Turkish Diplomacy in the Balkans and the Mediterranean. Opportunities and Limits for Middle-power Activism in the 1930s During the last decade, several works on Turkish foreign policy have focused on the role of Turkey as a middle power in international politics. William Hale writes that the Turkish example may offer some interesting pointers as to how medium-sized states have reacted to changing international environments during the past 200 years,1 while Baskın Oran, a Turkish scholar, who recently edited a two-volume work on Turkish foreign policy,2 sees Turkey as a middle power in the context of twentieth-century international developments. Both Hale and Oran base their argument on the traditional definition of middle powers and calculation of power using indicators such as population, economic resources and military strength. Similarly, middle powers are characterized by their opposition to undue great-power control, their growing tendency to act together and the influence they exert individually.3 They measure the power of middle countries in relation to the power of greater ones. Middle powers stand somewhere between the two extremes. In other words, they have some ability to resist pressure from more powerful states, and may sometimes be able to influence the policies of weaker ones, especially if they are geographically contiguous.4 In contrast to the works of Hale and Oran, this article specifically focuses on Turkey’s role in international politics in the 1930s. The emphasis on this decade derives from the fact that during the interwar period, more than any other phase of its history, Turkey can be classified as a middle power.
Although ‘middle power’ is a relatively recently coined term, the diplomats of
the 1930s were aware of Turkey’s distinct status in the international power
hierarchy. For example, British diplomats identified Turkey as a ‘small great
power’.5 In the interwar years, unlike the situation at present, the number of
middle powers was limited. The international system was multipolar in the sense that on the one hand there were several great powers such as Britain,
France, Italy and Germany and on the other there were many countries which
had not yet become independent: they were still colonies.
Therefore, the interwar period was a distinctive era during which a country
like Turkey with limited capabilities was able to command its power and to
resist greater states. The aim of this article is to analyse to what extent Turkey
during the 1930s was able to develop an autonomous diplomatic strategy in
the Balkans and the Mediterranean. In other words, it focuses on how Turkey
defined its priorities at the diplomatic level and to what extent it was able to
realize such priorities independently from the decision-making of the great power'