Neo-Ottomanism is a political and foreign-policy orientation that draws on Turkey’s Ottoman imperial heritage to justify an expanded role in regions once governed from Istanbul. The term first entered political vocabulary in the early 1990s, but it gained global attention during the 2000s and 2010s as Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP, pursued a dramatically more active posture across the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, and the eastern Mediterranean. Whether neo-Ottomanism represents a coherent ideology, a convenient label applied by critics, or something in between remains one of the more contested questions in contemporary geopolitics.
Where the Term Came From
The label “neo-Ottomanism” was originally applied to the foreign policy of Turkish President Turgut Özal, who led the country during the final years of the Cold War and the turbulent early 1990s that followed its end.1Reviews of Modern Science. The Western Balkans in Turkish Foreign Policy and Neo-Ottomanism Özal broke with decades of cautious, inward-looking diplomacy by reaching out to newly independent Turkic states in Central Asia and the Caucasus, and by signaling a willingness to engage with Muslim-majority populations beyond Turkey’s borders. He envisioned Turkey as a natural leader for a post-Soviet Turkic world, and his rhetoric openly drew on Ottoman-era connections that the Kemalist establishment had spent decades trying to bury.
Özal died in office in 1993, and Turkey’s foreign policy largely reverted to its traditional caution for the rest of the decade. The concept of neo-Ottomanism did not disappear, but it lacked a political vehicle capable of implementing it at scale. That changed when the AKP came to power in 2002. Although Özal had first articulated the vision, it was the AKP governments, guided heavily by the ideas and instructions of Ahmet DavutoÄŸlu, that actually turned neo-Ottomanism into operational foreign policy.2Springer Link. Theory, Practice, and Paradoxes of Neo-Ottomanism in Turkish Foreign Policy DavutoÄŸlu served first as chief foreign policy adviser, then as foreign minister, and eventually as prime minister. His framework, often summarized as “strategic depth,” held that Turkey had been underperforming on the world stage by ignoring the cultural, religious, and historical ties it had inherited from the Ottoman Empire.
The Tension With Kemalism
To understand why neo-Ottomanism provokes such fierce debate inside Turkey, you need to understand what it replaced. For most of the twentieth century, Turkish foreign policy was Kemalist: secular, nationalist, Western-oriented, and deeply wary of entanglements in the Middle East or the broader Muslim world. The Kemalist republic had defined itself in opposition to the Ottoman past. Ottoman history was treated as something to overcome, not something to celebrate or replicate.
Neo-Ottomanism flips that premise. As the Carnegie Endowment’s analysis frames it, Turkey’s new activism in the Middle East was driven by two conflicting impulses: neo-Ottomanism, which encouraged engagement and the projection of influence by recalling Turkey’s multicultural, Muslim, and imperial past, and Kemalism, which aimed to eliminate the perceived threat of Kurdish nationalism and protect Turkey’s secular, nationalist identity.3Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Turkey’s Middle East Policies: Between Neo-Ottomanism and Kemalism These two orientations are not just competing policy preferences; they reflect fundamentally different answers to the question of what Turkey is. Kemalists see Turkey as a European-style nation-state that happens to be Muslim. Neo-Ottomanists see it as the natural leader of a broader civilizational sphere shaped by Ottoman and Islamic heritage.
This friction has real institutional stakes. Critics of the AKP, including the military and the traditional national security establishment, have viewed neo-Ottomanism and its reliance on soft power in the Middle East as a direct threat to Turkey’s Kemalist secular identity.4Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Turkey’s Middle East Policies: Between Neo-Ottomanism and Kemalism For much of the AKP’s time in power, this tension played out through a slow-motion struggle between civilian government and the military, with the military seeing itself as the guardian of the Kemalist order. That struggle has largely been settled in the AKP’s favor following a series of political purges and, most dramatically, a failed coup attempt in 2016, but the ideological divide persists within Turkish society.
Television, Mosques, and Development Aid
One of the more distinctive features of neo-Ottomanism in practice has been the sheer range of its soft-power instruments. Turkey under the AKP did not just pursue diplomatic agreements; it built an infrastructure for cultural influence that spans continents.
