Contemporary Turkish Foreign Policy.

• Author: Sherwin, Joshua
• Position: Review

Yasemin Celik (Westport, CE: Praeger Publishers, 1999) 208 pp.

Yasemin Celik's Contemporary Turkish Foreign Policy might better e called "An Introduction to the History of Turkish Foreign Policy." Although Ms. Celik, a professor of comparative politics at the Fashion Institute of Technology, does an admirable job of reconstructing the major events in Turkish history, her work is essentially a distillation of previous works on the subject. Heavily footnoted, the book's main thesis--that "... Turkish foreign policy has been greatly affected by the end of the Cold War"--is hardly something that most scholars of international relations could argue with. While the book is useful for students first approaching the subject of Turkey and its foreign policy, it breaks little new ground and fails to offer anything more than a superficial analysis of some of the more controversial issues facing the Turkish Republic.

Indeed, the book was supported by a grant from the Institute for Turkish Studies, a quasi-independent, Turkish government-funded organization loosely affiliated with Georgetown University Because Professor Celik's views largely mirror official Turkish foreign policy, one questions the rigor with which she approaches her subject. Despite this, her work serves as a generally helpful "first cut" on an immensely complicated topic.

The book is historically structured, beginning with the early Republic's policy of neutrality and continuing through the end of the Cold War. The first chapter, "The Foundations of Turkish Foreign Policy," serves as an excellent primer on the country itself and introduces the reader to some of the more important facts about Turkey While it is true that such a slim volume (just over 200 pages) leaves little room to expound on relevant issues and that her work assumes no prior knowledge of Turkish history or institutions, she sketches in only very broad strokes some of the more important episodes in Turkish history To her credit, the Kurdish issue is given a fair hearing but only to the extent that it is a foreign policy and public relations dilemma for the government in Ankara. She makes no comment on the morality of Turkish policy vis-a-vis the Kurds. Moreover, Celik pulls few punches when dealing with the role of the military in politics. She makes a clear point regarding the fact that while the three military interventions in 1960, 1971 and 1980 have retarded the development of a strong multiparty system, "this...