Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Nick Clegg at a meeting in London. Photo by Cabinet Office via Flickr.

At a dinner in London, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and former UK Home and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw delivered two speeches with a common theme: Turkey is a rising regional, and maybe even global, power. Over the last decade it has undergone numerous political and economic reforms.  In 2010, extensive constitutional changes shifted power away from the military and towards the civilian judicial and executive branches of the government. Turkey’s emerging market is also striving with relatively stable growth figures. It is, according to the International Monetary Fund, the 16th biggest economy in the world.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is regarded by many as a leader empowered with the three Weberian forms of authority, namely traditional, rational-legal and charismatic. While some critics both within and outside Turkey question his stance on the role of religion in democracy, he savours much popularity particularly in the Middle East and North Africa region as well as in Turkey. His AK Party won 49.8% of the vote in the national elections in June 2011, establishing it as the majority party for a third time in a row. If and when Erdoğan becomes President in the next election, the current Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, very well could be his successor for Prime Minister, continuing along the path of increased global influence. Originally an academic, Davutoğlu is known for striving to put his academic foreign policy theory of “Zero-Problems” with Turkey’s neighbours into practice.

Yet Turkey still faces many challenges. Not only is it affected by the economic difficulties in Greece and Europe and unrest in Syria and the wider Middle East, but it also has to deal with various internal struggles. The Judiciary Branch is under strong criticism, for example, for long detention until trials commence. GDP forecasts project lower growth figures in 2012. While some decline is almost inevitable after the very high growth figures experienced in recent years, Turkey needs growth to employ its remarkably young population as they enter into the labour pool. Moreover, Turkey is still undergoing the very significant process of discovering its own identity, both internally with regard to its own history and externally vis-à-vis its neighbours, trying to get out of the oft-used cliché employed by press and guidebooks alike of being a place “between East and West”.

This means that there is quite a lot on Erdogan’s to-do list. Yet, Turkey faces a unique role as a bridge-builder in the middle of the political and economic crisis in Europe, the uprising in the Middle East and North Africa region and the increasing global power of Asia.

Fall and Rise

At the dinner, former Foreign Secretary Straw said that Turkey is now recognized as an equal, which ipso facto implies it was not before. European Realpolitik will have to take this into consideration. Turkey applied for associate membership in the European Economic Community for the first time in 1959.  As of yet it is still not a member. At the December 2011 Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Turkey, very few participants were from the European Union, despite the fact that over 45% of Turkish exports go to the EU. Since this summit was the follow-up to the one initiated by President Obama in 2010, it is somewhat understandable but not necessarily justifiable, for Europe and for Turkey.

Turkey is increasingly taking on a global responsibility, reaching the Turkish diaspora and beyond. It has built various cultural, social and economic institutions around the world, such as the Yunus Emre Vakfı, which may be regarded as the Turkish equivalent of the British Council. This network organises trips to Turkey and events like the migration symposium held in Berlin last November to celebrate 50 years since the beginning of the guestworker agreement with Germany.

The changes in Turkey’s influence and importance are due not only to its recent politico-economic progress, but also to a simple stock market-like calculation. A company may be valued by the sum of its discounted future cash flow. A rising Turkey will become more influential in the future and by that very fact becomes increasingly influential in the present. In 2023, the country will celebrate its 100th-year anniversary of being founded as a republic. Until then, Turkey still has many choices to make about which roads to travel.