State capacity, foreign/security policy and political crisis in Turkey: the promise of administrative reform

The current crisis of Turkey’s foreign and security policy, and associated conflict resolution capability is to a considerable extent the result of the failure to accommodate the rivalry between the bureaucratic and societal-pluralist modes of policymaking. The rivalry and inability to institutionalize either mode has resulted in the political and institutional crises in foreign policy. The political crisis is the direct result of policy actors losing touch with, and to a certain extent disregarding, societal demands for policy making, utilizing a populist attitude in a way to reflect deep- seated divisions and polarization in the country, as well as feeding into these divisions in order to extend one’s domestic hold on power. The institutional crisis has resulted from the sidelining of the bureaucracy, as well as its loss of agency in major issues, in the wake of state crisis and from continuous blows to the political class’ struggle against “bureaucratic tutelage” in Turkey. Against this backdrop, this paper traces the roots of the crisis, attempts to make sense of the twin institutional and political crises in foreign and security policy, and provides guidelines for the reform and reset of foreign/ security policy in Turkey.