Economic Diplomacy for Competitiveness: Globalization and Turkey’s New Foreign Policy

Year 2010, Volume: 15 Issue: 2, 21 - 47, 01.01.2010

Sadık Ünay

Abstract

This article aims to fill the methodological gap in the conventional IR literature by assessing the recent trajectory of Turkish foreign policy from the prism of international political economy, in particular global competitiveness. A holistic and interdisciplinary approach is adopted that incorporates critical insights from the disciplines of political science, international relations, economics, and development studies. The major parameters of Turkey’s structural transformation from an inward-looking, import-substituting economic and political system to a liberal export-promoting strategy are evaluated in line with the first- and second-generation neoliberal reforms in the 1980s and the 2000s, respectively. Meanwhile, the impact of economic globalization on the multifaceted processes of state transformation and the ascendancy of economic issues to the level of ‘high-politics’ in the post-Cold War era are emphasized, with special reference to the pursuit of economic diplomacy and ‘neo-protectionist’ science and technology policies by both industrialized and industrializing countries. The major caveats of accelerated global integration for Turkey’s ‘new foreign policy’ and principal policy challenges in the realms of macroeconomic management and foreign policy making are also identified

Keywords

Turkish foreign policy, economic diplomacy, neo-protectionism, competitiveness.

References

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• Weiss and Thurbon, “The Business of Buying American”, pp. 701–724.
• For detailed comparative data, see World Bank, World Development Report 2007, Washington DC.