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TURKEY'S GEOGRAPHICAL AMBITION
Alaska Native News
Aug 15 2014
Geopolitical Weekly Aug 14, 2014.
At a time when Europe and other parts of the world are governed
by forgettable mediocrities, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime
minister for a decade now, seethes with ambition. Perhaps the only
other leader of a major world nation who emanates such a dynamic force
field around him is Russia's Vladimir Putin, with whom the West is
also supremely uncomfortable.
Erdogan and Putin are ambitious because they are men who unrepentantly
grasp geopolitics. Putin knows that any responsible Russian leader
ensures that Russia has buffer zones of some sort in places like
Eastern Europe and the Caucasus; Erdogan knows that Turkey must become
a substantial power in the Near East in order to give him leverage in
Europe. Erdogan's problem is that Turkey's geography between East and
West contains as many vulnerabilities as it does benefits. This makes
Erdogan at times overreach. But there is a historical and geographical
logic to his excesses.
The story begins after World War I.
Because Ottoman Turkey was on the losing side of that war (along
with Wilhelmine Germany and Hapsburg Austria), the victorious allies
in the Treaty of Sevres of 1920 carved up Turkey and its environs,
giving territory and zones of influence to Greece, Armenia, Italy,
Britain and France. Turkey's reaction to this humiliation was Kemalism,
the philosophy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (the surname "Ataturk" means
"Father of the Turks"), the only undefeated Ottoman general, who
would lead a military revolt against the new occupying powers and thus
create a sovereign Turkish state throughout the Anatolian heartland.
Kemalism willingly ceded away the non-Anatolian parts of the Ottoman
Empire but compensated by demanding a uniethnic Turkish state
within Anatolia itself. Gone were the "Kurds," for example. They
would henceforth be known as "Mountain Turks." Gone, in fact, was
the entire multicultural edifice of the Ottoman Empire.
Kemalism not only rejected minorities, it rejected the Arabic script
of the Turkish language. Ataturk risked higher illiteracy rates to
give the language a Latin script. He abolished the Muslim religious
courts and discouraged women from wearing the veil and men from
wearing fezzes. Ataturk further recast Turks as Europeans (without
giving much thought to whether the Europeans would accept them as
such), all in an attempt to reorient Turkey away from the now defunct
Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and toward Europe.
Kemalism was a call to arms: the martial Turkish reaction to the
Treaty of Sevres, to the same degree that Putin's neo-czarism was the
authoritarian reaction to Boris Yeltsin's anarchy of 1990s Russia. For
decades the reverence for Ataturk in Turkey went beyond a personality
cult: He was more like a stern, benevolent and protective demigod,
whose portrait looked down upon every public interior.
The problem was that Ataturk's vision of orienting Turkey so firmly
to the West clashed with Turkey's geographic situation, one that
straddled both West and East. An adjustment was in order. Turgut Ozal,
a religious Turk with Sufi tendencies who was elected prime minister
in 1983, provided it.
Ozal's political skill enabled him to gradually wrest control of
domestic policy and -- to an impressive degree -- foreign policy
away from the staunchly Kemalist Turkish military. Whereas Ataturk
and the generations of Turkish officers who followed him thought in
terms of a Turkey that was an appendage of Europe, Ozal spoke of a
Turkey whose influence stretched from the Aegean to the Great Wall
of China. In Ozal's mind, Turkey did not have to choose between East
and West. It was geographically enshrined in both and should thus
politically embody both worlds. Ozal made Islam publicly respected
again in Turkey, even as he enthusiastically supported U.S. President
Ronald Reagan during the last phase of the Cold War. By being so
pro-American and so adroit in managing the Kemalist establishment,
in the West at least Ozal -- more than his predecessors -- was able
to get away with being so Islamic.
Ozal used the cultural language of Islam to open the door to an
acceptance of the Kurds. Turkey's alienation from Europe following the
1980 military coup d'etat enabled Ozal to develop economic linkages
to Turkey's east. He also gradually empowered the devout Muslims
of inner Anatolia. Ozal, two decades before Erdogan, saw Turkey as
a champion of moderate Islam throughout the Muslim world, defying
Ataturk's warning that such a Pan-Islamic policy would sap Turkey's
strength and expose the Turks to voracious foreign powers. The term
neo-Ottomanism was, in fact, first used in Ozal's last years in power.
Ozal died suddenly in 1993, ushering in a desultory decade of Turkish
politics marked by increasing corruption and ineffectuality on the
part of Turkey's sleepy secular elite. The stage was set for Erdogan's
Islamic followers to win an outright parliamentary majority in 2002.
