The brutal crackdown in Syria is still being reported from a Western perspective: as a “Middle East” affair. Like the related “Near East” and “Far East”, the name makes sense only if one assumes that a region is defined by its location relative to Europe and the US. However, Europeans may need to adjust to seeing things from the viewpoint of a rising power: Turkey.
Europe and the US, overstretched by their current military commitments, looked to their Nato ally to put pressure on Bashar al-Assad when Turkey’s Foreign Minister met the Syrian President on Tuesday. President Assad rebuffed Turkey’s warnings. But it is telling that it was that meeting that was taken to be the real gauge of Syria’s hard line, not its earlier dismissal of Arab leaders’ appeals.
Turkey has real clout over Syria, with whom it has visa-free travel and free trade agreements. In recent years, the Turkish-Syrian border has become a hub of regional trade, reinvigorating former Ottoman routes between Turkish cities and Aleppo. In 1990, only 20,000 Turkish passport holders visited Syria; in 1998, Turkey and Syria were on the brink of war; in 2010, Syria had almost a million Turkish visitors.
Turkish-Syrian relations reflect an increasingly outward-looking, non-eurocentric Turkey. Its foreign policy’s main architect is Ahmet Davutoglu, Foreign Minister since 2009 and an influential adviser of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan since 2002. The “Davutoglu doctrine” is based on responding to the emerging global power structure, particularly the economic powers of Latin America and Asia.
The policy assumes –as Kerem Öktem outlines in his recent book, Angry Nation: Turkey Since 1989 (Zed Books) – that “neither the European Union nor Nato and the US could maintain the hegemony that they had enjoyed for much of the last five decades”. Therefore, “if Turkey is to become a country that matters in the world, it first has to embrace its past as an imperial power and to engage with its immediate neighbourhood”.
That understanding has seen the expansion of Turkey’s embassies to ensure a global presence. Close attention is given to the Balkans, Russia and the Middle East. Russia is Turkey’s largest single trade partner (only the combined EU-27 surpasses the trade volume) and last year the visa regime was scrapped, as it has been with almost all of Turkey’s eastern neighbours.
As Mr Öktem notes, this is “a geography in which the European Union and the US have lost their central location”. While the “moderate Islamist” government still has EU membership on its agenda, this no longer tops the list. And voters have rewarded the government.
The Justice and Development Party won a historic third consecutive electoral victory in June. It lost a few parliamentary seats but its share of the vote increased to 50 per cent – up from 47 per cent in 2007 and 35 per cent in 2002. Mr Erdogan looks to be the longest-serving national leader since Attaturk.
Mr Erdogan’s extraordinary success cannot be understood exclusively through the lens of religion. Mr Öktem outlines the complexity of Turkey’s national development since the secular republic’s early days when Attaturk pronounced “How happy is the one who says: ‘I am a Turk’”. Mr Öktem calls his country an “angry nation” to capture the upheavals caused by the self-styled military guardians of the state, who often instigated the repression, violence and assassinations (of liberal, Islamist and Kurdish activists alike) to which they then presented themselves as the solution.
The country has yet to come to terms with its recent past, particularly the 1980s, which saw political repression combined with the growth of a consumerist culture. A Turkish cultural critic, Nurdan Gürbilek, rejects facile contrasts between East and West, Islam and Christianity, in her essay collection, The New Cultural Climate In Turkey (Zed Books).
Her Turkey is a society that bamboozles stereotypes: “A country where books are banned... but where people believe education is the key to every problem... Land of people who for years feared to use the word ‘Kurd’... but also of people whose favourite pop singers are Kurds. Land of people proud that their republic recognised the legal rights of women at its founding but who feel constantly threatened by femininity. A country where homosexuals are treated brutally but homosexual singers are made into icons. Land of strong religious communities where people expect the army to protect them against religion’s threat... of Europhobes who have long felt European and are sick to death of begging at Europe’s gate...”.
Mr Öktem borrows the term “Islamic Calvinists” to describe the entrepreneurial, socially disciplined, globally connected, middle-class supporters of Mr Erdogan’s government. However, he also links the broad constituency to the TV fare of the 1980s and early 1990s: Miami Vice, The Bold And The Beautiful, music shows and late-night soft porn... What he and Ms Gürbilek describe sounds less like Calvinism and more like, well, Italy – and us.
Whichever stand Europe takes on Turkey’s membership, it needs to revisit many of its assumptions about its huge eastern neighbour. Turkey has a current GDP growth of nine per cent and it continues to take definite, if tentative, steps towards becoming a maturing democracy with a key role in the world. If Europe’s own economic growth flatlines, we may have to get used to hearing ourselves referred to as Turkey’s “Middle West”.
ranierfsadni@europe.com