Turkey in Africa

Turkey's Strategic Involvement in Sub-Saharan Africa

Federico Donelli

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755636983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Diplomazia e trattati

Africa is increasingly becoming an arena for geopolitical competition over its resources and, in the last two decades, has seen many emerging powers such as China, India, Russia, Japan and Brazil attempting to strengthen their ties with the continent. Turkey's involvement has been much less discussed, despite the fact that Turkey's strategic involvement with several sub-Saharan African states has been deepening since its active engagement in the Somali crisis of 2011.
Federico Donelli brings to light the extent of Turkey's involvement in Africa and analyses the unique characteristics, benefits, challenges and limits of Turkish policy in the region. The book examines the Turkish diplomatic programme as well as its domestic reception, which includes humanitarian aid, religious links such as the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation), as well as private business links. Crucially, Donelli examines what makes Turkish involvement different from that of other international actors in the region – its historic ties with North Africa under the Ottoman Empire.

1

The relevance of Africa in a multipolar and decentralized system

The chapter analyses the transformations that have taken place within the international system from the beginning of the new millennium to the modern day. The main argument is that the current global order, defined as irregular multipolarity, has provided a permissive and favourable environment for the emerging powers in quest of greater political and economic protagonism and influence. While the multipolar structure, defined by some scholars as nonpolarity, has opened more windows of opportunity for the emerging powers, it has also contributed to the newly found centrality of the African continent. The latter, thanks to its huge natural and human wealth, has soon become a new arena of global competition. Over the years, a wide range of extra-regional powers, traditional-emerging and great-middle powers have launched a new scramble for Africa, resulting in a multilevel competition in the economic, political and security sectors.

1.1 The irregular and decentralized multipolar world order

Dealing with the international system as a whole means referring to the outcome of the dynamics – political, social and economic – which, being interconnected, determine the distribution of power among the different actors that operate in the international arena. The post-conflict system promoted by the United States at the end of the Second World War was based on the concept of integrated security, guaranteed by a system of alliances and growing economic interdependence based on the commercial market. Over the course of more than sixty years, this structure has undergone a process of adaptation and development, becoming, at the end of the Cold War, a real global order.¹ Several emerging players or latecomers have soon become the main beneficiaries of this globalized system. Encouraged by the opening up of the global market, these emerging players were able to fill – to a large extent – the gap with the more industrialized economies thanks to high and sustained growth rates. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the liberal order, understood as a set of principles and institutions, which governed the international system since the Second World War in coexistence with Soviet–American bipolarism, which was characterized by the mutual balance of democracy and market, gradually gave way to a neoliberal global order.² Within this new global order, the original and, for years, latent tension between the political and economic dimensions, the outcome of liberalism, was progressively resolved in favour of the latter. As a result, liberal democracy was progressively, and more often, sacrificed in the name of the free market.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the American soil wiped out an order that seemed to have been finally shaped. The unilateral interventionism embodied in the idea of pre-emptive war promoted by the Bush administration’s security policy and substantiated by Afghan and Iraq conflicts marked the beginning of the end of the brief unipolar interlude that had characterized the previous decade. The neoconservative agenda, according to many scholars and analysts,³ drove US foreign policy during the Bush presidency, was designed to prevent the rise of potential competitors not only by defending the American model of freedom, democracy and free enterprise as in the past but also by actively promoting its spread.⁴ This ambitious global project came at a high cost to the United States, both in economic and reputational terms and in terms of human lives. The sizeable investment of resources in non-essential strategic contexts, such as Afghanistan, exposed the United States to the risk of overstretching.⁵ In the United States, in fact, the investment of an exceeding amount of resources at the limit of its real capabilities has led to the gradual disengagement from some strategic contexts, leaving a vacuum that has partially been filled by the rise of emerging powers, such as China, and by the Russian resurgence.⁶ The Iraq War, moreover, led to a rift between the United States and the ‘others’, in particular some of the historical European allies (Germany, France), generating the first significant political debate on multipolarism, a counter-hegemonic trend as an alternative to US unilateralism. While the United States was increasing its boots on the ground, causing divisions and misunderstandings within its system of alliances, academia was wondering about the direction taken by the international system. Some scholars began to develop the idea of the ‘interregnum’, a transition phase from the missed unipolarity and the hoped-for multipolarity.⁷

