The Revenge of Geography (43 page)

Ozal died suddenly in 1993 at age sixty-five, after ten years as prime minister and president. This had profound repercussions for the future of Turkey, another instance about how the lives and deaths of individual men and women affect the destiny of geopolitics as much as geography, which retains its primacy mainly because it is permanent. Because Ozal in his own person held together apparent contradictions—pro-Islamism and pro-Americanism—his death shattered
a tenuous national consensus, though this took some years to unfold. For a decade after Ozal’s death, Turkey had uninspiring secularist leaders, even as economic power and Islamic devoutness continued to burgeon in the Anatolian heartland. By late 2002, the whiskey-sipping secular elite was discredited, and an election delivered an absolute parliamentary majority to the Islamist Justice and Development Party led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the former mayor of Istanbul. Istanbul, while the home of the secular elite, was also the home of millions of poor devout Turks who had migrated in from the Anatolian countryside in search of jobs to pry their way into the lower middle class; it was these millions to whom Erdogan had given a voice.

When Erdogan assumed control, he gave power to a wave of Islamism, strengthened by Ozal, that had been creeping back into Turkish life under the radar screen of official Kemalism. In 1945, there were 20,000 mosques in Turkey; in 1985, 72,000, and that number has since risen steadily, out of proportion to the population. According to some studies, almost two-thirds of urban working-class Turks prayed daily, as well as most rural Turks, percentages that have only gone up in recent years.
⁴
A revived Islam has competed extremely well with the secular ideologies of the right (fascism) and the left (Marxism) “as a savior of the disillusioned urban youth,” for whom Kemalism was not a “socio-ethical system” to guide daily life, writes the London-based author and journalist Dilip Hiro. Once a normal nationalism tied to Islam took root, Kemalism gradually lost its “raison d’être.”
⁵

Yet when the Turkish Parliament voted in March 2003 against allowing U.S. troops to stage in Turkey for an invasion of Iraq, it was not really the Islamist Justice Party that undermined the American position, but the secularists, who, by this point, had joined Europeans in their anti-Americanism as a reaction to the unsubtle post-9/11 rhetoric and deportment of the George W. Bush administration. The disastrous outcome of the Iraq invasion, which led to sectarian warfare inside Iraq, even as no weapons of mass destruction were found, roughly coincided with the realization that Turkey would not be admitted
to the EU. The upshot of these dramatic events—coming at a time when Turkey had a new, popular, and deeply entrenched Islamist government—was to shift the political and cultural pendulum dramatically in the country toward the Middle East and away from the West for the first time in literally centuries.

In a sense, as I’ve said, the United States was hoist on its own petard. For decades American leaders had proclaimed democratic Turkey as a NATO, pro-Israel bastion in the Middle East, even as they knew that Turkish foreign and security policy was in the hands of its military. Finally, in the early twenty-first century, Turkey had emerged as truly politically, economically, and culturally democratic, reflecting the Islamic nature of the mass of Turks, and the result was a relatively anti-American, anti-Israeli Turkey.

In the autumn of 1998, in Kayseri in central Anatolia, I interviewed leading Turkish Islamists, including Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s current president. The occasion was a meeting and rally of the Virtue Party, which later disbanded and reorganized itself as the Justice Party. The Virtue Party was itself a reincarnation of the Islamic Welfare Party, which had been untainted by corruption and sought to bring about the social justice that had existed under Ottoman Islam. In my report on those meetings, published in 2000, I got a big thing right and a big thing wrong. The big thing I got right was that these people, though a minority party, were about to be become a majority in a few years. And their fundamental theme was democracy: the more democratic Turkey became, the more their Islamist power would increase; for they linked the West with Turkey’s autocratic military power structure, which was ironic, but true.

