So-called “Arab Spring” events, which began in Tunisia in 2011 and soon afterwards spread to other MENA countries, provided a serious challenge for Turkey, not only in terms of foreign relations but also, and especially, with respect to Turkey's economic relations with the region. Before the protest movements affected the MENA countries in 2011 and 2012, Turkey's relations with the countries of the region were based on the general principles of mutual gain through economic interdependence and close neighbourly ties based on close historical and cultural links, in particular Muslim solidarity. This policy, designed by the AKP's foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, formerly a professor of international relations, was presented as a soft power and mutual economic benefit-based policy, popularized as designed to produce “zero problems with neighbours”. This active policy was essentially based on Turkey's increasingly strong economic interests in the region. Turkey's total trade with Middle Eastern countries had increased from $4.4 billion in 2002 to $26 billion in 2010.1

Davutoğlu 's foreign policy and regional and international relations strategy, in particular towards Middle Eastern countries, stood in sharp contrast with that of its immediate past. This active foreign policy was a departure from the country's much more cautious foreign policy which had existed for most of the republican period – the shift was from a diplomacy that was largely passive and one-dimensional to one that was dynamic and multidimensional. The basic principles that had guided Turkey's foreign policy since the founding of the republic in 1923 were caution and pragmatism. Lessons that had been learned from the way in which the Ottoman Empire had ended after the First World War convinced the leaders of the young Turkish republic to be cautious – believing that very little was to be gained and much to lose from entering into the unfriendly and unpredictable conflicts in Turkey's immediate neighbourhood. For most of the period until the late 2000s, Turkish foreign policy was almost always cautious and merely reactionary in response to the events happening within its surrounding region, and from the end of the Second World War onwards it strictly followed the lead of the US and NATO.