Whereas Ozal came from the center-right Motherland Party, Erdogan
came from the more openly Islamist-trending Justice and Development
Party, though Erdogan himself and some of his advisers had moderated
their views over the years. Of course, there were many permutations
in Islamic political thought and politics in Turkey between Ozal and
Erdogan, but one thing stands clear: Both Ozal and Erdogan were like
two bookends of the period. In any case, unlike any leader today in
Europe or the United States, Erdogan actually had a vision similar to
Ozal's, a vision that constituted a further distancing from Kemalism.
Rather than Ataturk's emphasis on the military, Erdogan, like Ozal,
has stressed the soft power of cultural and economic connections
to recreate in a benign and subtle fashion a version of the Ottoman
Empire from North Africa to the Iranian plateau and Central Asia.
Remember that in the interpretation of one of the West's greatest
scholars of Islam, the late Marshall G.S. Hodgson of the University
of Chicago, the Islamic faith was originally a merchants' religion,
which united followers from oasis to oasis, allowing for ethical
dealing. In Islamic history, authentic religious connections across
the Middle East and the Indian Ocean world could -- and did -- lead
to wholesome business connections and political patronage. Thus is
medievalism altogether relevant to the post-modern world.
Erdogan now realizes that projecting Turkey's moderate Muslim power
throughout the Middle East is fraught with frustrating complexities.
Indeed, it is unclear that Turkey even has the political and military
capacity to actualize such a vision. To wit, Turkey may be trying
its best to increase trade with its eastern neighbors, but it still
does not come close to Turkey's large trade volumes with Europe, now
mired in recession. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, Turkey demands
influence based on geographic and linguistic affinity. Yet Putin's
Russia continues to exert significant influence in the Central Asian
states and, through its invasion and subsequent political maneuverings
in Georgia, has put Azerbaijan in an extremely uncomfortable position.
In Mesopotamia, Turkey's influence is simply unequal to that of far
more proximate Iran. In Syria, Erdogan and his foreign minister,
Ahmet Davutoglu, thought -- incorrectly, it turns out -- that they
could effectively mold a moderate Islamist Sunni opposition to replace
President Bashar al Assad's Alawite regime. And while Erdogan has
gained points throughout the Islamic world for his rousing opposition
to Israel, he has learned that this comes at a price: the warming of
relations between Israel and both Greece and the Greek part of Cyprus,
which now permits Turkey's adversaries in the Eastern Mediterranean
to cooperate in the hydrocarbon field.
The root of the problem is partly geographic. Turkey constitutes a
bastion of mountains and plateau, inhabiting the half-island of the
Anatolian land bridge between the Balkans and the Middle East. It is
plainly not integral to a place like Iraq, for example, in the way that
Iran is; and its Turkic language no longer enjoys the benefit of the
Arabic script, which might give it more cultural leverage elsewhere
in the Levant. But most important, Turkey is itself bedeviled by its
own Kurdish population, complicating its attempts to exert leverage
in neighboring Middle Eastern states.
Turkey's southeast is demographically dominated by ethnic Kurds,
who adjoin vast Kurdish regions in Syria, Iraq and Iran. The ongoing
breakup of Syria potentially liberates Kurds there to join with radical
Kurds in Anatolia in order to undermine Turkey. The de facto breakup of
Iraq has forced Turkey to follow a policy of constructive containment
with Iraq's Kurdish north, but that has undermined Turkey's leverage
in the rest of Iraq -- thus, in turn, undermining Turkey's attempts
to influence Iran. Turkey wants to influence the Middle East, but
the problem is that it remains too much a part of the Middle East to
extricate itself from the region's complexities.
Erdogan knows that he must partially solve the Kurdish problem at home
in order to gain further leverage in the region. He has even mentioned
aloud the Arabic word, vilayet, associated with the Ottoman Empire.
This word denotes a semi-autonomous province -- a concept that
might hold the key for an accommodation with local Kurds but could
well reignite his own nationalist rivals within Turkey. Thus, his
is a big symbolic step that seeks to fundamentally neutralize the
very foundation of Kemalism (with its emphasis on a solidly Turkic
Anatolia). But given how he has already emasculated the Turkish
military -- something few thought possible a decade ago -- one
should be careful about underestimating Erdogan. His sheer ambition
is something to behold. While Western elites ineffectually sneer at
Putin, Erdogan enthusiastically takes notes when the two of them meet.
