balkan analysis
January 1, 2011
In the following interview, Balkanalysis.com Director Chris Deliso gets the views of Mehmet Ozkan and Birol Akgun, two leading academic experts on Turkey’s burgeoning diplomatic and economic engagement with Africa.
The work of Mr Ozkan, a PhD scholar at Spain’s Sevilla University, focuses on how cultural and religious elements shape foreign policy mentality in South Africa, Turkey and India. Prior to that, he studied at Istanbul University in Turkey, the University of Johannesburg in South Africa and Linkoping University in Sweden. For his part, Birol Akgun is a professor of international relations at Selcuk University in Konya, and has affiliations with the Institute of Strategic Thinking (SDE), an Ankara based think-tank. Professor Akgun concentrates on Turkish domestic and foreign policy and global security issues in general.
Readers interested in learning more about the topic should read an important article co-authored by Ozkan and Akgun, entitled “Turkey’s Opening to Africa” and published in Cambridge University Press’s 2010 Journal of Modern African Studies. References in the following interview are to comments made in that specific article.
Background and Ideologies
Chris Deliso: When did Turkey start to really perceive the value of expanding its diplomatic and economic reach in Africa? In your article, you point to 1998 – four years before the current AKP government took power – as a key date, a year after the EU failed to give Turkey candidate status at its summit. You point to this rejection as one part of the reason why the then-foreign minister, Ismail Cem, created the ‘Opening up to Africa’ policy document. Historically speaking, do we know what were the other motivations or influencing parties behind the creation of this doctrine?
Birol Akgun: As a matter of fact, there were some political initiatives made by Turkey in the 1960s to reach out to the third-world countries, in order to develop political relations with the non-Western world, and for a couple of reasons. To start with, after American President Lyndon Johnson wrote a letter explaining that the US might not be willing to defend Turkey against the Soviet Union in case of Turkey’s use of force in Cyprus, Turkey’s political elite began questioning the value of NATO’s security umbrella for Turkey....more...
Chris Deliso: When did Turkey start to really perceive the value of expanding its diplomatic and economic reach in Africa? In your article, you point to 1998 – four years before the current AKP government took power – as a key date, a year after the EU failed to give Turkey candidate status at its summit. You point to this rejection as one part of the reason why the then-foreign minister, Ismail Cem, created the ‘Opening up to Africa’ policy document. Historically speaking, do we know what were the other motivations or influencing parties behind the creation of this doctrine?
Birol Akgun: As a matter of fact, there were some political initiatives made by Turkey in the 1960s to reach out to the third-world countries, in order to develop political relations with the non-Western world, and for a couple of reasons. To start with, after American President Lyndon Johnson wrote a letter explaining that the US might not be willing to defend Turkey against the Soviet Union in case of Turkey’s use of force in Cyprus, Turkey’s political elite began questioning the value of NATO’s security umbrella for Turkey....more...
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