Turkey in Global Governance: Preferences, Capabilities, and Strategies

The international system has witnessed a period of progressive global power shift from the global north to the global south with the emergence of a number of states, mostly coming from the global south with huge economic, political, and military might as well as a significant ability to influence global affairs. The states are generally labelled as rising/emerging powers, middle powers, or rising/emerging middle powers. Such a transformation of the international system has also served in a reconfiguration of multilateralism and global governance mechanisms.

Global governance refers to collective efforts to assess and address global problems and processes that go beyond the capacity of national states. It includes a grand variety of cooperative problem-solving arrangements, which may be informal (practices and guidelines or temporary formations such as coalition of the willing) or formal (law and treaties or administrative structures and established practices), to manage collective affairs by various actors such as state authorities, intergovernmental organizations, private sector entities, or civil society organizations.

In its traditional conception, a middle power is a state whose size is in between great powers and lesser powers, or whose position is in between extremes in ideological or political systems. However the contemporary use of the term “middle power” rather refers to states with “distinct diplomatic characteristics such as the active, creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial use of diplomacy, leveraging niche areas, coalition- building skills, and normative and abiding good international citizenship”.

The IR literature tends to conceptualize middle powers in terms of three common attributions: positional, behavioral, and geographic. Positional attribution is related to a state’s position within an international hierarchy of states. Behavioral attribution refers to the type of diplomatic behavior they do, or could, display in common such as the pursuit of multilateral solutions to international problems, compromise in international disputes, and good international citizenship. Geographic attribution refers to those states geographically located between two great powers or between the system’s major powers ideologically. 

This view argues that the liberal tenet of the contemporary global governance leads the rising states to integrate into it and that the rise of new powers is an overstated phenomenon because their ascendance is indeed located within the Western global hegemony and the liberal world order. This liberal internationalist school of thought, represented by John Ikenberry, holds that although states in the rising power category compete with the US over the leadership of the international system, they do not oppose the principal rules of the system such as the rule of law, multilateralism, and openness.

During the cold war, Turkey adopted a nonautonomous pro-western foreign policy due to its proximity with the US and the west in general and was less vocal in terms of systemic challenge. Turkey only showed up with the unfolding of international crises closely concerned with its national interests (for instance, the Cyprus conflict). Similarly, in the Cold War years and in the 1990s, Turkey also lacked a combination of material resources (due to its long-lasting economic shortcomings), as well as diplomatic and ideational power that would have opened the pace for Turkey to pursue a global foreign policy role and a nuanced institutionalism. During the 1990s, Turkey faced serious domestic political and economic problems. It was not able to set a diplomatic agenda through an autonomous middle power foreign policy initiatives.

Turkey’s multilateralism mostly aimed at realigning its foreign policy with that of its Western allies. Regarding Turkey’s preferences in terms of the global governance system, since 1959 when Turkey made its first application for membership to European Economic Community (EEC)/European Union (EU), Turkey’s top institutional foreign policy priority has been integration with the Union as a full member. 

The deterioration of Turkish-American relations with the Iraqi War in 2003 and the ongoing Syrian war, and the stalemate in Turkey’s EU accession negotiations as well as the considerable increase in its material power made Turkey more inclined in global politics to act as an active agenda-setter and a normative foreign policy actor seeking a cosmopolitan and pluricentric world order rather than a passive follower.

A major example of Turkish activism was in the UN through its non-permanent membership in the UN Security Council for the term 2009-2010. This provided Turkey with new opportunities to play a more constructive role in global governance by strengthening its withinsystem challenge and its reform aspirations visá-vis the international order. This membership in the UN Security Council and a Turkey-Brazil joint initiative in the spring of 2010 regarding a fuel-swap deal with Iran accelerated Turkey’s active engagement with regard to the global governance institutions, particularly the UN. Turkey’s activism in the UN has also covered its close engagement within the work of the UN General Assembly and its other subsidiary bodies.

Turkey has shared a more common ideational ground with the five BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). 

These factors are; material power, the degree of states’ dependence on the global economy, states’ behaviors toward the existing international order, socializational and institutional power, and the strength of their civil society.

The more a middle power has material power that can be defined in terms of economic power, military power, and of population; the more it has the tendency to solve some international problems unilaterally or bilaterally, showing less willingness to search for multilateral solutions.

Economic interdependence serves to reinforce cooperation and preserve the peace among states, pushing states to find peaceful solutions to international crises. Accordingly, trade interdependence increases diplomatic cooperation among trade partners and positively affects their involvement in global governance through assuming more responsibilities. Liberal theories assume that the more a country becomes dependent on the global economy, the more it has a positive impact on its involvement in global governance. In this connection, the more a country has dependence on trade and investment, the more it seeks to foster multilateral cooperation in order to find responses to global crises.

It shows the degree of socialization of countries to the cultures and values (norms) of the international organizations and to the international order.

The middle powers all benefit from the institutionalization of the liberal world order and, due to their limited capacities and their efforts through international organizations, they legitimize the arrangements of the global inequalities. Their limited capacity prevents them from single-handedly shaping the global order and this inability makes them selectively and functionally take initiatives on certain global problems multilaterally. 

Turkey’s increasing activism in foreign policy was carried out throughout the 2000s.  The strategic importance of the G20 began to increase as an inclusive platform of global economic governance which enabled Turkey to participate in the global governance reform process. Turkey’s presidency for 2015 opened up a new era, not only for Turkey’s middle power diplomacy and activism toward the G20, but also for its unfolding nuanced stance vis-á-vis changing global governance frameworks. Ankara perceived the 2015 rotating presidency of the G20 as a major opportunity to display Turkey’s rising status at the international level as an economic and political power as well as to raise the profile of the G20 as a major global political economy platform.

Turkey’s rising middle power activism under its first rotating presidency could be explained through two main axis: The first axis aims to monitor the ongoing structural reforms such as maintaining sustainable global growth in the G20 and diminishing imbalances between the developed and the least developed countries. The second axis seeks to pursue a wider development and innovation approach with the aim of establishing coalitions with countries with similar development needs inside and outside the G20.

During its presidency, Turkey emphasized the need to have a more inclusive G20 agenda, which should represent not only the 20 member countries but would be relatively global, including the low-income developing countries (LIDCs). Turkey’s 2015 G20 presidency promoted the following motto: “inclusiveness, implementation and investment”.

Turkey’s G20 presidency clearly showed that Turkey’s perception of the G20 differs from that of the BRICS countries, which avoid investing too much in this platform and rather pursue a “hedging strategy” by seeking structural reforms in international institutions like the IMF. In contrast to the BRICS, Turkey sees the G20 as a unique platform especially for those middle powers who have been ardent supporters of the development of the forum since its establishment (for instance, South Korea, Australia, Mexico and Indonesia), and who favor multilateralism in order to balance the unilateral behaviors of major powers and to mediate between the latter and the emerging powers on sensitive issues.

Among these factors; the change in the country’s foreign policy identity and civilizational perception, and other factors such as possessing the necessary material, ideational and institutional power resources, the increasing dependence on the global economy, and the strength of its civil society can be named. Turkey’s relatively low material capacity in terms of GDP compared to that of other rising middle powers, its high trade dependence, its strong perceptions about a possible constructive role and middle-power actorness, and its long membership in major international organizations may serve to make Turkey potentially a more active player in global governance. Despite its low participation rates in civil society organizations compared to those of the other eight rising middle power countries, in recent years Turkish society has increasingly become more sensitive to global governance issues (such as humanitarian crises, environmental and climate change-related problems, poverty, unemployment, and gender inequality).