Turkey

I coauthored this post with my friend and colleague, Michael Koplow. He is the author of the blog: Ottomans & Zionists. When Turks go to the polls on August 10 to directly elect their president for the first time in the Turkish Republic’s history, the potential leading vote getter will be a man of impeccable religious credentials. This candidate has a graduate degree from al-Azhar University and previously served as the secretary-general of the Jeddah-based Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). Before being appointed to this position that he held for eight years, he was the founding director-general of the OIC-affiliated Research Center for Islamic History, Art, and Culture. While in Saudi Arabia, he proved himself both an adept and savvy leader of the multinational organization in his charge as well as a faithful servant of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its worldview. He has decried the loss of spirituality in Islam and is himself the son of a well-known Islamic scholar. Yet this candidate is not Recep Tayyip Erdogan; it is Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, who is carrying the banner as the joint candidate of the secular Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the rightwing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). For all of its militant secularism and decades of dominating Turkish politics, the secular old guard has lost the battle with the political forces that represent piety and religious conservatism, a fact that they implicitly acknowledge with Ihsanoglu—their white flag of surrender. Despite his formal training as a chemist, Ihsanoglu has devoted a considerable portion of his career to religious study and outreach. Of Ihsanoglu’s 25 books, nine are devoted to Islamic thought and culture. That Turks are being offered a choice between two religious candidates should be the final death knell for the meme that Turkey is a state being pulled apart by a battle between Islam and secularism. The truth is that religion won out a long time ago, and the fundamental divides in Turkish politics and society are organized around different fault lines. Today in Turkey there is an unmistakable sense of “Muslim-ness.” Conventional accounts of Turkish politics since the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) rise to power often use “Islamist” and “Islamism” to describe the party, but these terms have become one-dimensional and suggest parallels to groups like the Muslim Brotherhood without capturing the true nature of Turkey’s ruling party. The Justice and Development Party’s Muslim-ness is less targeted and more diffuse than Islamism, and while it certainly belongs within a broad classification of Islamist groups in the Muslim world, its underlying philosophical concerns and agenda are quite different from those organizations. This is a function of the Turkish experience, in which Muslim-ness involves a style of politics and a social setting in which piety flows through society. Limits on alcohol consumption or women donning the hicab reflect this religious sensibility, but Muslim-ness is broader. Toward this end, Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party have made exploration and expression of one’s Muslim identity not only safe and acceptable, but indeed valorized. Erdogan himself personifies the new Turkish man whose singular quality is being both proudly pious and Turkish. And the new Turkish woman, best represented by the wares of upscale fashion houses like Zühre or its down-market cousin, Armine, is quiet, confident, gorgeous, and covered. What is striking about these developments is how unremarkable they are in a political setting where not long ago, the hicab and public expressions of religiosity were indicators of reactionary backwardness. Of course, drawing conclusions about the direction of society on the extent to which Turkish women are covering their hair in public is bound to be fraught with misunderstanding as well as bad social science, but taken with a range of other developments, the hicab is an important sociological and anthropological factor in the story of Turkey’s religious evolution, which is not as dramatic as one might assume. Observers of Turkish politics and society have long assumed that because Turkey was an officially “secular” republic, the Turkish people had unquestionably accepted the secularizing reforms of the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal . This was likely a function of the fact that scholars of an earlier generation and policymakers wanted to see in Turkey what they wanted to see, rather than a complex society that is extending well beyond the municipal boundaries of either cosmopolitan Istanbul or Turkey’s dreary republican capital, Ankara. It was also the result of dominant non-religious—or even irreligious—elites who were the primary interlocutors with the outside world. This group fervently believes in Kemalism, and when it ruled during the first eight decades of the Turkish Republic’s existence, its members enforced secular politics and secular social mores through a variety of non-democratic political, economic, and cultural mechanisms. As a result of this ingrained secular commitment on the part the Kemalist elite, Ihsanoglu’s nomination was not without controversy. When leaders of the Republican People’s Party and Nationalist Movement