POLITICA EXTERNĂ A TURCIEI LA CENTENAR: BALANSAREA STRATEGICĂ A UNEI PUTERI MIJLOCII

Turkey, as most of the nations that once were great empires, often has an conceited sense of its heydays. This often leads to a readiness to be inspired, or a vulnerability to be manipulated, by effective politicians who are able to instrumentalize this kind of narrative. Understanding the importance of Turkey’s imperial past is essential to understanding its 21st century foreign policy. Since the late 2010s, Turkey has systematically positioned itself as a power aspiring for significant strategic autonomy in international affairs, for which reason researchers had to look for new analytical approaches to describe its behaviour in the international arena and relations with its neighbours. The concept of strategic hedging allows analysing more accurately Turkey’s multidirectional foreign policy, which does not correspond with the classical models of behaviour typical of middle powers. This research argues that, due to a complex of international and domestic developments, Turkey has been trying to combine different types of balancing and, more importantly, hedging. The paper explores how Turkey, in pursuit of its main goal of becoming a major regional actor, not that is only retaining, but also is trying to enhance its strategic autonomy in international relations. The structural (neo-realist) and ideational (constructivist) approaches, and that of strategic balancing, are the main benchmarks underlying the methodological and theoretical framework of this article