The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (26 page)

Confronted by rising Islamist sentiment, Turkey’s rulers attempted to adopt fundamentalist practices and co-opt fundamentalist support. In the 1980s and 1990s the supposedly secular Turkish government maintained an Office of Religious Affairs with a budget larger than those of some ministries, financed the construction of mosques, required religious instruction in all public schools, and provided funding to Islamic schools, which quintupled in number during the 1980s, enrolling about 15 percent of secondary school children, and which preached Islamist doctrines and produced thousands of graduates, many of whom entered government service. In symbolic but dramatic contrast to France, the government in practice allowed schoolgirls to wear the traditional Muslim headscarf, seventy years after Ataturk banned the fez.
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These government actions, in large part motivated by the desire to take the wind out of the
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sails of the Islamists, testify to how strong that wind was in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Second, the resurgence of Islam changed the character of Turkish politics. Political leaders, most notably Turgut Özal, quite explicitly identified themselves with Muslim symbols and policies. In Turkey, as elsewhere, democracy reinforced indigenization and the return to religion. “In their eagerness to curry favor with the public and gain votes, politicians—and even the military, the very bastion and guardian of secularism—had to take into account the religious aspirations of the population: not a few of the concessions they granted smacked of demagoguery.” Popular movements were religiously inclined. While elite and bureaucratic groups, particularly the military, were secularly oriented, Islamist sentiments manifested themselves within the armed forces, and several hundred cadets were purged from military academies in 1987 because of suspected Islamist sentiments. The major political parties increasingly felt the need to seek electoral support from revived Muslim
tarikas,
or select societies, which Ataturk had banned.
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In the March 1994 local elections, the fundamentalist Welfare Party, alone among the five major parties, increased its share of the vote, receiving roughly 19 percent of the votes as compared with 21 percent for Prime Minister Ciller’s True Path Party and 20 percent for the late Özal’s Motherland Party. The Welfare Party captured control of Turkey’s two principal cities, Istanbul and Ankara, and ran extremely strong in the southeastern part of the country. In the December 1995 elections the Welfare Party won more votes and seats in parliament than any other party and six months later took over the government in coalition with one of the secular parties. As in other countries, support for the fundamentalists came from the young, returned migrants, the “downtrodden and dispossessed,” and “new urban migrants, the ‘sans culottes’ of the big cities.”
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Third, the resurgence of Islam affected Turkish foreign policy. Under President Özal’s leadership, Turkey decisively sided with the West in the Gulf War, anticipating that this action would further its membership in the European Community. This consequence did not, however, materialize, and NATO hesitation over what response it would make if Turkey had been attacked by Iraq during that war did not reassure the Turks as to how NATO would respond to a non-Russian threat to their country.
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Turkish leaders tried to expand their military connection with Israel, which provoked intense criticism from Turkish Islamists. More significantly, during the 1980s Turkey expanded its relations with Arab and other Muslim countries and in the 1990s actively promoted Islamic interests by providing significant support to the Bosnian Muslims as well as to Azerbaijan. With respect to the Balkans, Central Asia, or the Middle East, Turkish foreign policy was becoming increasingly Islamicized.

For many years Turkey met two of the three minimum requirements for a torn country to shift its civilizational identity. Turkey’s elites overwhelmingly supported the move and its public was acquiescent. The elites of the recipient,
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Western civilization, however, were not receptive. While the issue hung in the balance, the resurgence of Islam within Turkey activated anti-Western sentiments among the public and began to undermine the secularist, pro-Western orientation of Turkish elites. The obstacles to Turkey’s becoming fully European, the limits on its ability to play a dominant role with respect to the Turkic former Soviet republics, and the rise of Islamic tendencies eroding the Ataturk inheritance, all seemed to insure that Turkey will remain a torn country.

