TURKEY BETS ON REGIONAL INFLUENCE AS EU HOPES FADE
Hans-Jurgen Schlamp, Daniel Steinvorth and Bernhard Zand

Spiegel Online
,1518 ,628575,00.html
June 4 2009

Frustrated by European opposition to its EU membership bid, Turkey
is looking instead to its eastern and southern neighbors in a bid to
flex its regional muscles. But will courting the Arab street actually
bring Ankara any benefits?

At the Sutluce Cultural and Congress Center on the Golden Horn in
Istanbul, experts and officials from around the world have come
together to talk about water. The thousands attending the event
include water experts, presidents and ministers, and they are here
to talk about the Euphrates, the Nile and the Tigris, about major
dams and about the privatization of entire rivers. One of mankind’s
future problems is being debated, and it is the Turks who are hosting
the event. A coincidence?

Ankara, the Ataturk Mausoleum: Two men pay their respects to the
founder of the Turkish republic, one wearing a brown robe with a
sheepskin cap, the other wearing a suit. They have many problems
in common, chief among them the fact that they are both leaders of
states on the brink. The two men are Pakistani Prime Minister Asif
Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Turkish President
Abdullah Gul, of all people, has brought them together. A coincidence?

In Ankara, US President Barack Obama is addressing the Turkish
parliament. He has nothing but good things to say about Ataturk and his
political heirs, the government’s reforms and Turkey’s geopolitical
importance — precisely the sorts of things for which the country,
desperate for recognition, has been waiting so long. Ankara,
of all places, is the last stop on Obama’s first trip abroad as
president. This, at least, is no coincidence.

Presidents and militia leaders, diplomats, military chiefs of staff and
the heads of intelligence services from the Middle East are choosing
the city on the Bosporus as a meeting place, and economic delegations
are visiting Turkey. Even Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, against
whom the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant,
chooses to visit Ankara, because he knows that he will not get a
lecture there.

The Turks, who always used to complain to their Western allies about
their rough neighborhood, apparently no longer have any enemies in the
east. Turkey’s old rival Russia has since become its most important
energy and trading partner. Syria and Iraq, two countries with which
Ankara has in the past been on the brink of war, are now friends of
Turkey, and relations are even improving with Armenia. The Arabs,
who never truly took to the successors of the Ottomans, now look
with admiration to what they call the "Turkish model," a dynamic,
open country that has a better handle on its problems than they
do. But what caused the transformation?

Europe is to blame. When Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan assumed
office in 2003, he planned to lead Turkey into the European Union. But
Europe was unmoved by this vision, and it has also lost much of
its appeal within Turkey. According to Germany’s Friedrich Ebert
Foundation, a think tank linked to the center-left Social Democratic
Party, as the Europeans have become weary of expansion, Turkey has
lost interest in joining the EU. Indeed, what Erdogan meant when he
spoke of Turkey’s "alternative" to becoming an EU member is becoming
increasingly clear.

Critics and supporters alike describe this new course as
"neo-Ottomanism." Ankara remains formally committed to its European
ambitions. However, frustrated by the open rejection with which it
has long been met in Paris, Vienna and Berlin, and which it has been
facing once again during the EU election campaign, Turkey is focusing
increasingly on its role as a peacekeeping power in a region it either
ruled or dominated for centuries.

Turkey’s change of course raises fundamental questions for Europe. Is
it a good thing or a bad thing for Turkey to be looking more to the
south and east than to the west these days? Does this shift speak
in favor of or against the eternal EU candidate? And wouldn’t the
reorientation of Turkish foreign policy be a welcome excuse to
conveniently bury the unpopular project of Turkish EU membership
for good?

The architect of Turkey’s new foreign policy, Ahmet Davutoglu, 50,
would certainly disagree. Davutoglu is a short man with a moustache
who is a professor of political science and, since the beginning of
May, the country’s new foreign minister. He has not yet broken with
the West: Only recently, he told his counterparts in Brussels that
his country would be "not a burden but a boon for Europe."

But Davutoglu, the author of the remarkable book "Stratejik Derinlik"
("Strategic Depth"), in which he discusses "multidimensional policy"
at length, follows a different compass than his predecessors, most of
whom were the sons of civil servants from Ankara and western Turkey,
drilled in Kemalist ideology and focused entirely on Nato, Europe
and the United States.

Davutoglu, like President Gul, is from Central Anatolia and a
member of a new elite influenced by Islamic thought. He completed his
secondary-school education at a German overseas school, learned Arabic
and taught at an Islamic university in Malaysia. He believes that a
one-sided Western orientation is unhealthy for a country like Turkey.

Davutoglu is convinced that Ankara must be on good terms with all
its neighbors, and it cannot fear contact with the countries and
organizations branded as pariahs by the West, namely Syria, Iran,
Hamas and Hezbollah. He believes that Turkey should have no qualms
about acknowledging its Ottoman past — in other words, it should
become a respected regional power throughout the territory once ruled
by the Ottoman Empire (see graphic).

