The autocracy promotion of Turkey in Northern Africa, Middle East, and Caucasus

Abstract

The foreign policy of Turkey has been analyzed, focusing on Erdogan governments and his relations with five countries of North Africa, Middle East, and Caucasus. Turkey has implemented different instruments of autocracy promotion in his relations with Syria, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Libya, and Egypt. The empirical evidence shows that Turkish diplomacy has been very flexible. On one hand, Erdogan used both hard and soft power; on the other hand, he negotiated with both authoritarian and hybrid regimes. Thus, autocracy promotion led to military interventions, together with a combination of blackmails and rewards; instead, the role of inertial emulation has been lower. The cases of Egypt and Libya were subject of a more specific analysis, which hypothesizes the existence of Erdogan’s project aimed at creating a coalition of Sunni parties, guided by the AKP; in such diplomacy, the starting point would be the values (rather than interests). This study proposes a two-stage division of Erdogan’s promotion of authoritarianism, thanks to a learning process that would have followed the negative experience in Egypt, which would result in a reconsideration of the higher weight given to interests in a later stage. For example, in Artsakh and Libya Erdogan solved conflicts through a territorial compromise.