Turkey’s Changing Security Environment and Transformation of Turkish Foreign Policy

Turkey’s security-oriented foreign policy during the 1990s, which changed dramatically by the 2000s towards a more liberal mode and which can also be considered as the “Europeanization of Turkish foreign policy”, returned to its re-securitized phase in the 2010s by resorting to hard power. This article aims at explaining this reversal by analysing changes in the intensity of Turkey’s internal and external threats. In this analysis, it will mainly concentrate on the ongoing civil war in Syria, as an enabling factor for the revival of PKK terror in Turkey and terrorist attacks from ISIS. Consequently, the unstable political and security environment surrounding the South-eastern borderline of Turkey has led to the use of hard power in national foreign policy. In contrast with the previous decade, the use of military power has become inevitable in the pursuit of national security interests against intra-country and cross-border terror threats.