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WHO LOST TURKEY?
By Owen Matthews; With Sami Kohen in Istanbul
Newsweek
December 11, 2006
International Edition
It's a slow-motion 'train wreck,' and the imminent crash of Ankara's
EU bid is a disaster for everyone.
Benedict XVI stood, shoeless, side by side with the Mufti of Istanbul
beneath the cavernous great dome of onetime Constantinople's famed
Blue Mosque, palms upraised in the traditional Muslim gesture of
peace and supplication. What precisely the pope prayed for is a
matter between himself and his maker--but surely it involved healing
between Christians and Muslims, an issue that has come to define his
pontificate and his era.
When prayer becomes a geopolitical strategy, there's a problem. The
most immediate: an imminent breakdown of relations between Turkey
and the European Union. Not so long ago, it seemed that Europe would
overcome prejudice and define itself as an ideology rather than a
geography, a way of being in the world rather than a mere agglomeration
of nation-states. But that chance is now lost. "Turkey will never be a
full member of the EU," predicts British M.E.P. Daniel Hannan. "There's
a dawning realization of that reality on all sides."
This is a tragedy--a catastrophe, potentially--of epochal
proportions. Europe's engagement with Turkey was a chance to show
the world that the West is not incompatible with the East, that
a democratic Muslim nation can be just as modern and European as
a Christian one. As Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
said recently, what's at stake is nothing less than "world peace,
fighting global terror and the clash of civilizations." A European
Turkey could have been a model for the rest of the Muslim world,
too, playing "constructively the role the Ottoman Empire once played
destructively--a bridge between the East and West," argues Egyptian
political thinker Abdel Monem Said Aly. Accepting Turkey might well
have helped Europe cope with its own issues of Muslim integration and
identity. And for Turkey itself the lure of EU membership was a force
for social transformation. The nation has come far in recent years;
but it still has far to go in jettisoning its authoritarian legacy
and creating a democracy that reaches broader and more deeply among
its culturally and ethnically diverse peoples.
Now come the recriminations, with fingers pointing this way and that.
Indeed, a glittery cast of geopolitical notables gathered just last
week in Brussels for a symposium aptly titled, "Who Lost Turkey?" EU
Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn has worked hard to avoid what he
has called a "train wreck," long seen coming but difficult to stop.
The proximate causes are numerous as they are petty, from bickering
over Cyprus to a vote by the French Parliament criminalizing denial
of Armenian "genocide" at the hands of the Turks in 1915. The rift
isn't formal yet, as the EU will likely opt for only a face-saving
partial suspension of negotiations after a deadlock on Cyprus failed
to be resolved last week. But it takes no special reading between the
lines to see that a fundamental tipping point has been reached. Late
last week Cyprus threatened to "veto" Turkey's entire bid. French
presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, kicking off his campaign,
also called for the suspension of further talks. "Turkey's place is
not in the EU," said he.
Officially, politicians in Ankara insist that they will plod on
regardless. "There is no Plan B," says Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul.
"Our goal is to continue on the same road" toward EU membership. Yet
in truth, with the EU as a guiding light, Turkey now risks careering
off on an entirely different geopolitical trajectory, the direction
and consequences of which can only be guessed at. Indeed, attitudes
are already changing. A recent poll in the newspaper Milliyet shows
support for joining the EU has fallen to just one third, down from 67
percent in 2004. If they don't want us, the prevailing sentiment goes,
we don't want them. Europeans, meanwhile, are doing some devaluing
of their own. Said Rehn last week: "Turkey's strategic importance
should not be exaggerated."
Now what? Gul and others may speak of "business as usual," but
European pressure has been the catalyst of a host of vital reforms
in recent years that no internal Turkish political force could ever
have accomplished. They range from reducing the role of the military
in politics to granting cultural rights to the country's 14 million
Kurds. Without the gravitational pull of EU membership, will these
changes continue? Or will the ethnic, religious and cultural wars
that have long raged beneath the surface of the Turkish republic
finally erupt in earnest?
The visit of the pope, a deeply controversial figure in the Islamic
world, has exposed the deepest of these: tension between secular
Turks and Islam. Ever since the founding of the Turkish republic
on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire by Gen. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,
Turkey's rulers have looked to the secular West rather than the more
religious East. With the election of the mildly Islamist government
of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AK Party in 2002, however, that line
has been blurred.
