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A Humanitarian Foreign Policy Crisis: The 1989 Migration of the Bulgarian Turks*

Zehra Gürsoy

Introduction

In this chapter a humanitarian crisis; the 1989 exodus of the Bulgarian Turks will be examined from the foreign policy aspects of the two neighbouring countries, Turkey and Bulgaria. The aim of the chapter is to highlight how the construction of the “Bulgarian identity” changed the relations between Turkey and Bulgaria from “good neighbourhood” to “enmity” and caused a significant foreign policy crisis on the Turkish side. Regarding these questions, the chapter explains the impact of the individual, domestic and systemic factors respectively, in the formation and the management of this crisis and helps us to evaluate whether Turkey’s crisis management strategy was successful or not during this incident. As the data in the chapter presents, the military violence is not a precondition for a foreign policy crisis, thus the humanitarian issues alone can be sufficient to trigger a crisis between neighbouring countries.