ABSTRACT
Syria has always been the yardstick for understanding and assessing the trajectory of Turkey’s foreign policy. The only arguably irredentist move of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of Turkey over the liberated territories of the defunct Ottoman Empire, has been incorporating the Syrian Liwa al-Iskenderun, today’s Hatay, a province of Turkey, in the late 1930s. The Kemalist dictum ‘Peace at Home, Peace in the World’, which became a lodestar in Turkish foreign policy and signaled the country had turned its back on its imperial past, was a pledge against irredentism concerning the territories in the Middle East and the Balkans. Under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey has followed four different stages. Firstly, from 2003 to 2011; the second, from the outbreak of the Arab Spring in early 2011; the third from 2012 to 2016; and finally, from 2016 to today. With successive military incursions into Syria that could be interpreted as expansionism, the debate is whether Turkey in Syria should be considered as the implementation of its neo-Ottomanism or if it should be characterized with anti-Kurdish Turkish nationalism.