A recent study by Bosporus University found that more Turks are
defining themselves by their religion these days than by their
nationality; 45 percent said they were "Muslims first" (up from
36 percent in 1999) and 19 percent said they were "Turkish first"
(down from 21 percent). Erdogan has taken pains not to push overtly
Islamist policies--for instance, he's studiously avoided repealing
Turkey's draconian law banning Islamic headscarves from government
offices, schools and universities. But he sent his daughters to be
educated abroad, in the United States, rather than have them remove
their headscarves at a Turkish university, and in 2004 tried (but
failed) to introduce a controversial law prohibiting adultery.
Erdogan's engagement with the Middle East is no less worrying for
Turkey's secular elite, particularly the generals who see themselves
as the guardians of Ataturk's modernizing (read: antireligious)
values. He is the first Turkish leader in years who's deliberately
looked East as well as West, making reform in the wider Islamic world
almost as much a priority as Turkey's EU project. A devout Muslim--he
recently passed out in his car during October's Ramadan fast because of
low blood sugar--Erdogan has campaigned for global Islam to reinvent
itself. In 2004 Ankara helped to wrest control of the Organization of
the Islamic Conference from conservative Islamists and backed a worldly
Turk, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, as secretary-general. Last week Erdogan
told an OIC session in Istanbul that women are "the most productive
part of society," and that they were discriminated against in Islamic
societies because of "traditions portrayed as religious rules."
That's revolutionary stuff, at least within the traditionally
conservative Muslim world. But back home, Erdogan's crusading rhetoric
has played into the hands of potential enemies, many of whom suspect
him of being a crypto-fundamentalist and aim to use the failure of his
EU bid to stop both him and his reform programs. As support for the EU
wanes, so Turkish ultranationalismrises. According to a confidential
AK Party poll earlier this year, more than 20 percent of first-time
voters support the chauvinist Nationalist Action Party, or MHP. Its
leader, Devlet Bahceli, complained last week that "the EU project is a
treacherous plan designed to weaken, divide and disintegrate Turkey,"
and he vowed to undo "anti-Turkish" human-rights legislation (such
as freedom of speech) pushed by Brussels.
A nationalist backlash could prove especially ugly at a time when the
aspirations of Turkey's 14 million Kurds have been raised by half
a decade of rapid (though still incomplete) liberalization. Recent
unrest flaring in Turkey's southeast saw a score of towns and villages
across the region wrecked in riots that brought hundreds of thousands
onto the streets. And the consequences for Cyprus would be nasty,
too. Already there has been talk from the opposition of absorbing the
Turkish northern part of the island into Turkey itself, which would
put an end to efforts to reunite the island for generations--and,
of course, deliver a death blow to Turkey's lingering EU aspirations.
Perhaps most dangerous of all, Turkey's generals--the "pashas"--are
becoming more vocal after years of relative silence. This year
they've blasted Brussels for promoting dangerously liberal reforms
from broadcasting in Kurdish to the right to nonmilitary national
service. (Though, in truth, their real concern is undoubtedly the
EU's insistence that the military stay out of politics.) "The Turkish
armed forces will never turn a blind eye to the basic values of
the Turkish republic for the sake of the EU," stormed naval forces
commander Adm. Yener Karahanoglu in September. Meanwhile, there is
evidence of an unholy alliance between ultranationalists and anti-EU
elements in the Army, some of whose members have been implicated in
attempted extrajudicial killings of Kurdish activists.
The stage is set for a showdown between the military and Erdogan next
May as the AK-dominated Parliament selects Turkey's new president.
The choice is entirely Erdogan's, thanks to his control of the
legislature. Some speculate he will take the post himself--a move
likely to infuriate Turkey's secularist bureaucracy, judiciary and
military, who suspect him of harboring a hidden Islamist agenda
and cannot forgive him his past as a leader of the radical Islamist
Welfare Party, banned in 1997. Erdogan himself was jailed four months
for sedition as recently as 1999.
Perhaps things are not as bleak as they appear. The collapse of
Turkey's EU bid may sharpen the country's internal ethnic, religious
and political divides--but that does not necessarily mean they will
erupt into open conflict of the sort that, most recently in 1997,
prompted the country's military to step in. And while the mutual
disillusionment between Turkey and Europe may be deep, Turkey remains
more Western, in terms of culture and economics, than it has ever been
before. From this it will not retreat. "Turkey's place is in Europe;
any talk of 'alternatives' is just talk," says former ambassador
Ozdem Sanberk. And yes, Turks may be turning more religious. But
those same polls from Bosporus University also show that support for
purely religion-based political parties has fallen, from 41 percent to
25 percent, over the past seven years. In other words: religion yes,
but religion-based politics, no. Meanwhile, another sign of the times:
while more people now favor scrapping the longstanding ban on wearing
headscarves in schools and public offices, the number of Turkish
women actually wearing them has dropped from 16 to 11 percent over
the past seven years.
