Turkey’s NATO: The South, the East, and the North-Atlantic Alliance

Turkey, which has been a NATO member since 1952, has recently threatened to veto Sweden’s NATO accession in order to demand significant political concessions from Sweden and, more surprisingly, to make Turkey’s support for Sweden’s NATO membership conditional on the EU giving a green light to Turkey’s own stalled EU admission process. While the EU has rebuffed this offer of a quid pro quo, this moment leads us to ask what impact Turkey’s behavior within NATO is having on the alliance and how Turkey, with its current populist government, conceives of its role in NATO. While Turkish leaders often criticize the EU and US using essentialist civilizational tropes opposing a “virtuous East” against an “immoral West”, Turkey is, perhaps counterintuitively, also a fervent advocate of the importance of NATO’s mission and often calls to expand NATO membership, including to Ukraine. Turkey is also the only NATO country to deepen its role in Afghanistan after the NATO withdrawal, after having been part of the NATO mission since 2001. And Turkey is the NATO member with the closest relations with Russia, even while supplying weapons to Ukraine. To make sense of these seeming contradictions, this article uses speeches, press releases, and political statements from Erdoğan and other Turkish leaders to explore the ways in which the populist government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan frames the NATO alliance and its role therein. How does the Turkish government deploy essentialized discursive frames of East and West to seek to achieve its policy goals in bargaining with fellow NATO allies? How does Turkey’s new populist normative agenda under Erdoğan conflict with long-standing norms in the NATO alliance? And finally, what impact has the “new Turkey” of Erdoğanist populism had on NATO’s role in the world? Engaging with debates within international relations over the role of international organizations as norm diffusers and forums for conflict resolution, this article seeks to view NATO from the point of Ankara, as a site of opportunities, struggles, and deal-making as Turkey attempts to revise its role in its region and beyond.