Turkey

There is a fundamental misperception with regard to Turkey’s relationship with the Balkans. Turkey is not external to the region, the way Russia is for instance. Its history and geographic location make it a part of southeast Europe.  Millions of Turks have their family roots in what was once known as ‘Turkey-in-Europe.’  This includes the founder of the republic, the Salonika-born Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Ties run deep at the political, economic, and societal levels. 

On the way to consolidate the shift from a parliamentary to a presidential republic, Turkey is facing a number of challenges in both domestic and foreign policy. Domestically, the main alarm bells for President Recep Erdogan come from the economy, which entered into recession at the end of 2018, with 20% inflation, 13.5% unemployment and rising costs of living, especially in food prices.

On December 16th 2016, there was an unusual – even by the post-coup attempt standards – police presence near the Cagdas art centre in Ankara. It didn’t take me long to figure out what was going on. On that evening, Andrei Karlov, the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, was shot by an off-duty Turkish police officer at a vernissage right there at the Cagdas centre. Even if there had been street protests over Russian involvement in the Syrian conflict in Ankara during the previous days, nobody could have ever anticipated such a tragic accident would occur.

Defining the nature of Turkish-US relations has become a challenge in itself. Although institutionalised and historical, these relations are suffering from an accumulated series of crises, an outdated framework, and diverging threat perceptions. A glimpse into the files on both countries’ agendas in recent years clearly confirms the nature of their relations.

US-Turkish relations have always been difficult to manage. But even in the context of a relationship prone to stresses and strains, the last few years have been extraordinarily difficult. Some of these frictions are structural, and some are the product of political dynamics in both countries alongside regional developments. The frictions may be managed. They will not easily be resolved. A relationship that both have reason to regard as “strategic” will continue to face tough tests.

Alliances and rivalries in the Middle East have become liquid. The proliferation of regional conflicts and a more acute sense of regime vulnerability across the region explain why realignments are more frequent and countries are able to ally on one particular front and be at odds on another one. In the past, alliances shifted but were far more consistent. Making sense of Turkey realignments is paramount to understand both the geopolitical shifts in the MENA region and tensions in transatlantic relations.

On 7 August 2011, the then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared the Syrian issue to be a ‘domestic affair’ for Turkey and that his country could not stay idle in the face of the political crisis in Syria. Almost eight years later, the Syrian crisis has indeed become an issue of Turkish domestic politics, albeit not in the way President Erdogan envisaged. At the beginning of the Syrian crisis in 2011, Turkey was seeking to project its power throughout the Middle East, seeing its immediate neighbourhood as Ankara’s hinterland.

Turkey is facing its first recession since 2009: economic growth contracted in the last two quarter of 2018 by -1.6% and -2.4%, respectively. As a result, Turkey’s economy only grew 2.6 % in all of 2018, compared to 7.4% in 2017 and an average of 6.8% in the period between 2010 and 2017. According to the latest OECD estimates, this year Turkey’s GDP will decrease by 1.8%.

After almost two decades of fast growth and rising prosperity, last year Turkey entered in economic recession. The reasons are due both to government policies and to macroeconomic factors. In this infographic, a set of economic indicators help better understand why Turkiey's economic growth contracted.