Why, many ask, is Turkey asserting itself? Is it bloody mindedness towards Europe? A “neo-Ottoman” vocation?

None of these theories suffice. The issue demands a more detached appraisal. The answer must first be sought in looking at how Turkey, eclipsed from the great power league 90 years ago, turned in upon itself – a process already underway before the First World war brought down the curtain on the Ottoman adventure.

Defeated and bruised, the Turkey that Kemal Atatürk forged in the place of the Ottoman Empire, locked it itself up into a fortress chrysalis to lick its wounds and protect its vulnerability. The multi-cultural empire yielded to a basically ethnic Turkish state with no friends on any of its lengthy borders, with a major reform and modernisation programme upsetting centuries’ old habits and the go-it-alone autarky fashionable elsewhere in the 1920s and ‘30s. Political life was petrified, the military overweening. The Cold War, and integration into NATO, did not open up Turkey to the outside world as was the case with Spain. If anything it prolonged the country’s relative isolation within persistently hostile borders. While allied with the “West” many circles in Turkey bore a grudges against the very western powers, Britain and France, which, as they saw it, had destroyed their imperial status. Greece, and soon, by extension, the problem of Cyprus, further sharpened Turkey’s sense of encirclement. Turkey’s former colonial subjects in the Arab world had no love for the former master. It was reciprocal: in the 1980s it was quite common to hear Turks refer to their southern neighbours as “pis Araplar” – dirty Arabs. Turkey’s foreign policy rested heavily on the twin pillars of loyalty to NATO and the prospect of integration into the European Union. A military alliance with Israel offered another anchorage point in a hostile world.

A sea change got underway in the nineteen nineties. Özal’ economic reforms gave new life to the economy and confidence, slashed inflation and weakened the dead anti-liberal hand of the bureaucracy and the autarky that it championed. The collapse of communist power in Eastern Europe reduced a major element of threat right along Turkey’s northern and eastern borders. Turkish entrepreneurs made increasing business inroads into the essentially Turkic-speaking former Soviet republics; Turkish politics and diplomacy followed. Integration into the European Union was getting nowhere fast. The Turkish parliament’s refusal of over-flying rights for the Americans at the outset of the second Iraq war was symptomatic of a country recovering pride and refusing to be bullied

A new Anatolian middle-class – pious but shunning Islamism - was changing power balances away from the uneasy alliance of Istanbul business with Ankara bureaucracy. The present Turkish government with its Islamic roots is a part expression of that shift. Turkey was now talking and dealing with the once hostile Russia, Romania and Bulgaria. With Greece too relations, while still tetchy over rights in the Aegean and the issue of Cyprus, were opening up. Relations with Iran were getting better than ever – as they were with the Arab world.

Turkey was becoming liberated, within and without. The sense of being client state was disappearing. The chrysalis was opening up after a long sleep.

Turkey is now kicking the humility and inwardness inherited from the Ottoman collapse. The area of the world in which Turkey lives remains unsettled and volatile. The risk of serious crises, if not outright implosion in some of Turkey’s neighbours is ever present. Many Turks are increasingly aware that throughout the Middle East there are only three other countries, beside itself, that can be seriously described as the big league – Iran, Egypt and Israel. All three of these suffer from increasing strains with big question-marks over their futures. Turkey, by comparison, looks much more solid. Turkey, clearly, can be harmed by domestic strife of its neighbours, but stands to profit from their prosperity, economically and politically. Potential flash-points abound. Cyprus, the Aegean and Greek sensitivities can still brew trouble. The uproar in May 2010 over the Gaza convoy was a product of the combined clumsiness of both Israel and Turkey. Ankara’s relations with the at least 20% of Turkey’s population, defy solution. Turkey is dependent on oil and gas imports – but has its hands on the tap of water supplies to much else of the Middle East.

Turkey’s foreign policy stance carefully eschews any suggestion of military sabre-rattling – a major change from its Ottoman past. And the threat of Turkey’s still powerful military establishment leaning too heavily on the country’s political process is certainly diminishing. Turkey’s political life meanwhile suffers from the lack of a credible opposition to the party now in power. But there are signs that that could now change and this would be a crucial step in consolidating Turkey’s internal stability and acceptance elsewhere as a regional power.

Turkey is not in the new BRIC (Brazil, India, China) club of the reshuffling of the world’s political power pack. But it is now firmly there as a major ancillary player.

Among other things this produces an enhanced challenge to the European Union – if the latter can find a way out of the infernal political challenge of its unwieldy incoherence and lack of direction.

Robert Cox is a former Senior Advisor to the European Community’s Humanitarian Office (ECHO), and former Commission Representative to Turkey.