Party announced their surprise challenger to Erdogan, prominent commentators immediately declared it a cynical gambit intended to siphon religious voters from the AKP that was bound to fail. That seemed like a fair interpretation. Why else would the CHP choose someone like Ihsanoglu, who violates core secularist principles and who neither looks nor sounds like traditional CHP standard bearers? Predictably, the nomination caused a firestorm within the CHP especially, whose more militant factions reacted with anger and vows not to vote for Ihsanoglu, dooming him from the start. What was shaping up to be a debacle would not be the CHP’s first misstep of the Erdogan era. There was a 2010 sex tape that felled the party’s longtime leader Deniz Baykal and more recently there was the party’s open support for Bashar al Assad in his blood soaked campaign to save his regime. Baykal’s peccadilloes and the party’s strange position on Syria are a symptom of CHP fecklessness rather than its cause. Over the last decade the party has struggled to expand its constituency beyond its traditional bastions of support in Izmir, Aydin and other cities along Turkey’s western rim. It is the CHP’s electoral weakness that has made it what seems like the perpetual also-ran of Turkish politics, which is why its leaders and those of MHP turned to Ihsanoglu. Ihsanoglu must have seemed like a low risk-high reward gamble. Since neither the CHP nor the MHP had a chance of winning the election and toppling Erdogan no matter who they nominated, why not join forces in an effort to expand their narrow constituencies and cut into the AKP’s base by running someone with strong religious credentials? As the thinking goes, if the Ihsanoglu experiment fails, then CHP and MHP will have lost no ground since it will be just the latest failure in a string of them dating back to the rise of the Justice and Development Party in 2002. Yet the idea that CHP and MHP can dabble in religion for purely instrumental electoral reasons misinterprets where Turkey stands in 2014 on religious issues. The West’s romantic notion of Turkey as a secular country is a myth. According to the 2012 Pew survey of Muslims worldwide, 97% of Turks believe in God, 67% of Turks say that religion is very important in their lives, 44% of Turks attend mosque at least once a week and 42% pray multiple times a day. Religion is ingrained in a way that elides a meaningful religious-secular distinction. This phenomenon is the natural result when the AKP lifted the drab conformity of Kemalism, allowing Turks to express their Muslim identities in new ways without fear of punishment or discrimination.   Even among the ardently secular, religion is an important means of cultural and political expression. A young secular Turkish woman recently declared that among her many problems with Erdogan was that he “did not believe in God.” When challenged, she declared that nobody who believes in the God in whom she believes could ever act the way the prime minister does.Religion is baked into the Turkish cultural pie, which is why it was actually a crucial ingredient for Atatürk, who coopted Islam in his effort to forge the Turkish Republic in the 1920s and 1930s. The Justice and Development Party has merely buttressed and extended these social and cultural dispositions with the Islamization of Turkey’s institutions—rules, laws, decrees—that has been underway throughout the AKP era.  This is a process in which Islamic legal codes, norms, and principles are either incorporated into existing laws, or supplant them. By grounding certain institutions in Islamic tenets, the Justice and Development Party has created an environment in which religion plays a greater role in society, including in areas that have not been directly Islamized.   It is not just restricting sales of alcohol or lifting the ban on headscarves at publicly funded universities, but also less obvious but more lasting measures like laws allowing graduates of preachers schools to enter the bureaucracy or alterations to the way judges are selected an promoted that will further embed Muslim-ness as a defining feature of Turkish society. In this way, society will transform state institutions rather than the other way around. This is why Ihsanoglu’s candidacy does not actually represent a radical departure. It is a logical progression of trends that have been in place for years, and is a harbinger of things to come rather than an outlier. The AKP’s success has been built on many factors besides for an appeal to religion, including nationalism, economic growth, and regional political power. Even if a majority of AKP voters—in the last parliamentary elections AKP voters represented a majority of the country—do not vote for AKP primarily because of its religious appeal, they are nevertheless made comfortable by the religious sensibility that the party conveys. The CHP and MHP have finally bowed to the demands of the electorate and through Ihsanoglu have communicated that they understand this message. The dividing lines in the presidential race have nothing to do with religion, but rather revolve around the role of the state, Turkey’s place in the West, its treatment of minorities, and economic inequalities. Those looking for staunch defenders and guardians of a secular tradition that never really existed to begin with are fated to be eternally disappointed.

