IS TURKEY DRIFTING AWAY OR NAVIGATING ITS WAY? (I)

Hurriyet Daily News
Nov 16 2009
Turkey

Since the Justice and the Development Party, or AKP, came to power in
2002, there have been many articles and discussions that questioned
AKP’s "real" intentions, and whether some of AKP’s foreign policies
should be taken as signs of Turkey leaving the Western alliance.

The AKP establishment, if I may call it this way, has strongly opposed
such scenarios and has given many instances to prove that AKP aims to
make Turkey a strong part of the western world and if EU, concomitantly
with ever-stronger ties with the eastern and the Muslim world. And if
one takes a closer look into this paradigm and hotly debated question,
one finds plenty of arguments to support both sides.

Therefore, when this unavoidable question was posed to me last week,
I felt obliged to delve into the underlying cogency or reasoning of
the AKP leadership, and I found it useful to enter into the discussion
in light of this underlying assumption, that I believe what drives
the AKP leadership to view and conduct its foreign policy. That
underlying assumption is the pragmatist modality of the AKP foreign
policy makers, which suggests that of ‘what works’ policies are the
main driving force for this leadership in order to be able to navigate
in this difficult geographical set up in which Turkey is situated. I
hope that I will able to analyze this difficult question diligently
and in an impartial fashion, as it gets increasingly harder to find
such objective analyses of this question nowadays.

First, I think the AKP administration, as said in the previous
paragraph, should be taken primarily as a pragmatist administration,
rather than an ideological one. I would even argue that this is the
most pragmatist administration Turkey has ever seen. In terms of this
pragmatic modus regarding foreign relations, the AKP sometimes comes
into view as the most liberal and most Western government in Turkey’s
history and sometimes the most conservative and pro-Islamic. Though one
must confess, AKP is most successful, while it plays its pro-Islamic
role, which suits it much better and appears to be genuine, because
of the electors it addresses and also because of the ideologies that
the many leaders of AKP have been fed and raised into.

It is true that today the administration in Turkey aims to capitalize
the Turkish Republic’s Ottoman links, and while doing that they
never needed to hide this sentiment. If one wishes to emphasize one
of these identities more than the others, and would like to call this
administration a newborn Ottomanist, or neo-Ottomanist, I think this
could be possible as well, even though as far as I know and hear, Mr.

Ahmet Davutoglu, himself, never used the term neo-Ottomanism.

Albeit we have witnessed in the recent history that the same AKP
administration utilized Turkey’s secular identity in many instances
as well, when it sees it fit. However, it is possible to view that
the AKP administration likes to emphasize Turkey’s secular identity
more while it engages with the Western world and the religious,
historic and democratic identity more while it engages with the Muslim
countries. This pattern is also another glimpse of its pragmatism.

I can elaborate on this argument with pure speculation to make my
point clear. And it is not a product of an outrageous imagination to
think that when the leaders of the AKP visit another Muslim country
or are visited by one of them, behind closed doors they quite possibly
would emphasize and refer to the common religious identity, let’s say,
against the Western hegemony, to further the relations. At the same
time, again as a pure conjecture, it is not so far off the chart
to think that the same Turkish political leaders, when they engage
with a Western leader, would turn to Turkey’s secular identity and
emphasize how different Turkey is from those backward countries in
the region in following a progressive path, whatever that path may be.

However, one matter is established and for that there is no need for
any speculation, and that is that today’s Turkey strives to calculate
its moves and likes to play a pro-active, pre-emptive role while
charming the immediate neighbors in a wide variety of foreign affairs.

This makes the AKP administration very unique and different from
past administrations.

The biggest reason for these pro-active policies, I believe, is to
level Turkey as one of those regional powers like in the other parts
of the world. Turkish foreign policy thinkers including Davutoglu,
the Turkish Foreign Minister, as a leading actor, apparently believes
that Turkey has enough tools in its toolbox to play this role. Its
history, growing economy, relatively vast population, geographical
location with its advantages or complications, religious identity as
well as secular one, lead them to think that Turkey is indeed up to
the task of being a regional power.

Turkey is trying to unlock its historic impasse with Armenia and
looking for better relations with the Kurdish autonomy in northern
Iraq as well as the Kurdish population within Turkey. It also
supported the reunification talks in Cyprus, especially during the
referendum in 2004, contrary to the state establishment views; and
it still maintains a persistent approach for full membership of the
EU by appointing a minister for the accession talks, even though the
appointment came very late. Hence, it can be argued that Turkey is
trying to advance its profile both in the East and the West. Turkey
with ever-improving relations with the Balkan countries, contrary
to arguments that it only engages with the Muslim world, even though
the Muslim world visits are more apparent and have brought tangible
results so far, tries to engineer "East and West together" paradigm
to reclaim a regional power status it once held in the Ottoman
times. And I think the AKP administration should be credited with
these intense engagement policies. In light of these developments,
it is safe to say that Turkey now has a self-confident and outward
looking administration, rather than an inward looking traditional one,
whether one likes many parts of this approach or not.

That being said, I do believe that this strategic deep thinking and
multi-dimensional approach incorporates many hazards. And sometimes
having too much self or miscalculated confidence would disillusion
this team about the country’s real power and with that it carries
enormous risks. And if this self-confidence spirit is mismanaged,
some of its consequences may be quite traumatic.

Next: Analyzing AKP’s foreign policy re-orientation in light of the
relationship with Syria, Iran and Israel.