Turkey’s Exhausting Zigzagging between East and West | Middle East Forum

Turkey has been a republic since 1923, a multi-party democracy since 1946, and a member of NATO since 1952. In 1987, it added another powerful anchor into the Western bay where it wanted it to remain docked: It applied for full membership in the European Union (EU). This imperfect journey toward the West was dramatically replaced by a directionless cruise, with sharp zigzags between the East and West, after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist AKP party came to power in 2002. Zigzagging remains the main Turkish policy feature to this day.