How does Turkey fit into the middle power category? What tools and multilateral channels does it use to pursue a middle power diplomacy at the regional and global levels? In looking at these questions, this book offers the perspectives of several authors on the theme of Turkey as a middle power, namely the regional-global connection of Turkeyâs middle power foreign policy, the components of its middle power multilateralism and its effects on Turkeyâs contribution to global governance, and finally its middle power avenues and means. Considering âmiddle powerâ to be a multicomponent and intermingled concept with material, behavioral, and ideational attributions, the book intends to scrutinize Turkey as a middle-ranked state that demonstrates both similarities and differences from other traditional and non-traditional middle powers.
The main rationale behind the book is to provide a comprehensive and conceptually rich analysis of Turkish middle powerhood at the regional, global, institutional, and behavioral levels. The chapters are predicated on an understanding that the renewed salience of the study of middle powers does not call for a simple repeat of a strictly defined research agenda from past eras. Therefore, the following chapters depart from the analytical assessment to pinpoint Turkeyâs institutional, material, and behavioral patterns that are connected to middle power concepts. Thus, the book fills the lacuna in the literature by offering a comprehensive and critical analysis of an emerging middle powerâs distinct and overlapping roles on both the regional and global scale, its institutional relations with international organizations, and its behaviors in global governance.
The Turkish case is illustrative in the sense that it has filled a range of roles as a regional, rising, and middle power, serving as both an asset and a risk for the country (Parlar Dal and Gonca 2014). Among its emerging peers, Turkey has long possessed significant advantages allowing it to take on an influential middle power role at both an ideological and, to a lesser extent, practical level (Sandal 2014; Parlar Dal 2014). However, its assumed roles as a rising or regional power and ascribed roles as a bridge between the North and South, and the intermingling of these, have contributed to the recent vicious circle observed in its relations with the West, which has served to make its middle power role more contradictory and less credible. The recent crisis observed in Turkeyâs relations with the West has placed serious constraints on the construction of Turkeyâ middle power identity in material, institutional, and behavioral terms. Equally, Turkeyâs relations with its eastern neighbors and other Middle Eastern countries are also important in terms of its emerging middle power diplomacy. Overall, Turkey as an emerging middle power is expected to pursue a balanced relationship with the Western world and developing nations with a strong commitment to international peace, democracy, human rights and open trade. However, as seen in the Turkish example, its deteriorating relations with the West and the East hinders Ankaraâs middle power role enactment, perceptions, and performance.
In the idealized conception of the middle power role, intermediary states work for the good of humanity and tend to act normatively as much as possible, thus differentiating themselves vis-Ă -vis other states. In short, middle powers need new agendas to act globally in every field of international politics to allow them the ability to act as both independent and engaged actors in their alliance with great powers. On the other hand, middle powers often seek to act as normative and democratic actors as a basis to allow them to establish balanced relations with great powers and to effectively engage with global governance policies, such as organizing international summits and conferences at home and sending troops to conflict-torn countries and on peacekeeping missions. Consensus at the global level on the role of middle powers in safeguarding collective interests and values such as democracy, rule of law, free market economy, and human rights, as well as a perception of their role as a positive asset for enhancing multilateralism in international institutions by great peers, their peers, and other outside actors would allow middle powers to play more constitutive and bridging roles in global governance.
Based on this interpretation, this edited book is structured as outlined below. The first section delves into middle power foreign policy in the regional-global nexus with a special focus on Turkey. This part begins with a general overview of Turkeyâs foreign policy in the past, present, and future through two different chapters: the first focuses on the Southern dimension in Turkish foreign policy and attempts to assess the possible role that Turkey may play in the South-South cooperation, and the second deals with Turkeyâs multistakeholder diplomacy from a middle power angle. The second section addresses Turkeyâs internationalism in global governance with four contributions on Turkey as a middle power in the UN, G20, MIKTA partnership, and in the UN funding system. The third part examines Turkeyâs middle power avenues and means in four valuable contributions on Turkeyâs involvement in the development debates in the UN since the 1960s and its development cooperation policies from a comparative approach; its humanitarian aid strategies as a non-traditional aid donor; and its diversifying public diplomacy policies and tools in the last decade.
