WHAT IS HAPPENING TO TURKEY?

By BRET STEPHENS

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MAY 11, 2010
Istanbul

As the country has become wealthier, it paradoxically has also shed
some of its Western trappings.

Last week I asked Bernard Lewis where he thought Turkey might
be going. The dean of Middle East historians speculated that in a
decade the secular republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk might
more closely resemble the Islamic Republic of Iran-even as Iran
transformed itself into a secular republic.

Reading the news about Turkey from afar, it’s easy to see what Prof.

Lewis means. Since coming to power in 2002, the ruling Justice
and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
has dramatically recast the traditional contours of Turkish foreign
policy. Gone are the days when the country had a strategic partnership
with Israel, involving close military ties and shared enemies in Syria
and Iran and the sundry terrorist groups they sponsored. Gone are the
days, too, when the U.S. could rely on Turkey as a bulwark against
common enemies, be they the Soviet Union or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Today, Mr. Erdogan has excellent relations with Syrian strongman Bashar
Assad, whom the prime minister affectionately calls his "brother." He
has accused Israel of "savagery" in Gaza and opened a diplomatic line
to Hamas while maintaining good ties with the genocidal government of
Sudan. He was among the first foreign leaders to congratulate Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad on his fraudulent victory in last year’s election. He has
resisted intense pressure from the Obama administration to vote for
a new round of Security Council sanctions on Iran, with which Turkey
has a $10 billion trade relationship. And he has sabotaged efforts
by his own foreign ministry to improve ties with neighboring Armenia.

The changes in foreign policy reflect the rolling revolution in
Turkey’s domestic political arrangements. The military, long the
pillar of Turkish secularism, is under assault by Mr. Erdogan’s
Islamist-oriented government, which has recently arrested dozens
of officers on suspicion of plotting a coup. Last week the Turkish
parliament voted to put a referendum to the public that would,
if passed, allow the government to pack the country’s top courts,
another secularist pillar, with its own people. Also under assault is
the media group Dogan, which last year was slapped with a multibillion
dollar tax fine.

Oh, and America’s favorability rating among Turks, at around 14%
according to recent polls, is plumbing an all-time low, despite Barack
Obama’s presidency and his unprecedented outreach to Muslims in general
and Turks in particular. In 2004, the year of Abu Ghraib, it was 30%.

All this would seem to more than justify Prof. Lewis’s alarm. So
why do so many Turks, including more than a few secularists and
classical liberals, seem mostly at ease with the changes Mr. Erdogan
has wrought? A possible answer may be self-delusion: Liberals were
also at the forefront of the Iranian revolution before being brutally
swept aside by the Ayatollah Khomeini. But that isn’t quite convincing
in Turkey’s case.

More plausible is Turkey’s economic transformation under the AKP’s
pro-free market stewardship. Inflation, which ran to 99% in 1997,
is down to single digits. Goldman Sachs anticipates 7% growth this
year, which would make the country Europe’s strongest performer-if
only Europe would have it as a member. Turks now look on the EU with
diminished envy and growing contempt. One time arch-rival Greece
mostly earns their pity.

Chief among the beneficiaries of this transformation has been the
AKP’s political base: an Islamic bourgeoisie that was long shut
out of the old statist arrangements between the country’s secular
political and business elites. Members of this new class want to
send their daughters to universities-and insist they be allowed to
do so wearing headscarves. They also insist that they be ruled by
the government they elected, not by the "deep state" of unelected and
often self-dealing officers, judges and bureaucrats who defended the
country’s secularism at the expense of its democracy and prosperity.

The paradoxical result is that, as the country has become wealthier
and (in some respects) more democratic, it has also shed some of
its Western trappings. Mr. Erdogan’s infatuations with his unsavory
neighbors undoubtedly stem from his own instincts, ideology and ego.

But it also reflects a public sentiment that no longer wants Turkey
to be a stranger in its own region, particularly when it so easily
can be its leader. Some Turks call this "neo-Ottomanism," others
"Turkish-Gaullism." Whichever way, it is bound to discomfit the West.

The more serious question is how far it all will go. Some of Mr.

Erdogan’s domestic power plays smack of incipient Putinism. The
estrangement from Israel is far from complete, but an Israeli attack
on Iran might just do the trick. And it’s hard to see why Mr. Erdogan
should buck public opinion when it comes to Turkey’s alliance with
the U.S. when he’s prepared to follow public opinion in so many
other matters.

Most importantly, will the Erdogan brand of Islamism remain relatively
modest in its social and political ambitions, or will it become
aggressive and radical? It would be wrong to pretend to know the
answer. It would be insane not to worry about the possibility.