Russia in Global Affairs

Turkey is a unique example of a country that successfully combines strategic hedging, various forms of balancing, and a proactive foreign policy aimed at increasing its strategic autonomy on all possible tracks. Turkey’s assertive regional and macro-regional policies combined with reactivated beneficial foreign policy projects have yielded a strong synergistic effect owing to skillful foreign policy maneuvering and favorable circumstances.

The fragmentation of civil society and the lack of mutual trust among its organizations standing on different political platforms make it extremely difficult for civil society to consolidate its potential and generate sociopolitical development from below. The same factors do not allow external forces to achieve the desired result from their tangible and intangible investments in the development of civil society, and lead to soft-power fiascoes.

The situation with religious minorities in many respects reflects the logic of the political process of recent decades in Turkey. The social base and the core constituency of the ruling AKP are people of conservative views or even supporters of religious nationalism. For this part of society, nationalism and Islamic identity are interrelated and complementary notions.

Abstract The paper studies the “Turkish model” in a comparative historical perspective from three angles: as an example of mobilization modernization; as a combination of…