Opening the Black Box of Turkish Foreign Policy

An Examination of AKP’s Neo-Ottoman Shift

Abstract

The meteoric rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) since the turn of the century has catalysed a significant metamorphosis in Turkish politics. Prevalently conceived as ‘neo-Ottomanism’, this paper will seek to examine the causes behind the party’s geopolitical shift. Overall, it will argue that President Erdoğan capitalised on a rare ‘window of opportunity’ created by the diminishing Kemalist military and Western bloc. Particularly, it will demonstrate how Erdoğan’s psychology was crucial in manipulating domestic structures and how his expansionist character filtered into his foreign policy. In doing so, it will offer an original model putting Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA) at the centre. This model will be applied longitudinally, scrutinising the structure-agency dynamic determining ‘neo-Ottomanist’ foreign policy from Turgut Özal (1989-1993) to Erdoğan’s second term (2007-2020). It will find that the Turkish military, the country’s Western dependence and its parliament have acted as centripetal forces to change, with the psychology of leaders determining the success and extremity of ‘neo-Ottoman’ shifts. The principal contribution of the paper lies in uniting psychology and structure within a single framework, advancing the thin literature on foreign policy change and extending its scope beyond the narrow geographical and conceptual focus of much existing work.