The FINANCIAL — Although the ultimate meaning behind the prime minister’s Arab countries visit is still on the table for a flood of in-depth media analysis that is sure to read too much in the apparent facts, the tour may prove to be exactly what Turkish officials meant it to be: rebuilding an entire region of differing priorities that might in return change the world entirely.
The emerging order, or lack of it, in the Arab Spring countries has hit all global actors but had more profound effects on Turkey, which has, in every sense, striven to be a close and trustworthy neighbor to those countries that were part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Turkish foreign policy since the collapse of the empire has inevitably been shaped with regards to developments in neighboring countries of the Near East, depending on where its priorities lay, but also on where it felt mostly at home, with family.
The Arab Spring, in that regard, promised the opportunity for mending the ties once severed when Turkey was pushed out of the area, first by ex-colonizers of Europe, then by the strongmen the world today calls dictators, who were once instrumental in saving those countries from Western exploitation. Turkey traditionally shied away from involvement that required ruthless competition with Western or Eastern powers, but the current government policies shine with a never before seen self-assuredness that shows Turkey will either be a part of the new order, or put up a fight that will give its rivals a good run for their money. When Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan embarked on Tuesday on a tour of the freshly out-of-revolt countries of North Africa, accompanied by hundreds of colleagues and businessmen, the media reverberated with reports that he had received a hero’s welcome from the people. Erdoğan was greeted with a sense of enthusiasm no leader in the region had enjoyed for decades. He repeatedly called on the Arab countries to unite and bury the hatchet to avoid the risks of the current absence of strong ties, while his words clearly included a subtext that Turkey saw itself as being a part of the new, hopefully democratic but still Islamic-rooted, union of Arab countries.
Erdoğan’s words also received popular backing in Turkey. The change in Turkish foreign policy has been evolving in parallel with public opinion, as surveys show that Turkey no longer wants to be a lone wolf. The results of the Transatlantic Trends 2011, an annual German Marshall Fund-sponsored opinion poll, on Wednesday indicated the same tendency toward cooperative politics among the Turkish public. The poll suggested that 43 percent of Turks in 2009 believed their country should act alone. The figure dropped to 34 percent in 2010, and eventually fell to 27 percent this year. But the idea of cooperation with others did not include the European Union or the United States; the public preferred cooperation with Middle Eastern countries.
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