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Erdogan's New Turkey: Goodbye Ataturk, Hello Ataturk

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  • Erdogan's New Turkey: Goodbye Ataturk, Hello Ataturk

    ERDOGAN'S NEW TURKEY: GOODBYE ATATURK, HELLO ATATURK

    Huffington post
    March 11 2015

    Stefan Ihrig . Polonsky Fellow, Van Leer Jerusalem Institute

    Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's incumbent president and past prime
    minister, struggles to escape the shadow of modern Turkey's founder.

    Mustafa Kemal Ataturk looms large over his country's past, present and
    future. It is hard to dismantle the figure, the legacy and the lasting
    authority of Ataturk, very much to Erdogan's dismay, especially as
    Erdogan seeks to radically redefine the country -- from the place
    of religion in society to a reform of the constitution, including a
    shift to a presidential system.

    For a short moment, a few months ago, it seemed as if Erdogan had
    received help from an unlikely source: Adolf Hitler. As my recently
    published book detailed for the first time, Hitler and his national
    socialists were big fans of Ataturk and his "New Turkey" -- so much
    so that they instituted a minor cult around the Turkish leader in
    the Third Reich.

    Hitler's dictum that Ataturk and the Turkish nationalist movement
    had been his shining star in the darkness of the democratic Weimar
    Republic in the 1920s, became the official line of the Third Reich.

    When the book came out, I was anxious about the reactions in Turkey.

    To my surprise, they were not only immediate but also quite positive.

    But then I realized it was primarily newspapers close to the governing
    Justice and Development Party (AKP) -- Erdogan's party -- that seemed
    interested in discussing Nazi fandom of Ataturk as a means to discredit
    Ataturk and his project.

    As more people in Turkey had a chance to actually read the book,
    however, less was said about it. To use whatever the Nazis said and
    did for one's own political ends is always a difficult and dangerous
    matter, no less so for the AKP as it tried to dismantle Ataturk --
    and distance Erdogan from him.

    The Nazis' one-sided love affair with Ataturk and his Turkey focused
    on four aspects:

    The Turkish war of independence against the Greeks and the Entente
    powers, which followed World War I, and during which the Turks achieved
    impressive results. In the end, the Treaty of Sèvres was modified with
    much more favorable terms. The Germans, smothered under the Treaty
    of Versailles, which imposed restrictive measures on development,
    were envious.

    The rapid modernization and re-construction of the country unimpeded
    by a multi-party system and carried out by a strong leader, "according
    to the will of the nation."

    The marginalization of religion in public and political life.

    The campaign to rid Turkey of its minority populations (mainly through
    the Armenian genocide during World War I, which came before Ataturk,
    and then through the Greco-Turkish population exchange at the close
    of the Turkish war of independence).

    All these, however, are fairly unusable in order to discredit Ataturk
    from an AKP point of view -- except for the bit about secularism. (The
    Nazis, actually, did not make much of this aspect of the New Turkey,
    publicly anyway -- they feared the power of the churches and popular
    sentiment.) Theoretically, that would leave the Turkish war of
    independence and modernization under a strong leader, as well as
    the Armenian genocide and the expulsion of the Greeks. The Armenian
    genocide is something that is still apparently too hot to touch for
    most Turkish politicians, even for the otherwise unimpeded Erdogan.

    And the AKP surely would not go as far as to discredit the Turkish
    war of independence, as it was a founding event for Turkey.

    And by now it might become clear that the Nazi adulation of Ataturk
    is a potential boomerang for the AKP if it really wanted to exploit
    this episode of German-Turkish history. The only aspect of the Nazis'
    fandom that may be at all usable from an AKP perspective to discredit
    Ataturk via Hitler is the one dealing with the leader-figure Ataturk
    and his monumental modernization project.

    Today, when we look back at Kemalism in its first decades, we will
    probably, with historical hindsight, want to stress its modernizing
    foundations and its role as a midwife to democracy after World War II.

    The more we know about the history of Turkey and the late Ottoman
    Empire, the more we appreciate the many great things Ataturk did for
    his country, many of them marvelous to the point of miraculous.

    But we could also look at the darker sides of Kemalist rule and
    remember how the opposition was dealt with, how there was no plural
    democracy but a one-party system and how a small elite set the agenda
    of the state, economy and society -- without so much as checks, much
    less balance. And it was precisely this the Nazis had focused on:
    the first decades as a leader-led, one-party state nearly unbounded in
    its zeal and scope for reforms. While the Nazis make for poor guides
    when it comes to politics and morality, in their fandom of Ataturk,
    they identified the birth defect of modern Turkey.

    "Erdogan can run and scream all he wants; he is Ataturk's kid."

    The recently -- and Putinesquely -- elected President Erdogan likes
    to refer to his state as the "new Turkey," just as Ataturk and his
    Nazi admirers did. That by itself may not mean much, but the label
    signifies the same: a Turkey that radically breaks with what was
    before. Erdogan can run and scream all he wants; he is Ataturk's kid.

    His emancipation from Ataturk, however, means doing what the father
    has done, with similar tools and perhaps even scope, "only" with a
    modified goal. It is still modernization, and potentially radical
    at that, but a more Islamic modernization. That by itself does not
    have to be a bad thing -- though we have yet to discover the full
    implications of Erdogan's vision. The problem is, as always with
    mega-projects, how to get there.

    Ataturk's project did not ask the people beforehand, for example,
    if they wanted to lose their language and their Ottoman-era dress.

    Erdogan seems not to want to bother much with asking questions either,
    and the envisaged refurbishment of the constitution, which may happen
    later this year, could open the gates for a radical reconstruction
    and redefinition of Turkey by the AKP.

    Where did Ataturk's mandate come from? It always leads back to the
    Turkish war of independence, and also to the historical context in
    which it was fought. Ataturk's was a victory against the world's
    most powerful countries, which had grown accustomed to treating the
    Ottoman Empire in a quasi-colonial fashion. They had threatened to
    cut down Turkey to a miniature version of itself, both geographically
    and politically. Ataturk won a war that seemed unwinnable, and for
    the rest of his life could draw on this, his national and political
    mandate. What Ataturk's reformist frenzy did, however, was provide
    a precedent for radical and, yes, un-democratic modernization.

    Erdogan's "Turkish war of independence" was the (real and imagined)
    inclusion of those previously excluded from Kemalist mainstream Turkey,
    as well as the enormous economic growth of the last decade. Is this
    a mandate for a radical break with what was before? For a break with
    democracy, the rule of law and an open society?

    Despite Erdogan's increasing conspiracy theory-driven rhetoric about
    Turkey's foreign enemies, today's Turkey is not the Turkey of 1919 or
    1923. We do not know yet what the AKP proposal for a new constitution
    will look like. But one thing is for sure: Nobody should ever be
    given Ataturk's mandate again -- if only because its potential scope
    was utterly undemocratic.

    Such a mandate requires an almost super-human self-constraint. And
    in any case, Erdogan is no Islamic Ataturk anyway.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stefan-ihrig/erdogan-new-turkey-ataturk_b_6831206.html

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