RESURGENCE OF NATIONALISM AND ISLAM THREATEN TO TURN TURKEY AWAY FROM WEST
Handan T. Satiroglu

World Politics Watch
Nov 28 2006

Adolf Hitler’s "Mein Kampf" and several conspiracy-themed books
depicting Turkey as under attack by American and European influences
sell briskly in local bookstores. Turkey’s $10 million movie "Valley
of Wolves," the most expensive to date, vilifying Christians and Jews
pulls in record crowds. A 28-year-old lawyer shoots a secularist judge
to death inside Turkey’s High Court. The Islamic and far-right press is
filled with stories of missionaries within Turkish borders converting
"defenseless" Muslims to "infidels."

Masked by Turkey’s 80-year Kemalist embrace of secularism, these
recent trends reflect a hard fact: Beneath the surface of the West’s
most crucial ally in the Muslim world, a dismaying anti-Western blend
of political Islam and nationalism is blossoming. A series of recent
patriotic shows of force — including angry mobs protesting the arrival
of Pope Benedict or deriding Elif Shafak for "insulting Turkishness" in
a growing chorus for restriction of freedom of speech — have revealed
an increasing backlash in Turkey towards Western values. Even as
Turkey aspires to join the European Union, the current administration
led by the pro-Islamic Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made
several attempts to roll back Turkey’s brand of draconian secularism:
criminalization of adultery, passage of punitive taxes on the wine
industry, and decriminalization of Hezbollah-backed Quran courses were
but a few items on the administration’s agenda as recently as 2005.

So how did this Mediterranean nation often promoted by Western
politicians and media as a "model Islamic nation" develop such a
taste for pro-Islamic nationalist sentiments? In a recent Pew poll
asking why Islam’s role is gaining strength in Turkey, the largest
reason cited was "growing immorality in our society." "The current
mood is a reaction to an anxiety felt by some people that some of the
values that are important to us are being sold out by the EU drive,"
Suat Kiniklioglu, head of German Marshall Program in Ankara, commented
in The Christian Science Monitor in 2005. Last year, "the country’s
hopes and forward-looking vision were behind the EU drive.

Now people are becoming confused. There is fatigue, and nationalism
becomes an escape route," he lamented.

Across the ocean, Jim Stroup, former Marine Corps foreign area
officer and now head of Bosphorus Consulting in Istanbul, echoed
similar sentiments: "The form of pro-Islamic nationalism we are
witnessing today is largely defensive and reactionary," he said
in an October interview. "It arises in response to what are seen
as attacks on Turkey’s viability or the honor inherent in being a
Turk." But perceived hemorrhaging of Turkish values hardly explains
why many Turks are taking to the flag and political Islam; ethnic
rivalries between Kurds and Turks and an increasing distrust of the
West, heightened by the Iraqi war and the cold shoulder given by the
EU have also been touted as possible causes for the resurgence of
nationalist pro-Islamic fervor.

A Wounded Pride

It would be simplistic to speak of a single nationalist current in
this country that has long been the guardian of the secular Kemalist
heritage. Indeed, it is viable to speak of two nationalist currents;
one "strongly positive and forward looking," as Stroup sees it, and the
second, injured and angry — the kind that is making headlines during
Turkey’s infamous controversies. The first sees grounds for optimism
on both political and social fronts and revels in the achievements of
the last decade. The country has managed to shake off some its most
dated laws against its ethnic minorities, achieved full EU candidate
status, and tamed inflation from a high 70 percent in 2002 to below
8 percent in 2005. During this period, Turkey has also managed to
attract record flows of direct foreign investment, while doubling
its foreign trade in the last three and a half years.

Articles on this Issue Borat vs. Nazarbayev: An International Incident
France: The Al-Dura Defamation Case and the End of Free Speech More
on Culture Articles by this Author Turkey and Europe: An Invitation
To Dance?

More by Handan T. Satiroglu In the last decade, the positive and
West-looking brand of nationalism prevailed as each subsequent
government led Turkey increasingly closer to the European Union. The
fiery eruption of nationalism that we are witnessing today,
however, feels humiliated and cast aside by its European and American
friends. Suggestions that Turkey is unfit to join the EU, coupled with
"campaigns of everyone from revisionist nationalist groups such as
Armenians and Kurds, and religious personages such as the new pope,"
claims Stroup, which paint Turks as "backward barbarians," gravely
offends the Turkish sense of dignity. To the Turk on the street,
the seemingly endless demands for reform and trickle of criticism
from Europe are not only deeply wounding to Turkish pride, but also
spark some historical resentment.

The perceived sense of public humiliation should come as no surprise;
the EU issue is just the contemporary face of a much older history.

Turkey was, after all, the central figure of a formidable 400-year-old
Empire, now forcibly condensed to its Eurasian backend.

In the same fashion as Arabs, the Turks perceive themselves as heirs
to a rich and diverse Islamic tradition, the focal point of all
things in their heyday. Stroup cautions that we shall see more of the
vengeful, unproductive expressions of wounded pride "that express
the sentiments of ‘enough’ and ‘we are Turks, we ruled the world,
and we will again.’" The ferociously anti-American movie "Valley of
the Wolves" that pits Turks against Americans, he concludes, reflects
this longing for a resurgence of a new Ottoman Empire, combining the
Turkish identity with principles of Islam.

