Suchergebnisse

In the interwar years, Turkey attempted to pursue activist diplomacy in the Balkans and in the Mediterranean. Of the two regions, Turkish diplomacy was more successful in promoting regional initiatives to preserve the status quo in the Balkans than in the Mediterranean. The regional co-operation efforts in the Balkans culminated in the Balkan Pact. A similar pact was also proposed for the Mediterranean by France. Ankara enthusiastically pursued and promoted this French idea, which never materialized. While the presence of like-minded states of comparable size and strength in the Balkans facilitated Turkish activism, the great-power rivalry in the Mediterranean severely limited the extent of Turkish involvement, particularly in the late 1930s. Turkish diplomacy in these two different operational environments in the interwar years offers a case study of the limits and possibilities for middle-power activism.

Turkey's foreign policy and relations in the early Republican era, before and during World War II, has been subject to systematic and scholarly research, leading to numerous publications since the 1970s. Although no less significant than Britain, Germany, or the Soviet Union in shaping Turkish inter-war foreign policy and priorities, Italy does not seem to have received a similar degree of attention in this growing literature. Italy is usually treated in the works on Turkish foreign relations only as a threat that Turkey's foreign and strategic policy aimed to counter after 1934.

This article studies how and why the policies of the Bulgarian and Romanian states towards Muslim/Turkish minorities differed widely from each other between 1923 and 1936. Minority policies in Bulgaria shifted from tolerance during the Agrarian People's Union government in 1919, to assimilation and repression in the 1930s. In contrast, the Romanian state tolerated and favourably treated Muslim minorities throughout the interwar period. In order to account for this difference, we highlight the influence of Turkey's diplomatic relations on Bulgarian and Romanian state policies towards minorities and the responses of the latter. While Turkish-Bulgarian relations see-sawed, Turkish-Romanian relations constantly improved from the 1920s to 1930s. We argue that, whenever Turkey's diplomatic relations with Bulgaria and Romania ameliorated, Bulgaria's and Romania's minority policies improved. Yet, whenever diplomatic relations deteriorated, so did the minority policies.

Turkish naval policy during the period between the establishment of the Turkish Republic & WWII was influenced by a set of institutional, domestic, & international factors. Until the mid-1930s, domestic political rivalry & Turkish military culture relegated the navy to a secondary role in support of the army for territorial defense. Because of the new republic's international isolation, naval policy was shaped largely in a diplomatic vacuum. Ankara gradually tried to take advantage of emerging great power rivalries in Europe to secure affordably priced naval arms. In the process, politically unsatisfied powers such as Germany & Italy figured prominently as suppliers of naval arms to Turkey. After 1934, changing international political & economic conditions weighed more heavily than domestic factors in setting the parameters of Turkish naval policy. The armaments program adopted in 1934 provided for naval expansion to counter the Italian threat in the Aegean. This shift of emphasis is in naval policy also reflected Turkey's changing international status from an 'outcast' to a pro-status quo power. However, the coming of the WWII denied Turkey the chance to build the fleet envisaged under its new naval program. Adapted from the source document.

Studies the political & strategic motives behind Italy's decision to sell naval arms to Turkey under favorable credit terms, 1929-1932. The era was marked by vacillating Italian-Turkish relations as Italy changed strategies from colonial expansion into Turkey to winning the cooperation of the Turkish navy in dominating the Eastern Mediterranean. Following the patterns of British & German dealings with the Ottoman Empire, Italy sought to penetrate Turkey politically & militarily through its arms trade. After Mussolini's notorious 1934 speech outlining Italian expansion into Africa & Asia, Turkey's attitude toward Italy cooled, & Turkey increased its efforts to build a naval fleet. It is speculated that Italy's strategy would have been ineffective, regardless of the change in relations, because Turkey had adopted a strategy of avoiding military alliances between powers of unequal strength (Deringil, 1989). Ironically, warships purchased from Italy were used to counter Italy's threat. L. A. Hoffman