"Turkey's Geographical Ambition is republished with permission of
Stratfor."
http://alaska-native-news.com/turkeys-geographical-ambition-12760
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
Alaska Native News
Aug 15 2014
Geopolitical Weekly Aug 14, 2014.
At a time when Europe and other parts of the world are governed
by forgettable mediocrities, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime
minister for a decade now, seethes with ambition. Perhaps the only
other leader of a major world nation who emanates such a dynamic force
field around him is Russia's Vladimir Putin, with whom the West is
also supremely uncomfortable.
Erdogan and Putin are ambitious because they are men who unrepentantly
grasp geopolitics. Putin knows that any responsible Russian leader
ensures that Russia has buffer zones of some sort in places like
Eastern Europe and the Caucasus; Erdogan knows that Turkey must become
a substantial power in the Near East in order to give him leverage in
Europe. Erdogan's problem is that Turkey's geography between East and
West contains as many vulnerabilities as it does benefits. This makes
Erdogan at times overreach. But there is a historical and geographical
logic to his excesses.
The story begins after World War I.
Because Ottoman Turkey was on the losing side of that war (along
with Wilhelmine Germany and Hapsburg Austria), the victorious allies
in the Treaty of Sevres of 1920 carved up Turkey and its environs,
giving territory and zones of influence to Greece, Armenia, Italy,
Britain and France. Turkey's reaction to this humiliation was Kemalism,
the philosophy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (the surname "Ataturk" means
"Father of the Turks"), the only undefeated Ottoman general, who
would lead a military revolt against the new occupying powers and thus
create a sovereign Turkish state throughout the Anatolian heartland.
Kemalism willingly ceded away the non-Anatolian parts of the Ottoman
Empire but compensated by demanding a uniethnic Turkish state
within Anatolia itself. Gone were the "Kurds," for example. They
would henceforth be known as "Mountain Turks." Gone, in fact, was
the entire multicultural edifice of the Ottoman Empire.
Kemalism not only rejected minorities, it rejected the Arabic script
of the Turkish language. Ataturk risked higher illiteracy rates to
give the language a Latin script. He abolished the Muslim religious
courts and discouraged women from wearing the veil and men from
wearing fezzes. Ataturk further recast Turks as Europeans (without
giving much thought to whether the Europeans would accept them as
such), all in an attempt to reorient Turkey away from the now defunct
Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and toward Europe.
Kemalism was a call to arms: the martial Turkish reaction to the
Treaty of Sevres, to the same degree that Putin's neo-czarism was the
authoritarian reaction to Boris Yeltsin's anarchy of 1990s Russia. For
decades the reverence for Ataturk in Turkey went beyond a personality
cult: He was more like a stern, benevolent and protective demigod,
whose portrait looked down upon every public interior.
The problem was that Ataturk's vision of orienting Turkey so firmly
to the West clashed with Turkey's geographic situation, one that
straddled both West and East. An adjustment was in order. Turgut Ozal,
a religious Turk with Sufi tendencies who was elected prime minister
in 1983, provided it.
Ozal's political skill enabled him to gradually wrest control of
domestic policy and -- to an impressive degree -- foreign policy
away from the staunchly Kemalist Turkish military. Whereas Ataturk
and the generations of Turkish officers who followed him thought in
terms of a Turkey that was an appendage of Europe, Ozal spoke of a
Turkey whose influence stretched from the Aegean to the Great Wall
of China. In Ozal's mind, Turkey did not have to choose between East
and West. It was geographically enshrined in both and should thus
politically embody both worlds. Ozal made Islam publicly respected
again in Turkey, even as he enthusiastically supported U.S. President
Ronald Reagan during the last phase of the Cold War. By being so
pro-American and so adroit in managing the Kemalist establishment,
in the West at least Ozal -- more than his predecessors -- was able
to get away with being so Islamic.
Ozal used the cultural language of Islam to open the door to an
acceptance of the Kurds. Turkey's alienation from Europe following the
1980 military coup d'etat enabled Ozal to develop economic linkages
to Turkey's east. He also gradually empowered the devout Muslims
of inner Anatolia. Ozal, two decades before Erdogan, saw Turkey as
a champion of moderate Islam throughout the Muslim world, defying
Ataturk's warning that such a Pan-Islamic policy would sap Turkey's
strength and expose the Turks to voracious foreign powers. The term
neo-Ottomanism was, in fact, first used in Ozal's last years in power.
Ozal died suddenly in 1993, ushering in a desultory decade of Turkish
politics marked by increasing corruption and ineffectuality on the
part of Turkey's sleepy secular elite. The stage was set for Erdogan's
Islamic followers to win an outright parliamentary majority in 2002.