Reflecting these conflicting pulls, Turkish leaders regularly described their country as a “bridge” between cultures. Turkey, Prime Minister Tansu Ciller argued in 1993, is both a “Western democracy” and “part of the Middle East” and “bridges two civilizations, physically and philosophically.” Reflecting this ambivalence, in public in her own country Ciller often appeared as a Muslim, but when addressing NATO she argued that “the geographic and political fact is that Turkey is a European country.” President Suleyman Demirel similarly called Turkey “a very significant bridge in a region extending from west to east, that is from Europe to China.”
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A bridge, however, is an artificial creation connecting two solid entities but is part of neither. When Turkey’s leaders term their country a bridge, they euphemistically confirm that it is torn.

Turkey became a torn country in the 1920s, Mexico not until the 1980s. Yet their historical relations with the West have certain similarities. Like Turkey, Mexico had a distinctly non-Western culture. Even in the twentieth century, as Octavio Paz put it, “the core of Mexico is Indian. It is non-European.”
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In the nineteenth century, Mexico, like the Ottoman empire, was dismembered by Western hands. In the second and third decades of the twentieth century, Mexico, like Turkey, went through a revolution which established a new basis of national identity and a new one-party political system. In Turkey, however, the revolution involved both a rejection of traditional Islamic and Ottoman culture and an effort to import Western culture and to join the West. In Mexico, as in Russia, the revolution involved incorporation and adaptation of elements of Western culture, which generated a new nationalism opposed to the capitalism and democracy of the West. Thus for sixty years Turkey tried to define itself as European, while Mexico tried to define itself in opposition to the United States. From the 1930s to the 1980s, Mexico’s leaders pursued economic and foreign policies that challenged American interests.

In the 1980s this changed. President Miguel de la Madrid began and his successor President Carlos Salinas de Gortari carried forward a full-scale redefinition of Mexican purposes, practices, and identity, the most sweeping effort at change since the Revolution of 1910. Salinas became, in effect, the Mustafa Kemal of Mexico. Ataturk promoted secularism and nationalism, dominant themes in the West of his time; Salinas promoted economic liberalism, one of two dominant themes in the West of his time (the other, political democracy, he did not embrace). As with Ataturk, these views were broadly
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shared by political and economic elites, many of whom, like Salinas and de la Madrid, had been educated in the United States. Salinas dramatically reduced inflation, privatized large numbers of public enterprises, promoted foreign investment, reduced tariffs and subsidies, restructured the foreign debt, challenged the power of labor unions, increased productivity, and brought Mexico into the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada. Just as Ataturk’s reforms were designed to transform Turkey from a Muslim Middle Eastern country into a secular European country, Salinas’s reforms were designed to change Mexico from a Latin American country into a North American country.

This was not an inevitable choice for Mexico. Conceivably Mexican elites could have continued to pursue the anti-U.S. Third World nationalist and protectionist path that their predecessors had followed for most of the century. Alternatively, as some Mexicans urged, they could have attempted to develop with Spain, Portugal, and South American countries an Iberian association of nations.

