Siyasi aracılar ve Türkiye’nin Balkanlarda Devletten-Topluma Yönlü Diplomasisi

Abstract

The Justice and Development Party governments in Turkey have placed public diplomacy into the service of foreign policy as a multi-dimensional tool-kit to be utilized in extending the overseas communication beyond governments towards their publics. And this may be the first time in the Republican history that by the Justice and Development Party era, people abroad have found Turkey's mission bodies more accessible and reachable in terms of both institutional presence and of institutional willingness to involve in their affairs/problems. The Justice and Development Party governments have accordingly adopted a comprehensive 'state-to-society' public diplomacy agenda, targeting for instance the so-called 'kin communities' , by which shared civilizational memories, values and histories are often recalled and promoted in building relations. The target communities have thus been encouraged to embrace such identity frames and hence to renegotiate and when possible redefine their sense of belonging in a civilizational sense. This is a development which brings the constitutive appeal of the country's new foreign policy into a brighter light. Based on this, this paper initially questions the constitutive influences Turkey has possibly posed to the targeted communities abroad. Moreover, in the implementation of such state-to-society public diplomacy, certain political figures in Turkey have functioned as intermediaries between the public diplomacy bureaucracy and the communities abroad, as facilitators of Turkey's access to the targeted communities, and vice versa. These political elites have mostly been the members of the ruling party in the Parliament, acted as the chairman of inter-parliamentary friendship groups, accompanied prime ministers and presidents in their visits to target communities, and used their personal ties and networks to bring the targeted communities closer to Turkey, and vice versa. They therefore have direct involvement in the conduct of overseas stateto-society policy and have personally contributed to the country's public diplomacy campaigns. This paper, at this juncture, secondly aims to unfold this intermediary role of the political elites, which would help garner a better understanding of the sources and causes of Turkey's societal influences abroad. The paper uses Turkey's relations with the Bosniak and Albanian communities in the Balkans as case studies to trace the state-to-society diplomacy and the intermediaries' roles within it. To better observe both the influence and the intermediaries' facilitative role, interviews are conducted with some of the political intermediaries who took part in Turkey's reach to the kin communities in the Balkans.