Newsweek
February 18, 2008
International Edition

The True Turkish Believer

By Owen Matthews And Sami Kohen
WORLD AFFAIRS; Europe; Pg. 0 Vol. 151 No. 7 ISSN: 0163-7053

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan just won’t take no for
an answer. In 2002 he and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development
Party (AKP) came to power promising to get Turkey into the European
Union. Under the banner of the EU’s "Copenhagen criteria" for new
members, the AKP made an impressive start: it abolished the death
penalty, curbed the backroom political power of the military and
eased restrictions on Kurdish language and culture. But instead of
recognizing just how far Turkey had come, European leaders recoiled,
rebuffing Erdogan and his country at virtually every turn. French
President Nicolas Sarkozy says he opposes Turkish membership in the
EU because it’s "an Asian country," suggesting instead that maybe one
day it could be part of a proposed Mediterranean Union. German
Chancellor Angela Merkel warns that "Turkey’s membership is going to
constrain the EU." She offers "privileged partnership" instead of
full membership.

Erdogan is undeterred. Instead of slowing down the pace of change,
the AKP has announced its biggest and boldest reform package yet.
Emboldened by a resounding victory in snap elections last summer, the
party has embarked on a wholesale overhaul of the hard-wiring of the
country’s political system. Central to the new order is a redrawing
of Turkey’s 1981 Constitution designed to give more power to the
people–including direct presidential elections–as well as
introducing more freedom of speech and religion. In doing so, the AKP
hopes to create a society that Europe simply cannot refuse–one that
is moving ahead with a long-term strategy that looks calmly past the
current crop of anti-Turkish European leaders. "Whatever they say, we
will continue on our path," promises Foreign Minister Ali Babacan.
"For us the important thing is that the negotiation process with
Europe remains on track."

What is driving this? One top European diplomat who has worked
closely with Erdogan during Turkey’s negotiations with the EU says
Turkey’s prime minister "has a deep and personal commitment to
bringing his country into Europe. He feels that that is his country’s
destiny." During his years in power Erdogan has developed a powerful
narrative for Turkey as a "bridge between cultures," with both his
country and himself playing key roles in "bringing religions and
culture closer together to avoid a global clash of civilizations." It
is a philosophy he expounded eloquently upon at a recent Madrid
conference on the "Alliance of Civilizations," which he co-hosted
with Spanish Prime Minister Josa Luis Rodrà – guez Zapatero, and it is
based on the assumption that Turkey cannot stand alone in glorious
isolation.

There is also a more pragmatic rationale for looking to Europe.
Turkey’s growing harmonization with western business practices and
regulations has brought a deluge of foreign investment–$20 billion
last year–which has helped fuel GDP growth of close to 6 percent for
the past five years and helped modernize Turkey’s once creaky
manufacturing and textile industries.

Still, if taken at face value, Erdogan’s enthusiasm for Europe comes
as a surprise: for most of their careers, Erdogan and his close ally
Abdullah Gul, now president, shared with most Turkish Islamists a
deep suspicion of Europe and Western values in general. Their
political mentor, Necmettin Erbakan, frequently railed against the
West for being ruled by "racist imperialism and Zionism." Erdogan
himself, while mayor of Istanbul in the mid-1990s, sparked
controversy when he compared democracy to a streetcar: "When you come
to your stop, you get off."

But then reality intervened. In 1999 he was convicted of sedition
after reciting an allegedly subversive Islamic poem at a political
rally. He spent four months in jail, and by his own account, his
spell in prison helped convince him that political Islam needed
modernizing just as much as the Turkish state. The two, he came to
understand, were locked in a vicious cycle. On one side, an
ultraconservative military was using police-state methods to enforce
a rigid secularism, which was at odds with the reality of Turkish
society; on the other side were old-guard Islamists like Erbakan,
whose blend of nationalism, religion and anti-Westernism was out of
step with a modern, globalized world.

Adding to this political awakening was an economic crisis in 2000 and
2001. The Turkish lira had lost two thirds of its value after the
collapse of a series of corrupt banks and the flight of foreign
capital. Erdogan, and the newly formed AKP, blamed the economic
difficulties on rampant political cronyism, runaway populist spending
and government incompetence.

The simplest way of fixing it was by integrating Turkey into
Europe–a widely popular goal at the time, with 80 percent approval.
It quickly became a catchall for bold reforms the AKP could never
have dared attempt without the support of Brussels, such as reducing
the power of the military-dominated National Security Council.
"Europe is the instrument which can help us put our own house in
order," Erdogan told NEWSWEEK BEFORE coming to power in November
2002. "Our central goal is to put Turkey on the road to Europe."

Ever since, Erdogan has tried to steer an extraordinarily narrow path
between the EU, his party’s own conservative, religious roots, and
the small but powerful ultrasecularists in the military, judiciary
and bureaucracy. For instance, Erdogan has tackled some of the most
repressive aspects of Turkey’s police state head-on, allowing Kurds
some cultural rights, scrapping a few (but by no means all) of the
laws restricting free speech, and cutting the powers of the
military-dominated National Security Council. Through it all, Erdogan
has been dogged by accusations that his Islamist-rooted AKP’s real
goal is to foist a more conservative Islamic rule over the secular
state of Turkey. In his critics’ view, the most important thing for
Erdogan and his allies is not to join Europe but to use the prospect
of joining as a convenient front to push a religious agenda. As
evidence, they say, Erdogan’s first move in the constitutional
overhaul was not to scrap the anti-free-speech laws–such as the
infamous Article 301, which punishes "insulting Turkishness"–as
Brussels has repeatedly demanded, but to call for an end to the
longstanding ban on the wearing of Islamic headscarves in
universities.

