Turkey has long been a haven of geo-political stability. But, since 2003, Turkey’s virtually unquestioned alliance with the United States has undergone a profound re-evaluation, due to the Iraq War, and the Turkish consensus on its decades-long EU candidacy has begun to wobble, owing to EU dithering. Given Turkey’s central role not only in maintaining peace in the volatile Caucasus region but also in promoting peace in the Middle East — the talks now underway between Syria and Israel are, after all, being conducted with Turkish mediation — neglecting Turkey is not only foolish, it is dangerous.
Both the dominant Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its secular rivals remain publicly committed to pursuing EU membership, but in practice doubts have emerged. French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s insistence that a referendum should be held on Turkey’s admission suggests that years of painful adjustment to EU norms will never produce the payoff of membership.
The US and the EU are evidently convinced that Turkey has nowhere else to go. The Turks, they think, will fatalistically accept any snub. But this cozy assumption overlooks a tectonic shift in Turkey’s geo-political position.
Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkey looked to the newly-independent central Asian states in a mood of pan-Turkic romanticism. These ancestral homelands exercised a hold on Turkish imaginations, but today it is business opportunities, energy resources, and other practical matters rather than ethnic unity that are creating a loose Turkic “commonwealth.”
Most striking is Turkey’s renewal of relations with Russia without damaging its ties to the newly independent post-Soviet states. Turkey’s ancient antagonism toward Russia briefly revived when the Soviet Union imploded.
In the early 1990’s, some Turkish generals saw the humiliation of Russian troops in Chechnya as part of a long-awaited revenge.
But, while Russia (and Iran) were once Turkey’s great geo-political rivals, today they are export markets and energy suppliers. Energy is the key to Turkey’s new geo-political position. Its industry and population are growing dynamically, so its energy demands are producing geo-political synergy with Russia and Iran, neither of which can afford to cut the flow of oil and gas without provoking a massive internal crisis.
Meanwhile, as Turkey’s attitude toward its neighbors has changed, its governing elite has watched the EU embrace ex-communist countries with far shakier market economies and shorter democratic records. As one Turkish general put it, “If we had joined the Warsaw Pact rather than NATO, we would be in the EU by now.”
Last summer’s re-election of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP, followed by the election of Abdullah Gul as the first president whose wife wears a headscarf, seemed to confirm the fears of anti-Islamic Europeans.
Yet, even if many AKP activists and voters are devout Muslims, Erdogan and Gul remain committed to European integration. Time is running out, however, for them to satisfy their supporters and silence their critics by achieving it.
The problem is that the AKP’s victories, together with America’s courting of Erdogan and Gul, have triggered a crisis of direction among Turkey’s once-dominant secular and pro-western elite. Even if the AKP can rely on the allegiance of millions of voters and swarms of new members anxious to join the winning side, the secularists are deeply entrenched in Turkey’s institutions, universities, media, and business.
But both ordinary AKP supporters and disillusioned secularists are now suspicious of America’s actions and motives in the region. Key military figures’ tacit backing for the Turkish Parliament’s refusal to endorse the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq suggests that Turkish nationalism could unite the AKP’s rank-and-file MPs with their otherwise implacable foes in the secular camp. If the EU were to snub Turkey openly over membership, or if America were to seem too lax on the Kurdish problem in Northern Iraq, a huge swathe of the two camps could well unite.
Turkey’s links with Israel, for example, have been strained by Israeli investment in Kurdistan. While Shimon Peres made a gesture of reconciliation by choosing Ankara as the setting for the first speech by an Israeli president to the parliament of a predominantly Muslim country, Israel’s concerns about Iran are far more serious than are Turkey’s. Israel’s two most irreconcilable enemies, Iran and Syria, are in fact among the most vocal supporters of Turkey’s hard-line stance towards the Kurds.
America’s conquest of Iraq de-stabilized Turkey’s Western orientation more than the US cares to admit. Most Turks don’t want to see their country excluded from the West, but if the EU spurns them while speeding up entry for weaker candidates, Turkey may come to feel sufficiently strong and embittered to strike out on a new geo-political course.
Mark Almond is Lecturer in History at Oriel College, Oxford University. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).
