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Good-bye, Mr Putin

Deniz Eröcal

FOREWORD This essay was started as a short article on Turkey’s geostrategic flirts with Russia

and their breakup during periods when the country turned its face back to the West. As it developed, it turned into a more wide-ranging overview of its

peregrinations in the geopolitical sphere. In the end it has come back full circle to try to shed a new light on Turkey’s chequered relationship with Russia, which has always been a key factor – perhaps the most important one – behind its quest

to become part of the West – at least in the last quarter of a millennium.

“Je ne sais pas l’art d’être clair pour qui ne veut pas être attentif.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau1

Turkish rulers’ flirt with Mr Putin lasted a little longer than an earlier affair with Mr Lenin,

but not much longer. In the darkest hour of her National Struggle2 – the War of liberation

fought from 1919 to 1922 by what was left of Ottoman Turkey against her WWI victors

Britain and France and their nearby proxies Greeks and Armenians – the new rulers of

Ankara had found an ally of convenience in the Marxist-Leninist Soviets, who themselves

were engaged in a parallel struggle to wrest the Russian Empire back from the same victors

and their local collaborators – the Whites, Ukrainian nationalists, nascent Caucasian states

and so on. In the event, the material aid the Kemalist forces received from Soviet Russia

(weapons, ammunition, gold to pay officers’ salaries, etc.) helped quicken their victory, which

was completed by September 1922 with the expulsion of the invading Greek Army from

Anatolia. In return, the resumption of Turkish sovereignty to the Straights in the following

months protected the young USSR from further attempts by the Entente powers to fester anti-

revolutionary strife in their Black Sea flank. In the state of exhaustion and exasperation that

they had reached by then, with growing social tensions, including a separatist uprising in

Ireland, and their chief ally America turned isolationist, Britain and France may not have had

much appetite for more jingoistic adventures anyway.

                                                                                                               1 “I have not mastered the art of making myself clear to the man who refuses to pay attention” in Social Contract, Book III, Chapter 1, opening sentence. (It took him two books to figure that out.) 2 In Turkish, Millî Mücadele. In more recent periods the designation Kurtuluş Savaşı (War of Liberation, or Redemption) has been used and is sometimes wrongly translated as a “war of independence”. Despite the occupation of a great deal of its territory between 1918 and 1922, Turkey continued to be an independent state.

 

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The Soviet-Turkish alliance, first formalised in 1921, and confirmed in 1925 for a limited

period of ten years – as was customary in military cooperation agreements in those days – was

re-conducted for a second decade in 1935, with both countries increasingly weary of the rise

of an anti-status quo Hitlerite Germany.

But the Soviet-Turkish affair was never more than an arrangement for practical cooperation

vis-à-vis common foes – the arrogant Western democracies making life difficult for the

successor states of old Oriental autocracies. As soon as his hold on power was secure – indeed

a few days after the end of active war in Anatolia – on 12 September 1922 Mustafa Kemal

had the Turkish Communist Party closed down. The Soviets on their side never refrained

from persecuting Tatars, Kazakhs or other Turkic subjects of their realm, and Turkey never

made a serious international issue out of that.

And the Soviet-Turkish affair did not survive the WWII. As the next deadline of 1945

approached for deciding weather to renew the pact, with Soviet strength growing by day

together with their exasperation with what they saw as Turkey’s double game during the war,

Stalin made no secret of his desire to “Finlandize” Turkey. A formal demand was made for a

Soviet military base inside the Turkish Straights, while the obedient Armenian and Georgian

SSRs advanced their territorial demands on adjacent Turkish provinces Ardahan and Kars.

It is under these circumstances that Turkey appeared to be throwing herself back in the arms

of the West in the dark winter of 1945-46. Yet, Kemalist Turkey’s reconciliation with Britain

had started in the 1930s, epitomised by the visit of King Edward VIII to Turkey in September

1936 and the courtesy call of the Turkish fleet to Malta the following month, much to

Mussolini’s irritation. As the winds of war gathered over Europe in the late 1930s, Turkey

sought greater military cooperation with Britain. It signed an unambiguous military pact with

both Britain and France in October 1939, as Poland was giving her last breath under the Nazi

onslaught. This surely was not a sign of friendship in good times only. But the fear of being

crushed by the Germans and/or the Soviets – who, remember, were allies between August

1939 and June 1941 through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – and a profound reluctance to

inflict war on the still fragile young Republic, made Turkish rulers of the time dither. They

have not honoured in time their pledge to go to war alongside their British ally even after the

probable Soviet objection to it vanished in June 1941 when Hitler tore apart his pact with the

Socialist devil and invaded the Soviet Union.

