The Handbook of Global Security Policy

Chapter 24 Contextualizing Global Security: The Case of Turkey

Aslı Çalkıvik

Introduction

“Globalization imposes on us a moral responsibility; it forces on us the responsibility to see and hear other people's problems and the responsibility to solve them” (Aksam, 2012a). These observations belong to the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which he articulated in a speech delivered at the 2012 UNCTAD Conference held in Qatar. It was a speech that unfolded in slightly provocative terms as Erdogan went on to suggest that “the global moral conscience that worried about dolphins, whales in extinction, rain forests” should not remain oblivious to what it has seen, heard and felt of “… the pain of children who are dying in Kabul, Gaza, Mogadishu, Bagdad, Hama and Hummus.” Delivered at a time when the waves of the Arab uprising continued to pound the streets of Syria, and Turkey's insistent requests for NATO to adopt a determined stance in defense of the country's national security interests had little resonance in Brussels, this address was expressive of a broader trend in Turkey's security policies in the post-Cold War era, namely, a contested, yet, unequivocal re-orientation towards being a more vocal defender of globalized conceptions of security and a proactive actor in global security governance.

This chapter engages with the transformation in Turkey's security policies by attending to the contemporary developments and debates as it surveys Turkey's role in the formulation ...