In January 2017, relations between Greece and Turkey were under severe strain when warships from both sides engaged in a brief standoff near a pair of uninhabited Greek ‘islets’ in the Aegean, whose sovereignty is disputed by Turkey. Theoretically informed by the literature of foreign policy analysis, we examine how the Greek diplomats, military officers and political analysts interpreted Turkey’s behaviour at that particular time. The article considers the following research question: which factors, from a Greek point of view, explain Turkey’s foreign policy in the Aegean in January 2017? Our theoretical expectation is that, in the aftermath of the coup attempt in Turkey, Greek diplomats, military officers and political analysts would ascribe domestic calculations into Turkey’s activities. We employed Q- methodology to uncover socially shared perspectives on this topic. Based on our findings, we uncovered two viewpoints: (1) Turkey’s diachronic strategy in the Aegean and (2) the strongman style. According to the former and most widely shared viewpoint, a consistent ‘rationalist’ strategy to change the status quo in the Aegean explains Turkey’s behaviour. According to the second one, the belief system of Turkey’s leadership legitimises the use of force in the conduct of foreign policy.
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This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in INTERNATIONAL SPECTATOR on 31-01-2022, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03932729.2021.2007610 In July 2015, after intense negotiations with its creditors, Greece received a bailout in exchange for fiscal restraint. The coalition government at that time, led by the left-wing SYRIZA party, elected on the basis of an anti-austerity platform, eventually accepted the prevalent austerity frames of the creditors. Through the aid of Q-method, an analysis of Greek opinion leaders’ views of the negotiation highlights that this outcome can be explained in two different ways. The first posits that the ideological overtones that ruling SYRIZA injected in its negotiation strategy exhibited a lack of socialisation and undermined Greece’s already weak bargaining position. The second focuses on the institutional status quo bias in the Eurogroup in Germany’s favour, which discourages any change in the Eurozone. These two views may have partly been influenced by questions of political accountability.
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