Two Notes on Turkey's Foreign Policy

Briefly now.

One of the things that stands out on a visit to Istanbul is the southern bridge spanning the Bosphorus. It's a sight that often stands in as a kind of synechdoche for Turkey: bridge between two cultures, two continents, two ways of life, two faiths, two histories, so on and so forth. (The tale of Xerxes lashing the Hellespont comes to mind.)

So with all of that, it's interesting to read an attempt to find a new metaphor for Turkey. In an op-ed in the English-language edition of Hurriyet, Gul Demir and Nikki Gam write:

I think there are two sides to this. The first one is the rhetoric of being a bridge; I think it does not serve Turkey’s interests. A bridge is something very static, which Turkey is not; it is an ever changing country. Secondly a bridge is something that connects two sides and has no influence on either side; the bridge is something that you pass over. You don’t pay attention to it. However, Turkey is not a bridge and I think we should forget using this rhetoric. We should drop this rhetoric from Turkish foreign policy. We are a kind of melting pot, a hub, a political, cultural, strategic hub, whatever you would like to call it, a center where people can meet together, talk together, and where they can interact together. So the tough side of this is that I oppose the rhetoric of the bridge in Turkish foreign policy.

All of which brings to mind another brief aside in a recent issue of the Economist. Discussing Turkey's changing foreign policy, they write:

Some credit [for Turkey's recent foreign policy successes] is due to Mr Davutoglu, who was a foreign-policy adviser to the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for seven years before becoming foreign minister in May. This spry former academic is seen as the architect of Turkey’s soft power, which blends realpolitik with a fierce pride. A pious Muslim with a moralistic bent, Mr Davutoglu has been among the most influential foreign ministers in the history of the Turkish republic.

His approach rests on two pillars. One is to have “zero problems” with the neighbours, many of them troubled or troublesome. The other is “strategic depth”. This calls for a Turkish zone of political, economic and cultural influence, primarily among neighbours (many of them former Ottoman dominions) in the Balkans, the south Caucasus and the Middle East.

From bridges to zones, and it's worth thinking about the ways in which metaphors (particularly spatial ones) end up structuring the political world in which we live.