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The Arab Spring has significantly destabilized the "geopolitical zone" surrounding Turkey. Although Turkey, at first, viewed these events as opportunities for "democratic restoration," the Arab Spring has unleashed new dynamics that have turned Turkey's region into a zone of chronic crisis. Indeed, a new "age of insecurity" has begun in the Middle East, as identity-based animosities and radical tendencies threaten nation-state borders and the principle of sovereignty. These conditions confront Turkish foreign policy with multidimensional challenges and pressures not witnessed during the past decade. In light of President-elect Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's desire to more fully utilize the powers of the presidency to take a more active role in foreign policy, an evaluation of this new period has become necessary for tackling these challenges and generating practical responses to these pressures.
In this new period, Erdoğan's first task entails forging a new model of foreign policy implementation without abandoning the foreign policy vision that characterized his tenure as prime minister, while employing the institutional suppleness of the presidency. Davutoğlu's promotion from foreign minister to prime minister can be read as a signal that Erdoğan will sustain even more resolutely the foreign policy discourse that has been consolidated over the past several years. However, the pair must answer several critiques that have recently been aimed at them and reestablish their "discursive superiority" on foreign policy issues. Surmounting these challenges is just as important as the new foreign policy model the pair must implement.
The Critique of Turkey's Foreign Policy
Over the past decade, the AK Party under Erdoğan has successfully produced solutions to many foreign policy challenges, and facilitated a continuity in the fundamental transformation that Turkish foreign policy has undergone. Both institutionally and ideationally, Erdoğan and his foreign policy team have instituted the most important foreign policy "revision" in the history of the Turkish Republic. Not only did this administration produce structural solutions to several of Turkey's chronic political problems, it has also "radically" recast how Turkey is perceived internationally. With its implementation of pro-growth economic policies, Turkey took its place as a "significant" actor on international platforms. Erdoğan devoted his energy to consolidating Turkey's democracy and reconstructing the domestic political order: from civil-military relations to the Kurdish problem to the relations between religion and state, he has confronted numerous challenges which are remnants from Turkey's early republican era. Through these policies, Erdoğan has played an important role in the last decade of an attempted "restoration" that stretches back over a century.