Organizational Response to Recurring Foreign Policy Crises: The Case of Turkish Military Intervention in Cyprus

Building on Graham Allison’s conceptual models framework, this paper presents a case in state level foreign policy analysis. To reflect on the role of organizational processes and bureaucratic bargaining in foreign policy decisions, the case of Turkish intervention in Cyprus is analyzed. Turkish parliament authorized military intervention during the Cyprus crises in 1964, 1967, and 1974. However, the respective governments in 1964 and 1967 refrained from military intervention while the 1974 authorization was followed by Turkey’s “Cyprus Peace Operation.” In order to understand the particularities of these decisions, rational policy, organizational process, and bureaucratic politics models are comparatively applied to Turkish decision-making during the respective crises. The argument is that the intervention decision can best be explained through a combination of rational calculations by consecutive Turkish governments and the gradual change in the standard operating procedures of the Turkish military and foreign policy bureaucracy. The findings have implications on the role of organizational routines in implementing foreign policy decisions as well as the basic assumptions of conceptual models framework and its explanatory power in different contexts.