Throughout the history, Turkic world has never given up the ideology of becoming together and establishing global peace and order. In this context, many attempts have been made and some successes have been achieved individually. Today, cooperation processes are tried to be developed in an updated context within many organizations. However, the desired domain has not been achieved yet. In this regard, it is obvious that the most important leverage that will trigger cooperation processes in the Turkic world and provide new capabilities in all other areas, especially demand for finance, is energy. For this reason, it is very important to establish an energy union between the independent Turkic countries.
However, how can such a target can be achieved? Do the Turkic Countries have to come together and found a different version of OPEC? What can we say about the energy transition issues? Is it possible to transport the Turkmen and Uzbek gas to Europe through a new pipeline project: “Trans-Caspian”? How may US, China, India and Russia react to these trends? Is it possible to integrate non-Turkic countries into the collaboration? How will such an integration affect the regional and global dynamics? How can we define the most applicable strategy to put coherent steps for the future? All these questions must be analysed to be able to draw an acceptable picture for the energy integration policies between the Turkic countries.
In this study, first we mention the main idea of the Turkic energy union, its importance, and a start-up model for this. Next, regarding above questions, we will propose an applicable integration model and a realization strategy for the Turkic energy union.
PDFAssoc. Prof. Vakur Sumer has received his Ph.D. on International Relations, from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. He is a faculty member at Department of International Relations, Selcuk University, Konya, Turkey. He has worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Global Research Institute at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, NC, USA, and as a visiting scholar at the Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California-Davis, CA, USA. Sumer has been a researcher at Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany in 2012.