In November, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan received a gift to mark his taking over the helm of the Organization of Turkic States. The large, gold-framed map of “the Turkic world”, depicting communities of ethnic Turks across Europe and Asia, spoke to a deeply rooted nationalist vision of pan-Turkic unity.
But the decision by Kazakhstan’s president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to ask Vladimir Putin for help in suppressing protests that rocked his country has dealt a blow to Erdogan’s dreams of forming a bloc made up of Turkey and “brotherly” nations in the former Soviet Union.
“The fact that Tokayev called Russia and Putin and not Turkey and Erdogan is proof that the big boss [in the region] is still Russia,” said Bayram Balci, director of the French Institute for Anatolian Studies in Istanbul.