Turkish television dramas, known as dizis, became a surprisingly powerful tool. Historical series set during the Ottoman Empire became massive hits not only in Turkey but across the Middle East, South Asia, and parts of Africa and Latin America. These shows did more than entertain. They played a critical role in Turkey’s nation-branding efforts, creating a positive image of the country abroad and boosting tourism. They also helped President ErdoÄŸan project himself as a leader with the potential to lead the broader Muslim world.5Contemporary Review of the Middle East. Neo-Ottoman Turk-Scape: Analyzing the Role of Dizis as Türkiye’s Soft Power A series depicting Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent or the founding of the Ottoman state is not just a costume drama in this context; it is a vehicle for a specific historical narrative in which Turkey is the heir to a great and benevolent civilization.
Institutional soft power goes beyond television. Two organizations have been particularly important. The Turkish International Cooperation Administration, known as TÄ°KA, was established in 1992 under the foreign ministry specifically to address the developmental needs of the newly independent Turkic republics. Throughout the 1990s, TÄ°KA oversaw roughly 270 technical aid and development projects across Central Asia and the Caucasus, and it grew substantially under AKP rule.6All Azimuth. Turkish Foreign Policy Towards Central Asia: An Unfolding of Regionalism and Soft Power Through TÄ°KA, Turkey positioned itself as an active donor country in regions where it had virtually no presence just a few years earlier. Today TÄ°KA operates in over 150 countries, making it one of the larger development agencies of any middle-income nation.
Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs, known as the Diyanet, has served a complementary role. Together with its affiliated foundation, the Diyanet has helped build and restore mosques across Central Asia, trained new religious leaders, and distributed religious publications originally printed in Turkey.7All Azimuth. Turkish Foreign Policy Towards Central Asia: An Unfolding of Regionalism and Soft Power The Diyanet’s international reach has expanded dramatically in the AKP era, with Turkey funding major mosque construction projects from the Balkans to Southeast Asia. The most visible example is probably the massive central mosque Turkey built in Tirana, Albania, but similar projects dot the landscape from Bishkek to Mogadishu. For critics, these projects look like religious imperialism wrapped in development aid. For the Turkish government, they represent a natural extension of cultural and spiritual ties that predate the modern nation-state system.
The Balkan Front
The Balkans occupy a special place in the neo-Ottoman imagination. The Ottoman Empire governed much of southeastern Europe for centuries, and significant Muslim populations remain in Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania, North Macedonia, and elsewhere. Under the AKP, Turkey dramatically expanded its footprint in the region through a combination of investments, cultural exports, access to education, and diplomatic and political ties. Analysts have argued that these activities serve to increase Turkey’s political prestige in the region and are essentially part of a neo-Ottoman agenda.8Reviews of Modern Science. The Western Balkans in Turkish Foreign Policy and Neo-Ottomanism
Turkey’s Balkan engagement looks different from its Central Asian engagement in an important way. In Central Asia, Turkey leans heavily on ethnic and linguistic kinship with Turkic-speaking peoples. In the Balkans, the common thread is primarily religious (Islam) and historical (shared Ottoman governance), rather than ethnic. This makes the Balkan strategy a clearer test case for neo-Ottomanism as a civilizational project rather than a narrowly ethnic one. Turkey has funded school construction, scholarships, and mosque restorations across the western Balkans, while Turkish businesses have moved into infrastructure and real estate. The model is not colonization but cultivation of influence through economic presence and cultural goodwill, with the Ottoman past serving as the connective tissue.
The reception has been mixed. Bosniak and Albanian leaders have generally welcomed Turkish investment and diplomatic attention. Serbia, Greece, and other historically Christian-majority states in the region tend to view Turkey’s growing presence with suspicion, interpreting it through the lens of Ottoman occupation rather than Ottoman heritage. That split reaction illustrates a fundamental challenge for neo-Ottomanism: the Ottoman past means very different things to different populations, and Turkey’s attempt to rehabilitate that past as a source of soft power inevitably activates old grievances alongside new partnerships.
The Blue Homeland and Maritime Ambition
Neo-Ottomanism is not only about cultural influence and development aid. It has a hard-power dimension as well, and nowhere is that more visible than in the eastern Mediterranean. Turkey’s “Blue Homeland” doctrine, or Mavi Vatan, represents an assertive maritime strategy that claims extensive rights over waters stretching from the Black Sea through the Aegean to the eastern Mediterranean.
