Definition of Turkey’s National Interests in the Early Cold War Era: Divergence and Convergence between DP and RPP in the 1950s

Özet

Öz National interest is a widely debated concept in the IR literature while analyzing foreign policies of states. This paper analyzes Turkey’s national interests in the 1950s and argues that they were hard to define commonly for all and there were convergence as well as divergence between the government and the opposition in the definition of national interests. As a result, despite the continuity, specifically, in the development of Turkish-American relations and the Middle East policy in the first half of the decade, Middle East and Cyprus policies in the second half caused split between two sides. Such an argument can be regarded as a contribution to the third way in the literature mainly divided by the “continuity vs rupture” debate in Turkish foreign policy and definition of national interests between Democrat Party (DP) and Republican People’s Party (RPP).