Turkey declared war against Germany only in April 1945 when it was a militarily useless

symbolic gesture made to secure admission as a founding member of the new United Nations.

 

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Thus, Stalin’s fury at Turkish cowardice was perhaps not entirely incomprehensible. But,

remember that the men ruling Turkey at the time (President İsmet İnönü, Chief of Staff of the

Armed Forces Field Marshall Fevzi Çakmak and many others) had seen war of the most

devastating kind and had fought against the same Britain and France from 1914 to 1922. In

the end, circumstances helped them bring Turkey back inside the West’s protective umbrella

where it had once enjoyed protection, prosperity and even some tentative respect between the

Anglo-Ottoman commercial Treaty of 1838 and the start of the – so-far – penultimate

Russian-Turkish war in 1876.3

The rest is history (of the Cold War), starting again with a symbolic gesture – the appearance

of the American battleship USS Missouri in the Istanbul harbour in April 1946, ostensibly to

deliver the remains of the late Ambassador Mr Münir Ertegün who had had diplomatic

cunning to die while in office in Washington – and continuing with the proclamation of the

Truman Doctrine (April 1947) including a pledge to aid Turkey (and Greece), all the way to

Turkey’s inclusion in the Marshall Plan for European reconstruction (starting in April 1948)

and its successor organisation the OECD in 1961.

So strong was America’s leadership and resolve in those days – flanked by a still imperious

Britain – to mobilise an anti-Soviet block that it could run roughshod over the objections of

some Europeans, such as the Dutch, to the inclusion of Greece and Turkey in the nascent

NATO. The Dutch had even resisted the inclusion of Italy initially, preferring to keep the

Alliance literally Atlantic.

A heating up of the Cold War in Korea in 1950, and nine hundred dead Turkish soldiers

(fallen in the defence of the Western line) later Turkey became a NATO member in 1952,

together with Greece. By 1964 Europeans were willing to go as far engaging Turkey (and

Greece) in a formally irrevocable course for accession – in principle by the 1980s – in their

nascent Common Market (officially the European Economic Community – EEC).

In the end it was Turkish dithering again, more than anything else, which stopped the post-

war momentum for integrating the country firmly in the Euro-Atlantic family of free market

democracies. The high – or, rather low – point may have been reached in 1976, when the

government led by the instinctively protectionist civil engineer Mr Demirel nonchalantly

                                                                                                               3 In the 1860s, the Ottoman Sultan Abdülaziz could be received with the highest pomp and circumstance and reside in the palaces of French and British monarchs in what were the first state visits abroad by an Ottoman sovereign – not counting military campaigns. Despite scepticism in certain quarters, there was a genuine effort to give Ottoman political reforms of the time the benefit of the doubt, and engage that Empire in what was then called “the Concert of Europe” – sort of the G20 of the time.

 

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turned down a sincere proposal by the EEC to accelerate Turkey’s accession. Greece, which

accepted a parallel offer, was in by 1981. Having been snubbed by the West in the Cyprus

imbroglio that came to head in 1974, and having come under an arms embargo by its

principal ally America, Turkey was perhaps in no mood to concede sovereignty, which is what

you do when entering the EEC.

The year 1976 was also pretty much the last one when Turkey was not in crisis, economic or

political, or rushing from one to the next, until the early years of the 21st century. The years

with sharp economic downturns (1977-80, 1988-89, 1991, 1994, 1999-2001) have left scars in

the nascent industrial labour force, with industrial relations becoming imprisoned in a

protectionist class-struggle mind-set, obstructing the growth of modern sector employment. In

parallel, misunderstood and mishandled demands for more political freedom and expression

turned into anarchy and terror (albeit in mild forms of it by today’s standards), leading to a

military coup in 1980, which subsequently led the institutionalisation of a repressive regime in

the 1982 Constitution.

