Turkey in NATO - An Ambivalent Ally - Louis A. Delvoie 58

A number of old causes of estrangement continue to enjoy a long shelf life, and new ones have been added to the list in the decade or so following the end of the Cold War, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the geo-political re-alignments to which they gave rise. [...] Portraying the plight of the Turkish-Cypriots as that of a Muslim minority which had suffered grievously at the hands of a non-Muslim majority, the Turkish government sought to enlist the sympathy and support of the Muslim world as a whole through the Organi- zation of the Islamic Conference (OIC). [...] The Post-Cold War Order The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of Yugoslavia all created new oppor- tunities and challenges for Turkey. [...] As one Turkish scholar put it: The seriousness of the instabilities and vulnerabilities in the 1990s ema- nating from the regions around Turkey acquire added significance against the background of the transformation that the Western alliance has undergone since 1990 in response to the elimination of the Soviet threat and the emergence of regional conflicts such as the war in the former Yugoslavia. [...] At the behest of the EU the Turkish government is seeking to curb the powers and influence of elites which have traditionally been the strongest defenders of Turkey’s secularism, of its Western orientation and of its membership in NATO.