| Abstrakt: |
Turkey's Central Asia policy offers an interesting perspective for analysing political and economic interests of Ankara in the region after the collapse of USSR. The political place of Central Asia in Turkish foreign policy priorities has changed slowly, but constantly from 90s to now. Although all Turkish governments and presidents followed friendly cooperation with Turkic speaking countries, the centrality of the region was lost and geoeconomic interests became dominant. However, among institutional cooperation possibilities TİKA has developed major arguments and increasingly intense activities towards the region. The article seeks to understand the reasons behind the changes of Turkish Foreign Policy and the role of Central Asian countries in Turkey's agenda. Its objective is to underline how the geoeconomic interests may change foreign policy vectors of the countries and show the increasing dependence and involvements of Ankara on bordering countries. Besides enumerating the reasons, we also propose institutional cooperation between Turkey and Central Asian countries which seems to have more positive impact both in bilateral and multilaretal relations. The paper tries to frame the relations from Turkey's perspective and explain the chronology of Ankara's involvement post-Soviet Central Asia. The datas referring to the policies and starategies are primarily taken from the research articles, but also from reports. The literature review shows also that majority of research and papers are focused on early 90s and post 2000 period, indicating Turkey's most active periods towards the region. The papers outcomes are based on qualitative method and try to explore foreign policy priorities and changes occurring based on geoeconomic interests. We try to describe the variations in Ankara's policies and explain the relationships between Turkic capitals and leaders of Turkic states. We used open-ended questions such as followings to conduct our research. What are the main interests and priorities of different Turkish governments within Central Asia? What are the main differences and similarities in bilateral political and economis relations? What kind of changes occurred in institutional coopeartion including TİKA, and its activities within the region? Data format is entirely textual and the study design remained flexible. The article not only shows the achievements and the limit s of Ankara's policies in Central Asia, but also tries to indicate the possible ways for the long-term and constructive policymaking in order to create the conditions for Turkey to remain as a player within the region. In the other case, Ankara may easily lose not only positions, but even presence as it happened in Middle East and North African region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
