Book Review Mesut Ozcan, Harmonizing Foreign Policy: Turkey, the EU and the Middle East, Ashgate Press, England, 2008, 191 p., ISBN: 978 0 7546 7370 5

Turkish foreign policy has made a remarkable achievement in recent years, raising the influence of Turkey in surrounding critical regions, extending from the Balkans to the Middle East and as well as in international politics. With Harmonizing Foreign Policy: Turkey, the EU and the Middle East, Mesut Ozcan sets about to explicate a part of this picture, that is, the shift in Turkish foreign policy towards the Middle East, which, the author argues, becomes more visible in policies towards Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 1999 is the beginning of the aforementioned shift, according to Ozcan, a year in which the EU gave Turkey a candidature status and Abdullah Ocalan, the leader and founder of the PKK, was arrested. This was also a year that provided Turkish decision makers with a democratic opening in foreign policy—a shift from security-oriented foreign policy to a democracy-oriented one. From that time onwards, Turkey, according to Ozcan, has been exposed to the process of Europeanization of foreign policy, a process that has taken Turkey away from a foreign policy under American influence.