The Political Economy of Regional Power: Turkey under the AKP

GIGA Working Papers (GIGA) No 204, September 2012, 24 p.
German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA)

André Bank & Roy Karadag *

In 2006/2007 Turkey became a regional power in the Middle East, a status it has continued to maintain in the context of the Arab Spring. To understand why Turkey only became a regional power under the Muslim AKP government and why this happened at the specific point in time that it did, the paper highlights the self-reinforcing dynamics between Turkey’s domestic political-economic transformation in the first decade of this century and the advantageous regional developments in the Middle East at the same time. It concludes that this specific linkage – the “Ankara Moment” – and its regional resonance in the neighboring Middle East carries more transformative potential than the “Washington Consensus” or the “Beijing Consensus” so prominently discussed in current Global South politics.

* André Bank, M.A. is a research fellow at the GIGA Institute of Middle East Studies. Dr. Roy Karadag is a post‐doctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) at the University of Bremen.

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