That same year the EU called upon Turkey to intervene in the ongoing Turkish-Greek Cyprus standoff by encouraging the Turkish north to support a UN-sponsored unification plan that was to precede Cyprus’s admittance to the EU. Although Turkey was successful in its efforts and the Turkish north voted strongly in favour of the plan, the Greek south overwhelmingly rejected it. In May 2004 Cyprus entered the EU as a divided territory: EU rights and privileges were extended only to the southern region, because it alone was under the administration of the internationally recognized Cypriot government. Late in the following year, formal negotiations over Turkey’s EU membership were officially opened. Though it has since recognized Cyprus as a member of the EU, Turkey’s failure to extend full diplomatic recognition subsequently posed a recurrent stumbling block in its EU bid; talks were stalled in late 2006 by Turkey’s continued failure to open its air- and seaports to Cypriot passage.
In addition, Turkey’s bid was slowed by a number of challenges from standing EU members, with opposition from France and Austria traditionally being among the most vocal; French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy expressed the opinion that Turkey did not belong in the EU. In addition, Sarkozy sought to establish new limitations on future expansion of the EU community. Austria, France, and Slovakia, among others, suggested that Turkey be extended a “privileged partnership” in the place of full membership. Nonetheless, Turkish efforts to gain EU membership persisted, and they included constitutional reforms in 2010. Regional engagement, the Arab Spring, and the Syrian Civil War
The AKP’s victory in 2007 heralded a shift in Turkish foreign policy toward stronger regional ties and greater independence from Turkey’s traditional alignments with NATO, the United States, and Israel. Turkey became more outspoken in its support for Palestinians’ rights and its disapproval of Israeli actions such as the 2008–09 attack on the Gaza Strip. It also sought engagement with Iran and Syria, the two countries most resistant to U.S. influence in the Middle East.
Turkey’s regional diplomacy was tested by the onset of the Arab Spring, a wave of uprisings in 2011–12 that upended several Middle Eastern regimes that had been on friendly terms with Turkey. The Turkish government initially opposed any international military intervention on behalf of the rebellion against Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi but shifted to a position of support for intervention, as international condemnation for Qaddafi grew and his regime began to appear too weak to defeat the rebels.
In 2011, as the Arab Spring spread to Syria, Turkish officials took on an active role in an ultimately fruitless international effort to broker a peaceful settlement between the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the opposition. When negotiations failed, Turkey, hosting the nascent Free Syrian Army opposition, turned against Assad and began providing military and financial support to the rebel fighters. As the uprising grew into a full-fledged civil war, Turkey became increasingly involved. In August 2016 its armed forces launched an offensive into northwestern Syria, aiming to push militants of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and Kurdish separatists away from its border. After the combat mission concluded in March 2017, Turkish forces remained in northern Syria to maintain a buffer zone and protect Syrian rebels there. In the summer of 2018, Assad’s forces successfully recaptured territory held by rebels in the southwest of the country, leaving the Turkish-held areas in the north as their only safe haven. Turkey reinforced its military holdings in Syria as it negotiated a buffer zone with Assad-allied Russia. By the end of the year, with the buffer zone with Assad and Russia largely holding, Turkey prepared to expand its mission to expel Kurdish separatists from northeastern Syria; the campaign was delayed, however, after the United States announced its intent to withdraw its own troops from northeastern Syria. Malcolm Edward Yapp The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Citation Information
Article Title: Turkey
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 25 August 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/Turkey
Access Date: August 29, 2019
Additional Reading General works
A general introduction that contains a useful bibliography is Helen Chapin Metz (ed.), Turkey: A Country Study, 5th ed. (1996). A helpful shorter work is Dankwart A. Rustow, Turkey: America’s Forgotten Ally (1987). Older, still useful works include Lord Kinross (patrick Balfour, Baron Kinross), Turkey (1960); Cedric Salter, Introducing Turkey (1961); and Andrew Mango, Turkey (1968). Geography The land
Works in European languages dealing specifically with Turkey are somewhat restricted. The only text devoted solely to the geography of Turkey is John C. Dewdney, Turkey (1971); but much additional geographic information is available from broader studies, including George Babcock Cressey, Crossroads: Land and Life in Southwest Asia (1960); William C. Brice, South-west Asia (1966); Stephen H. Longrigg, The Middle East: A Social Geography, 2nd ed., rev. by James Jankowski (1970); W.B. Fisher, The Middle East, 7th ed., completely rev. (1978); Alasdair Drysdale and Gerald H. Blake, The Middle East and North Africa: A Political Geography (1985); and Peter Beaumont, Gerald H. Blake, and J. Malcolm Wagstaff, The Middle East: A Geographical Study, 2nd ed. (1988). Numerous aspects of Turkey’s physical and human geography are mapped and analyzed in Gerald H. Blake, John C. Dewdney, and Jonathan Mitchell (eds.), The Cambridge Atlas of the Middle East and North Africa (1987). The standard national atlas is Ali Tanoğlu, S. Erinç, and Erol Tümertekin, Türkiye Atlasi (1961). The people
The country’s population is discussed in John C. Dewdney, “Turkey: Recent Population Trends,” in John I. Clarke and W.B. Fisher (eds.), Populations of the Middle East and North Africa (1972), pp. 40–67. Village life is described in Mahmut Makal, A Village in Anatolia, trans. from Turkish (1954); Joe E. Pierce, Life in a Turkish Village (1964, reissued 1983); and Paul Stirling, Turkish Village (1965). Migration is treated in Nermin Abadan-Unat et al., Turkish Workers in Europe, 1960–1975 (1976); and in Ruşen Keleş, “The Effects of External Migration on Regional Development in Turkey,” in Ray Hudson and Jim Lewis (eds.), Uneven Development in Southern Europe (1985), pp. 54–75. The economy
Economic development is the main focus of Oddvar Aresvik, The Agricultural Development of Turkey (1975); Edwin J. Cohn, Turkish Economic, Social, and Political Change (1970); Z.Y. Hershlag, Turkey: The Challenge of Growth (1968), and Economic Planning in Turkey (1968); Caglar Keyder, The Definition of a Peripheral Economy: Turkey, 1923–1929 (1981); Malcolm D. Rivkin, Area Development for National Growth: The Turkish Precedent (1965); and Bertil Wålstedt, State Manufacturing Enterprise in a Mixed Economy: The Turkish Case (1980). John C. Dewdney, “Agricultural Development in Turkey,” in John I. Clarke and Howard Bowen-Jones (eds.), Change and Development in the Middle East (1981), pp. 213–223, surveys agriculture’s role in the economy.