The Turkish Diaspora in Germany and Turkish Public Diplomacy

Narendra Modi has been using his travels to mobilize support among the Indian disapora in the US and in Australia but he’s not the only national leader to do this Recep Tayip Erdogan has been doing the same with the Turkish diaspora. With this in mind the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik have a newish working paper by Yaşar Aydin on developments in Turkish Diaspora policy and its implications for Germany.

The paper traces the evolution of Turkish policy towards its diaspora from support for guest workers who were abroad on a temporary basis, through consular support for people of Turkish descent to the current situation which, for the first time sees the diaspora as potential public diplomacy/soft power tool. The changing perspective on the diaspora is linked to broader shifts in Turkey and in Turkish foreign policy towards a neo-Ottoman perspective. Aydin interviews Turkish organizations in Germany and finds that most of them are (at best) pretty lukewarm about the new initiatives, not least because some of the ‘Turkish’ organization are actually Kurdish. As a result Aydin argues that German political leaders can afford to be relatively relaxed about the new policy.

The paper supports three broader observations that I would make on public diplomacies.  Firstly, the nature of a country’s PD is tied to its self conception and the paper does a nice job making this connection.  Secondly, the implied divergence between what the government wants to do and what people on the ground think about their policy is pretty standard.  Thirdly, diaspora policies are useful tools but can become liabilities if the countries involved become involved in diplomatic disagreement, countries like India, China, Russia and Turkey that regard themselves as rising diplomatic powers could usefully pay attention to the way in which pre 1945 German attempts to instrumentalize their diaspora consistently undermined their diplomatic relations with other countries.

Indian Soft Power in Afghanistan

The thing that is most impressive about soft power is the ability of the concept to penetrate into the deepeast reaches of foreign policy.  The major reason for this is the ambiguity of the concept that allows it to be used with a variety of different meanings. Here is a US cable discussing opportunities for India to deploy soft power resources in Afghanistan.  What are the main resources available to deploy?  Cheap professional expertise (more engineers for a given budget), power lines, food aid, training and education.

This is also interesting in that it is an example of one country (the US) seeking to benefit from the deployment of another country’s resources in a third country.

Student Visas, Fake Universities and the National Image

I’m catching up on my marking  backlog from my India trip so not  much to say at the moment..but via the Indian Ministry of External Affairs twitter feed I’m interested to learn about the case of Tri Valley University in San Francisco – which has just been shut down on suspicion of money laundering.  Most of the students are Indian  and some of them have been electronically tagged – which is going down like a lead balloon in India with the foreign minister weighing in.

This is a nice example of a story that is probably not getting any play in the US but has considerable visibility in India and is probably coming as a bit of a surprise to the State Department.  Statement from the MEA here and some Indian coverage here and here.