Security Promises of the East: Meeting the Expectations of Turkey in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO)

Abstract

This paper argues that Turkey’s full membership to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) would have a symbolic meaning in terms of showing its displeasure of the Western actions towards Ankara and whose message of not being alone in a world of realist thinking. Even if Turkey becomes a full member of the SCO, which is subject to its departure from NATO membership, it will still need to continue being in search of developing and deepening its strategic relations bilaterally with the strongest actors of Russia and China in the SCO. This paper, therefore, concludes that, in a world of quickly changing and unpredictable geopolitical settings, Turkey can be better off so long as it continues to maintain political, economic and security links with the West, and concurrently tries to find ways to develop and deepen strategic relations with the East. By performing the method of qualitative content analysis, this work tries to prove its argument by exploring first the gap in security interests within NATO, second Turkey’s difficulties in getting support in the Alliance and third the scope of the SCO as a security provider and geopolitical partner for Turkey.

Keywords

• Turkey
• West
• East
• NATO
• Shanghai Cooperation Organisation

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