At the heart of the doctrine is a dispute with Greece over maritime borders and island sovereignty. Turkey has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, arguing that a fair division of maritime space in the Mediterranean should give more weight to the length of a country’s contiguous coastline than to the scattered Greek islands that dot the sea near Turkey’s coast. Turkish authorities contend that applying the Convention’s standard formulas in such a confined, island-dense space would give Greece an enormous maritime area that far outstrips what Turkey considers equitable.9Revista da Escola de Guerra Naval. The blue homeland (Mavi Vatan): Turkey’s Naval Strategy in the Surrounding Seas (2020-2023)
Whether the Blue Homeland doctrine counts as “neo-Ottoman” depends on whom you ask. Its architects have framed it primarily in terms of national security and resource rights rather than imperial nostalgia. But the doctrine’s ambitions clearly overlap with neo-Ottomanism’s broader vision of Turkey as a power that refuses to be boxed into its current borders. The eastern Mediterranean has become a flashpoint precisely because it sits at the intersection of energy politics, historical grievance, and great-power competition. Turkey’s naval buildup, its dispatch of drilling ships into contested waters, and its signing of a maritime boundary agreement with Libya’s Government of National Accord in 2019 all fit a pattern of assertive engagement that neo-Ottomanism’s critics point to as evidence that the ideology is not just about soft power.
The Defense Industry as a Foreign Policy Tool
Turkey’s defense industry has undergone a striking transformation over the past two decades, and that transformation has become inseparable from the country’s broader foreign-policy ambitions. Turkish-made drones, armored vehicles, and naval platforms have entered service with a growing list of countries, and Turkey has established military bases and conducted active operations in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and the South Caucasus. Researchers have concluded that Turkey’s increasing military presence beyond its borders, achieved through arms exports, forward-deployed forces, military bases, and peacekeeping missions, reflects the adoption of an active and assertive foreign policy.10Ä°nsan ve Toplum Bilimleri AraÅŸtırmaları Dergisi. The Effects of Turkish Defense Industry’s Transformation on Turkish Foreign Policy
The most high-profile example was the role Turkish armed drones played in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Turkey provided Azerbaijan with significant military support, and the Bayraktar TB2 drone became an international symbol of Turkey’s growing arms capability. For proponents, this demonstrated that Turkey could support kinship-based alliances with real military heft, not just rhetoric. For critics in Europe and the broader West, it confirmed fears that Turkey was pursuing an independent, neo-Ottoman-inflected strategic course in which military power served civilizational and ethnic solidarity rather than alliance obligations.
Strains With the West and the Multipolar Pivot
One of the most consequential dimensions of neo-Ottomanism is how it has reshaped Turkey’s relationship with the West. Turkey remains a NATO member and has been a candidate for European Union membership since 1999, though accession talks have been effectively frozen for years. Under the AKP, Turkey has increasingly positioned itself as a power that wants to maximize strategic autonomy in a world it sees as becoming multipolar.
Turkey’s bid to join the BRICS grouping is perhaps the clearest signal of this shift. Analysis suggests the move represents an attempt to maximize strategic autonomy in an increasingly multipolar world order, and it illuminates the tensions between Turkey’s existing NATO commitments and its interest in alternative alignments.11Journal of BRICS Studies. BRICS and Beyond: Türkiye’s Strategic Drift from the West and Its Impact on Global Geopolitics Turkey has also cultivated closer ties with Russia, purchased the Russian S-400 missile defense system despite fierce objections from Washington, and positioned itself as a mediator in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. None of this fits comfortably within the traditional Western alliance framework, and all of it is consistent with a neo-Ottoman worldview in which Turkey is too important to be a junior partner in anyone’s bloc.
The relationship with the EU is instructive. EU accession was once the centerpiece of Turkey’s Western orientation and a top AKP priority. Over time, as accession talks stalled and European leaders grew openly skeptical of Turkey’s candidacy, the AKP’s rhetoric shifted. The Ottoman past, once downplayed to reassure European partners, became something to celebrate openly. The EU was recast from an aspiration to a peer, and Turkey began to present itself as the center of its own civilizational sphere rather than the eastern edge of Europe’s.