Whereas Ozal came from the center-right Motherland Party, Erdogan
came from the more openly Islamist-trending Justice and Development
Party, though Erdogan himself and some of his advisers had moderated
their views over the years. Of course, there were many permutations
in Islamic political thought and politics in Turkey between Ozal and
Erdogan, but one thing stands clear: Both Ozal and Erdogan were like
two bookends of the period. In any case, unlike any leader today in
Europe or the United States, Erdogan actually had a vision similar to
Ozal's, a vision that constituted a further distancing from Kemalism.
Rather than Ataturk's emphasis on the military, Erdogan, like Ozal,
has stressed the soft power of cultural and economic connections
to recreate in a benign and subtle fashion a version of the Ottoman
Empire from North Africa to the Iranian plateau and Central Asia.
Remember that in the interpretation of one of the West's greatest
scholars of Islam, the late Marshall G.S. Hodgson of the University
of Chicago, the Islamic faith was originally a merchants' religion,
which united followers from oasis to oasis, allowing for ethical
dealing. In Islamic history, authentic religious connections across
the Middle East and the Indian Ocean world could -- and did -- lead
to wholesome business connections and political patronage. Thus is
medievalism altogether relevant to the post-modern world.
Erdogan now realizes that projecting Turkey's moderate Muslim power
throughout the Middle East is fraught with frustrating complexities.
Indeed, it is unclear that Turkey even has the political and military
capacity to actualize such a vision. To wit, Turkey may be trying
its best to increase trade with its eastern neighbors, but it still
does not come close to Turkey's large trade volumes with Europe, now
mired in recession. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, Turkey demands
influence based on geographic and linguistic affinity. Yet Putin's
Russia continues to exert significant influence in the Central Asian
states and, through its invasion and subsequent political maneuverings
in Georgia, has put Azerbaijan in an extremely uncomfortable position.
In Mesopotamia, Turkey's influence is simply unequal to that of far
more proximate Iran. In Syria, Erdogan and his foreign minister,
Ahmet Davutoglu, thought -- incorrectly, it turns out -- that they
could effectively mold a moderate Islamist Sunni opposition to replace
President Bashar al Assad's Alawite regime. And while Erdogan has
gained points throughout the Islamic world for his rousing opposition
to Israel, he has learned that this comes at a price: the warming of
relations between Israel and both Greece and the Greek part of Cyprus,
which now permits Turkey's adversaries in the Eastern Mediterranean
to cooperate in the hydrocarbon field.
The root of the problem is partly geographic. Turkey constitutes a
bastion of mountains and plateau, inhabiting the half-island of the
Anatolian land bridge between the Balkans and the Middle East. It is
plainly not integral to a place like Iraq, for example, in the way that
Iran is; and its Turkic language no longer enjoys the benefit of the
Arabic script, which might give it more cultural leverage elsewhere
in the Levant. But most important, Turkey is itself bedeviled by its
own Kurdish population, complicating its attempts to exert leverage
in neighboring Middle Eastern states.
Turkey's southeast is demographically dominated by ethnic Kurds,
who adjoin vast Kurdish regions in Syria, Iraq and Iran. The ongoing
breakup of Syria potentially liberates Kurds there to join with radical
Kurds in Anatolia in order to undermine Turkey. The de facto breakup of
Iraq has forced Turkey to follow a policy of constructive containment
with Iraq's Kurdish north, but that has undermined Turkey's leverage
in the rest of Iraq -- thus, in turn, undermining Turkey's attempts
to influence Iran. Turkey wants to influence the Middle East, but
the problem is that it remains too much a part of the Middle East to
extricate itself from the region's complexities.
Erdogan knows that he must partially solve the Kurdish problem at home
in order to gain further leverage in the region. He has even mentioned
aloud the Arabic word, vilayet, associated with the Ottoman Empire.
This word denotes a semi-autonomous province -- a concept that
might hold the key for an accommodation with local Kurds but could
well reignite his own nationalist rivals within Turkey. Thus, his
is a big symbolic step that seeks to fundamentally neutralize the
very foundation of Kemalism (with its emphasis on a solidly Turkic
Anatolia). But given how he has already emasculated the Turkish
military -- something few thought possible a decade ago -- one
should be careful about underestimating Erdogan. His sheer ambition
is something to behold. While Western elites ineffectually sneer at
Putin, Erdogan enthusiastically takes notes when the two of them meet.
"Turkey's Geographical Ambition is republished with permission of
Stratfor."
http://alaska-native-news.com/turkeys-geographical-ambition-12760
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress