Abstract
Historically it has been a bridge between Asia and Europe, but is Turkey now changing its position?
What “outside world” means for a Western observer and, say, an Egyptian may not be the same thing. For the former, Turkey might already have been closing its borders to the outside world with its foreign policy over the last decade. For the latter, she may be doing just the opposite. Turkey is famously a bridge between continents; it shares borders with both Greece, a member of European Union, and Syria, one of the more chaotic Middle Eastern countries of our day. So the answer is as complicated as the question about openness. It may be that Turkey is becoming more open to a certain region (the Middle East and Asia), while not being as open to another (Europe). Yiğit Bulut, one of the most influential advisers of the Turkish prime minister, wrote an article in April saying the new world order now consisted of “three main components: the American continent, the Turkey-Russia-Eurasia-Middle East line, and the China-India-Iran line.” According to Bulut, Europe doesn’t “exist” anymore and it is “impossible for it to be in the new balance of the world order”. He wrote: “The American continent alone represents the Western power focus with its values and this representation will continue by getting stronger. There won’t be any Europe in the new balance. Let me write clearly, in the new balance the new West is only America.”
This seems to confirm the suspicion of numerous Western observers about a change of direction in Turkey’s foreign policy. What the government understands as the West is the US, a close ally of Turkey since the foundation of the republic. According to this new understanding of foreign relations, Westernisation stands for the liberalisation of markets. In the eyes of the government, the French-rooted ideas of Enlightenment and Turkey’s accession to the EU are no longer as important as they have been in the past decades. Speaking to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in 2012, Erdoğan complained of waiting “at the European Union’s doorstep for 50 years” and not being allowed to become a member, despite the country’s efforts. “No other country has experienced such a thing,” he said. “We will be patient until a point.”
If that point was reached through the country’s continuing exclusion from the EU, then where does that leave us in regards to Turkey’s openness to the outside world? The European Commission has been instrumental in encouraging the country to adopt reforms in the area of freedom of expression and civil liberties. It has also urged numerous Turkish governments to tackle human rights violations in the country. If Turkey turns its back on Europe and adopts a liberal approach only in the marketplace and not in the public sphere, the question is whether the right to protest and other public freedoms will suffer as a result.
Above: A Turkish passenger ferry sets sail across the Bosphorus Straits, which divides Europe and Asia
Credit: Osman Orsal/Reuters
To understand Turkey’s relationship with the outside world, and discussions of the idea of “foreignness” and freedoms advocated by the West, it is important to look back a few years to see how it arrived at its current semi-closed position.
There was a time in Turkey when people treated foreign things with extreme suspicion. This was especially the case in the 1990s, my teenage years, when the country’s nationalist ideology reached a feverish point. In the 15 years following the military coup of 1980, Turkish state ideology portrayed foreign things as responsible for the country’s problems. For example, Turkey had battled for decades with the Kurdish question. According to the state discourse produced by the generals during the 1980s, Turkey’s Kurds had struggled to preserve their language, identity and culture not because they wanted to secure those as their inalienable rights, but because foreigners somehow convinced them to do so. It was the same with civil society. NGOs, human rights groups and public intellectuals began severely criticising the state apparatus, not because they genuinely believed there was something wrong with its machinations, but because foreigners somehow convinced them to do so.
One of the most prevalent ideas of this discourse was that the people were not “ready for democracy”. The public was portrayed as ignorant, unenlightened and lacking in sophistication. As Karl Marx famously wrote in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “They cannot represent themselves. They must be represented.” Another argument was that those who found this discourse elitist and anti-democratic felt that way because foreigners somehow convinced them to think that way.
At Istanbul’s Italian embassy, anti-foreign protesters destroyed massive amounts of pasta to make their point
According to the militarist discourse, it was the British and Americans in particular who used their financial and ideological influence to bring dangerous ideas inside the country’s borders. And following from that, the state could stop the flow of ideas if it really wanted to. A wave of anti-West protests, funded by the state, started taking place on streets. Foreign ideas were portrayed as dangerous for the country’s security and unity. In the wake of a political crisis with Italy over the deportation process of the Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan, state-affiliated groups kickstarted rallies against Italians, whom they accused of protecting Kurdish terrorists. In front of the Italian embassy in Istanbul, anti-foreign protesters destroyed massive amounts of pasta to make their point. When two Leeds fans were killed by Turkish fans in Istanbul in 2000 (a few metres away from the now famous Gezi Park, the location of last year’s protests), a jingoistic newspaper did little to conceal its delight. It boasted about how Turks had defeated the English in the stadium (the score was two-nil) and out in the street.
Killing foreigners was clearly felt to be OK, since, according to the state discourse, dark forces like George Soros and his Open Society Foundation were secretly plotting against the government under the guise of democracy, human rights and individual freedoms. It was all doublespeak; it suggested that demanding freedom was equal to demanding slavery and that the ostensibly progressive ideas of liberals would bring the country back to the middle ages.
NGOs like Greenpeace, Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly and Amnesty International were seen as suspect and their representatives were portrayed as puppets in the pay of shadowy power centres from the West. Writers with cosmopolitan views were handpicked and made scapegoats of all that went wrong in the country. Similar traitors had existed during Turkey’s war of independence in the 20th century and the revolutionary elite had severely punished them. Why not set the clocks back a few decades and do the same to those foreign agents? This was achieved through a political campaign orchestrated by mainstream national newspapers. Those who had been targeted either had to flee the country, or live with police protection so as not to be assassinated by counter-guerilla forces.
The campaign to close Turkey to the outside world took a big hit in 1999, when a massive earthquake rocked the country. The state infamously refused blood aid from the Greek government. The argument was that the purity of the Turkish blood could be contaminated. It was the government’s duty to preserve the purity of the race. The famous maxim of the day was grammatically simple: “The Turk has no other friend but the Turk.” Foreigners, be they Greeks or Arabs, were natural enemies.
According to the state discourse at the time, the most dangerous idea Turkey could have was democracy, which was a Greek concept anyway. Turks were simply not ready for it, as they had not been during the previous eight decades. If the country wanted to survive in its current form, it was crucial that an enlightened elite, and not ignorant masses, continued ruling it.
This idea changed dramatically when the representatives of the closed-Turkey discourse lost the general elections in 2002, but not quite the way Turkey-watchers and liberals had expected. According to many, the shift of power from left- and right-wing nationalists to conservative democrats (AKP) would bring about the country’s integration with the Western world. The problem with this analysis was that it ignored the anti-Orientalist element in the new government’s discourse. Turkey’s conservative democrats were different from other conservative parties in the West, in that they built their discourse on a critique of what they had seen as the imposition of an Orientalist-Westernising discourse on the country during the 20th century. Among their political aims was to reach a post-nationalist era.
When it became clear during the last five years that the conservative-democrat government’s idea of openness included openness to the Eastern world, the debate took a different turn. When, following a Davos meeting in 2009, Erdogan accused Israel of committing crimes against humanity in the West Bank, The Guardian reported how he was greeted with “cheering crowds and mass adulation” in Cairo. While Turkey’s interest in the Palestinian cause was welcomed in some quarters, it was watched with suspicion in others. Turkey wanted to portray itself as a model democracy in the Middle East, arguing that its conservative-democratic outlook could be a magic formula for countries divided between cultures of a Ba’ath-style secularism and radical Islamism. But the model country argument was problematic for many secularists at home, who advised the government to mind its own business and pay more attention to national matters.
According to its domestic critics, the key reason why the government wanted to be open to the outside world was related to Islam and the idea of a caliphate. This institution from Ottoman times gave the power of representation of all Muslims to the Ottoman Sultan and his office in Istanbul. After the Ottomans defeated the Arabs and started controlling the Arabian peninsula in the 16th century, the title of Caliph was transferred to Ottoman rulers and symbols of the Caliphate were moved to Istanbul. Towards the late 18th century, Ottoman sultans started using the Caliph title in international affairs and the title made Istanbul the centre of all Muslim people. Until it was abolished in 1924, the title gave Ottomans extra-territorial influence over all Islamic lands. The new republic’s secular politics, on the other hand, were based on self-sufficiency, and territorial and cultural independence.
For conservative-democrats Turkey is better off doing business in Asian and African countries where it has historical ties
So there have been different approaches, and motivations, to openness in Turkey’s political culture. For nationalists, Turkey is better off when it is self-sufficient. It has plenty of resources and it does not need Europe, the US, or business ventures in Africa, to survive. In contrast, for liberals, Turkey is better off as a partner of Europe and a full EU member. Commerce and cultural integration with European partners are good things for the country and are a natural continuation of the Westernising vision of its founders. For conservative-democrats Turkey is better off doing business in Asian and African countries where it has long-held historical ties.
The government’s ruthless response to environmental protesters in 2013 unsettled this picture further. According to Turkish officials, the protests were partly provoked by power centres outside Turkey. When the government looked for those responsible in leaking wiretaps about Turkish politicians on Twitter and YouTube, the category of “outside world” provided an useful answer. But the clampdown on social media that began in March was partly paradoxical, as it came from politicians who are themselves very active on those platforms. The prime minister has more than four million followers on Twitter, who heard nothing from him there for two weeks after a ban was imposed on that website. It seemed as if, in the harsh election atmosphere of Turkey, the international ambitions of the government were paused. Entrepreneurial and political openness to the outside world, whether it involved Europeans or Muslims, was put on hold because of national concerns.
During the last couple of years liberals and secularists, who have demanded openness to the Western world, have felt disappointed by what they identify as a decrease in Turkey’s willingness to adopt EU reforms. Now it may be the conservatives’ turn to criticise the government because of its loss of interest in the outside world. If Turkey wants to play an influential role beyond its borders (in the Middle East as well as in Europe, where millions of Turks live), it will need to remember the responsibilities that come with being more open to the outside world.