“When will the United States support democracy in Turkey?” the man next to me at the Virtue Party dinner had asked. “Because until now it has been supporting the military.” Before waiting for my answer, he added: “I have been to Israel, and there, democracy is more developed than in Turkey.”
⁶

And that was the big thing I got wrong. Because moderate Turkish Islamists were then relatively open-minded about Israel, I assumed they would always be so. In fact, circumstances would change dramatically:
the result of the Turks’ own historical evolution as electronic communications brought them into closer contact with pan-Islamist thought (the defeat of geography in other words), and the specific actions and mistakes of both the American and Israeli governments in the coming years.

At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Turkish geography mirrored Turkish politics. Bordering Greece in the west and Iran in the east, Bulgaria in the northwest and Iraq in the southeast, Azerbaijan in the northeast and Syria in the south, even as more than half of Anatolia is Black Sea or Mediterranean coastline, Turkey is truly equidistant between Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. The same with its foreign and national security policy. Turkey was still a member of NATO, cooperated with U.S. intelligence services, maintained an embassy in Israel, and had facilitated indirect peace talks between Israel and Syria. But it was conducting military incursions against the Kurds in northern Iraq, was helping Iran avoid sanctions for developing a nuclear weapon, and was politically and emotionally behind the most radical Palestinian groups.

The Israeli commando raid in May 2010 against a flotilla of six ships bringing humanitarian supplies from Turkey to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, and the ferocious Turkish reaction to that, was the catalyst for announcing to the world Turkey’s historic pivot from West to East. Turks saw the struggle for Palestine not as an Arab-Israeli fight, in which as Turks they could play no part, but as a conflict pitting Muslims against Jews, in which Turks could champion the Muslim cause. Among the key insights that often get overlooked in the late Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington’s
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
, of which Turkey represents a prime illustration, is that globalization, while a force for unity on one level, is a force for civilizational tension on another, since it brings large and spread-out solidarity groups together; and so while the Islamic world lacks political cohesion, Islamic consciousness nevertheless rises alongside globalization. Thus, the Islamic aspect of Turkish identity grows. This happens at a time when the non-Western world becomes healthier, more urbane, and more literate,
so that there is a rise in the political and economic power of middle tier nations such as Turkey.
⁷

Turks helped lead the House of Islam for almost 850 years, from the Seljuk Turk victory over the Byzantines at the 1071 Battle of Manzikert in eastern Anatolia to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Western Allies in 1918. Only for the past century have the Arabs really been at the head of Muslim civilization. In fact, until the Iranian Revolution of 1978–1979, even the then 50 million Muslims in Iran were largely invisible to the West; just as 75 million Muslims in present-day Turkey were largely invisible until the Gaza flotilla crisis erupted at the same time that the Turks made a deal with Iran to accept its enriched uranium, and voted against sanctioning Iran at the United Nations. Suddenly, Western publics and media woke up to the blunt geographical fact of Turkey.

Then in 2011 came the uprisings against tired autocracies across North Africa and the Middle East, a beneficiary of which in a historical and geographical sense was Turkey. Ottoman Turkey ruled North Africa and the Levant for hundreds of years in the modern era. While this rule was despotic, it was not so oppressive as to leave a lasting scar in the minds of today’s Arabs. Turkey is an exemplar of Islamic democracy that can serve as a role model for these newly liberated states, especially as its democracy evolved from a hybrid regime, with generals and politicians sharing power until recently—a process that some Arab states will go through en route to freer systems. With 75 million people and a healthy economic growth rate until recently, Turkey is also a demographic and economic juggernaut that can project soft power throughout the Mediterranean. It simply has advantages that other major Mediterranean states proximate to North Africa—Greece, Italy, and Spain—do not.

Yet there are key things to know about Turkish Islam, which indicate that the West may find a silver lining in Turkey’s rise in the Middle East.