Only the final flare-up of the Cold War between the West and a Soviet regime in its terminal

crisis, plus, to a lesser extent, the emergence of an anti-Western revolutionary Iran, helped

keep Turkey in the Western camp, militarily speaking. But its economy was now failing to

keep pace with the rapid modernisation enjoyed by Greece, Portugal and Spain, and Turkey

was less and less seen as part of that group of countries.

While Turkey’s usefulness as a “staunch ally” – a sort of unsophisticated subordinate standing

guard, asking no questions – was grudgingly recognised, its oppressive regime became a

subject of scorn. Its accession process to what was soon to be renamed the European

Community was now frozen. Turkish nationals who could tour Europe visa-free up until the

1970s became unwanted denizens of the Third World. There were already too many of them

settled in Germany. They differed too much from the “European”, showed little inclination to

“integrate” and become innocuous minorities like the Portuguese or the Yugoslavs, and more

of them were now pouring in as political refugees. So little respect did the Turkish state now

command that the country’s Kurdish fringe – quiet since the 1940s – flared up in open revolt

in 1984.

Meanwhile, deeper forces were at work quietly. At the international level a resurgent form of

Islamic piety and communitarianism – soon to be termed Islamism – was propelling the

ordinary people of predominantly Muslim societies into a sort of grass-roots rebellion –

indeed, a revanche – against their superficially westernised elites. While this was scarcely evident

 

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in Turkey in the 1980s, it was going to pose the greatest challenge to the country’s pretention

to be part of the West.

The other fundamental shift – of a more benign nature – worked in the socio-economic

sphere. Deeply impacted by forced economic liberalisation and outward-orientation from

1980 on, something previously unknown began to emerge in the Turkish landscape.

During the nine hundred years of statehood in Asia Minor/Anatolia and adjacent areas Turks

had occupied every function from nomadic conqueror to subsistence farmer, en passant par

landed gentry, sword-bearing-horse-riding ruling class, and bureaucrat, but scarcely that of

the merchant. Now, a new variety of a Turk appeared, industrial – indeed industrious – and

trader. Tens of thousands of industrial enterprises emerged, manned and managed by Turks,

plying the trade routes of Europe and the Middle East, delivering manufactured good, copied,

assembled, and shipped pell-mell through the country’s inefficient and corrupt transport and

customs infrastructures, if necessary by abusing the lax export promotion regime. Starting

from the simplest tee-shirts and plastic widgets, entrepreneurs moved on to more complex

products, as their unstable markets rose and collapsed in the war-torn Middle East (Iraq,

1990), the Balkans (Yugoslavia, 1991), or in the newly opening USSR (Russia, 1998). In the

process they learned to compete in more discerning markets. With relentless resolve and

flexibility, from each crisis they emerged more numerous, bigger and more sophisticated.

With American MBAs in their pockets, the second generation Turkish entrepreneurs were

transforming the sociology of many smaller cities in inner-Anatolia into an industrial one,

seeking prosperity on their own feet, independent of the hand-outs from the state or

subservience to Istanbul’s old guard of established big industrialists who lived in symbiosis

with that state. It was the alliance of these two undercurrents – the Turkish variant of

Islamism and the emerging industrial middle class of inner Turkey – that was going to pose

the most potent challenge to Western-looking Turks’ grip on power in the country.

The breakup of the Soviet empire between 1989 and 1992 seemed to make all tables spin.

The “staunch ally” became less indispensable as the arch-foe disintegrated into chaos and its

economic lethargy – already deep during the Brezhnev era stagnation – turned into coma. A

string of budding, independent nation-states, strewn from the Baltic to the Adriatic – some

newly invented, some reborn – all with impeccable Western credentials – white skin, Christian

heritage – now made more valuable partners for NATO and jumped the accession queue to

what was by now called the European Union (EU).

 

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In its state of drunken torpor the rump Russian Federation was too happy to let thousands of

Turkish entrepreneurs claim a share – as traders, builders or hosts inside Turkey, to a

burgeoning number of Russian customers and visitors – of Russia’s mineral wealth, which by

then had become the only source of prosperity for (some of) them. What a delightful sight it

was to see those Slavonic hordes descend by the million to the resorts of Antalya every year

without having had to fight their way through the Balkans, which they would have had to do

in the 19th century.

