechanisms such as the IMF, World Bank and WTO. Rising powers other than China and Russia are also not equally represented in global governance mechanisms compared to the established powers. Voting procedures and acting bureaucrats of these organizations clearly reflect the bias. This induces strong claims from the rising powers, asking for more representation in political and economic governance mechanisms. Reform demands in international governance mechanisms are one of the most crystalized characteristics that all rising powers share. At the heart of those demand claims lie rising powers’ skeptical attitude towards neoliberal values.

Alongside criticisms on exclusiveness, rising powers see the USA’s hegemonic position in the current world order as being problematic. Governments of these countries argue on different platforms and occasions that the USA occupies a superfluously stronger hegemonic position than its capacity to produce order. For them, the USA’s power decline is a matter of fact and it is no longer legitimate that the USA continues to have the sole say on critical issues of world politics. Indeed, the USA is waning (Layne 2009), but this is not the only ground for rising powers’ multilateralism claims. The political utility of American primacy has been questioned since the early 2000s (Brooks and Wohlforth 2008, 2) because of its normative g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Contextualizing Turkey’s Africa policy
• Part 1 Historical, theoretical and political foundations of Turkey–Africa relations
• Part 2 Economic relations and military strategies
• Part 3 Turkey’s soft power
• Conclusion: Turkey: Just another emerging power in Africa?
• Index