This article was originally published here on Politico.com on Tuesday, August 5, 2014. If Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan were an American politician, he would be an excellent candidate for one of Chris Cillizza’s “Worst Week in Washington” features. First, on Friday, July 19, a day after the State Department spokesperson criticized him for his frequent invocation of the Nazis to describe Israel’s behavior, Erdogan asked, “What do Americans know about Hitler?” Given that almost 200,000 young Americans died fighting in Europe during WWII, quite a lot, actually. Second, in an open and embarrassing display of just how far the cult of Erdogan’s personality has gone, the 60-year-old prime minister appeared in a friendly soccer match—wearing a bright orange uniform—and miraculously scored three goals in 15 minutes to the collective delirium of announcers, fans and opposing players from the Istanbul Basaksehir club. (It was a bit of a disappointment that he did not pull off his jersey in triumph after the hat trick; it would have given the growing Tayyip Erdogan-Vladimir Putin comparisons an additional element of absurdity.) Third, the American Jewish Congress demanded that Erdogan return the “Profiles in Courage” award the organization bestowed upon him in 2004 for his commitment to protect Turkish Jewry, combat terrorism and forge peaceful coexistence in the Middle East. The prime minister—who is also a recipient of the Muammar al-Qaddafi prize for human rights—was, in the words of Turkey’s ambassador in Washington, “glad” to return the honor. Finally, Cillizza’s colleague at the Washington Post, Richard Cohen, penned a column about Erdogan’s “Hitler fetish,” wondering whether the Turkish prime minister had lost his marbles. Continue reading here...

