Erdogan's Personal Diplomacy and Turkish Foreign Policy.

• Author: Ulgul, Murat
• Position: ARTICLE

Introduction

In recent years, one of the most popular concepts in Turkish foreign policy has been public diplomacy. Public diplomacy refers to a government's engagement with foreign societies in ways that improve these societies' perceptions about that government's country. (1) Public diplomacy attempts to increase the positive image of a country within foreign societies so that these societies can constitute an effective pressure group on their own governments, thereby influencing their government to pursue positive relations with that country. Increasing a countries' attractiveness can be realized through several means, including student exchange programs, radio and television broadcasts, establishing cultural centers abroad, and cultivating relations with foreign non-state actors. (2) Sometimes public diplomacy efforts may include military means if their primary objective is to improve the status of a country among foreign audiences. Theodore Roosevelt's famous Great White Fleet demonstration in which the United States Navy showed its gigantic battleships to foreign people in a world tour between December 1907 and February 1909, or Turkey's increasing number of military bases in African countries where Ankara does not have any major security interests, can be considered as examples of public diplomacy through military means. Yet, public diplomacy is mainly linked with the concept of soft power, as it constitutes an inexpensive way to increase a country's image and interests, and thus its power abroad, without relying on the production and usage of expensive military weapons. (3)

Since the establishment of the Office of Public Diplomacy under the Turkish Prime Ministry in 2010, public diplomacy has become one of the most popular terms in Turkish academia. Several articles and books have been published on the subject, (4) public diplomacy courses have been added to the curriculum of several university programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and, a significant number of graduate students are in the process of writing their theses and dissertations on Turkish public diplomacy. Public diplomacy is crucial for inter-state and society relations, and growing attention to the subject is desirable in both academic and policy terms. The problem is that a similar emphasis and attention is not given to other state practices of modern diplomacy which can be useful in analyzing Turkish foreign policy today. In this regard, personal diplomacy is a highly understudied area in the literature on recent Turkish foreign policy, although it has been increasingly practiced by the Turkish leadership in the last few years. While public diplomacy and personal diplomacy are not mutually exclusive and can be followed at the same time, personal impressions between political leaders can play an important role in international relations under certain structural, bureaucratical, and psychological conditions. When leaders face a crisis or an ambiguous situation, for example, a phone call with a foreign leader or a face-to-face negotiation can offer more productive results than other state practices. Similarly, in countries where leaders play a significant role in shaping policies, personal relations between leaders can provide a shortcut to solving difficult problems between states. Finally, when a leader is confident about his or her decisions and does not trust the bureaucratic process, personal diplomacy can be more effective in shaping state decisions. (5)

All of these conditions are applicable for analyzing Turkish foreign policy today. While they will be explained in detail, it is necessary to highlight the changing foreign and domestic conditions at this point to illustrate why we should focus on personal interactions between leaders instead of public diplomacy. When Turkey started its public diplomacy initiative and opened the Office of Public Diplomacy, Ankara enjoyed stable and constructive conditions in its relations with other international actors. At that time, the most important concept in Turkish foreign policy was "zero problems with neighbors," and Ankara's main motivation was to fix frozen historical problems with Armenia, Greece, Syria, and others. (6) On the domestic front, the AK Party government had initiated a resolution process which aimed to bring stability to interethnic relations. (7) Although the European Union (EU) accession process had frozen because of disagreements over the Cyprus issue, relations remained cordial, (8) and Obama's presidency brought a fresh approach in the United States' relations with Muslim-populated countries, including Turkey. (9) In the Middle East, Turkey's prestige and reputation had grown as a result of public diplomacy and soft power efforts to cultivate good relations with its neighbors, although relations with Israel started breaking down. (10) All in all, Turkey enjoyed a calm and stable atmosphere at home and abroad.

A lot has changed in nine years. In the Middle East the Arab Spring, first welcomed by Turkey and many other countries as a democratic wave, soon unleashed chaos and anarchy in the region which gravely affected Turkey's neighborhood, especially Syria. Out of this disturbance, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) emerged as a security threat to all regional countries. However, instead of establishing a collective security system, all actors egoistically tried to benefit from the anarchical situation as Iran, Saudi Arabia, (11) Russia, and the United States (12) entered into a competition for influence in the region. The PKK and its affiliates in Syria also saw a chance to realize their plan for an independent Kurdish state and undermined the resolution process to improve Kurdish rights in Turkey. At the same time, Turkey's "zero problems with neighbors" policy failed, as all parties refrained from taking serious steps, while Turkey's domestic problems after the Gezi Park and the December 17-25 incidents took priority on the government's agenda. Turkey's relations with major powers also deteriorated during this period. The Syrian refugee problem, the frozen accession process, and the European Parliament's criticisms toward Ankara over its democracy and human rights record led to an exchange of harsh rhetoric between Turkey and the EU, while relations with the United States entered a period of crisis as a result of several developments, including Washington's support for the YPG, the residence of Fetullah Gulen in the United States, and Turkey's purchase of the S-400 missile system from Russia. (13) Turkey's relations with Russia and Iran were also far from stable, moving suddenly from cooperation to crisis and vice versa. (14)

Can public diplomacy help us make sense of this changing atmosphere of crisis? Some answer this question affirmatively by arguing that public diplomacy can help the crisis management processes. Olsson, for example, points out that public diplomacy can serve as a "crisis communication tool" by increasing an "actor's ability to understand and identify the issue at hand," providing networks between stakeholders and facilitating communication between competing parties. (15) Al-Muftah similarly shows that Qatar recently employed public diplomacy as a tool of crisis management to win the hearts and minds of the Western publics when the country needed to diminish the negative effects of the blockade imposed by Arab countries. (16)

Yet there are some weaknesses to public diplomacy as a crisis management tool. First, public diplomacy requires time and patience to be effective. Shaping a foreign public's viewpoints about your country and then waiting for their effects on foreign governments' policies is not a short-term task. It may take months or even years for public diplomacy to meet the foreign policy objectives of a government, while crisis periods necessitate fast and effective policy actions. In times of crisis, a government should concentrate most of its resources to solve the problem at hand instead of spreading them into different policy areas, as public diplomacy often requires. Moreover, if a country has a problem with a foreign government, it may be futile to use the foreign public as an intermediate power to solve the problem, because the foreign government would have more resources to shape its own public's views on the crisis issue. By spreading its own propaganda through media outlets and/or preventing connections between the public and foreign governments -such as reducing cultural exchanges or restricting foreign broadcasts- the home government always has the ultimate information advantage in shaping public opinion within its borders.

With these reservations, this article does not undervalue the benefits of public diplomacy. Public diplomacy is a necessary foreign policy tool which may help to diminish the negative effects of a crisis, and a government should employ it both in times of peace and in times of crisis. Yet, we need a complementary approach to analyze the recent practices of Turkish diplomacy. For this purpose, this paper will focus on personal diplomacy, which may be more helpful in crisis periods, and has indeed been increasingly utilized by Turkish politicians in recent years.

Personal diplomacy refers to diplomatic efforts "when a particular national leader tries to sort out an international problem on the basis of their own personal relations with, and understanding of, other national leaders." (17) Practiced for centuries, personal diplomacy has gained prominence in recent years as many leaders have come together at international conferences and summits, and technological developments have made communication between leaders easier. More importantly, however, personal diplomacy is unparalleled in providing a "quick fix" to international problems, as national leaders have the power to solve problems via direct communication instead of relying on intermediaries such as diplomats or the...