As the East-West rivalry seemed to have disappeared, and Turkey’s attachment to the West

became more and more ambiguous, Ankara and Moscow could now indulge in geopolitical

hide-and-seek games, here creating a Black Sea Economic Cooperation gizmo – was it an

Organisation, a Community, a process… no one knew, and it did not matter –, there luring

Turkey into the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation – the club of the planet’s most powerful

autocrats. A chorus of armchair geo-politicians and amateur Great Game strategists lectured

ad nauseam about the merits and prospects of oil and gas pipelines that were going to link inner

Asia’s fossil fuel riches to the outside word via Turkey. None seemed to have studied the map

of abandoned and politically unusable pipelines that litter the landscape of the Middle East.4

Gazing into Central Asia, Turkish pan-Turanists – previously considered an eccentric fringe

group – now became more numerous, respectable and credible in proposing stronger ties with

their Turkic brethren freshly liberated from the Russian yoke. It was going to take them a very

long time to realise – and many have not yet fully confessed – that Central Asia is not only

Turkic. Many of its old centres of civilisation were in fact more Iranian than anything else.

(For example, the word “Tajik” literally designated Muslims of Persian or Iranian persuasion

to Sogdian5 Turks and Tang-era Chinese during the 8th century, when the Arab armies were

introducing Islam to Central Asia. And, Tajik has long been the predominant identity of

Central Asia’s venerable urban centres such as Bukhara and Samarkand.) Indeed, even the

nearby Azeri who can understand Western Anatolian Turkish – even if the latter cannot easily

reciprocate the compliment – are predominantly Shi’ite Muslims, and therefore culturally

closer to Iranians, when they are not Soviet-educated atheists. Besides, the hold on power by

the Soviet-trained leadership in the region proved to be too strong for anyone outside the

ruling family circles to be of any significance, economically or otherwise. Central Asia did not

                                                                                                               4 For example those that run from Iraq to the Mediterranean through the Jordan-Palestine/Israel corridor or Syria-Lebanon, built on the assumption that the post WWI international order in the region was going to prevail. 5 Sogdiana roughly represents the region between the rivers Amu Darya and the Syr Darya in their upper and middle reaches.

 

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open up to international exchanges, remained economically and geopolitically bottled up and

could provide no bonanza – not even for Turkey.

As the final years of the twentieth century were approached both Russia and Turkey seemed

adrift, an old imperious power increasingly unable to command respect – not even internally,

in its Chechen wilderness – and a would-be – to some a re-emerging – great power not quite

able to articulate why it ought to count more.

To their West, Europe was increasingly absorbed by its enlargement mechanics, while the

capacity of its ancient great powers to play decisive roles in global affairs all but vanished.

Europe as a counterpoise to the American hyper-power was not to be. Yet, though America

reigned supreme militarily, with its booming New Economy having successfully dealt with an

earlier Japanese challenge in economic supremacy, it remained detached and disinterested in

steering the geopolitical evolution of any part of the world. This was contrary to what it had

consistently done between the 1940s and the 1980s. It did not even have enough focus and

stamina to sort out the mess in Afghanistan and Iraq that it had helped worsen.

In the Middle East the field was wide open for Islamism to take over as the standard bearer of

contestation against the oppressive regimes there and the Western influence that had pretty

much designed the region politically and was still propping up some of those same regimes.

But the potency of Islamism – either in its “moderate” variety, or in its terrorist offshoots –

was not fully appreciated. The calendar was not yet showing 11 September 2001.

As is often the case in these matters, powerful financial crises focused the minds in Moscow

and Ankara, even if each saw a different light in the lightning rods that shone over their skies.

In Russia, the financial seizure of 1998 wiped out not only a great deal of middle class savings

that had been painfully stored since the post-Soviet economic collapse, but also marginalised

the tenuous fringe of Russians who held some hope in an open society in which economic and

political freedoms combine to build prosperity. The devastation caused by the crisis, and the

generalised state of lawlessness of the post-Communist order helped rally longing and support,

in the good old Russian tradition, for a “good Tsar” who will reign in the abusive bureaucrats

and the boyars who lick the people’s blood, defeat internal enemies – starting with the

Chechens – and make Russia great again by restoring an aggressive posture against other

nations. In the Russian moujik’s6 mind, outsiders could wish nothing but ill for Russia. The

