Our man in Turkey
Civitas, 27 June 2011
Turkey’s bloodless civil war is between pious Muslims who want the public space to be dominated by their interpretation of religion, and less dogmatic Muslims who believe in the strict separation of state and mosque (Burak Bekdil, Hurriyet June 7 2011)
Europe can be seen as bracketed by Turkey to the south-east and Great Britain to the north-west. These two large ex-imperial countries – with very different (though inter-locked) histories, constitutional traditions and recently-elected governments – would seem to have some things in common. As the Ottoman Empire became the nation-state of Turkey, and the British Empire also became a nation-state, both countries had perforce to re-structure their relationships with the other nation-states of the world, and in particular with their immediate geographical neighbour, ‘Europe’.
While neither country is the dominant power it once was, both countries are large enough to feel they have some degree of choice in the ‘matter of Europe’: Turkey is the 14th. largest economy in the world, the UK being about the 5th. Both maintain competent military forces: Turkey, having been neutral for most of WW2, was a founder-member of anti-Russia NATO and has 510,700 men in its conscript-based Armed Forces. Both countries have extensive varied trade and financial networks: Turkey is in the middle of a credit-based boom: retail loan growth (credit cards) is running at a predicted (unsustainable!) annual rate of 40%, and April’s monthly current account deficit, at $7.7 billion, is the second-biggest monthly gap since 1984. Britain, of course, is at the other end of this kind of financial escapade.
Both countries are, in their own ways, functioning democracies. Here, however, differences are in evidence: the turn-out in Turkey’s recent election for a unicameral Parliament was nearly 90%. ‘Minor’ parties have shrunk, in part because of an imposed ‘10%’ electoral support requirement, designed in part to undermine a Kurdish political movement. The ruling AKP and the CHP (the main opposition) together won 76% of the vote. The AKP, with 50% of the votes, won 327 of the 550 seats, this being Prime Minister Erdogan’s third successive win. Whatever the AKP’s original geographical base in the more traditionally religious parts of Turkey, it is now a genuinely national party, well attuned to both the religious and material interests and concerns of the average young Muslim Turk. A kind of public-sector mortgage facility has enabled thousands of Turkish families to become owner-occupiers of a unit in the hundreds of new blocks of flats. AKP election literature made much of the hundreds of new hospitals and local medical centres: and of the reduction, through state regulation, in the prices of medicines as well as of the provision of school books (free for millions) and of the very real extension of educational opportunity and of jobs in the semi-regulated industrial and commercial life of Turkey. While Turkish per capita income is about half that of Western Europe, AKP election literature, identifying and proclaiming the progress made over the last decade, very clearly looks forward to parity by 2023, the centennial year of the founding of the Turkish Republic.
Whether actually ‘in Europe’ (an option now favoured by a minority of the electorate) or ‘merely’ in NATO, or as the major power in its Eastern and Muslim hinterland, Turkey is a major geo-political player indeed in the dangerous world of Southern Europe and the Middle East. The AKP’s foreign policy is summed up in the slogan ‘Zero Problems’ by which PM Erdogan means that Turkey will pick no fights nor respond with aggressive intent to any action of its neighbours and near-neighbours – Greece, Bulgaria, the Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Russia – etc: This is an extraordinarily tall order! Indeed, at the time of writing the Turkish government is watching with great care the movement of Syrian troops and Syrian refugees in the border area of Hatay – a province which became part of Turkey only in 1938: and it has quite clearly put pressure on would-be Gaza blockade-breakers to remove the Turkish element from whatever flotilla sails away later in the year. Turkey has also yet to settle the ‘Kurdish Problem’, being home to 12 million Kurds and (other minorities). Persistently, though, whether in its conversations or negotiations with Israel or Syria, Prime Minister Erdogan’s Government seeks to adhere to the ‘Zero Problems’ approach. This foreign policy is, of course, backed up by the very considerable power and strategic importance of Turkey’s armed forces, a power and strategic importance underlined by the major up-grade of NATO’s base at Izmir. It was this power, too, which led Israel’s Prime Minister to write a very prompt letter of congratulations to Erdogan expressing Israel’s concern to maintain good relations with Turkey, relations somewhat frayed by the affair of the Gaza Flotilla and the killing by Israeli troops of 8 Turkish activists on board the Mavi Marmara. While the stability and competence of the Armed Forces risks being fractured by the on-going prosecution of very senior officers for their alleged role in ‘conspiracies, Turkey’s foreign policy is further under-girded by a wide network of international cultural and commercial connections and promotional activities. At the time of writing, Turkey is playing host to a US-based association of Balkan émigrés to the USA; and to a ‘Language Olympiad’ in which over one thousand young people from over 130 countries demonstrate their competence in the Turkish language and culture, a competence derived in part from the schools opened in countries like Nigeria by the Gullen organization. Unlike Britain, Turkey seems proud of its broader or even imperial role. An Exhibition currently at the Istanbul Museum of Archaeology traces the nature and fates of several empires, concluding with ‘the Ottoman Dominion/Empire: 1299-1923’ – note the dates! – and, over-riding the several manifestations of this ‘empire’, concludes with the statement that ‘the cultural and artistic legacy of the Ottoman Empire is kept alive in the Republic period’, i.e. from 1923 onwards. An AKP election leaflet insists that Turkey in 2011 is liked and admired throughout the world. Opinion polls now indicate that most Turks are indifferent to the blandishments (or to the contumely) of ‘Europe’. Turkey is, according to Mr Erdogan the ‘sick man’ neither of Europe nor of anywhere else in the world.