The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) just published this report that I coauthored with Jacob Stokes, Bacevich fellow at  CNAS, and my research associate Alexander Brock. "The Contest for Regional Leadership in the New Middle East” shows how, in addition to the historic political change occurring within the major states of the Middle East, there is a transformative process underway remaking the dynamics among the states of the region. The reordering of the geopolitics of the region has exposed rivalries among the contenders for leadership, as well as different ideological, economic, nationalistic and sectarian agendas. The report argues that Washington has sought to accommodate these changes in a way that continues to secure its strategic interests. What role the United States will play in a “new Middle East” is the subject of intense debate among Americans, Arabs and Turks. Nevertheless, it is clear that with all the problems regional powers have confronted trying to shape the politics of the region, American leadership will continue to be indispensable. See the full report here... I hope you find it interesting.  

Hdeel Abdelhady says that Egypt’s new investment law is not a solution to its economic woes, but rather is a symptom of the country’s inability to conceive and implement coherent economic policies. Paul Schutzer, Casualty of War: A Great Photographer’s Final Pictures  Jenny White weighs in on Turkey’s upcoming elections and posts some upbeat music.  

There is a lot that seems inexplicable about Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s recent conduct.  In the last few years, the Turkish prime minister has squandered the good will of many of his citizens and his counterparts around the world.  Erdogan once represented a kind of Turkish “third way” (as cliché as that sounds) in which political reform and compromise were combined with economic liberalism and a consciously Muslim identity, but now he is mostly  known for bluster, intimidation, and the reversal of the impressive political reforms of 2003 and 2004. The prime minister’s routine bullying of his opponents seems rather unnecessary given his mastery of the Turkish political arena. That said, the most recent head-scratching episode came a few weeks ago upon the Turkish leader’s visit to the grieving people of Soma—the site of Turkey’s worst mining disaster ever.  Erdogan, who was ostensibly there to express sympathy for the families of the 305 dead miners, ended up slapping a protester unhappy with the government’s handling of the catastrophe.  If that was not enough, the ”Great Master” as his adoring press refers to Erdogan, reportedly called the poor man, “Israeli semen” as he stole away. Astonishing, to say the least.  Recently, Michael Weiss of FP.com and Now Lebanon—a keen observer of events in Syria, Turkey, and Russia—asked whether Erdogan is a “poached egg.”  Weiss’ work is always interesting and provocative, yet behind Erdogan’s sometimes curious behavior is a brilliant politician who deftly manipulates Turkey’s past greatness and humiliations, to powerful political effect. It is easy for anyone who has ever been within five feet of Erdogan to conclude that he is among the best politicians of his time—only Bill Clinton seems better.  The Turkish leader has an innate ability to reach a lot of Turks at their core.  It is not just that he understands what makes his constituents tick, but it is almost as if he represents every dream, wish, and desire they have ever had for Turkey and themselves.  For many, Erdogan is the ultimate expression of a new Turkish man—strong, emotional, pious, confident, and clear-eyed and unapologetic about Turkey’s greatness.  This gives him a significant reservoir of support to do the kinds of things that the prime minister has been doing. Take the much-discussed Twitter ban, which was lifted by court order in April.  As I discussed in a previous post, the attacks on Twitter and the continuing YouTube blackout are winning political tactics for Erdogan.  The same goes for the AKP’s efforts to exert control over the Supreme Council of Judges and Public Prosecutors, the threats directed at the Gulen movement, the criminalization of first aid under certain circumstances, the gerrymandering of electoral districts, and the intimidation of the Turkish media.  This runs the gamut from distasteful to frightening, but it is both entirely rational and a winning political strategy. Erdogan’s seemingly thuggish approach to politics works so well because it is framed in a way that evokes a simplified version of Turkish history in which a great country and people were debased  by the manipulation and double-dealings of outside powers and their local agents.  Hammering away at the “interest rate lobby,”  “international bankers,” “Zionists,” and “Pennsylvania”—Erdogan’s shorthand for the Gulen movement’s leader, Fethullah Gulen, who resides in a gated compound in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania—as the prime minister does so often, seems deeply strange and profoundly paranoid, but the historical record has bequeathed Erdogan a wealth of material that makes his current tale of Turkey-under-siege plausible to large numbers of Turks. Americans and other observers may have a hard time remembering what took place almost a century ago during and immediately after WWI, but Turks do not.  Here is a refresher:           The recently much discussed (inaccurately) Sykes-Picot Agreement was actually the Sykes-Picot-Sazanov Agreement.  There is some debate about the extent of Russian (Sergey Sazanov was the Tsarist era foreign minister) participation in negotiating the agreement, but it was enough that it imagined a post-war settlement in which Moscow controlled Istanbul and the Turkish Straits (the Dardenelles and Bosporus).             When Hussein Rauf met Admiral Arthur Calthorpe aboard the British warship Agamemnon on October 28, 1918, the British commander assured Rauf that the allies would not occupy Istanbul.  Of course, the British (and French, whom Calthorpe was also in theory representing) immediately went back on their word.  As Margaret Macmillan wrote in her wonderful book, Paris 1919: “In London, the British cabinet received the news of the armistice [with the Ottoman Empire] with delight and fell to discussing how Constantinople ought to be occupied…”             Then there is the Treaty of Sevres (1920), which not only brought the Ottoman Empire to a merciful end, but also made provisions for an independent Armenia and Kurdistan in Anatolia and granted Greece control over islands in the Aegean close to the Dardenelles as well as control over territory along the west coast of what is now Turkey and Eastern Thrace (now known as European Turkey or the Marmara region).   One might reasonably wonder what these distant events have to do with Erdogan’s conduct.  Everything. When the Turkish leader spins conspiracies about foreign plots and parallel states, he is reminding Turks of a painful past, and telling them that he will never allow what befell the Ottoman Empire—which has been celebrated in the AKP era—to happen to Turkey.  This is not to condone what Erdogan and the AKP’s leaders have done. Rather it is important to grasp the Turkish historical context in order to understand how  the prime minister has manipulated it for his own political ends  It also provides a clearer picture of Erdogan.  The Turkish prime minister may seem off, but there is every reason to believe that he knows exactly what he is doing.  

Hurriyet Daily News explains the Soma mining disaster in five questions. Murat Aksoy’s sober take on the death of Turkish miners. Michael Koplow has chosen to laugh (rather than cry) in light of Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s response to the Soma mine disaster.  