                                                                                                               6 Muzhik or moujik, referring to a peasant or an ordinary person (perhaps, a “bloke”) in Russia.

 

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saviour was a little Russian Napoleon, with manners far worse than his Corsican

predecessor’s. His first name, and that of his father, promised that he would rule the world.7

In Turkey, the sharp economic downturn of 1999, which was followed by an even more

painful financial crisis in 2001 – both equally home-made, as the world economy was not in

crisis – combined to generate the most perfect storm in the country’s political landscape,

resulting in a political tabula rasa. The early parliamentary elections of November 2002 threw

out 89 per cent of the MPs of the previous parliament and brought in a new political party

(AKP8) out of nowhere and into power with an absolute majority – the first since 1987. AKP

incarnated precisely the marriage of the two powerful social and economic undercurrents that

had been gathering strength in Turkey in the preceding two decades – Islamism and the inner

Anatolian industrial middle class. The method that brought it to power – genuinely free

elections – was the opposite of what brought Putinism to power in Russia. In those days the

AKP was in no position to muzzle the media, which remained largely hostile to it, like much

of the rest of the establishment in Turkey. Nor could it deploy the means of the state to reach

it ends, unlike nowadays.

More importantly, the conclusions that the Turkish state drew from the crises of 1999 – 2001

could also not have been more different from those the Russians drew from theirs. Turkey

had a crisis because, while its economy had industrialised and moved towards competitive

markets, its state and economic governance had not been reformed accordingly. Reckless debt

and deficit policies by the government crowding out private investment were the chief cause of

macroeconomic instability and were bottling up the otherwise powerful economic dynamism

of the country. That had to be stopped. This, at least was the conclusion that the new power

in Turkey – thankfully – drew.

And, what better way to bolster pro-market forces than opening the country to foreign

investment and re-energising the EU accession process that had been dormant since the late

1970s? This was music to the ears of global finance and the international organisations. Aid

poured in from the IMF, World Bank and the EU. Turkey rapidly recovered the level of

annual output lost between 1999 and 2001 and embarked in one of its strongest bouts of

economic expansion (GDP grew by 77 per cent between 2001 and 20089).

                                                                                                               7 Vladimir, from vlad (to rule) and myr (the world, or peace), hence “ruler of the world” or “owner of the peace”, depending on one’s interpretation, in any case, meaning the top dog. 8 Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (Justice and Development Party). 9 IMF Data Mapper, March 2016.

 

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Those on the Left and the Kemalists kidded themselves – and many still do – that it was all to

the credit of Kemal Derviş (a former World Bank Vice President) who did it all during his

brief, comet-like passage as economy minister through Turkish politics10. Decency requires to

recognise that Turkey’s remarkable recovery and structural transformation in the early 2000s

were not thanks to a mere World Bank official overseeing the application of standard

“Washington consensus” medicine to Turkey’s ills – there had been many IMF Stand-By

Arrangements for Turkey in the past, but none had been coupled with decisive structural

reforms. Credit needs to go, instead, to the political stability brought by AKP’s solid majority

in the Parliament and its clear-cut orientation – at that time – in favour of pro-market

industrial forces in the country.

Post-9/11, and especially post-2003 invasion of Iraq by the bellicose George W. Bush

Administration – when Turkey refrained from approving the use of its territory by the

American military for attacking Saddam’s Iraq – Turkish-American relations deteriorated

rapidly. That stopped only when America itself was struck by crisis in 2008 and a new

Administration thereafter began to try to reverse the course chosen in 2001.

Russia managed to avoid confrontation with America until 2008 when it felt strong enough to

flex its muscle and show – in the brief war against a feeble Georgia – how it was prepared to

deal with incursions into its imperial fringe by an unfocused and half-hearted West.

Meanwhile its economy was growing handsomely thanks to what turned out to be one of the

strongest commodity booms in history. Even the financial crisis of 2008 – 2009 did not stop

that boom, as China and other “emerging” economies filled in for the slack left by slow

growth in advanced economies. Yet, there was very little in this for the ordinary Russian.

As the initial euphoria following Barrack Obama’s accession to American presidency faded,

and the world waited for him to deliver something other than brilliant speeches, the

assertiveness and arrogance of “emerging” powers grew. There was little to restrain them.

