The Western Condition - St Antony's College - University of Oxford

The Western Condition: Turkey, the US and the EU in the New Middle East
out quietly around the same time, with little to show in the way of institutional reform. 61 Without
a doubt, a breakthrough in any of these bold initiatives would have provided a major boost for
efforts within Turkey to face the country’s historic traumas and heal its deep running sociopolitical
wounds. It would also have allowed its decision makers to tackle regional challenges
exacerbated by the outbreak of the Arab uprisings with better grounded self-confidence. Instead,
having acted largely against the will of the nationalist and conservative Sunni segments of the
society, and seeing no tangible return on its investments, the AKP government eventually
backtracked and went on to adopt a populist and confrontational rhetoric that appealed to the
preferences of these two sizeable and partly overlapping constituents.
It is against such a backdrop of ‘failed openings’ that Turkish foreign policy flourished during
this period, a period which we can safely characterise as Davutoğlu’s apogee. While his influence
within the foreign ministry continued to grow following the election of Abdullah Gül to the
presidency, Davutoğlu’s flagship doctrine of ‘strategic depth’ truly came to replace Ankara’s
traditional reactive approach when he became foreign minister in 2009. Borrowed from military
doctrine to indicate the extent to which a country or territory‘s vulnerability can be reduced
beyond the strict defence of its boundaries, the term has come to take on a broader politicodiplomatic
understanding – i.e. “the ability of a state to reduce threats by a combination of
strategies which includes improving relations with neighbours to try and bring the possibility of
an armed conflict to zero and thereby creating space for economic development and
projection”. 62 As summarised by Pakistani General Durrani:
Strategic depth, within and without, is of course the need of every country. ‘Friendly
neighbourhood’, ‘near abroad’, and buffers are some of the more familiar variants.
Of course, this is not merely a spatial concept (Israel has it in the US), it is also
economic, political (alliance building), and is best provided by unity within. 63
Foreign Minister Davutoğlu, caused a stir within the AKP and effectively spelled the end of the Armenian initiative.
See Nigar Göksel, ‘Turkey and Armenia Post-Protocols: Back to Square One?’, TESEV Foreign Policy Programme,
November 2012.
61 The government set up an ‘Alevi workshop’ and invited prominent figures from the Alevi community to take part
in a constructive dialogue with the state. Prime Minister Erdoğan became the first Turkish prime minister to visit an
Alevi ‘cemevi’ (place of congregation and prayer) and the first ever Sunni leader to visit Imam Ali’s shrine in Najaf,
Iraq. His public apology for the Dersim massacres of 1937 – 38 was also of symbolic importance, even if there was a
subtext of highlighting the CHP’s responsibility in it. However, marred by mutual distrust and a lack of sincere
intent, the workshop failed to produce any meaningful framework for institutional reform and the state’s refusal to
officially recognise Alevism as a minority religion persisted.
62 Ejaz Haider, ‘Pakistan needs strategic depth’, The Express Tribune, 7 October 2011.
63 Lt-Gen (r) Asad Durrani, ‘Strategic depth — revisited’, The Express Tribune, 19 October 2011. In the military world,
the term generally refers “a state’s ability to deal with an offensive through elastic, multi-layered defence, absorb the
initial thrust, stress the enemy forces and inflict attrition on it through multiple counter-strikes that would lead to
the offensive petering out and falling short of its objectives. At a basic level it is a rather simple calculation of
distances between the frontlines and/or any forward battle sectors and a state’s strategic assets: industrial areas, key
urban and population centres, communications lines, military production centres, in effect the state’s heartlands or,
to put it another way, all the soft and hardware whose agglomeration makes a state viable. For politico-military
planners this becomes a central precept. How vulnerable such assets are and what strategy must be adopted to
31