Whatever the outcome, Turkey's struggle is going to have serious
repercussions. Europe's alienated and angry Muslim minorities, for
instance, will hardly be encouraged to come to terms with Western
culture if Europe sends a clear signal that Turks cannot be full
Europeans. And in the wider Middle East, Turkey's growing role as a
model will be undermined by a break with Brussels. "Middle Easterners'
disillusionment with the failures of Arab nationalism and the extremism
of fundamental Islam is making them reassess the Turkish route,"
says Hugh Pope, a writer on regional affairs. "More and more opinion
leaders see hope in what appears to be Turkey's successful synthesis
of Islam and modernity." Will that leadership evaporate if Turkey
fails to join the European club?
Many strategists in Washington--and not just neoconservatives--fear
that an EU-Turkey split will resonate through the Muslim world as a
major geopolitical defeat for Western values. "Turkey is to the West
what Germany was in the cold war ... a frontline state," former U.S.
ambassador to the U.N. Richard Holbrooke told EU Commissioner Rehn at
the "Who Lost Turkey?" symposium. Turkey's progress "is keenly watched"
by its neighbors, acknowledges Foreign Minister Gul. "We have been
a rare beacon of stability in an inherently turbulent region."
Will that beacon flicker and die without the EU? "The government
can't turn its back to the EU," says one Erdogan foreign-policy
adviser, who is not authorized to speak on the record. "And the
EU cannot turn its back on Turkey." The two sides have too much in
common to split completely. Rather, there's the makings, long term,
of an entente. Europeans already talk of a special partnership,
short of membership. Turkey has said it will never settle for that,
but we'd best hope for some accommodation. Everyone is poorer for the
failure of vision that has scuppered one of the great civilizational
projects of our times.
By Owen Matthews; With Sami Kohen in Istanbul
Newsweek
December 11, 2006
International Edition
It's a slow-motion 'train wreck,' and the imminent crash of Ankara's
EU bid is a disaster for everyone.
Benedict XVI stood, shoeless, side by side with the Mufti of Istanbul
beneath the cavernous great dome of onetime Constantinople's famed
Blue Mosque, palms upraised in the traditional Muslim gesture of
peace and supplication. What precisely the pope prayed for is a
matter between himself and his maker--but surely it involved healing
between Christians and Muslims, an issue that has come to define his
pontificate and his era.
When prayer becomes a geopolitical strategy, there's a problem. The
most immediate: an imminent breakdown of relations between Turkey
and the European Union. Not so long ago, it seemed that Europe would
overcome prejudice and define itself as an ideology rather than a
geography, a way of being in the world rather than a mere agglomeration
of nation-states. But that chance is now lost. "Turkey will never be a
full member of the EU," predicts British M.E.P. Daniel Hannan. "There's
a dawning realization of that reality on all sides."
This is a tragedy--a catastrophe, potentially--of epochal
proportions. Europe's engagement with Turkey was a chance to show
the world that the West is not incompatible with the East, that
a democratic Muslim nation can be just as modern and European as
a Christian one. As Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
said recently, what's at stake is nothing less than "world peace,
fighting global terror and the clash of civilizations." A European
Turkey could have been a model for the rest of the Muslim world,
too, playing "constructively the role the Ottoman Empire once played
destructively--a bridge between the East and West," argues Egyptian
political thinker Abdel Monem Said Aly. Accepting Turkey might well
have helped Europe cope with its own issues of Muslim integration and
identity. And for Turkey itself the lure of EU membership was a force
for social transformation. The nation has come far in recent years;
but it still has far to go in jettisoning its authoritarian legacy
and creating a democracy that reaches broader and more deeply among
its culturally and ethnically diverse peoples.
Now come the recriminations, with fingers pointing this way and that.
Indeed, a glittery cast of geopolitical notables gathered just last
week in Brussels for a symposium aptly titled, "Who Lost Turkey?" EU
Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn has worked hard to avoid what he
has called a "train wreck," long seen coming but difficult to stop.