First the US, then, increasingly, Europe, began to be absorbed by their own affairs. Restoring

broken public finances turned out to be a daunting task in a world where there was no longer

a generally accepted view of what was good economic policy. This was in stark contrast with

the good old days of the 1980s when the Western world had managed to surmount the

economic and political turmoil of the late 1970s and had pulled itself back together through a

Liberal revolution spearheaded by Thatcherism and Reaganomics. Whether those ideologies

had got everything right is beside the point. During the “G7 era” all principal economic

                                                                                                               10 Mr Derviş was State Minister in charge of economic coordination from March 2001 to August 2002.

 

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powers rowed in the same direction. In the new “G20” world order that arose from the Great

Recession, they were spending their time hitting each other’s heads with the oars.

Political systems too showed signs of breakdown. In Europe, anti-establishment and anti-EU

parties expanded their following, even among historically cool-headed nations like the Dutch.

The growing attractiveness of Islamism as a vehicle for self-expression by Europe’s internal

Muslim underclass was a boon for the recruiters of far-Right and other anti-establishment

causes. Across the Atlantic, as the post-crisis rebound stuttered in the early 2010s,

uncharacteristically for the American economy, “dysfunctional” became a household word

used in connection with Washington – also a far cry form the historical image of the American

Constitution as an ingenious, self-correcting system of government.

In the “G20” world order the emerging great powers seemed to have less and less reason to

take guidance from the established powers. The sclerotic markets of America and, especially,

Europe offered little potential for the kind of growth that would entice the industrial class of

Turkey that was now coming of age and flexing its competitiveness muscle across products of

a wide range of sophistication. The EU’s share in Turkish exports collapsed from 58 per cent

to 39 per cent between 2003 and 2013, while total merchandise exports as a percentage of

Turkey’s GDP rose from15.6 to 18.4 in the same period.

With healthier public finances now, Turkey was also in a position to exercise its diplomatic

muscle, quadrupling the number of its embassies in Africa, hosting an increasing number of

conferences involving developing country leaders11, here promoting a “technology bank” to

assist the Least Developing Countries, there expanding a foreign aid budget dwarfing those of

many established donors, even if its accounts were never subject to international audit by the

donors’ club, the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee – why take counsel from the

guardians of the previous world order! Turkey could now secure a non-permanent seat in the

UN Security Council (2009 - 2010), for the first time since 1961, Chair the OECD Ministerial

Council in 2012 and get acceptance to preside the G20 in 2015. Indeed, the Turkish leaders

had now become a permanent fixture in top international gatherings, rubbing elbows with

world leaders. Who needed EU membership, if you had more chances of meeting Mrs Merkel

than the leader of a medium-sized EU member?

It was also more fun to flirt with like-minded autocracies such as Putin’s Russia, go through

the motions of purchasing militarily useless rocket systems from China and float the prospect

                                                                                                               11 The UN Conference on the Least Developed Countries, May 2011, The UN Forum on Forests, April 2013, UN Conference to Combat Desertification, October 2015…

 

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becoming a bona fide member of the Shanghai club of Asian autocrats – why not, if even

India, the most populous “democracy” and the proudest of emerging great powers also did it?

Even during the unthreatening torpor of the Yeltsin years Russia was still a continent-size

power armed with nuclear warheads and every conceivable weapon system to “deliver” them.

Even without a deliberately focused anti-Western belligerence it was capable of festering

interminable conflicts in its former imperial periphery, from Transnistria to the Mountainous

Karabakh, crippling the ability of many of its former subject peoples to conduct an

autonomous foreign policy. Now a more assertive Russian state, filthy rich with oil revenues,

had less reason to remain polite and be bound by the rules expected from a well-mannered

participant in a European order “from the Atlantic to the Urals”. In reality, that order could

only have been either from the Atlantic to the Pacific, or nothing, but few European fans of

Russia took this into account.

Having dealt with the Chechen rebellion in the most brutal fashion one could picture – if the

“international” Press had covered it properly – i.e., by appointing the most ruthless rebel

warlord as the local potentate and ensuring that the world forgot about Chechens as a people,

it could now embark on a vigorous military build-up to prepare for more ambitious

opportunities.

