Open Democracy, UK
July 29 2005
Turkish doubts
Fred Halliday
29 – 7 – 2005
A moderate democratic Islamism in power, careful diplomacy over Iraq,
the prospect of European Union membership … this should have been
Turkey’s decade. But things are going wrong, finds Fred Halliday in
Ankara.
The recent bomb explosions in a café in Istanbul and in a bus in the
Aegean tourist resort of Kusadasi (in which five people died) have
reminded the world that Turkey – alongside London, Madrid, and Egypt
– remains a target of violent attack both by the secular far left (
the Kurdish PKK and by Islamists who oppose its ties with the United
States and Israel.
These are not the first bombings even in recent years, and Istanbul
was, most notably, the site of major Islamist assaults in 2003. But
they underline what appears, to the visitor returning to Turkey after
several years, to be a pervasive mood of political concern about
developments abroad and at home.
Turkey is used to conflict and to international crisis, and the
Turkish state has, over past decades, made its own distinctive
contribution to such processes. But the mood now in this city, an
ancient Hittite settlement in the centre of the country chosen by
Kemal Atatürk in the 1920s as a more `indigenous’ Turkish capital
than the suspect cosmopolis of Istanbul, is now uneasy and edging on
anger.
For this there are three reasons: Europe, Iraq, and domestic Turkish
politics.
The European complex
The first is Europe. Turkey has been seeking membership of the
European Union since the 1960s; in November 2004, Brussels finally
agreed to open negotiations, due to commence on 3 October 2005. For
the many Turks who, for cultural, economic and strategic reasons,
want to join the union, this appeared a historic landmark.
In the ensuing months, however, things have gone wrong. The Turkish
government itself has not acted to meet many of the conditions laid
down by Europe for commencing the talks. At the same time serious
opposition, not just to Turkish entry but to the very commencement of
talks, has emerged inside the EU – both at the popular level in the
referendums in France and the Netherlands, and in statements by the
Austrian government and by politicians expected soon to attain power,
such as Nicolas Sarkozy in France and Angela Merkel in Germany. The
latest Eurobarometer poll shows that 52% of Europeans oppose Turkish
entry while 35% support it.
The formal Turkish response is to brush all this aside: Brussels must
keep to its commitment to start negotiations, and in earnest, while
the French and Dutch referendum results were not really about Turkey
or Muslim immigration but a reflection of popular opposition to the
effects of globalisation and the arrogance of the Brussels elite.
But there is also increasing nationalist irritation in Turkey at the
way the enlargement process is being revised and new obstacles are
being created on the European side – besides the longstanding
concerns about human rights, torture, women and Kurdish freedoms, new
conditions relating to Cyprus and Armenia are being raised,
apparently as a way of blocking the start of the October
negotiations. That it was the Turks who, in 2004, accepted the United
Nations settlement on Cyprus, and the Greeks, incited by bishops and
demagogues, who rejected it, seems to have escaped the notice of the
EU officials handling the negotiation.
In one sense, there is little the Turks can do about this. Some,
despite current disagreements with the United States, argue that
Turkey should stop trying to please the meddling and fickle Europeans
and explore a fuller strategic and economic relationship with the US.
Some talk of closer links to the middle east and to the former Soviet
republics, particularly those of the Turkish dunya (world), where
various forms of Turkic language are spoken. But the whole basis of
the modernisation of Turkey since the 1920s has rested on the claim
that Turkey is already part of Europe: indeed some of the features of
Turkish politics that the EU objects to, such as a rigid secularism
and an authoritarian reformist state, are themselves reflections of
modern European models.
The middle east, much in vogue in the 1970s, has proven to be
economically unreliable and the source of many political problems. As
for the dunya, the honeymoon is over: poor, remote and corrupt
central Asian states offer little to the Turkish economy and there is
also awareness of considerable hostility to Turks in these countries,
as evident in the burning of Turkish banks and businesses in the
riots in Kyrgyzstan.
Ties with the former Soviet world in general are certainly
proliferating: two hours waiting in Istanbul airport reveals that,
for every flight that leaves for Paris, Berlin or London, at least
one other leaves for Bishkek, Baku, Kishinev or Kharkov. And recently
Vladimir Putin visited Turkey – the first visit by a Russian
political leader in the tempestuous four centuries of their
relationship. But there is no substitute here for integration into
the European Union.
The Iraq dilemma
The second, and most important, reason for the current Turkish
malaise is Iraq. Turkey provided some support, against the wishes of
much public opinion, in the American war with Baghdad over Kuwait in
1990-1991: but this was over quickly and the main fighting took place
far from Turkish frontiers in what Turks refer to as `the gulf of
Basra’.
In the ensuing years Turkey profited from the smuggling and
legitimate trade associated with the oil-for-food programme. When it
came to the US invasion of 2003, the strength of opposition from
Turkish public opinion and the Turkish state itself made no
comparable accommodation with Washington possible.
