Turkey: Sly as a Fox? Explaining the successive development of Turkey’s multilateral cooperation efforts

Abstract: Since the European Union membership application in 1987, twenty-six years have passed and the status of Turkey has only progressed from a “potential candidate” to an “official candidate”. At the same time, a successive expansion is traceable in Turkey’s efforts for multilateral cooperation with other parts of the world. While being seemingly random at the first sight, it is possible to observe distinct and specific periods where these efforts were escalated. The explanation for this phenomenon rests upon the presented harmony between these specific periods and the contributable insights given by the realist tradition. The applied congruence method shows that the use of “balance of threat” arguments does not demonstrate a great deal of correlation with times of strained relations between the USSR/Russia and Turkey. On the contrary, the deliberated “balance of influence” arguments present an interesting parallel with these efforts throughout the periods of significant deadlocks in Turkey-EU relations.