BY MELIKSAH UTKU
YENI SAFAK- At the beginning of this week, Istanbul welcomed a great many guests, including top officials from 50 different countries. Maybe you don't know most of these countries, and can't point to them on a map. You might also ask why other countries you're familiar were among them.
These 50 countries represent the world's least-developed countries (LDCs). They were in Istanbul because the annual conference where the UN evaluates its development strategies for those countries was held this week in Turkey, hosted by Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul.
Turkey hosting this conference, which our media largely ignored, in fact has great symbolic meaning. Of course a single conference isn't enough, but it signals that Turkey has serious initiatives to carve out a role in the global world economy and politics.
We can sum up our foreign policy with these two principles: `Peace at home, peace in the world,' and Westernization.
I personally think that the first saying by our great founder Ataturk protected our country from serious dangers and will continue to provide a moral compass to our progress in the years to come. I also believe that Westernization, which began to be shaped at the beginning of this century, is a concept spread to stifle the domestic choices of countries following the new world order.
But the question is the implementation of these political preferences, not whether they are right or wrong. After all, many countries have gotten top-notch economies by implementing Westernization policies or gained international political prominence by stressing the pursuit of peaceful policies.
We've also done a bad job implementing these two political preferences. Some politicians misunderstood `Peace at home, peace in the world' to mean passivity. Moreover, we've used Westernization to stymie our relations with most of the world, except for a few countries located to our west, not as a development project.
However, there are strong efforts for transformation. For instance, the Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States was important in that it gave the first signs of our policies escaping from its vicious circle. This process has been rapid in recent years. I believe that this process is very healthy despite all the mistakes. For this reason, I see Turkey's will to become the protector of the world's poorest 50 countries as a great expansion, not a mere pipe dream. What's that approach amount to but a natural outgrowth of the principle `Peace at home, peace in the world'?