Will Mexico succeed in its North American quest? The overwhelming bulk of the political, economic, and intellectual elites favor that course. Also, unlike the situation with Turkey, the overwhelming bulk of the political, economic, and intellectual elites of the recipient civilization have favored Mexico’s cultural realignment. The crucial intercivilizational issue of immigration highlights this difference. The fear of massive Turkish immigration generated resistance from both European elites and publics to bringing Turkey into Europe. In contrast, the fact of massive Mexican immigration, legal and illegal, into the United States was part of Salinas’s argument for NAFTA: “Either you accept our goods or you accept our people.” In addition, the cultural distance between Mexico and the United States is far less than that between Turkey and Europe. Mexico’s religion is Catholicism, its language is Spanish, its elites were oriented historically to Europe (where they sent their children to be educated) and more recently to the United States (where they now send their children). The accommodation between Anglo-American North America and Spanish-Indian Mexico should be considerably easier than that between Christian Europe and Muslim Turkey. Despite these commonalities, after ratification of NAFTA, opposition to any closer involvement with Mexico developed in the Untied States with demands for restrictions on immigration, complaints about factories moving south, and questions about the ability of Mexico to adhere to North American concepts of liberty and the rule of law.
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The third prerequisite to the successful shift of identity by a torn country is general acquiescence, although not necessarily support, by its public. The importance of this factor depends, in some measure, on how important the views of the public are in the decision-making processes of the country. Mexico’s pro-Western stance was, as of 1995, untested by democratization. The New Year’s Day revolt of a few thousand well-organized and externally supported
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guerrillas in Chiapas was not, in itself, an indication of substantial resistance to North Americanization. The sympathetic response it engendered, however, among Mexican intellectuals, journalists, and other shapers of public opinion suggested that North Americanization in general and NAFTA in particular could encounter increasing resistance from Mexican elites and the public. President Salinas very consciously gave economic reform and Westernization priority over political reform and democratization. Both economic development and the increasing involvement with the United States, however, will strengthen forces promoting a real democratization of the Mexican political system. The key question for the future of Mexico is: To what extent will modernization and democratization stimulate de-Westernization, producing its withdrawal from or the drastic weakening of NAFTA and parallel changes in the policies imposed on Mexico by its Western-oriented elites of the 1980s and 1990s? Is Mexico’s North Americanization compatible with its democratization?

In contrast to Russia, Turkey, and Mexico, Australia has, from its origins, been a Western society. Throughout the twentieth century it was closely allied with first Britain and then the United States; and during the Cold War it was not only a member of the West but also of the U.S.-U.K.-Canadian-Australian military and intelligence core of the West. In the early 1990s, however, Australia’s political leaders decided, in effect, that Australia should defect from the West, redefine itself as an Asian society, and cultivate close ties with its geographical neighbors. Australia, Prime Minister Paul Keating declared, must cease being a “branch office of empire,” become a republic, and aim for “enmeshment” in Asia. This was necessary, he argued, in order to establish Australia’s identity as an independent country. “Australia cannot represent itself to the world as a multicultural society, engage in Asia, make that link and make it persuasively while in some way, at least in constitutional terms, remaining a derivative society.” Australia, Keating declared, had suffered untold years of “anglophilia and torpor” and continued association with Britain would be “debilitating to our national culture, our economic future and our destiny in Asia and the Pacific.” Foreign Minister Gareth Evans expressed similar sentiments.
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The case for redefining Australia as an Asian country was grounded on the assumption that economics overrides culture in shaping the destiny of nations. The central impetus was the dynamic growth of East Asian economies, which in turn spurred the rapid expansion of Australian trade with Asia. In 1971 East and Southeast Asia absorbed 39 percent of Australia’s exports and provided 21 percent of Australia’s imports. By 1994 East and Southeast Asia were taking 62 percent of Australia’s exports and providing 41 percent of its imports. In contrast, in 1991 11.8 percent of Australian exports went to the European Community and 10.1 percent to the United States. This deepening economic tie with
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Asia was reinforced in Australian minds by a belief that the world was moving in the direction of three major economic blocs and that Australia’s place was in the East Asian bloc.

Despite these economic connections, the Australian Asian ploy appears unlikely to meet any of the requirements for success for a civilization shift by a torn country. First, in the mid-1990s Australian elites were far from overwhelmingly enthusiastic about this course. In some measure, this was a partisan issue with leaders of the Liberal Party ambivalent or opposed. The Labor government also came under substantial criticism from a variety of intellectuals and journalists. No clear elite consensus existed for the Asian choice, Second, public opinion was ambivalent. From 1987 to 1993, the proportion of the Australian public favoring the end of the monarchy rose from 21 percent to 46 percent. At that point, however, support began to waver and to erode. The proportion of the public supporting deletion of the Union Jack from the Australian flag dropped from 42 percent in May of 1992 to 35 percent in August 1993. As one Australian official observed in 1992, “It’s hard for the public to stomach it. When I say periodically that Australia should be part of Asia, I can’t tell you how many hate letters I get.”
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