Prospects for a Torn Turkey: Turkey's Future, and Its Implications for Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the U.S. Interest

November 17 , 2008

The Central Asia Caucasus Institute (CACI) at SAIS hosted a forum on Monday, November 17, 2008, in the BOB building.

The forum featured Mr. Halil Karaveli, Senior Fellow of the Turkey Initiative at CACI and Silk Road Studies Program, and Dr. Svante E. Cornell, Research Director at CACI and the Silk Road Studies Program. Professor S. Frederick Starr, Chairman of the Institute, introduced the forum’s speakers to the audience.

“During 2007 and 2008,” Mr. Karaveli explained, Turkey was shaken by a “deep regime crisis” pitting the ruling Justice and Development (AKP) party, “the Islamic conservative party,” against the “secular opposition – other parts of the state establishment, mainly the military.” The AKP not only survived this crisis, but has today come close to controlling the Turkish state: it is entrenched throughout the Turkish bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the most powerful business interests in the country have close ties with the party. Furthermore, through their control of the media and other production mechanisms, Islamic conservatives have come to define the ideological agenda.

In this latter regard liberal intellectuals in Turkey have played a critically important role by delegitimizing the traditional Republican notions of secularism and the unitary state. Such notions, in liberal intellectual discourse, belong to the past. Today, the center-right, which had been the dominant force in Turkey since the 1960s, has been effectively wiped out. The center-right, while secular oriented, found political success by accommodating religion and legitimizing its use in politics; this legitimization provided an opening for Islamic conservatives to seize power, which they did through the AKP.

Though Karaveli does not expect that the Islamic conservatives of the AKP intend to turn Turkey “into a Sharia state, making Turkey into a Saudi Arabia…or an Iran,” his concern is that they “aspire to, as they say, re-define secularism.” This new definition of secularism “could not mean that rationalism and freedom of thought replaces a religious worldview that orders society.” Such negative arguments (another example is the insistence that “religion should not be restricted to the shrine and the conscience” in the words of one Turkish columnist) “at least raises a question mark” about the prospects for secularism in Turkey.

Though a principle of a separation between church and state remains one of the major political legacies of the Enlightenment, some remain skeptical of the applicability of this legacy to other civilizations; Samuel Huntington, for instance, has written that Turkey should not aspire to become secular – it should remain true to its own culture and religion.

While the decline of secularism in Turkey need not necessarily lead towards anti-Western attitudes, Karaveli proposes that diplomatic relations may become increasingly fragile given the resulting cultural estrangement. Former AKP deputy chair Dengir Firat, for instance, recently observed that “our relationship with the United States is a relationship based on cold realpolitik, while our relationship with our European friends is more idealistic.” Such statements suggest a growing cultural divide with clear implications in the diplomatic sphere.

A second risk involves a tendency in the West to dismiss the Turkish seculars as antiquated authoritarians, even though secularism is well entrenched in Turkish civil society. Turkish seculars resent the support given by both Europe and the United States to the Islamic conservatives in power, a resentment that is beginning to constellate an alliance between anti-Westernists and anti-Islamists in Turkey, especially in the military.

Beginning with Karavelli’s conclusions, Dr. Cornell elaborated upon their implications for Turkish foreign policy. Historically, the Turkey has always been oriented towards the West – even the Ottoman Empire was famously referred to by Tsar Nicholas I as “the sick man of Europe,” not Asia. The Ottoman Empire never saw itself as culturally Western so much as a counterpart to the West – “as the representative and spokesperson for the world of Islam”; the Turkish Republic, on the contrary, sought integration with the West, and was modeled directly on Enlightenment principles of secular governance. This founding relation between Turkey’s secular governance and Western orientation may dramatic consequences, given recent trends.

Turkey’s powerful economy, ideal population balance, large military force and strategic location allow it to function as “a bulwark of stability” between the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus. Surrounded by such complex foreign policy considerations, however, Turkey tends to act reactively rather than proactively, and its attempts to develop an effective long-terms strategy are thereby constrained. Further, there is a certain poverty of realism in Turkey’s foreign policy outlook, a disproportionate orientation towards Europe and away from the Middle East, and “a remarkable tendency to conjure and to believe in conspiracy theories.” Finally, two domestic considerations – the Kurdish issue, and the role of religion in Turkish society – will continue to divert the country’s attention from foreign matters.

Those anti-American attitudes of both Islamists and secularists remarked upon in Karavelli’s discussion have only been exasperated, first by recent international developments – the U.S. war in Iraq, President Bush’s foreign policy more generally, and the U.S.’s unwillingness to deal with the PKK issue – and second, by an unrealistically conspiratorial assessment of the U.S.’s role in international events. That said, Turkey’s relationship with the United States may weaken, but is unlikely to qualitatively change. Anti-Westernism was in fact the primary obstacle to Islamic conservative’s ascension to power, and the AKP thus has adopted a more conciliatory posture.

Still, Dr. Cornell shares Mr. Karavelli’s concern that the Islamization of Turkey may lead to a growing cultural estrangement from the West. One consequence may involve the rejection of Turkey’s membership candidacy in the European Union, which could in turn lead to increasing resentment of the West. Another involves Turkey’s relationship with Israel: though Turkey continues to mediate between Israel and the Muslim world, its priorities are shifting towards its relationship with the latter, particularly in the cases of Iran and Syria. Turkey’s relationship with such countries exemplifies its willingness to strike a diplomatic balance between the United States and countries considered to be rogue states by the United States government.

In the late 1990s, in contrast, the foreign policy objectives of Turkey and the United States were quite synchronized. Today, we see such alliances as Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s Stability and Cooperation Platform, initiated independently of the United States – a development that Cornell describes as “inconceivable” as recently as eight years ago. While strategic interests may coincide, Turkey can no longer be relied upon as a Western actor on the international stage.