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May 16, 2004
Review: Turkey’s identity conundrum
AN abiding feature, nay pillar, of Turkey’s foreign policy since the founding of the republic, 80 years ago, has been its desperate toil for acceptance as a part of Europe. It has been intensified into a national passion since the Treaty of Rome launched the European Union in 1960. Turkey was one of the earliest countries to stake a claim for its membership. That its bid has been consistently stalled by the Europeans underlines the severity of its handicap.
Turkey’s European problem goes back to more than five centuries. It started with the Ottomans rising on Europe’s firmament as a great power and has never since gone away. The Europeans, having lost half the continent to the Turks, still took them as outsiders and invaders. But the Ottomans carried no baggage of identity search as an obsession. In fact they never pressed their European credentials; they felt no need for it.
In a timely compilation of a number of well-researched papers by a galaxy of some very authentic scholars and researchers on all aspects of Turkey’s foreign policy in the 21st century, Professors Tareq Y. Ismael and Mustafa Aydin — the former teaching political science at the University of Calgary, and the latter international relations at Ankara University — dig out historical evidence to make the point that Ottoman sultans, viciously caricatured in the annals of European history, acted with cool rationale and responsibility to balance out the cut throat game of power.
Sultan Suleiman, the Magnificent, stood firmly, for instance, between the rest of Europe and the predatory expansionist instincts of Emperor Charles V — the marauding son-in-law of Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragon. But for Suleiman’s military might and diplomatic acumen, the Europe of today might have been a different kettle of fish all together.
But the moment Turkey became weak, it wasn’t only set upon with venom by the European vultures, but they also blatantly refused to assign any European credentials or persona to Turkey. They coined a vicious and vindictive shibboleth and stuck it on Turkey like a stigma: Turkey may be “ in Europe”, it said, but it is “ not of Europe”.
The framers of Turkish foreign policy may be shy to admit it, but the Islamic faith of the Turks is preponderantly at the bottom of this ingrained hostility. As a very perceptive chapter of the book on the historical (Ottoman) persona of Turkey in the European minds vividly brings it up, contemporary European leaders still seem smitten by old prejudices. As recently as in January 1997, the then Dutch foreign minister, Hans Van Mierlo, stood up in the European Parliament, sympathized with the Turkish frustrations on being constantly thwarted from Europe, then became brutally frank and said it was “time to be honest” and admit that the problem riveted on ushering a large Muslim state into Europe. He then dared his peers to ponder, “Do we wish this to happen?”
Their fixation with Europe, and a craving to be accepted as Europeans, saddles the Turkish foreign policy framers with a huge mill around their neck. Because they must never be perceived by the Europeans, or the West as a whole, to be deviating from their supposed European axis, the practitioners of foreign relations in Turkey must give pride of place to their secularist moorings, endowed to them by modern Turkey’s architect, Kemal Ataturk. This, per se, demands keeping a distance from the Islamic world.
A well-articulated paper on Turkish-Iranian relations in the post-Cold War era stresses this point, with great candour, that Turkish foreign policy experts continually threw spanners in the works, vis-à-vis Iran because they viewed the Islamic revolution there from their narrow perspective and concluded that, because of its Islamic roots, it couldn’t be anything else but at odds with Turkey’s secularism. The Islamist-reformist prime minister, Nejmuddin Erbakan, fell a victim to the ire of these secularists who, in cahoots with the scheming Turkish generals, turned the tables on him and shunted him out of power.
Turkey’s spiralling relations with Israel that have jumped exponentially in the last decade are also a product of this secular and Euro-centric foreign policy culture. Because Israel is secular, for the record, and democratic, as its mentors never tire of reminding the whole world, therefore it is worth cozying up to for Turkish foreign policy makers. It must go to the credit of Turkey’s current, inherently Islamist, government that it stood well up to crude American pressure last year and refused to become a conduit for aggression against Iraq.
Turkey’s pronounced Euro-centrism creates anomalies for it in what is, without doubt, a natural and historic bastion for it: Central Asia and Caucasus. Except for Armenia, which is Christian and instinctively hostile to Turkey because of historical reasons, and Tajikistan, which is predominantly Persian-speaking, the rest of the newly liberated countries in this large swathe of geography have distinct Turkish lineage and pedigree.
There was a great effervescence and euphoria in Turkey for creating a vast new arc of Turkic states, based on common language, culture and antecedents, when these states were finally released from the oppressive Russian bondage in 1989. Turkey rushed into the perceived vacuum with great élan. But reality soon dawned and impeded acceleration for fear that the European callings of Turkey may get diluted or faded in the process.
It must, however, be heart-breaking for the makers of Turkish foreign policy that despite their impulsive straining not to displease the Europeans, and by implication jeopardize their prospects for acceptance in the European ‘club’, the response from the other side is still fairly tepid, if not cool. That the European countries, particularly Turkey’s long hostile neighbour Greece, are keeping Turkey on coals and grilling it given any opportunity must truly be frustrating in the extreme. The most recent arm-twisting and ill-disguised blackmail of Turkey on the Cyprus unification issue is a befitting reminder of its unmitigated handicap in Europe.
Turkey’s Foreign Policy in the 21st Century: A Changing Role in World Politics.
Edited by Tareq Y. Ismael and Mustafa Aydin
Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Gower House, Croft Road, Aldershot, Hants GU 11 3 HR, UK
Website: www.ashgate.com
ISBN 0 7546 3501 5
224pp. Price not listed
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