With NATO’s reckless and half-serious flick with Ukraine and Georgia stopped upon the

severe punishment rendered on the latter in 2008, it could now move further to muzzle

Ukraine’s hesitant efforts to embrace a pluralist market democracy. Thanks to Ukrainians’

time-honoured ability to divide and be conquered, Russia was able to propel his illiterate

protégé Victor Yanukovich to Ukraine’s presidency (February 2010) and go about anchoring

Kiev more firmly in Moscow’s sphere of gangster capitalism. As the Donetsk mafia licked the

meagre blood left in Ukraine’s veins, the West could do little other than stare. Their

disinterest was only exceeded by that of Turkey, too happy to sell goods to the fast growing

Russian market. News of punitive Russian embargoes on this or that export product from

Moldova, Ukraine or Georgia could only generate jubilant articles in Turkish business

newspapers, announcing new moneymaking opportunities.

But the newly flexed Russian power was different in nature from the Turkish one. Turkey

now surpassed Russia in exports of manufactured goods in absolute terms for the first time in

recorded history (Figure 1 - see charts at the end). In fact, Turkey had been ahead of Russia in

per capita exports of manufactures for some time and increased its lead (Figure 2).

Demographically too, though Russia was still bigger, its assertiveness was underpinned by a

 

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population in secular decline, increasingly ill and more violent (Figures 3 to 7). It was only

going to take the next inevitable dip in raw material prices for Turkey to surpass Russia again

in per capita production (Figure 8).12 By then Turkey had arrived within striking distance of

the once mighty Russian giant in the R&D intensity of the economy as well (Figure 9).

Russia was feared. It inspired the dreadful sort of respect, which also suited the temperament

of the KGB-trained street fighter who ruled its gang of security thugs who ruled the country

from the Moscow Kremlin.

For a brief moment Turkey was somewhat admired for its economic prowess, and there was

some tentative respect for its government – there was talk of a “Turkish model” that might be

of inspiration for the Arab states that were struggling to give a positive direction to their

restive masses in the wake of the Arab Spring. Albeit, beneath the glittering façade of a “rising

Turkey”, cracks were difficult to miss. This was still a country fighting a Kurdish insurgency,

and had one of the largest populations of journalists in prison, even before Mr Erdoğan’s

authoritarianism began to attract international condemnation. Still, some hoped that Turkey

was now becoming the type of an economy and society that could only continue to prosper in

conjunction with an open, rules-based political order, domestically and internationally.

However, the country’s top leadership had a different view.

It is the characteristic of unchecked power to grow more arrogant and seek greater

adventures. And in Oriental societies – of which both Russia and Turkey are part, behind

their Peterbourgeoise and Kemalist facades – the prevailing political culture nurtures little

awareness of the risks associated with unchecked political power.

As they entered the year 2013 no one in Russia or Turkey could anticipate the turmoil that

awaited them in international relations, and domestic affairs in the case of Turkey. Prior to his

sham re-election the previous year Putin had eliminated what was left in the way of opposition

in Russia. There was no more domestic politics in Russia.

In Turkey, Mr Erdoğan sailed from victory to victory, the latest one being in the local

elections of March 2013. An aura of invincibility gave credence to his claim that there was no

real opposition in the country. He did have a point. What passed as opposition in Turkey had

squandered the best part of a decade since AKP’s coming to power in 2002 with efforts to kill

that party through unlawful methods, including a shot at a military coup in 2007 – with the

                                                                                                               12 In GDP per capita measured at market prices and exchange rates. Even though it has become fashionable to make cross-country comparisons of output converted at purchasing power parities, market prices and exchange rates represent the only “real” measure of value at which anybody will actually purchase your goods.

 

 13  

armed forces expressing objection to the AKP heavy weight Mr Abdullah Gül’s appointment

as President of the Republic. This was followed with attempts to have that party –

representing more than 40 per cent of the popular vote – banned in court.

These clumsy and illegitimate moves only made AKP and its ruler Mr Erdoğan more

aggressive in their own methods to assert supremacy. An unprecedented judicial process

placed a sizable portion of Turkey’s 300-plus flag officers (generals and admirals) under arrest.

