The commonly held view of Turkish foreign-policy action in both European and American political and media circles is that it changed radically with the coming to power in 2002 of a government they label as “Islamist.” Specifically, it is the foreign policy of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) Government that they depict as breaking with the ideological Atlanticism that successive (republican) governments had adopted since the end of the Second World War. The “break” would have proceeded equally from the fact that Turkish diplomatic actions would henceforth look to “the East,” including the Middle East, in being guided by an Islamic thread would present as a right-thinking “paternalism” a strategy of Empire that dare not say its name (the famous “neo-Ottomanism”)—which to some meant that the Turkish foreign policy action was “Orientalizing,” even “Islamizing” at the same time that prospects for a rapid entry into the European Union were receding.

These Western representations can also be found in the academic literature that, in recent years, regularly made the study of AKP foreign policy toward the Arab world its subject. By themselves, such perceptions say more about the actors who contribute to spreading them than the action frameworks and contexts that play a role in crafting Ankara's diplomatic positions. They seek to discredit the AKP Government's external action by reading them through the sole prism of the religious and cultural variable. What is more, they have the effect in Europe of producing a diffuse fear of Turkish activism abroad that reinforces the rejectionist positions on, and reactions to, this country's candidacy for entry into the European Union. This highly politicized reading is also shared by the Turkish elites who were in place before R. T. Erdogan took power. The former, mostly belonging to the so-called “secular” current, accuse the AKP—and hence the “Islamo– liberal–conservative” current—of interring, in the name of a pan-Islamic Brotherhood and ties of a common legacy culture, the state's modernity and secular identity that they are attached to. For their part, the AKP leaders present their foreign-policy actions as acting to “repair” connections with the regional, especially Arab, environment that ruptured when the Ottoman Empire crumbled.