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COMMENTARY
August 11, 2004
Turkey
That wonderful sense one sometimes gets that everything is going to hell may be supplied by looking at what is happening in Turkey. My own impression of almost two years ago that Turkish refusal to support U.S. war preparations for Iraq would prove a mere glitch in Turkish-U.S. relations has proved wrong. I assumed that after an unambiguous U.S. triumph over Saddam Hussein Turkey would eagerly buy into the new regional order. At the time I underestimated the power of French and German diplomacy to persuade Turkey's newly-elected "mildly Islamist" government that the cost of taking the other side of the Franco-German spat with the Anglo-Americans would be more than Turkey could afford -- assuming Turkey still hoped to get into the European Union. But I was also too optimistic about the direction and intentions of that new Turkish government whose prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was welcomed as the "moderate Islamic" leader who would make his country comfortable with both its revived Islamic cultural identity and its received commitment to democratic institutions and secular law. While Mr. Erdogan is himself no religious fanatic but a calculating politician he finds that he has let a cat out of a bag. There are no minimum demands for the state recognition of the authority of Islam over secular life and what seemed at first to be a "both/and" proposition begins more to resemble an "either/or". From the news reaching me in the space of just a couple of years public demands for the Islamicization of Turkish institutions have become much more shrill and the effects of Saudi funding on Turkey's mosques and imams have become more apparent. Jew-baiting makes good politics in many countries and can be glibly defended with the argument that the speaker is not attacking Jews but "Zionists" or the state of Israel. The giveaway is that substituting "Jews" for "Zionists" makes each sentence clearer and that Israel is criticized in terms that would be applied to no other state. In the Middle East today gratuitous anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli rhetoric has become an informal condition for favourable trade terms with Iran and many of the Arab countries. Turkey's prime minister has been advancing both causes -- his personal popularity and his country's trade terms throughout the region -- by what I would characterize as a campaign of Jew-baiting. While he has not yet abrogated the tripartite military pact which his predecessor made with the U.S. and Israel upon which Turkey depends for military assistance he has poisoned its spirit by increasingly strident rhetoric against Israel and Israelis backed with crude diplomatic snubs. On the other hand Mr. Erdogan has taken to speaking flippantly and even sarcastically about the very existence of the international Jihad as if it were a product of the American neo-conservative and Israeli (read: "Jewish") imagination. For domestic reasons he continues to take the Kurdish PKK terrorists quite seriously but speaks of them as if they did not enjoy sponsorship from Iran and Syria. Some of this posturing may be genuinely na?ve but he is playing to domestic anti-American and Islamist constituencies that will not be easily sated now they have tasted his political blood. He is whether or not he yet grasps it riding a tiger. The Turkish media go much further and interpret the new state policy of Israel-bashing as part of a larger "Neo-Ottomanism" designed to increase Turkey's prestige within the Islamic world at large. Predictably much of this backfires for with the long memories that persist throughout the region resentment for Turkic-Ottoman chauvinism is also recovering. The imaginative power of the long-defunct Ottoman Empire is what Osama bin Laden and other Jihadists invoke but in a different way. The last days of the Ottomans before the First World War were also the last days when a Caliph in Istanbul could make a symbolic claim to precedence among the world 's Muslims. A form of spiritual nostalgia is associated with this lost glory; but nearly a century after Ataturk's revolution made the heart of the Ottoman empire into the secular state of Turkey what is practically remembered is the way Turkish-speaking rulers treated their Arabic-speaking subjects. But we are not going backward in time rather forward. In Turkey we may well be seeing the coalescence of both the European and Middle Eastern political fashions as a regime which is undermining the Turkish secular constitution and with it modern Turkey's prosperity and stability falls back on demagoguery. Prime Minister Erdogan is forging a new coalition between those who look East and those who look West in which anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are the only common features. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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