ERDOGAN BRAND OF ISLAM SHOULD WORRY THE WEST

The Australian
May 14, 2010 Friday
1 – All-round Country Edition

The secular military is under attack and the foreign policy has
dramatically shifted

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.

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 US could rely on Turkey as a bulwark against
common enemies, be they the Soviet Union or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Today, 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 $US10 billion ($11bn) trade relationship. And he has
sabotaged efforts by his own foreign ministry to improve ties with
neighbouring 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 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 multi-billion-dollar tax fine.

Oh, and America’s favourability rating among Turks, at around 14 per
cent 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 per cent.

All this would seem to more than justify Professor 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 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 per cent in
1997, is down to single digits. Goldman Sachs anticipates 7 cent 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. 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 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 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. Erdogan’s infatuations with his unsavoury
neighbours 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 Erdogan’s
domestic powerplays 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 Erdogan should buck public
opinion when it comes to Turkey’s alliance with the US.

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 insane not to worry about
the possibility.