The rise and fall of Turkey’s soft power discourse

Since the coming to power of the Justice and Development Party [Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP] in 2002, Turkish foreign policy has witnessed significant changes. After the euphoric years of foreign policy pro-activism geared towards the global expansion of Turkey’s influence, domestic and regional developments have raised questions concerning Ankara’s capacity to achieve its ambitious foreign policy goals. Parallel to the “rise and fall” of Turkish foreign policy, a similar cycle can be observed regarding the discourse on Turkey’s “soft power”. This paper seeks to appraise Turkey’s “soft power” and “model” discourses by establishing the chronology of their emergence and highlighting the multidimensional structure of their production. The authors argue that the discourses on Turkey’s “soft power” are created within a triadic system of discourse production. This system works through the domains of think tanks, academia, and foreign policy actors in Turkey and beyond. These domains are bound to each other through reciprocal relations of interest and are negotiated by gatekeepers, i.e. well-connected persons of influence. Turkey’s “soft power” discourse is as much a product of Turkish foreign policy itself as it is a product of Turkey’s relations with the United States (US). Circulating through these different domains, and being appropriated by a large number of actors with differing and sometimes contradictory interests, these discourses, reconstructed by the authors in this study, are highly permeable, diverse, and unstable. For a brief period, they did, however, collectively contribute to the emergence of an almost hegemonic discourse on Turkey’s soft power, thereby reinforcing the AKP regime at the beginning of the 2010s

Recompositions de l’État et coproduction de l’action publique

Afin d’analyser le rôle des acteurs privés dans la politique étrangère de la Turquie, cet article étudie l’action du mouvement de Fethullah Gülen au Kurdistan irakien de 1994 à 2014. Ce cas d’étude met en évidence le fait que des réseaux transnationaux comme le mouvement de Gülen participent à la production de la politique étrangère, et que cette participation varie en fonction de l’évolution des coalitions mobilisées pour le contrôle du pouvoir sur la scène nationale. Ainsi, le développement du mouvement de Gülen était en partie lié aux intérêts de la politique étrangère turque lorsque celle-ci était contrôlée par l’armée au début des années 1990. Il a ensuite participé à la production d’un nouveau paradigme sur le dossier kurde irakien au sein d’une « nébuleuse réformatrice » rassemblant bureaucrates et acteurs privés de divers horizons à la fin des années 2000. Suite au transfert de ce dossier de l’armée au ministère des Affaires étrangères et au développement des relations entre Ankara et Erbil, le mouvement de Gülen a progressivement été marginalisé, avant que l’Etat turc lui-même demande la fermeture de ces écoles suite au conflit entre l’AKP et la cemaat en décembre 2013.This article addresses the role of private actors in Turkish foreign policy process, and more specifically the interactions between the Gülen movement and Turkish foreign policy towards Iraqi Kurdistan from 1994 to 2014. This case study brings to light the fact that the role of transnational networks in foreign policy depends on the evolution of power struggle between competing coalitions on the domestic scene. Therefore, the development of the Gülen movement’s activities was partly linked with the army’s foreign policy at the beginning of the 1990’s. It then evolved and participated with a reformer nexus of various actors to the production of a new paradigm on the Kurdish file at the end of the 2000’s. After the file transfer from the army to the MFA and the development of the relations between Ankara and Erbil, the Gülen movement started to be marginalized, and the Turkish state even asked for the closure of the schools after the crisis between the AKP government and the movement in December 2013

The rise and fall of Turkey’s soft power discourse

Since the coming to power of the Justice and Development Party [Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP] in 2002, Turkish foreign policy has witnessed significant changes. After the euphoric years of foreign policy pro-activism geared towards the global expansion of Turkey’s influence, domestic and regional developments have raised questions concerning Ankara’s capacity to achieve its ambitious foreign policy goals. Parallel to the “rise and fall” of Turkish foreign policy, a similar cycle can be observed regarding the discourse on Turkey’s “soft power”. This paper seeks to appraise Turkey’s “soft power” and “model” discourses by establishing the chronology of their emergence and highlighting the multidimensional structure of their production. The authors argue that the discourses on Turkey’s “soft power” are created within a triadic system of discourse production. This system works through the domains of think tanks, academia, and foreign policy actors in Turkey and beyond. These domains are bound to each other through reciprocal relations of interest and are negotiated by gatekeepers, i.e. well-connected persons of influence. Turkey’s “soft power” discourse is as much a product of Turkish foreign policy itself as it is a product of Turkey’s relations with the United States (US). Circulating through these different domains, and being appropriated by a large number of actors with differing and sometimes contradictory interests, these discourses, reconstructed by the authors in this study, are highly permeable, diverse, and unstable. For a brief period, they did, however, collectively contribute to the emergence of an almost hegemonic discourse on Turkey’s soft power, thereby reinforcing the AKP regime at the beginning of the 2010s

No english title available

À la conquête de l’État. Politique étrangère de la Turquie au Kurdistan d’Irak et transformation du champ étatique sous le gouvernement AKP.No English summary available

No english title available

À la conquête de l’État. Politique étrangère de la Turquie au Kurdistan d’Irak et transformation du champ étatique sous le gouvernement AKP.No English summary available