Turkey Turning Its Face Towards the East

The Republic of Turkey, even starting from its very early years, was trying to embrace a secular stand in its foreign policy towards Arab countries while having a friendly attitude. As time went by, more Arab countries acquired independence and Turkey developed its relations with both east and west. As a result and also thanks to its geological position, it started to function as a bridge between them. Yet, this has changed after the 1950s. 

After the political disagreements related to Cyprus, Turkey started to develop tense relations with the West and wanted to seek more multilateral foreign policy relations rather than just having NATO and the US as allies. Thus, Turkey turned its face towards the East for a while, partly willingly and partly because it was getting alone in the international arena. But also, this was because of the growing number of independent states in the East. This situation gave Turkey a kind of hope to constitute power and a chance to have equal interstate relations rather than having more of a messenger role between two worlds.

In addition to political reasons, Turkey was experiencing hard times economically and from the 50s up until the 80s, the situation got worse. The better relations with the East meant better economical trade relations. Especially after the petrol sanctions during 1973, Turkey was having trouble and needed a beneficial political relationship.

So, although Turkey didn’t abandon this intermediary role, it developed more support for the East. For example, it gave verbal support to Algeria rather than France at the times of the conflicts between these two countries during the 60s. Furthermore, Turkey sought some common grounds to meet such as cultural or historical. At first, religion was not one of these due to Turkey’s political stand from day 1. However, with the government changes in Turkey and the status quo changes of the international arena, this also changed during the 70s.

Even though at the beginning Turkey had a negative view on joining the Islamic Congress, for the benefit of the country and their own political perspective, the government at that time agreed to attend. Later on, Turkey also became a part of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and formed closer relations with the countries that were once too antisecular for themselves. 

However, Turkey’s domestic politics was not stable as its foreign policy, and these two spheres affected each other naturally. In addition, the East was experiencing political wars, coups, revolutions, and so on. These problematic political lives affected Turkey-Arab countries' relations negatively. As a result, Turkey couldn’t have a linear relationship for long periods of time with the East. So it is safe to say that there was a clear shift in the actions and foreign policy of Turkey regarding its perspective upon Arab countries during this time period. And these were mostly because of political and economical reasons.

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