This article was originally published here as part of the Middle East Institute’s Middle East-Asia Project on civilianizing the state.  Since the patterns of civil-military relations in Turkey began to change a decade ago, analysts have focused on the modalities and the durability of civilian control of the armed forces, the consequences of the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer cases on the cohesion of the armed forces, and how the transformation of the officer corps’ historic relationship with the political system has affected the capabilities of the armed forces. Observers have given significantly less attention to the military’s role in the economy. Since the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the military has deployed its power in this area through indirect means. First, during relatively brief periods of military rule, the officers influenced economic policy without dictating the details of policymaking. Second, the military’s pension fund invests its members’ funds in the economy. Finally, until the mid-1980s, the senior command exercised control over the military procurement process through various military foundations. Over time, however, the military’s ability to shape economic policies has changed and the officers’ role in the economy has become normalized. The economic interests of Turkish officers have always been different in degree and kind from their counterparts in, for example, Egypt and Algeria, where the configuration of power has favored autonomous military establishments. The instances in which Turkish commanders have engaged in corruption or used their status to extract rent from state-owned or private enterprises are few. Unlike the Egyptian military, in particular, the Turkish military has not become a major player in the economy through either direct control of firms or, as is increasingly the case, the blurring of the military and private sectors. Continue reading here...

“What next?”  That is the question that virtually everyone in Turkey is asking and it has Turks on edge. It has become shorthand for a series of other questions: Will Prime Minister Erdogan declare his presidential candidacy? Probably…maybe…,but you never know. Will President Gul oppose him? Unclear. Can Erdogan remain prime minister?  Yes, but he seems to want to be president. Would Gul be willing to be prime minister if Erdogan becomes president? He says he won’t play Medvedev to Erdogan’s Putin, but that may just be a tactic.  If not Gul, then who would assume the prime ministry? Perhaps deputy prime minister Ali Babacan, but whoever it is—besides Gul—it will certainly be someone Erdogan can control or intimidate.  Can Erdogan be marginalized in the officially apolitical presidency? The prime minister is the sun around which Turkish politics revolves; he does not do “marginalized.” In August, Turks will go to the polls and for the first time directly elect their next president.  This would have been a historic and interesting affair under ordinary circumstances given the personalities that were likely to be involved, but in light of the Gezi Park protests, the corruption scandal/AKP vs. Gulenists smack down, and last month’s municipal elections the presidential election has taken on a larger meaning about the future trajectory of the country.  And, until that issue is settled, nothing else is.  A lot of Turks seem to be living in suspended animation waiting for some clarity.  They are anxious after a long and difficult eleven months.  All the questions about what Erdogan and Gul might do seem to be as much about finding some kind of emotional anchor as they are about the political struggle that is unfolding in front of them. Turkey seems unmoored within itself.  Everything that everyone told themselves about a liberalizing, prosperous, confident country is open to question.   It must be a difficult way to exist.  Outwardly the AKP folks remain confident, buoyed by municipal elections results that gave them 44 percent of the vote.  Peel back that number and take a closer look at the results and the ruling party lost 2 million votes and gave up huge percentages relative to previous elections in areas where there were actual contests. That has got to be unsettling. Still, the AKP is not going anywhere and all the attempts to gain some clarity on what might happen in the coming presidential election are not worth the effort.  One can understand why the Turks have invested so much energy in it, but the outcome is not in doubt.  No one knows what Erdogan will do.  There are compelling reasons for him to seek the presidency and there are equally compelling reasons for him to stay put.  The point is that it seems entirely up to Erdogan.  One day soon he will decide what he wants to do and then he will leverage the AKP’s parliamentary power, its virtual ministry of information, and the inability of the opposition parties  or anyone else to do much about it to make it happen.  Erdogan and the party’s spokespeople will couch every move in the context of “democratization” and all critics as jealous enemies of Turkey’s progress.  In other words, the answer to “what next?” is more of the same.

Fehim Tastekin wonders if Turkey is reverting to an intelligence state. Mohamed Gad, writing for Mada Masr, asks if current Egyptian Finance Minister Hany Qadry will actually reform Egypt’s subsidies. Bruce Crumley looks at the increasing involvement of European Jihadis in Syria’s civil war.

Alexis Artaud de La Ferrière examines how Algeria’s elections will influence regional politics, especially those in Tunisia. The Turkish citizen journalism group "140journos" is trying to use technology to bring democracy back to Turkey, writes Burcu Baykurt for Jadaliyya. Maria Golia discusses the issue of fighting Hepatitis C in Egypt.