Under the above title, Turkish daily Today’s Zaman (07.09.11, online) hosted the following article by Kerim Balci:
“Turkish-Israeli relations cannot be isolated from the general framework of Turkish foreign policy and Turkey’s self-perception (used here as the English translation of Husserl’s concept of “Selbstverstandnis”) as the mediator par excellence of the Middle East.
Within this framework, Israel is not only an “other” but also a “third side.” That means as long as Turkey has diplomatic relations with any other actor in the Middle East, it will have to have some kind of relationship with Israel also. The cessation of relations with Israel altogether would not only affect Turkey and Israel but would also bring about a multidimensional change in Turkey’s foreign policy paradigm. Turkey is either a soft power adhering to its ‘zero problems with neighbour’s’ policy, and thereby remains in communication with Tel Aviv, or it becomes a hard power with a greater naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean basin, ends its relations with Israel and retains its problems with its neighbours.
This is not a critique of Turkey’s recent strategy of sanctions against the State of Israel. This is a wakeup call about the changing dynamics of Turkish foreign policy. This should worry the Turks and the Israelis as well as the Syrians, the Greek Cypriots, the Iranians, the Armenians and other neighbours of Turkey. With its rejectionist policies, Israel managed to push Turkey to the limits of its patience and cause it to abandon its well-considered and orchestrated new foreign policy.
I assume Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu is most disturbed by Israel’s imposition on Turkey of a self-perception as a hard power. I am sure he is lamenting the loss of the hopes of tranquillity and peace in Turkey’s relations with its neighbours. From now on, every new decision made in Ankara on foreign policy will carry a whiff of this new reality: Ankara’s increasingly harsh criticism of the Syrian regime is not unrelated to what has happened between Turkey and Israel. We won’t find the Turkish Foreign Ministry willing to run to the rescue of Iran in an international crisis, and we won’t find Turkish diplomats willing to engage in productive conversation with their Armenian counterparts within the framework of this new self-perception. We will find the Turkish Air Forces more willing to bomb the Kandil Mountains in cases of terrorist attacks perpetrated within Turkey, and we will certainly find Turkey more threatening towards Greek Cypriot ambitions of establishing oil drilling facilities within the international waters around Cyprus. But Turkey is not the one to blame here. The Israeli Government caused Ankara to become this way.
This is not to say that the transition from soft power to hard power is a one-way metamorphosis. Turkey can, and hopefully will, turn back to its early Davutoglu-era foreign policy principles. This would, of course, be contingent upon Israel’s decision to accede to Turkey’s demands related to the Gaza aid flotilla incident. Put in frank and straight terms: By not apologizing and not paying compensation to the families of the victims, and by manipulating the reports of international bodies via its lobbying machine, Israel is not losing only one ally, it is causing the entire Middle East to lose a good mechanism for mediation.
That early Davutoglu-era Turkish foreign policy paradigm is necessary for the newly emerging participatory democracies of the Arab Middle East. If 10 years from now we still find Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen stuck in a quagmire of self-renewing dictatorships, this will, to a certain extent, be due to Israel’s unwillingness to keep Turkey on track as an emerging soft power.
