Turkish foreign policy in the Balkans amidst 'soft power' and 'de-Europeanisation'

Alpan, Başak and Öztürk, Ahmet Erdi (2022) Turkish foreign policy in the Balkans amidst 'soft power' and 'de-Europeanisation'. Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 22 (1). pp. 45-63. ISSN 1468-3857

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 2000s, an extensive degree of academic research has been echoing one popular opinion, which is ‘Turkey is back to the Balkans’. These studies have been scrutinising the complicated role of Turkey in the Balkans, usually drawing upon the use of soft power by the former. This impact in the region remained intact during the 2010s, although the overall Turkish foreign policy in the 2010s has been highly securitised and de-Europeanised, losing its soft power character that had been its trademark starting from early 2000s. In this regard, this paper aims to decipher different dimensions of Turkey’s foreign policy in the Balkans through a more general exploration of the de-Europeanisation of Turkish foreign policy in the 2010s. Through more than 80 semi-structured interviews, which were conducted between 2016-2020, with political actors, diplomats, religious leaders, scholars and journalists in Turkey and in the Balkans, we address the question of whether the divergence Turkish foreign policy from a soft power perspective and its concomitant de-Europeanisation tendency had been crystallised in its policy towards the Balkans within the context of the 2010s.

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