Description
Turkey’s foreign policy under the AKP has generated debate over whether the country is drifting away from the West or pursuing a pragmatic search for greater autonomy. The early 2000s were marked by close alignment with the Euro-Atlantic community and enthusiasm for EU accession, while the 2010s brought assertive regional interventions, defence-industrial upgrading, and overtures to non-Western platforms such as BRICS and the SCO. This paper situates these developments within broader transformations of the global political economy, from the 2008 financial crisis to the rise of multipolarity and renewed great-power competition. Drawing on a critical IPE/IR framework, it challenges the familiar “benign 2000s / coercive 2010s” framing, instead highlighting continuities of neoliberal expansionism and state restructuring in the 2000s. Shifts in the global order and domestic crises after 2011 accelerated Ankara’s pursuit of strategic autonomy, yet this has unfolded alongside a continued commitment to NATO and the Western security architecture, despite significant tensions. In the last couple of years, it is plausible to argue that this orientation has been re-entrenched against the background of an emerging Second Cold War. In this sense, Turkey differs from other Global South countries in an era of “Active Non-Alignment” and/or “polyalignment,” as it did during the first Cold War. The result is a pragmatic strategy of balancing and leveraging ties across multiple power centres in order to strengthen Turkey’s position in a shifting geopolitical landscape, albeit within certain structural limits.