Regional-Global Nexus in Middle Power Foreign Policy
Revisiting the âMiddle Powerâ Concept
Despite a mounting number of studies over the recent years, the concept of middle power remains theoretically and empirically understudied in the International Relations (IR) literature. A simple search in the Google-N-Grams reveals that while scholarly interest in middle powers emerged in the 1940s, attention did not begin accumulating until 2000,1 mostly as a result of the growing number of scholars from middle-ranked countries studying middle powers (Cooper 2011). However, the concept can be traced back to even earlier times and was first used by the Mayor of Milan to determine three different states by their sizes: grandissime (empires), mezano (middle powers), and picolli (small powers) (Wight 1978, 298; Ravenhill 2011; Yalçın 2012). Nonetheless, the term was first popularized among IR scholars by Organski in 1958, when he clustered states as superpowers, great powers, middle powers, and small powers (Cooper 2011). Similarly, at the Congress of Vienna, the Versailles Peace Treaty, and the League of Nations, middle powers were also considered states with different international legal status. In his seminal work on middle powers, Holbraad cited other past usages in which middle powers were referred to as states materially less equipped than great powers, defenders of the balance of power, and providers of peace and order (Holbraad 1984, 3). However, the concept emerged more widely after WWII to describe Canada and Australia and their attempts to be recognized as a distinct class of states with distinct privileges within the post-war settlement on this ground (Robertson 2017). Status anxieties loom large over middle powers (Patience 2014), and this is true for both historical and contemporary cases. Thus, the concept became commonly employed by Canadian scholars and leaders (Higgott and Cooper 1990) as well as scholars and leaders from other potential middle powers (Cooper 2011).
These relatively early uses of the concept focused on the explicit power capabilities arising from the middle powersâ material resources and their legal status in major global governance organizations. However, the newer uses of the middle power conception have become more about distinct diplomatic characteristics such as the active, creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial use of diplomacy, leveraging niche areas, coalition-building skills, and normative and abiding good international citizenship rather than coercion and exercise of power over the years despite the lack of an authoritative definition of the term (Robertson 2017).
Overall, the growing IR literature tends to conceptualize middle powers in terms of three common attributions: functional, positional, and behavioral (Cooper 2016; Chapnick 1999; Carr 2014). At the theoretical level, middle powers are often overlooked in mainstream IR theories such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism despite their long historical roots (Ping 2017). When these traditional approaches do assess middle powers, realists, liberals, and the English school depart from the positional attributions while constructivists focus more on the behavioral. Ravenhills noted that a definition of middle powers can be encapsulated with five Cs: capacity, concentration, creativity, coalition building, and credibility (Ravenhill 2011). Yet, existing definitions vary from one scholar to another based on the specific meaning they attribute to the concept. As underlined by William Tow and Richard Rigby, no consensus has been reached on what exactly the term âmiddle powerâ refers to (Tow and Rigby 2011). Similarly, Sook-Jong Lee stressed that since the criteria for measuring middle-sized countries differ, it is difficult to define a country as such (Lee 2012). Table 1.1 summarizes the traditional/old-generation and non-traditional/new-generation definitions of middle powers with reference to their authors.