Even a government as well supported in the Grand National Assembly as is the AKP will find it difficult to create a world of ‘Zero Problems’. The ur-text of Turkish politics is a debate or dispute about the nature of Turkey’s inheritance from the founding father, Ataturk. Statues and pictures of Ataturk are ubiquitous – a kind of explicit and public obeisance to his life, example and policies. Turkish politics are in some sense a dispute about the nature of this inheritance. While early on his leadership, Ataturk clearly found it convenient to address the sensitivities of the predominantly Muslim and conservative population of the new Republic, by the time of his death in 1938 he had established, in the new state of Turkey, a secular Republic from which Sultan, Caliph, madrassas, the adhaan and the fez had been driven out and in which the potentially anti-secular forces of conservative Islam had been neutralized by a mixture of terror, repression and electoral manipulation. Although radical – women, for example, were progressively enfranchised in 1930, 1933 and 1934 – Ataturk’s Republic, while secular – was not (as it is now) democratic. To safeguard what was obviously a precarious polity, Ataturk gave what was in effect supervisory control to the Army and to the judiciary – both of these institutions stacked with Kemalist (i.e. Ataturk’s) supporters: and three times since WW2 the Army stepped in to ‘remedy’ what it saw as the excesses of democracy. The AKP’s success has rather reversed this way of defending secularism: and in presenting ‘democracy’ as the basis and guarantor of the Republic has perhaps put secularism at risk. It has certainly set about the Army: not a day goes by when yet another senior military officer is arraigned and arrested on charges of conspiracy, while journalists too join the soldiers in the long wait for a trial: at the moment the Turkish Air Force awaits a new commander, several of the best candidates being accused or suspected of involvement in one of two long-running ‘conspiracies’. Pro-Islamic policies such as re-opening the argument about female head-covering or the sale and consumption of alcohol are further evidence of the newly-released power of Turkey’s (and Ataturk’s) ‘democracy’ to temper Ataturk’s secularism. In the political controversies engendered by these struggles, a large clutch of journalists have found themselves in prison – they are/some of them are ‘terrorists’ said President Gul. The President later qualified this claim: but there are 10 000 court cases currently pending against journalists, making journalism in some parts of Turkey ‘impossible’, said a senior journalist (Hurriyet June 8 2011).
Prime Minister Erdogan plans to complete this re-structuring of the Republic by trying to change the constitution (itself derived from an earlier military coup) to a presidential system: and he is young, able and ambitious enough to be able to see himself as President in 2023, the centennial year of the Republic.
To liberals (including the liberal authors of a much-quoted anti-Erdogan piece in The Economist) this consolidation of ‘democracy’ may well be a vote too far: it may seem odd for liberals to be critical of a politician who has quarantined an over-zealous military, but he has also quarantined a busy and assertive Press. In seeking further limitations on the sale and availability of alcohol, for example, or in liberating the inherently restrictive prescriptions of religion, the ruling AKP may well be casting edging towards a totalitarian form of ‘democracy’, not unlike that practiced by Ataturk, but with the added legitimacy of being grounded in the will of the people. In this ‘tyranny of the majority’ – a formulation seemingly miles away from the evident progress and amiable prosperity of the country – there might be little room for or tolerance of those minority rights which are now the staple diet of Western liberalism. Turkey’s economy is booming: but there are, in levels of indebtedness and in a growing current account deficit, signs of trouble ahead which may well restrict the publicly-subsidised consumer activity which has for some years provided the relative prosperity for which ‘democracy’ so handsomely rewarded the AKP in the June election. What would then be left of Turkish ‘democracy’ other than its inherent Islamic conservatism, coupled with an edgy sense of troubles on the march in the near East and the Arab Spring – already a serious concern on Turkey’s border with Syria – and continuing issues with a determined Kurdish minority, currently threatening a boycott of the Assembly? How helpful and co-operative would the Armed Forces be, given the level of pruning of its senior ranks – indeed, how competent would it be?
Ataturk, in a most amazing way, turned a beaten and dissolving Empire, the ‘sick man of Europe’, into a viable and functioning secular (or secularizing) nation-state. He did this by manipulating ‘democracy’, creating what was in effect a coercive autocracy. The institutions which buttressed this autocracy have now, in the name of democracy, been demolished. What we now have is yet another experiment in nation-building, one in which a secular tradition (with a large if relatively small number of adherents) faces a democratic practice of uncertain provenance and disturbing future. Ubiquitously, over and above the hills and cities of this extraordinary country, fly huge and very visible banners, borne on steel flag-posts clearly built to last. Perhaps the evident cheerful pride Turks take in their accomplishments will see them through – probably more surely than the sad and shamefaced ‘patriotism’ with which the British face their equally dangerous world.
References:
Newspapers: HURRIYET DAILY NEWS, and ZAMAN
AKP Party Literature
ATATURK, by Andrew Mango, John Murray, 2004
THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC MEMORY, edited by Esra Ozyurek, Syracuse University Press, 2004