View article

INTRODUCTION Turkey is not one of the great powers of the Twentieth century. Her geopolitical location, however, has enabled her to play a potentially more influential role in world politics than otherwise would have been possible. She holds the key not only to the Turkish Straits but lies along the roads from the Balkans to the Middle East and from the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf. She is a member of the biggest surviving military bloc and most European organisations, as well as a candidate for European Union membership. Her political involvement and exposed position assign her an importance hardly matched by any other medium power. Accordingly, the correct evaluation of this country's policies is of crucial importance. Furthermore, as one of the small number of nonwestern societies successfully struggling to modernise both country and people, together with the aim of evolving a workable parliamentary democracy, she has long seemed to offer lessons and insights into an important political process. Yet, the interest she is getting in the western media and the amount of scholarly works on Turkey, produced especially from an international relations perspective, do not match the importance conferred upon her by other players in international politics. Given her frequently expressed strategic importance on the edge of Europe, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union, this may seem surprising. For this very reason, however, it is difficult to place Turkey into any neat category that the area specialists and foreign policy analysts like to draw before starting their research. Not only does Turkey not appear to fit any one geographical category …