The Turkish parliament refused to allow the US to use Turkish
territory for the invasion and since then criticism of the United
States has reached levels unprecedented even in the crises over
Cyprus in 1963 and 1974. Matters were not helped when, later in 2003,
US forces publicly humiliated a group of Turkish special-force
soldiers captured in Sulaimaniya, Kurdish Iraq.
All of this has been accompanied by increasing Turkish nationalism
and the spread of a suspicion among secular nationalists and
Islamists alike that the US is using the occupation of Iraq to
threaten Turkey, above all by allying itself with the Kurds in Iraq
and so fomenting trouble among the Kurds of eastern Turkey.
This fear is openly stated by officials in Ankara: the first step
will be the partition of Iraq into Arab and Kurdish states, they say,
and this will be followed in few years by the partition of Turkey, in
a final realisation of the plan originally laid down in the –
notorious among Turks – Treaty of Sèvres of 1920, against which
Atatürk led his victorious national revolution.
All of this nationalism has had one other consequence: although the
Turkish state has, in principle, granted rights to Kurds to publish,
broadcast and speak in their own language, Kurdish politicians are
too fearful of reprisals to exercise these rights.
For the Islamists there is the further charge that the US-Kurdish
alliance is being promoted by Israel. Turkey has had good economic
and military relations with Israel for years and these have continued
despite greater criticism of Israel’s policies towards the
Palestinians. Israeli planes practice in Turkish airspace, while a
major twenty-year project to transport water in large container ships
to Israel is going ahead. Turks and Israelis also share a sense of
being the whipping-boys of Europe, and Turks frequently visit Israel
– `the only country in the world where we are not treated with
condescension’, as one leading sociologist put it to me.
But while there is little sympathy in Turkey for the Arabs as such
-`they betrayed us by siding with the British and French in the first
world war’ – the war in Iraq is seen as a major threat to Turkey, and
also, as officials admit, as a reminder of how limited Turkish power
is. While it has long been said that Turkey would intervene in
northern Iraq to prevent the establishment of a Kurdish state, this
would be much less likely if United States forces remain stationed
there.
The AKP and domestic politics
Alongside these two major international problems, there is a third,
domestic component of the Turkish malaise. This is uncertainty about
the direction and strength of the ruling party, the Islamist AKP, in
office since November 2002. At one level things have gone better than
expected: the armed forces, who through the powerful National
Security Council retain a major say in Turkish politics, have allowed
the Islamist party to exercise power, while for its part the AKP has
cast off some of its religious garb and is presenting itself as a
progressive party, in contrast to the `secular conservatives’ of the
old elite.
One reason for concern, however, is that no one can be sure of its
intentions. The AKP makes no secret of its intention to lift the ban
on headscarves in public places, including government offices and
universities. While many secularists are now ready to accept this,
some see it as an initial step towards a referendum aimed at making
the wearing of headscarves by women compulsory. Alcohol is still
generally available in Turkey, but is gradually reducing in
circulation: recently the press corps on the prime minister’s
eighteen-hour flight to Washington was outraged to find that there
was nothing alcoholic to drink.
More broadly, no one is entirely sure whether the AKP’s apparent
enthusiasm for joining the EU is genuine or whether, in the end, it
would prefer to fall back on a nationalist Islamist project rather
then endure European interference on issues of social and political
freedom. This uncertainty is compounded by the weakness of the
opposition parties, the old secular Republican People’s Party (CHP)
and the rightwing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). By default this
gives the AKP an almost free hand. `We are living in a one-party
state,’ said one intellectual concerned at the lack of opposition to
the Islamist project.
Where does Turkey belong?
All this should be of concern to more than just the 70 million people
of Turkey. It is indeed an anomalous country in both European and
middle eastern terms: after spending an evening in a hotel ballroom
with a hundred members of the Ankara business and political elite I
felt – in terms of political attitudes and the enthusiastic
socialising of those present – that in some ways Turkey was more like
a medium-sized Latin American country, a Mexico, Peru or Argentina,
that had ended up in the wrong place. But however it addresses its
social and political problems Turkey remains critical to European
relations with the middle east and is therefore central to the
trans-national crisis both are now living through.
Herein lies the paradox, indeed the irresponsibility, of opposition
to closer European involvement with Turkey: for only if it is
possible to build a stronger relationship in which Europe, instead of
indulging in a one-way discussion about what Brussels expects from
Ankara, actually learns about and listens to Turkey, will the wider
questions of Europe and the middle east, cultural difference and
terrorism, be addressed. This is not, however, the way things are
going at the moment, in western Europe or here, in central Anatolia.
In the end it may be that Europe needs Turkey even more than Turkey
needs Europe.