Indeed, if we knew a little more about Jalal ed-Din Rumi, the thirteenth-century founder of the Turkic
tariqat
that was associated with the whirling dervishes, we would have been less surprised by
Islam’s compatibility with democracy, and Islamic fundamentalism might not seem so monolithic and threatening. Rumi dismissed “immature fanatics” who scorn music and poetry.
⁸
He cautioned that a beard or mustache on a cleric is no sign of wisdom. Rumi favored the individual over the crowd, and consistently spoke against tyranny. Rumi’s legacy is more applicable to democratizing tendencies in the Muslim world than are figures of the Arab and Iranian pantheons with whom the West is more familiar. The eclectic nature of Turkish Islam, as demonstrated by Rumi, goes together with Turkey’s very Westernization. Turkey’s democratic system, though imperfect and influenced for too long by an overbearing military, incorporated orthodox Islamic elements for decades. Unlike quite a few Arab states and Iran, Turkey’s industrial base and middle class were not created out of thin air by oil revenues. Again, we have geography to thank for the advanced level of human development in Turkey compared to most places in the Middle East. Turkey’s position as a land bridge not only connects it to Europe, but made for a wave of invasions by Central Asian nomads that invigorated Anatolian civilization, of which Rumi’s poetry is an example. It was the Ottoman Empire that played a large role in bringing European politics—at least the Balkan variety of it—into intimate contact with that of the Middle East. The national independence struggles of the nineteenth century in Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece encouraged the rise of Arab nationalist societies in Damascus and Beirut. Similarly, modern terrorism was born at the beginning of the twentieth century in Macedonia and Bulgaria, before filtering into Greater Syria.

In the early twenty-first century, Turkey boasted a vibrant and politically dominant Islamic movement, an immense military capability compared to almost any country in the Middle East save Israel, an economy that had grown 8 percent annually for many years, and still managed over 5 percent growth during the worldwide recession, and a dam system that made Turkey a water power to the same extent that Iran and Saudi Arabia were oil powers. These factors, seen and unseen, allow Turkey to compete with Iran for the locus of Islamic leadership and legitimacy. For years Turkey had been almost as lonely
as Israel in the Middle East. Its Ottoman era overlordship complicated its relationship with Arabs, even as its relations with neighboring Syria were overtly hostile, and those with Baathist Iraq and fundamentalist Iran tense. In 1998, Turkey was actually on the brink of war with Syria over Damascus’s support for the radical anti-Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party. During this time Turkey maintained a virtual military alliance with Israel, confirming its status as a Middle East pariah. But all of this began to change with Erdogan’s and the Justice Party’s assumption of power, which came at the same time as the West’s downward plunge in Turkish public opinion, owing to Turkey’s virtual rejection by the European Union and an increasingly truculent right-wing America and right-wing Israel.

Turkey did not withdraw from NATO, nor break diplomatic relations with Israel. Rather, under Erdogan’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey adopted a policy of “no problems” with its immediate neighbors, which in particular meant historical rapprochements with Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Because of Turkey’s economy, so much more technologically advanced than its neighbors—and growing faster, too—Turkey’s robust influence in the Balkans to the west and the Caucasus to the east was already an established fact. Bulgaria, Georgia, and Azerbaijan were all flush with Turkish appliances and other consumer goods. But it was the Turkish championing of the Palestinians, and the intense popularity of the Turkish people which that engendered in Gaza, that made Turkey an integral organizational fact in the Arab world to a degree it had not enjoyed since Ottoman times. Neo-Ottomanism might have been a specific strategy developed by Davutoglu, but it also constituted a natural political evolution: the upshot of Turkey’s commanding geographical and economic position made suddenly relevant by its own intensifying Islamization. Neo-Ottomanism’s attractiveness rested on the unstated assumption that Turkey lacked both the means and the will in this era of globalization to actually carve out a new-old empire in the Middle East; rather, it rested on Turkey’s normalization of relations with its former Arab dependencies, for whom Ottoman rule was distant enough, and benign enough, at least when
viewed across the span of the decades and centuries, so as to welcome Turkey back into the fold now that it had turned hostility against Israel up several notches.