The asymmetry of power in favour of the United States raised concern in several countries. They were worried that unilateral action by the United States might shape the entire global order according to Washington’s preferences, ignoring and threatening their interests and security.⁸ Consequently, the ‘others’, not being able to counterbalance, due to the costs involved, or challenge through anti-hegemonic alliances to avoid provoking the United States, decided to adopt soft balancing’ strategies. Scholars define soft balancing as the initiatives aimed at hindering or limiting a great power, without running the risk of a reaction. Such strategies are less serious than the mobilization of military capabilities or the establishment of security alliances against a hegemonic power.⁹

The military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, in addition to placing the main global powers on different positions, have provoked criticism from civil society, including that of the United States. In a few months, transnational movements and pacifist counter-narratives spread all over the world. This trend had the merit of sensitizing the world public opinion not only on the events in the conflict zones but also on the transition phase of the international order.

At the end of Bush’s term, the United States had accelerated the process intended to reduce their international commitment. During the decade of 2009–18, the US role in the international system has gone from being a primary player or ‘global hegemon’ (Bush’s presidency) to a ‘reluctant hegemon’ (Obama’s presidency), and in recent years it has taken on the role of almost a ‘revisionist power’ (Trump’s presidency). At the same time, the 2008 financial crisis, which involved Western ‘economies’, favoured the spreading of the idea of a post-American order. Most of the economies of the so-called Global South have gone through soft crises, or ‘good crises’, overcome by following independent and original paths. Conversely, the West, struggling with a slow and asymmetric growth, has lost legitimacy and credibility in relation to both the emerging players and the poorest countries that no longer or not only look to Western liberalism to regulate, organize and plan their economic growth paths.¹⁰ As a result, emerging state actors have gained greater capacity to exert pressure on traditional powers, claiming greater influence in global governance as well as the possibility of developing and promoting alternative strategies to address global challenges.

The traumas to which the West has been subjected in the first decade of the new millennium have exacerbated the disappointment about the ‘end of history’ predicted by Fukuyama in 1992.¹¹ This frustration has fed, on one hand, the tendency of those who saw imminent the ‘Western sunset’ predicted by Spengler almost a century ago, and rehabilitating, on the other hand, the theories of the ‘clash of civilizations’.¹² In this environment, several exponents – scholars and policymakers – of liberal internationalism reflected on the fate of a global order whose structure was and still is shaped by the balances of power dating back to the 1940s and which excludes many key players of current international politics.¹³

Over the years, different interpretations have been provided on the transformation of the global power structure, from the neo-realists centred on the anarchic nature of the system to the hierarchical ones, and of the power transition, focused on the asymmetries of power configured in a pyramidal way.¹⁴ Moreover, it was the same conception of power that changed, from a state-centric to a multi-centric and multidimensional one. The temporary and transitory nature of the international system appeared immediately characterized by a ‘strong ambiguity’¹⁵ and marked by the emergence of an ‘irregular’ multipolarity, in which the United States had preserved a central, albeit not hegemonic, role. As Samuel Huntington brilliantly predicted in 1999, world politics oscillates between unipolarity and multipolarity, a uni-multipolar system with one superpower and several major powers – a strange hybrid order, which, according to the well-known political scientist, could be followed by a new era marked not only by multipolarism but also by renewed multilateralism.¹⁶ In contrast to the idea of an inevitable configuration of the global order in a multipolar reality, some scholars have advanced the hypothesis of an international system in which power is more fragmented and dispersed, namely, nonpolarity. Nonpolarity would be a condition characterized not by the simultaneous presence of distinct poles or power concentrations but by a balanced distribution of power in a multiplicity of centres linked together by globalization. The latter with the many interdependencies it has generated – economic, financial, commercial and cultural – plays a central role in this system. As stressed by Haas,

Today’s nonpolar world is not simply a result of the rise of other states and organizations or of the failures and follies of U.S. policy. It is also an inevitable consequence of globalization. Globalization has increased the volume, velocity, and importance of cross-border flows of just about everything, from drugs, e-mails, greenhouse gases, manufactured goods, and people to television and radio signals, viruses (virtual and real), and weapons.¹⁷

The literature, on both IR and int ernational political economy, agrees that the financial crisis of 2008 has accelerated the process of reconfiguring the global order, economic and political.¹⁸ Furthermore, the same negative effects have affected the United States’ choice to revise their international approach, thereby favouring a different distribution of power and the consolidation of China as a major rival.¹⁹

The developments of the last decade have shown how the international system is still going through a phase of transition from a period characterized by unipo...