How Former Ottoman Territories View Turkish Engagement
A persistent gap exists between how Turkey frames its regional engagement and how many of the countries on the receiving end experience it. In the Balkans, Central Asia, and the Middle East, reactions vary enormously depending on local politics, religious identity, and historical memory.
Muslim-majority communities in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania have generally been receptive to Turkish investment and cultural outreach, seeing Turkey as a partner that understands their history and respects their identity in a way that European institutions sometimes do not. In Central Asia, the Turkic-speaking republics have welcomed elements of Turkish engagement, especially development assistance and educational programs, while remaining wary of being pulled into Turkey’s orbit. Countries like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have their own post-Soviet identities and do not necessarily want to swap Russian-influenced politics for a Turkish-influenced version.
In the Arab Middle East, the picture is more complex. Turkey’s early support for popular uprisings during the Arab Spring initially generated goodwill in some quarters, but its subsequent interventions, particularly in Syria and Libya, produced sharp backlash. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have all been openly hostile to what they perceive as Turkish overreach, and they view neo-Ottomanism as a thinly veiled bid for regional hegemony. For these countries, the Ottoman past is not a source of shared heritage but a reminder of foreign domination. The framing matters: Turkey’s government speaks of rediscovering bonds with brother nations, while its regional rivals hear echoes of imperial ambition.
The Question of Whether It Is Really an Ideology
Scholars disagree about whether neo-Ottomanism is a coherent ideology or simply a convenient label. Critics of the term argue that it overstates the degree to which Turkish foreign policy is driven by nostalgic revivalism. Much of what gets called neo-Ottoman, they point out, is just a rising regional power doing what rising regional powers do: expanding trade relationships, building military capacity, projecting cultural influence, and seeking to reduce dependence on a single alliance system. You do not need Ottoman nostalgia to explain why a country of eighty-five million people with a large economy and a strategic location might want a bigger seat at the table.
Proponents of the label counter that the Ottoman framing is not incidental but central. The AKP has deliberately cultivated Ottoman symbolism, from the construction of a massive presidential palace in Ankara designed to evoke imperial grandeur, to the renaming of public spaces and institutions, to the decision in 2020 to reconvert Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia from a museum back into a mosque. These are not the actions of a government that merely wants more trade deals. They reflect a self-conscious effort to redefine Turkey’s national identity around its Ottoman and Islamic heritage, and to export that redefined identity through diplomacy, aid, media, and, where necessary, military force.
The truth is probably that both readings capture something real. Neo-Ottomanism is partly a strategic posture adopted by a pragmatic political party that found Ottoman nostalgia to be a powerful tool for domestic mobilization and international differentiation. It is also, for a significant segment of the Turkish political class and public, a genuinely felt civilizational identity that shapes how they think about Turkey’s place in the world. The mix of pragmatism and sincerity is not unique to Turkey; most national foreign-policy doctrines are held together by a similar blend of interest and belief.
Domestic Cultural Politics and Ottoman Nostalgia
Inside Turkey, neo-Ottomanism is not just a foreign-policy framework. It feeds into a broader cultural politics that shapes everything from urban planning to school curricula. The AKP era has seen a proliferation of Ottoman-themed restaurants, television shows, consumer goods, and public architecture. Ottoman-era calligraphy has returned to public buildings. State media regularly produces content that glorifies Ottoman conquests and sultans.
This cultural turn serves a concrete political function. Turkey’s population is deeply divided along secular-religious and urban-rural lines. Ottoman nostalgia allows the AKP to construct a national narrative that valorizes the religious, conservative, and provincial identity of its base, which felt marginalized during the Kemalist era. The message is that the Ottoman centuries were not a period of backwardness to be escaped but a golden age to be reclaimed. For AKP supporters, this is affirming and empowering. For secular urbanites who identify with the Kemalist tradition, it is alarming, because it implies that the republic’s founding break with the Ottoman past was a mistake.
The consumer dimension should not be underestimated. Ottoman-themed commodities and experiences have become a significant market. Tourism campaigns lean heavily on Ottoman heritage sites. The historical dizis that function as soft power abroad also function as political culture at home, reinforcing a narrative of civilizational greatness that aligns with the AKP’s political project. There is a feedback loop: the government promotes Ottoman nostalgia, popular culture amplifies it, and the resulting public mood creates space for bolder foreign-policy moves that might otherwise face domestic resistance.