The Turkish press touts Davutoglu as "Turkey’s Kissinger," and even
Erdogan and Gul refer to him as "hoca" ("venerable teacher"). The
country’s foreign policy increasingly bears his signature. For example,
at his suggestion, Turkish diplomats revived talks between Syria
and Israel that had been discontinued in 2000, leading to secret
peace talks that began in Istanbul in 2004. However, the talks were
temporarily suspended in late 2008 because of parliamentary elections
in Israel and the Gaza offensive.

The Turks say that they achieved more during the Gaza conflict than
Middle East veterans like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, arguing
that Hamas’s willingness to accept Israel’s ceasefire offer was
attributable to Ankara’s intervention. They also say that the fact that
Erdogan angrily broke off a discussion with Israeli President Shimon
Peres at the World Economic Summit in Davos cemented his reputation in
the Islamic world as a friend of the Palestinians. When street fighting
erupted in Lebanon between supporters of the pro-Western government
and of Hezbollah in May 2008, Erdogan intervened as a mediator.

Ankara is also seeking to reduce tensions in the Caucasus region,
where the Turks have often acted against Russia, prompting Moscow to
accuse Turkey of being sympathetic to the Chechen cause. After the
war in Georgia last summer, the Erdogan government brought together
officials from Tbilisi and Moscow. Turkey and Armenia are now seeking
to overcome long-standing hostility by establishing diplomatic
relations and reopening their shared border.

Off the Horn of Africa, the US Fifth Fleet turned over the leadership
of Combined Task Force 151, which is responsible for combating piracy
in the Gulf of Aden and off the coast of Somalia, to the Turkish
navy. At the same time, a man paid an official visit to Ankara who
had not appeared in public since 2007: Iraqi Shiite leader Muqtada
al-Sadr, the head of the notorious Mahdi Army militia. Davutoglu had
sent a private jet to bring him to Turkey from his exile in Iran.

Compared with the cool treatment Turkey gave its southern and eastern
neighbors for decades, this is a stunning about-face. But not everyone
approves. Critics like political scientist Soner Cagaptay describe
Ankara’s foreign policy as "pro-Arab Islamist." In a recent op-ed for
the Turkish daily Hurriyet, Cagaptay argued that Turkish diplomats,
who had once "looked to Europe, particularly France, for political
inspiration" have now fallen for the Arab world, and generally
for Islamists — in other words, for Hamas instead of secular
Fatah, or Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood instead of the government in
Cairo. "However, being popular on the Arab street is not necessarily
an asset for Turkey, since in autocracies popularity on the street
does not translate into soft power in the capitals," Cagaptay argues.

Diplomats like Hakki Akil, the Turkish ambassador in Abu Dhabi,
disagree. According to Akil, Turkey has acquired "soft power" by
expanding its sphere of influence from the Balkans to Afghanistan,
transporting Russian, Caspian Sea and Iranian oil and gas to the West,
and building housing and airports in Kurdish northern Iraq. Europe,
says Akil, ought to be pleased with Ankara’s course. As Akil’s boss
Davutoglu said in Brussels, political stability, a secure energy
corridor and a strong partner on its southeastern flank are all
"in the fundamental interest of the EU."

In truth, everyone involved knows that Turkey doesn’t stand a chance
of becoming a full member of the European club in the foreseeable
future — and probably never will. Of course, no one in Brussels
is willing or able to admit this. The EU stands by the accession
negotiations without limitations, European Commission President Jose
Manuel Barroso repeats on a regular basis.

But these very negotiations are hardly moving forward. According to
a recent internal European Commission report, Turkey has made "only
limited progress." Some EU countries have already abandoned the idea of
accepting Turkey into their midst. In Bavaria, conservative Christian
Social Union campaigners promote a message of "No to Turkey" as they
make the rounds of beer tents. At a televised campaign appearance in
Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas
Sarkozy made their opposition to EU membership for Turkey clear.

Ironically, Turkey’s strategic importance for Europe "is even greater
today than in the days of the Cold War," says Elmar Brok, a German
member of the European Parliament for the conservative Christian
Democratic Union who specializes in foreign policy issues. And then
there is the paradox of the fact that the more intensively Turkey,
out of frustration with Europe, engages with its eastern neighbors,
the more valuable it becomes to the West. According to Brok, the West
must "do everything possible to keep Ankara on board."

Brok and other members of the European Parliament envision making
so-called "privileged partner" status palatable to Turkey. It would
enable Turkey to have a similar relationship to the EU as Norway
does today and to enjoy many of the benefits of EU membership,
including access to the European single market, visa-free travel,
police cooperation and joint research programs. But it would not,
however, become a member.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress