urkey was once a forgotten country: on the periphery of Europe, fixated with joining the European Union, a reliable NATO ally during the Cold War, and unfriendly to Iran and the Arab countries. No longer. Warmer relations with the Middle East and cooler ones with the west are now the norm, not the exception. Unsurprisingly the country’s foreign policy is at the centre of debates raging on the future trajectory of this geo-strategic nation. So, in which direction is it heading? Conventional wisdom increasingly sees Turkey as drifting towards the Iran-Syria axis at the expense of Israel, Europe and the United States. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has, after all, engaged – to quote the Israeli Foreign Ministry – in a continuous verbal ‘tongue-lashing’ against Israel since last year’s Gaza conflict, questioned western motives towards Iran, embraced Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir and deployed rhetorical assaults against French President Nicolas Sarkozy for opposing Turkey’s accession to the European Union (EU). Turkey, in other words, is reflecting the ballad by Rudyard Kipling, ‘Oh East is Eastand West is West, and never the twain shall meet!’ Disagreements between Ankara and Washington are widening on Iran’s nuclear plans, the Middle East peace process, and the possibility of recognising the events of 1915 as an Armenian genocide. Domestically, more discomforting events are on the horizon, from the near-standstill of the government’s ‘Kurdish initiative,’ a democratic package to settle the long-standing Kurdish issue, to the deteriorating political atmosphere.
Is Turkey condemned to a breakdown with the west? Although on the surface, it looks like the country is abandoning western leanings; the reality is far more complicated. Following the end of the Cold War twenty years ago, some sort of re-alignment was inevitable. Turkey was bound to re-integrate economically and politically into the Middle East and Eurasia, including with neighbouring Iran and Syria. This is most visible in the altering foreign trade picture. In 2008 Turkey’s trade with the EU dropped below fifty percent for the first time, while that same year Middle Eastern countries accounted for 8.7 percent of its imports and 19.3 percent of its exports – both record figures. Another critical driver of the foreign policy re-orientation is Turkey’s acute energy dependency. It is reliant on Russia and Iran for 63 percent and twenty percent respectively of its gas consumption; this impacts directly on foreign policymaking. Islamic nationalism or secular citizenship? Much of the discussion on foreign policy is taking place in a vacuum, disconnected from the internal environment.
This is a crucial mistake, as history and the domestic situation lie at the heart of the emerging foreign policy. Specifically, the assumption is that the ruling Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP), supported by public opinion, is pursuing an ideological anti-western foreign policy contrary to the country’s traditional secular, pro-western outlook. That assumption belies a proper structural assessment of which way Turkey is actually proceeding. Starting from basics, Turkey is not a predominantly secular state. Republican Turkey was founded on two conflicting ideologies: Turkish Sunni Islamic nationalism and secular citizenship. Its constitution declares that Islam is not a source of law and public policy yet the state subsidises eighty thousand Sunni mosques, pays the salaries of ninety thousand imams and Islamic officials, and mandates religion classes focussed on Sunni Islam in schools.
These two conflicting components of state tradition condition foreign policy. Furthermore, public opinion seems to prefer warmer relations with Europe rather than the Middle East or Russia: 22 percent of Turks favoured ‘closer cooperation’ with the countries of the European Union on ‘international matters’ compared to only ten percent and three percent choosing countries of the Middle East and Russia respectively, according to last year’s Transatlantic Survey by the German Marshall Fund. Forty-three percent in the same survey preferred Turkey to ‘act alone’, an isolationist streak fostered by the country’s republican founders. Most revealing of all, almost half of respondents still consider EU membership a ‘good thing’, a figure that has been increasing in recent years despite the open hostility expressed by France and Germany. Given the legacy of the Republic’s founders, it comes as no surprise that Ankara cooperated with the US to defeat ‘godless’ communism, built low-key relations with Israel – except for unusually close ties in the latter half of the 1990s – and applied for EU membership in 1987.
At home, it was preoccupied with challenging the perceived left-wing threat to the nation’s Sunni Islamic heritage. Foreign policy is an uneasy coexistence between ideology and pragmatism, a reflection of the domestic imbalance between religious nationalism and secular citizenship. Since the early 1990s, the confluence of domestic and international events, ranging from the gradual consolidation of civilian rule, to the 2003 Iraq war, the rapid adoption of modern communication technologies, and the vagaries of EU accession, are forcing people to confront the contradictions of balancing between the twin perspectives. Similarly, the outcome of the Turkey- Armenia reconciliation and Cyprus, whether positive or negative, are encouraging a rethink. Muddling through these two mutually exclusive ideologies is no longer sustainable. A choice needs to be made between a state and society based on secular citizenship or one anchored in religious nationalism. That rethink is going on with minimal intervention from outsiders such as the EU.
Predicting the future course of these internal discussions is fraught with imponderables and uncertainty. Nevertheless, the early indications are that the nation is moving closer to secular citizenship: the precipitous decline in popularity of the AKP and the military, public displeasure with the existing political class, the appearance of non-ideological, centrist political movements and a maturing debate on the Kurdish issue, Armenia and the role of religion in state and society. Naturally, the process would have been greatly eased by a smoother EU accessionprocedure; the flip side is that Turkey is taking full ownership of the change. Whatever the signs, the outcome is not a foregone conclusion. It is possible – just possible – that Turkey will come to embody the often-forgotten continuation of Kipling’s ballad: ‘But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!’
By Fadi Hakura
