President Gul: "Turkey has an active role in shaping the new world order"

Turkey is already playing an active part in shaping the future international order set to replace the post-Cold War "imperfect equilibrium," President Abdullah Gul suggested yesterday. Gul was speaking at Chatham House, the British think tank that will today present him its prestigious Chatham House Prize from the hands of Queen Elizabeth. Gul suggested that the Cold War world system has yet to be replaced by a new system that will effectively manage international relations. This new order should not shoehorn countries in the old categories of the First, Second and Third World and should also reject a Eurocentric understanding of history and international affairs, he said. In this new order, principles and goals must prevail over club membership reflexes, and instead of an order in which winners are rewarded and losers punished, the new order should enable us to win the hearts and minds of the defeated, he added. Gul said that the new order must be a multicultural, multi-dimensional, heterogeneous but harmonized one where hegemony by any single power is refused. In his speech, Gul also argued that Turkey has been doing its part to usher in a new order through exemplifying its zero-problem policy as an alternative to Cold War zero-sum games.