As the chill of the post-coup reprisals spreads across Turkey, reaching the offices and homes of dozens of journalists, it’s safe to say the country’s application to join the EU is as good as frozen for a generation.
President Tayyip Erdogan doesn’t have to bring back the death penalty to punish the failed coup leaders – something which, he’s already been warned, will kill off Turkey’s candidacy. For good reasons and bad, after this purge, which looks more and more like a witch-hunt, no European leader is going to be able to persuade a doubtful electorate that Turkey belongs to Europe.
And remember, there are several member states where it’s not just the electorates that are doubtful. Germany’s Angela Merkel is, at best, ambivalent. In France, it’s not just the National Front’s Marine Le Pen for whom opposition to Turkey’s membership is a badge of pride; there is also Nicolas Sarkozy, once more a candidate for the centre-right’s presidential nomination. In central and eastern Europe, beginning with Austria and Hungary, the opposition to Turkey’s membership is visceral.
Meanwhile, with Brexit, Turkey loses one of its stronger champions of membership. The UK, always favouring a union that was looser and based on free trade, rather than one based on deeper political ties, used to see the incorporation of Turkey as guaranteeing the looser trading model.
It didn’t have to be this way. It’s worth reminding the sages who like to remark that the founders of the original European community didn’t have Turkey in mind that, in fact, they did. In 1953, Alcide de Gasperi explicitly ruled in North Africa and what he called the near East (with the context showing that included Turkey as well as the eastern Mediterranean).
Granted, it helped that in 1953 all of North Africa except Libya was still under European colonial rule, with important European communities living on the coast. But there was more to it than that. The Europe we have in mind, De Gasperi wrote, excludes no one.
Since then, the European debate on Turkey has gone badly wrong, with too much attention paid to red herrings on both sides. Unfortunately, there’s little sign that Erdogan’s revenge on his adversaries will help us revise our views and expand our understanding of what’s happening on our eastern border.
But we should. In or out of Europe, Turkey is an important regional neighbour. For many member states, it’s a Nato ally, which will restrain how they deal with it. In any case, the disaster in Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world means Europe will have to continue to cooperate with Turkey, whatever it thinks about its political developments.
One popular myth about this attempted coup is that it pitted secular democrats against Islamist authoritarians. Well, no.
It’s true that the coupists were made up of an army faction that had to move quickly before a further purge of its ranks took place in August.
There’s also no doubt that the purge would have strengthened Erdogan’s personal power base, as part of a strategy to give himself the formal powers of an executive president.
(Currently, Turkey’s president is formally only a figurehead, with effective political power residing with the prime minister; but Erdogan, having appointed a pliant prime minister, is already exercising many de facto executive powers.)
The disaster in Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world means Europe will have to continue to cooperate with Turkey, whatever it thinks about its political developments
However, that doesn’t mean the coupists were democrats. Think about it: it’s a remarkable democracy where it’s the army that decides what is permissible democracy and what isn’t.
In liberal democracies, the army falls strictly under the supervision of politicians. Here it’s the politicians who are supervised by the army. And, time and again in the last several decades, the army has taken power and purged politicians it didn’t like.
To its credit, it always restored electoral democracy. But let’s not fool ourselves. Elections and civil governments returned but power was never dispersed. The army remained the ‘deep state’, the state within the state.
Just because they wanted a strictly secular state doesn’t mean they were liberals. It’s a strange liberal state that has large posters of the founding father – Ataturk in this case – hanging in important buildings.
Much has rightly been made of Erdogan’s evident paranoia in the wake of the coup. But the Turkish deep state was no less paranoid about its imagined, and real, internal and international enemies. Security-driven regimes, who repress free dissent, often become nests of conspiracy theorists. How could they not?
Radical political critique is impossible while the regimes are incapable of openly facing up to their mistakes, lest they give grist to their opponents’ mill. The political landscape becomes populated with shadowy saboteurs.
Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow, a flawed novel in some ways, is excellent in giving a sense of what such a landscape is like, whether in the centre of things or on Turkey’s periphery. In his hands, the secularists and the Islamists are mirror images of each other despite their ideological differences.
None of this means that the Turkish electorate didn’t have good lucid reasons for electing Erdogan in successive elections, beginning from 2002. There’s a reason why his party is called the Justice and Development Party. Equitable development of the Turkish provinces was neglected by the secularist parties that were just as corrupt as he is today. By 2002, they had run the country’s economy into the ground, leaving it at the door of the IMF.
Within a few years, Erdogan (who had served as a good mayor of Istanbul) had led a government that brought the economy back to its feet, with a growth rate averaging over five per cent for several years.
Ten years ago I spoke to shopkeepers in Istanbul who, almost surprising themselves in saying so, told me they intended to vote for him in the then coming election.
For the first time, their shops had running water; an area of the Bosphorus, whose stench was unbearable even at a long distance, had been cleaned up and transformed into a tourist attraction.
All that lies some years away. Since then, Erdogan has cast aside his political caution. He has systemically been accumulating political power and become more extravagant in his utterances.
Perhaps he always was a wolf in sheep’s clothing or maybe it’s power that’s given him his wolfish appetite. But all this is beside my point.
My point is simply how European debate about Turkey’s membership has bypassed discussing the real dynamics of the country.
Can a country of Turkey’s size, cultural diversity and geopolitical borders (with Syria and Iran as neighbours) have a security apparatus that doesn’t end up dominating the apparatus of government?
Could a country with Turkey’s neighbourhood subordinate its individual geopolitical interests and ever acquiesce to the EU’s common security and foreign policy? Or would its tail end up wagging the EU dog?
Instead of being obsessed with Islam and how Turkey could help endear Europe to the Arab world, couldn’t a little bit of history have told us that Turkey’s activity in the MENA region is driven by national interests and that Arabs have often resented it for that very reason?
Once more, Europeans are discussing the case of Turkey with the air of concerned cosmopolitans. In many instances, however, we are betraying, once more, our egregious blinkered parochialism.
ranierfsadni@europe.com