Shifting Dynamics in Turkish Foreign Policy in the Trans-European Space

This chapter reconstructs Turkey’s foreign policy interactions with the key actors in the Trans-European space, during the Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, hereafter AKP) era, evaluating how they have developed over time and how they have been mutually influencing. Turkish foreign policy has shifted from a Europe-centred outlook, generally characterized by the long haul of European Union (EU) membership, towards a more assertive foreign policy approach, fuelled with attaining an ambitious regional role, which was particularly displayed with the unfolding of the Syrian crisis. After presenting the origins and the main features of a pro-active and multi-dimensional Turkish foreign policy, this chapter analyses how different factors in Turkey-EU relations have led to a long pause in the membership process and contributed to re-orient Turkish foreign policy towards its regional spaces. In the last section, we present selected cases of the recent Turkish structural foreign policy activism in its regional spaces, mainly from Central Asia, Middle East and Africa, and the Balkans.