Interview with News.Az

July 27, 2012 | Baku | News.Az

News.Az interviews Dr. Sylvia Tiryaki, Deputy Director, Global Political Trends Center, Istanbul Kültür University.

There are few evidences of Turkey to become a new regional superpower. How would you estimate Turkish policy in the region?



Actually, there are more than few indicators. Almost all the opinion polls including Pew, Tesev, Brookings Institute show that people of the region like Turkey, respect Turkey and endorse its foreign policy in the region. Moreover, Turkey is increasingly becoming visible in the international fora, concerning the problems of the region.

There is an opinion that Turkey preferred to enhance its cooperation with the Islamic world after some problems has occurred in cooperation between Ankara and the EU. Will this step bring more benefits for Turkey, due to negative perception of Turkish membership to the EU, or just the opposite Turkey will loose restricting its cooperation with Brussels? 

First of all, these are not contradictory but complementary processes. Secondly, there is not much correlation between Turkey’ accession negotiations’ pace (or their “hiccups”) and Turkey’s involvement with the Middle East. Some of the changes in the Turkish foreign policy towards the region are by design, due to Ahmet Davutoglu’s vision, some of the changes happened by default. Israel Gaza intervention in 2009 was the turning point in the Turkish foreign policy, rather than the nature of the Turkey-EU relations.

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