The proximate causes are numerous as they are petty, from bickering
over Cyprus to a vote by the French Parliament criminalizing denial
of Armenian "genocide" at the hands of the Turks in 1915. The rift
isn't formal yet, as the EU will likely opt for only a face-saving
partial suspension of negotiations after a deadlock on Cyprus failed
to be resolved last week. But it takes no special reading between the
lines to see that a fundamental tipping point has been reached. Late
last week Cyprus threatened to "veto" Turkey's entire bid. French
presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, kicking off his campaign,
also called for the suspension of further talks. "Turkey's place is
not in the EU," said he.
Officially, politicians in Ankara insist that they will plod on
regardless. "There is no Plan B," says Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul.
"Our goal is to continue on the same road" toward EU membership. Yet
in truth, with the EU as a guiding light, Turkey now risks careering
off on an entirely different geopolitical trajectory, the direction
and consequences of which can only be guessed at. Indeed, attitudes
are already changing. A recent poll in the newspaper Milliyet shows
support for joining the EU has fallen to just one third, down from 67
percent in 2004. If they don't want us, the prevailing sentiment goes,
we don't want them. Europeans, meanwhile, are doing some devaluing
of their own. Said Rehn last week: "Turkey's strategic importance
should not be exaggerated."
Now what? Gul and others may speak of "business as usual," but
European pressure has been the catalyst of a host of vital reforms
in recent years that no internal Turkish political force could ever
have accomplished. They range from reducing the role of the military
in politics to granting cultural rights to the country's 14 million
Kurds. Without the gravitational pull of EU membership, will these
changes continue? Or will the ethnic, religious and cultural wars
that have long raged beneath the surface of the Turkish republic
finally erupt in earnest?
The visit of the pope, a deeply controversial figure in the Islamic
world, has exposed the deepest of these: tension between secular
Turks and Islam. Ever since the founding of the Turkish republic
on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire by Gen. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,
Turkey's rulers have looked to the secular West rather than the more
religious East. With the election of the mildly Islamist government
of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AK Party in 2002, however, that line
has been blurred.
A recent study by Bosporus University found that more Turks are
defining themselves by their religion these days than by their
nationality; 45 percent said they were "Muslims first" (up from
36 percent in 1999) and 19 percent said they were "Turkish first"
(down from 21 percent). Erdogan has taken pains not to push overtly
Islamist policies--for instance, he's studiously avoided repealing
Turkey's draconian law banning Islamic headscarves from government
offices, schools and universities. But he sent his daughters to be
educated abroad, in the United States, rather than have them remove
their headscarves at a Turkish university, and in 2004 tried (but
failed) to introduce a controversial law prohibiting adultery.
Erdogan's engagement with the Middle East is no less worrying for
Turkey's secular elite, particularly the generals who see themselves
as the guardians of Ataturk's modernizing (read: antireligious)
values. He is the first Turkish leader in years who's deliberately
looked East as well as West, making reform in the wider Islamic world
almost as much a priority as Turkey's EU project. A devout Muslim--he
recently passed out in his car during October's Ramadan fast because of
low blood sugar--Erdogan has campaigned for global Islam to reinvent
itself. In 2004 Ankara helped to wrest control of the Organization of
the Islamic Conference from conservative Islamists and backed a worldly
Turk, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, as secretary-general. Last week Erdogan
told an OIC session in Istanbul that women are "the most productive
part of society," and that they were discriminated against in Islamic
societies because of "traditions portrayed as religious rules."
That's revolutionary stuff, at least within the traditionally
conservative Muslim world. But back home, Erdogan's crusading rhetoric
has played into the hands of potential enemies, many of whom suspect
him of being a crypto-fundamentalist and aim to use the failure of his
EU bid to stop both him and his reform programs. As support for the EU
wanes, so Turkish ultranationalismrises. According to a confidential
AK Party poll earlier this year, more than 20 percent of first-time
voters support the chauvinist Nationalist Action Party, or MHP. Its
leader, Devlet Bahceli, complained last week that "the EU project is a
treacherous plan designed to weaken, divide and disintegrate Turkey,"
and he vowed to undo "anti-Turkish" human-rights legislation (such
as freedom of speech) pushed by Brussels.
