Moving Away from The West or Taking Independent Positions: A Structural Analysis for The New Turkish Foreign Policy

This paper focuses on understanding and explaining the change of Turkish foreign policy,particularly in the last decade. Many observers have expressed a suspicion that Turkey is abandoning its Western-centric alignment and gradually shifting its axis. The thesis argues that rather than a shift, Turkey is taking an independent position. It maintains that the end of the Cold War and the change in the international structure from bipolarity to unipolarity has provided incentives for countries with some degree of material capabilities to pursue independence from the U.S. policy preferences. This study analyses structural effects on the behavior of Turkey. Later it associates the observed change in Turkey’s foreign policy as the outcomes of taking an independent position to maximize its objectives. Finally, it presents empirical research to prove the argument