The West — Foe or friend?

The nationalist outburst is not limited to perceived displays of
public humiliation. Inside the country, simmering tensions between
Turks and ethnic Kurds proves to be a fertile cause for nationalist
zeal. While today’s escalating violence is nowhere near the bloodshed
witnessed in the 90s, which claimed the lives of an estimated 35,000,
the potential of Kurdish separatist violence has come back to haunt
the Turkish social landscape. Images of mothers and wives wailing in
wretched sorrow, kneeling over their sehit (martyr) wrapped in the
Turkish flag have become commonplace in the mainstream media. The
emotionally charged funerals are not only public events for the
soldiers who died fighting Kurdish rebels in the rugged southeast,
but are also becoming the focus of growing anti-U.S. sentiment.

Many Turks cite the U.S. invasion in Iraq as the most important
factor in the rise in Kurdish terrorist group PKK’s violence. Despite
stabilization in U.S.-Turkish ties after the immediate fallout of
the war, Turks have come to believe Washington’s inaction against the
PKK is a ploy to divide the Middle East. As Yektan Turkyilmaz, a Ph.D.

candidate at Duke University, observes, the current nationalist
outburst is a reaction to perceived imperialistic goals to divide
Turkey along ethnic lines, "in order to destabilize the entire
region and intensify exploitative efforts." Turkish media is rife
with provocative articles about the pro-American activities of Kurds
in Northern Iraq, as well as stories linking the PKK with the U.S.

occupation force or the CIA. "There is widespread belief in Turkey
that the U.S.’s new Middle East project also entails the formation
of an independent, but satellite, Kurdish state not only in the Iraqi
soil, but also on Turkey’s southeast," Turkyilmaz said in an interview
earlier this month. Convinced that the West is fueling ethnic tensions
in the same spirit with which European influences brought down the
Ottoman Empire, a growing number of Turks have come to "take on an
anti-EU and more specifically anti-American position," he explains.

Add to this the perceived illegitimacy of the U.S.-led war in
Iraq, Turks’ confidence in most Western projects has plummeted to
record levels. Probably nothing characterizes this disillusion more
graphically than the recent figures published by the Pew Research
Center: Seventy-one percent of Turkish people believe that the United
States may someday threaten their country, while a mere 12 percent
held a favorable opinion of Americans. Similarly, positive opinions
about Christians have fallen from 31 percent in 2004 to 16 percent,
just one percent higher than their dislike of Jews.

With only 35 percent of the public in favor of the EU (half of what
it was in 2004), a sense of drift away from the EU accession has also
deepened in the country — a mood that is unlikely to change with the
just-released highly critical "Progress Report" by the EU Commission.

The report lists a host of problems in human rights, freedom of
expression, and judiciary and military reform, and highlights Turkey’s
failure to make concessions about the Cyprus issue. In a thinly veiled
cautionary note, the Commission indicates it will suspend some parts
of the EU negotiations if there is no further progress over Cyprus

Meanwhile, Turks fault the country’s old rivals Cyprus and Greece
for the acrimonious report, claiming they are lobbying Brussels
to take a stance against Turkey’s refusal to open its ports to
Greek-controlled Cyprus. Today, demands that Turkey acknowledge the
Greek part of Cyprus, as well as the changes aimed at bringing Turkey
closer to Europe, are seen by many as undermining the integrity of
Turkey. In a recent poll, 51 percent of Turks claimed to see the
EU-inspired reforms as a reproduction of the widely despised 1920
Treaty of Sèvres, which led to the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire by
Western interests. Echoing a populous sentiment held by everyone from
storekeepers in villages to college students relaxing in cafes, Ahmet,
a cab driver in the boisterous streets of Ankara, expressed the point
in percipient bluntness: "Europe is asking a lot. I believe all these
reforms are designed to weaken the state in order to break it up."

For a very long time Turkey has been touted as a model secular
Muslim state. But the sweeping tide of Muslim nationalism might leave
Turkey more isolated by the West than it has ever been before. For
decades, Ataturk’s Turkey looked to the West for political, social
and economic cues. That, however, is fast changing as a result of
bitter relations with the EU and the Iraqi war, which has everyone
from leftists to Islamists angered. The rocky relationship with the
West would not be so alarming if it weren’t for the shift in Turkish
attitudes towards the Muslim Middle East. Alliances with neighboring
Damascus, Dubai and Tehran, as opposed to Washington and Brussels,
now seem to make more sense to Turks. For the first time since the
inception of the Turkish republic in 1923, a growing number of Turks,
primarily of the populous rural constituency, seem comfortable with
the notion of aligning with the greater Islamic ummah, rather than
traditional American and European allies.

Indeed, Turkey’s next presidential and parliamentary elections
should help determine the country’s direction. If center-right and
center-left parties manage to defeat the Islamists, Turkey’s Western
ambitions might continue. If the current pro-Islamic and nationalist
AKP is victorious, then what will happen is anybody’s guess.

Handan T. Satiroglu is a sociologist and writer who divides her time
between the U.S. and Europe.

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