A nationalist backlash could prove especially ugly at a time when the
aspirations of Turkey's 14 million Kurds have been raised by half
a decade of rapid (though still incomplete) liberalization. Recent
unrest flaring in Turkey's southeast saw a score of towns and villages
across the region wrecked in riots that brought hundreds of thousands
onto the streets. And the consequences for Cyprus would be nasty,
too. Already there has been talk from the opposition of absorbing the
Turkish northern part of the island into Turkey itself, which would
put an end to efforts to reunite the island for generations--and,
of course, deliver a death blow to Turkey's lingering EU aspirations.
Perhaps most dangerous of all, Turkey's generals--the "pashas"--are
becoming more vocal after years of relative silence. This year
they've blasted Brussels for promoting dangerously liberal reforms
from broadcasting in Kurdish to the right to nonmilitary national
service. (Though, in truth, their real concern is undoubtedly the
EU's insistence that the military stay out of politics.) "The Turkish
armed forces will never turn a blind eye to the basic values of
the Turkish republic for the sake of the EU," stormed naval forces
commander Adm. Yener Karahanoglu in September. Meanwhile, there is
evidence of an unholy alliance between ultranationalists and anti-EU
elements in the Army, some of whose members have been implicated in
attempted extrajudicial killings of Kurdish activists.
The stage is set for a showdown between the military and Erdogan next
May as the AK-dominated Parliament selects Turkey's new president.
The choice is entirely Erdogan's, thanks to his control of the
legislature. Some speculate he will take the post himself--a move
likely to infuriate Turkey's secularist bureaucracy, judiciary and
military, who suspect him of harboring a hidden Islamist agenda
and cannot forgive him his past as a leader of the radical Islamist
Welfare Party, banned in 1997. Erdogan himself was jailed four months
for sedition as recently as 1999.
Perhaps things are not as bleak as they appear. The collapse of
Turkey's EU bid may sharpen the country's internal ethnic, religious
and political divides--but that does not necessarily mean they will
erupt into open conflict of the sort that, most recently in 1997,
prompted the country's military to step in. And while the mutual
disillusionment between Turkey and Europe may be deep, Turkey remains
more Western, in terms of culture and economics, than it has ever been
before. From this it will not retreat. "Turkey's place is in Europe;
any talk of 'alternatives' is just talk," says former ambassador
Ozdem Sanberk. And yes, Turks may be turning more religious. But
those same polls from Bosporus University also show that support for
purely religion-based political parties has fallen, from 41 percent to
25 percent, over the past seven years. In other words: religion yes,
but religion-based politics, no. Meanwhile, another sign of the times:
while more people now favor scrapping the longstanding ban on wearing
headscarves in schools and public offices, the number of Turkish
women actually wearing them has dropped from 16 to 11 percent over
the past seven years.
Whatever the outcome, Turkey's struggle is going to have serious
repercussions. Europe's alienated and angry Muslim minorities, for
instance, will hardly be encouraged to come to terms with Western
culture if Europe sends a clear signal that Turks cannot be full
Europeans. And in the wider Middle East, Turkey's growing role as a
model will be undermined by a break with Brussels. "Middle Easterners'
disillusionment with the failures of Arab nationalism and the extremism
of fundamental Islam is making them reassess the Turkish route,"
says Hugh Pope, a writer on regional affairs. "More and more opinion
leaders see hope in what appears to be Turkey's successful synthesis
of Islam and modernity." Will that leadership evaporate if Turkey
fails to join the European club?
Many strategists in Washington--and not just neoconservatives--fear
that an EU-Turkey split will resonate through the Muslim world as a
major geopolitical defeat for Western values. "Turkey is to the West
what Germany was in the cold war ... a frontline state," former U.S.
ambassador to the U.N. Richard Holbrooke told EU Commissioner Rehn at
the "Who Lost Turkey?" symposium. Turkey's progress "is keenly watched"
by its neighbors, acknowledges Foreign Minister Gul. "We have been
a rare beacon of stability in an inherently turbulent region."
Will that beacon flicker and die without the EU? "The government
can't turn its back to the EU," says one Erdogan foreign-policy
adviser, who is not authorized to speak on the record. "And the
EU cannot turn its back on Turkey." The two sides have too much in
common to split completely. Rather, there's the makings, long term,
of an entente. Europeans already talk of a special partnership,
short of membership. Turkey has said it will never settle for that,
but we'd best hope for some accommodation. Everyone is poorer for the
failure of vision that has scuppered one of the great civilizational
projects of our times.