Erdogan presented it as a liberal move, a step on the path to the EU
and a victory for human rights. "Why," he asked, "should wearing the
headscarf be a crime?" But by focusing on the issue, he touched one
of the rawest nerves in Turkey’s ongoing culture wars. For many of
Turkey’s elite, keepers of the ultra-secular traditions of the
nation’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, allowing headscarves at
university is the thin edge of a dangerous wedge. Akdeniz University
rector Mustafa Akaydin fears that the AKP’s ultimate goal is to
"destroy Ataturk’s reforms" and that soon "Turkey will resemble an
Arab country or Iran." He warns there could be "confrontation and
chaos" on university campuses as a result. Indeed while the repeal of
the ban is enormously popular–the latest polls show voters favor
scrapping it by 64 percent to 27 percent–more than 120,000 people
marched last week in Ankara to protest the decision and demonstrate
their commitment to secularism.

Erdogan’s critics note that the EU considers the headscarf to be an
internal issue–and certainly not part of the Copenhagen criteria.
Moreover, several European countries–including France–restrict the
wearing of religious symbols in public schools. "Erdogan and his
government are more interested in Islamicizing Turkey than
democratizing it," says Cengiz Aktar, a specialist on EU affairs at
Bahcesehir University. A true liberal, critics say, would have used
his vast political capital on more-pressing human-rights concerns,
which could turn out to be far more damaging to Turkey’s EU bid than
repealing a ban on headscarves. There is, for instance, no civilian
alternative to compulsory military service, as there is in other
countries. Conscientious objectors are regularly jailed. At the same
time, speech remains far from free. Last month a newspaper editor was
given a three-year suspended sentence for the crime of "insulting
Ataturk." Moreover, a report by Human Rights Watch last year cites a
rise in reports of police brutality and an increase in the number of
people prosecuted and convicted for violations of speech laws. They
say the state’s intolerance of dissent "has created an environment in
which there have been instances of violence against minority groups."
In January 2007, Hrant Dink, the editor of a Turkish-Armenian
newspaper was assassinated by a teenage gunman.

Clearly, in the face of a hostile secular military and its overheated
rhetoric, and an EU that is ambivalent about Turkey at best, Erdogan
will have to continue to prove his Western bona fides. There are a
number of benchmarks that could determine whether Erdogan is still
serious about the EU. Most important, Brussels urgently wants the AKP
to scrap Article 301. Second, Europe will want Erdogan to show that
he cares about the religious freedoms of non-Muslims, too–for
instance by liberalizing the laws on non-Muslim charitable
foundations and by reopening the world-renowned Orthodox seminary on
the island of Helybeliada, near Istanbul. It has been closed since
1971.

Whether Erdogan will follow through with his plans is still an open
question. Almost no ruler in modern Turkish history has been better
placed to push reform as he is, here and now. Last year, using a
canny mix of brinkmanship and diplomacy, he got the United States to
back limited Turkish airstrikes and commando raids against PKK bases
inside northern Iraq. That won him huge support not just from
voters–including ultranationalist voters–but also from Turkey’s
politically powerful generals. "The government stands side by side
with our soldiers," Erdogan told parliamentarians when asking them to
authorize the use of force outside Turkey’s borders last year. That
message went some way toward defusing the military’s longstanding
enmity toward Erdogan and the AKP.

But the danger is that further reforms will be swamped in the fallout
from the headscarf ban. Deniz Baykal, leader of the opposition
Republican People’s Party or CHP, warned that Turkey faces "a
counterrevolution," and vowed to fight to reinstate the headscarf ban
through the avowedly secularist Constitutional Court. That will mean
months of political messiness and upheaval. On the AKP side, the
pressure is on from the grass roots to go further still. Once
headscarves are allowed in universities, some AKP members will wonder
why it is still banned in hospitals, courts and municipal buildings.
"The lifting of such bans in other public services will come to the
agenda gradually, inshallah," says Husnu Tuna, an AKP member of
Parliament’s Constitutional Committee.

That, too, could be considered a liberal move–more akin to much of
the West’s freedom of religion than Ataturk’s ideal of laïcita, or
freedom from religion. Now Erdogan faces an enormous balancing act.
The test of his commitment to European ideals will come as he chooses
in the months ahead which reforms to pursue next–EU reforms, or
those advocated by his grass-roots supporters. Poll numbers suggest
waning support among Turks for entry to the EU, largely because of
European rebuffs and the perception that Europe has failed to keep
its promises on Turkish-dominated Northern Cyprus. Yet it seems
increasingly unlikely that Erdogan and the AKP would ever hop off
that old European streetcar. Since his firebrand days, Erdogan has
realized that straight political Islam has a limited appeal to all
but a tiny minority of Turkish voters. The same goes for isolationist
nationalism. So he is likely to take a more pragmatic path, if for no
other reason than that Turkey’s continued economic growth is tightly
linked to its embrace of Western business standards. Indeed Turkey is
going to keep driving that streetcar west–no matter what the EU or
Erdogan’s opponents have to say about it.