CARLO FRAPPI

Dal confronto alla cooperazione: Turchia e Russia nel sistema eurasiatico post-bipolare

218

Maggio-Agosto 2008

Anno LXXIII    n. 2

Summary - Historical, geographical, demographic and strategic considerations make Turkey and Russia two key players in the Eurasian space, an area which, encompassing territories from the Black Sea basin up to Central Asia, is gaining a new centrality in the landscape of the international system emerged after the conclusion of the Cold War. Historically rivals, Turkey and Russia seem today to effectively cooperate in the same regional projection that had long determined their conflicts. The long series of conflicts of the nineteenth century, as well as the opposition at the sunset of the Russian and Ottoman Empires or Soviet threats to the territorial integrity of Turkey following the Second World War, seem to set the pace to a pragmatic political and economic cooperation. The cooperation between Ankara and Moscow is not, in itself, a novelty in the landscape of the relations between the two countries. It occours however today in a much more complex context than the Cold war one, and it appears to be significantly a consequence of a broader rethinking of the two countries’ foreign policies. Aim of the article is to analyse the difficult path that led to the current state of relations between Turkey and Russia , highlighting its deeper motivations and, in this way, the chances to become a structural factor of the post-bipolar eurasiatic system.