YEARENDER: Turkey tackles long-time taboos to achieve regional goals

Istanbul - This past year was one filled with historic milestones for Turkey. On October 10, Ankara signed a historic deal that paves the way for restoring diplomatic ties with Armenia and for the two countries to take a look at their mutually contested history.

Four days later, Turkey signed another important deal, abolishing visa requirements between it and Syria, a country which only a decade ago it almost went to war against after Ankara accused Damascus of supporting to the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

In November, meanwhile, Turkey's parliament engaged in an unprecedented debate over the Kurdish issue and reforms the government wants to make in order to resolve that decades-old problem.

These milestones are not unrelated. This past year saw Turkey's government, led by the liberal-Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP), take dramatic steps to recalibrate foreign policy, seeking a greater engagement with the surrounding region and to establish itself as a neighborhood soft power broker and mediator.

But observers say Ankara's foreign policy ambitions are tied up in first resolving the historic and, until recently, taboo issues - particularly the Armenian, Kurdish and Cyprus problems - that have cast a heavy shadow over domestic politics for the last few decades.

"Turkey wants to play internationally, and to play internationally it has to put its house in order," says Henri Barkey, an expert on Turkey at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC.

"With their strong military and economy they have the hard power, but what they are trying to do now is build up their soft power. They have to do something. There is a discrepancy between domestic Turkey and the image it is trying to project abroad," he says.

Ankara has certainly been making moves on these issues.

Although the Cyprus problem remains stuck, Turkey has given its support to the reunification talks being held between the divided island's Greek and Turkish governments. Along with the deal made with Armenia, Turkish leaders have made clear their intention to introduce a broad democratization initiative to deal with the Kurdish issue.

"We have the intention to take determined, patient and courageous steps," Turkish Interior Minister Besir Atalay said in a nationally televised July news conference.

"This can be seen as a new stage."

The government's moves are being enabled, on the one hand, by a gradual change in Turkish society and political life that has made it easier to talk about these issues.

"Until very recently, the public had been conditioned to accept things from the perspective of statism, nationalism and chauvinism," says Dogu Ergil, a professor of political science at Ankara University.

"But the dominance of the state over issues and making them taboo and undebatable is fading."

But Ankara also appears to be driven by a realization that these taboos were ultimately hurting Turkey's ability to make an impact abroad.

"That position was limiting in the foreign policy arena. Until recently, Turkish foreign policy was mostly reactive, it didn't take any initiatives, and it didn't do things beyond its own borders," says Barkey.

But analysts say that moving ahead on restoring ties with Armenia makes strategic and political sense for Turkey, a European Union candidate country, and its regional ambitions.

"(The agreement with Armenia) will do a lot to counter prejudices in Europe about what kind of country Turkey is, that it's not just a strategic asset but also a country that can deal with its history and its own past. That will have a lot of impact in Europe," says Hugh Pope, Turkey analyst for the International Crisis Group, a policy and advocacy organization based in Brussels.

Still, making such an abrupt shift on what had been previously been untouchable issues is going to be difficult. After decades of being told that there is no such thing as Kurdish identity or that there was no room for discussion on the Armenian genocide issue, Turks are now being asked to think differently.

"We are going through exceedingly difficult times, because you are talking about a public that has been indoctrinated for decades on these issues. Now we are talking about preparing the public psychologically for dealing with these problems in a different way," said Lale Kemal, a political analyst based in Ankara and a columnist for the English-language newspaper Today's Zaman.

Some of Turkey's foreign policy moves are also not without their risks. Ankara's rapidly warming relations with Tehran and its deteriorating ties with Israel, which this year took a dramatic nose dive, have raised the eyebrows of some policymakers in Europe and the United States.

But if 2009 was any indication, Turkey is now ready to take bold steps - both domestically and abroad - as it plots a more independent and visible course on the world stage.