Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction
- Part 1 Turkey's Securitisation of Greece (1991–99)
- Part 2 Desecuritisation in Turkish Foreign Policy: The Rapprochement between Turkey and Greece (1999–2016)
- Part 3 Reverting to the Default Settings in Turkish Foreign Policy (2016 Onwards)
- Bibliography
- Index
Part 3 Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: aN Invalid Date NaN
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction
- Part 1 Turkey's Securitisation of Greece (1991–99)
- Part 2 Desecuritisation in Turkish Foreign Policy: The Rapprochement between Turkey and Greece (1999–2016)
- Part 3 Reverting to the Default Settings in Turkish Foreign Policy (2016 Onwards)
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The desecuritisation approach towards Greece in Turkey's foreign policy has positively affected political, economic and social issues. The absence of any tangible changes in the core disputes between the two countries is incontrovertible, yet both Greece and Turkey managed to establish a dialogue during the post-1999 period. Despite the promising landscape, new disputes – including the extradition of eight military officers who fled to Greece following the failed 15 July 2016 coup attempt, the migration-related crisis, the Hagia Sophia's conversion into a functioning mosque and the mounting tension in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean – have gradually begun to dampen this atmosphere. In an elite survey conducted by Triantaphyllou and Dizdaroğlu in 2016, more than 40 percent of Turkish elites (representatives from academia, the military, journalism, diplomacy and business) evaluated the current state of the relationship as either ‘good’ or ‘rather good’, and more than half of elites (53.5 percent) considered a crisis between the two countries within the next five years ‘improbable’ or ‘rather improbable’. However, Turkish decision-makers, or securitising actors, have once again adopted the securitisation approach due to the political tension within Turkey as well as its isolationism in foreign policy. For some, this shift occurred when eight soldiers accused of involvement in the 2016 coup attempt fled to Greece, although other incidents and political dynamics also contributed. This part of the book evaluates these emergent crises, large and small, which accompanied the changes in Turkish domestic politics and precipitated adjustments in the rhetoric of Turkish decision-makers. These adjustments can be evaluated as a reverting to the default securitisation settings in Turkish foreign policy. Particularly, Turkey's official statements, along with naval deployments in the Eastern Mediterranean, present a good example of securitising practices, as argued by the authors of the Paris School. Accordingly, security professionals’ practices are crucial for the securitisation of issues (Bigo, 2014). Therefore, this part is devoted to the analysis of the post-2016 period in bilateral relations, so as to understand the shift from the previous period's desecuritisation back to securitisation.
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- Turkish-Greek RelationsForeign Policy in a Securitisation Framework, pp. 149 - 164Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2023