Table 1.1
Middle power definitionsa
Traditional/old-generation definitions of middle powers (until the 2000s) | ||
|---|---|---|
Functional approaches | Positional approaches | Behavioral approaches |
1. Many of the post WWII middle power imaginings were functional 2. Countries with special relations with post-war settlers, such as Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the Netherlands, enact functional middle power roles 3. Ravenhill (2011) drew attention to the aspiration of Canada for a privileged position in international institutions, which was central to Canadaâs sense of national identity in foreign affairs. Chapnick also underlined the functional understanding of Canadian post WWII foreign policy Chapnick (1999) 4. Functional roles can be extended to South Korea, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey, Poland, Finland, and Czechoslovakia. Here it generally overlaps with other functional categories such as balancer or pivot 5. A similar category noted by Cooper et al. (1993) is that of functional/geographic attributes and are states located between two great powers or power blocs, such as Turkey | 1. Positional approaches depart from an objective ranking of the states by quantifiable factors such as GDP, population, military size, defense spending, resources, and industrial capacity, as well as immeasurable power sources such as national will and strength of leadership 2. This kind of classification departed from the realist understanding that middle powers are capable of exerting a degree of strength and influence not found in small powers Patience (2014). Holbraadâs definition of middle powers as states that are significantly stronger than small powers but relatively weaker than great powers was also based on positional definitions Holbraad (1984, 4) 3. In this sense, these types of definitions focus on the hierarchical ranking of states. Chapnick (1999) calls this the âhierarchical modelâ 4. In addition to economic capacities, physical attributes, such as geography, location, and size, also matter for the definition of middle powers according to Cooper et al. (1993, 16â27) 5. Second-tier states, emerging states, rising powers, and regional powers are similar concepts in this sense | 1. Behavioral approach departs from the argument that middle powers are supposed to have distinct diplomatic characteristic such as active diplomacy (the creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial use of diplomacy), niche diplomacy (the concertation of financial, human, and network resources on limited objectives), coalition building (working with like-minded states), and good international citizenship (a belief in the utility and necessity of cooperation to solve international problems). Inhibitor, mediator, or intermediator states are similar concepts in this sense 2. Wood (1988) argued that middle powers are those countries with leadership abilities (regional/subregional leadership or issue-based leaderships); countries with stabilizing, mediating, or counterbalancing roles; those seeking status by allying with great powers; or good citizens of the international community that follow the rules of the game 3. For Cooper et al. (1993, 16â27) normative middle power category included states acting as honest brokers or trusted mediators and behavioral middle power category as acting as a catalyst or an entrepreneur in regional and global matters. In this sense, middle powers are primarily defined by their behavior |
Non-traditional/new generation definitions of middle power (after the 2000s) | ||
|---|---|---|
Traditional-based | Mixed (or intermingled) | New definitions |
Ping (2005, 2017) refined the positional definitions Carr (2014) refined capacity-based definitions with a systemic impact approach Ikeda (2004) refined the positional definitions What Carr (2014) calls the identity approach, statesâ self-identification of middle power status, can also be studied under the label of behavioral approaches | Jordaan (2003) recognized distinct types of middle powers, including emerging and traditional middle powers Robertson (2006) employed functional-, positional-, and behavioral- based definitions Parlar Dal and Cooper (2017), Parlar Dal and Kursun (2017) and Onis and Kutlay (2017) also employed eclectic definitions Sandal (2014) used functional, positional, and behavioral attributes to address the Turkish and Brazilian cases | Patience (2014) discarded all definitions above and argued that historically there are three types of middle powers based on three characteristics/attributes: Concert of Europe, regional, and neo-Kantian middle powers. However, while the concert of Europe is a functional approach, Patienceâs characterization of regional middle powers focused on states seeking to cultivate regional groupings in response to security concerns, improving trade networks, and responding to the pressures of globalization. Neo-Kantian middle power is primarily a behavioral definition Sangbae (2009) defined middle powers as nodes in diplomatic networks by employing newly emerged research technologies |
Overall, defining a middle power is a contested and complex endeavor in International Relations. Thus, finding a working definition can appear to be a futile exercise. Over the past years, studies which have attempted to create a working definition of a middle power have refined definitions by utilizing one of the above attributes, combining the existing definitions, or creating novel ones. That is, each study makes use of a selected definition of middle powers for its own purposes. The chapters in this edited book also employ their own working definitions in an eclectic manner by taking into consideration the existing categories of definitions of middle powers and their functional, positional, and behavioral attributes.
Within the mounting literature on middle powers, very few studies have focused on the regional-global power nexus in middle power diplomacy, and an increasing number of studies on the topic have dealt with the Asian context thanks to their focus on traditional middle powers such as Australia, Ko...