On Turkey’s Trail as a “Rising Middle Power” in the Network of Global Governance: Preferences, Capabilities, and Strategies

Year 2014, Volume: 19 Issue: 4, 107 - 136, 01.01.2014

Emel Parlar Dal

Abstract

Acknowledging Turkey as a “rising/emerging middle power”, occupying a middle ground between traditional or Western middle powers and non-traditional middle powers, this paper aims to reassess Turkey’s changing power and position in the complex power hierarchies and the changing architecture of global governance through its preferences, capabilities and strategies by using a comparative analysis. It then briefly resumes its findings to assess the driving factors, conditions and specific characteristics explaining Turkey’s contribution to global governance compared to a cluster of eight selected countries composed of the five BRICS countries, labeled as non-traditional middle powers, and Canada, Australia and South Korea, as traditional middle powers. Finally, it looks at Turkey’s contribution to global governance at the institutional level, with a special focus on Turkey’s 2015 G20 presidency as a test case for understanding its global governance activism. In the final analysis, this study underlines that Turkey’s ambitious agenda for its G20 presidency gives clear signals of its future preferences and middle power activism in less hierarchical G20-type forums in which developed and developing countries are equally represented and middle power countries are allowed more manoeuvring capacity

Keywords

Global governance, international order, Turkish foreign policy, rising middle powers, traditional middle powers, emerging non-traditional middle powers, G20.

References

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