Again, many who oppose Mr Erdoğan today may fool themselves with the notion that those

moves were necessary and that their success would have saved the country from the current

descent into autocracy. A more cool-headed view is possible. That Turkey’s superficially

westernised but instinctively anti-democratic old guard blew the opportunity to establish a

modus vivendi with the challenge the Islamists posed to their privileged position. And by

refusing to respect them and the legitimacy of their democratic mandate, they have given the

Islamists no option other than seeking the destruction of the westernised segment in Turkey’s

power structure. In effect, they coerced their Islamist enemies to effectively take their own

place and shape the country’s destiny in the same top-down, authoritarian manner, except

perhaps with a different dress code.

With very little effort – a somewhat more modern and effective mass party organisation and a

vaguely more charismatic leader – the main opposition party CHP13 could have posed a far

more potent challenge to AKP. But they were never going to try. Seeking a mandate by

catering to the needs of the electorate was not their thing.

And where legitimate and effective political opposition is weak – through its own fault in the

case of Turkey – discontent finds another channel to express itself. With the Gezi Park events

that flared up in Turkey in May 2013, it was precisely into this dead end that part of Turkey’s

frustrated and ostensibly westernised youth turned itself. For Mr Erdoğan whose Islamist

political upbringing contained no appreciation of political checks and balances – indeed, any

limit to absolute power – this was a priceless opportunity to rally his own base around a clear-

cut “us vs. them” fight.

Effectively unopposed, Mr Erdoğan soon felt bold enough to take on even one of the principal

factions within his own Islamist political family, the Gülenists – a sort of latter-day

brotherhood-cum-masonic order à la Turque owing allegiance to a babbling priest in self-

imposed exile in Pennsylvania. Within a year, thousands of technocrats, from the police to the

                                                                                                               13 Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican People’s Party).

 

 14  

judiciary, who were rightly or wrongly associated with Mr Gülen’s confrèrerie, were removed

from office or exiled to positions where they could not pose a threat to Mr Erdoğan’s power.

The net effect of the internal political turmoil in Turkey since April 2013 was that, as the

going got rough on the international arena from the next year on, the Turkish society found

itself utterly divided to the point where no level of external danger would prove sufficient to

rally the bulk of the nation around its government.

And the going did get rough in the international arena. Messrs Erdoğan and Putin may have

appeared unshakable in their grip on power domestically, and imperturbable on the

international stage, with Europe in a desperate struggle to save their currency union while

America reeling under self-inflicted fiscal sequester. But beneath this triumphal facade

developments beyond any autocrat’s control were going to put both countries through severe

trials.

The first trial opened in Kiev, as the ordinary people of Ukraine rose en masse in rebellion

against their government – something that the Turkish nation has never been able to do.

Kremlin’s political engineers turned out to be as unprepared in 2013 as they had been during

the Orange Revolution of 2004. Conspiracy theorists and assorted armchair geo-strategists

may relish the thought that the Maidan protests from November 2013, which resulted in the

expulsion of Yanukovich government by February 2014, were an American-inspired plot

pitting a Europe-leaning Western Ukraine against a Moscow-leaning, Russian-speaking east.

More careful observers have every opportunity to realise that there is a “middle Ukraine” of

self-respecting patriots (many of whom are Russian-speakers at home) whose sole reason for

rebellion was utter disgust for the savage gangsterism of Yanukovich & Co.

This was the sort of grass-roots rebellion that Oriental autocrats are incapable of analysing

and deflecting. And Ukraine – which had always been intrinsically a little freer than Russia,

with a peasantry a little richer than Russia’s servile masses – did not master the cruelly

effective methods of repression that kept autocracy unshakable in Russia. A few gangster

bodyguards of Yanukovich were able to murder nearly a hundred protesters in the slopes

leading to the Parliament building in Kiev. But the bulk of the Ukrainian police, and even

more so the Ukrainian Army, would not fire at its own countrymen – unlike Turkish law

enforcement bodies which could always be relied upon by the government to shoot at

protesters en masse, as they were happy to confirm during and after the Gezi Park events.

 

 15  

With his protégé Yanukovich booted, and having lost control of Western and central Ukraine,

including Kiev (3 million inhabitants), Russia had no means of responding other than

lowering the level of the discussion. Outright Anschluss of Crimea and blatant festering of

armed rebellion by Russian Army-assisted criminal gangs parading as separatist freedom

fighters in the Donbas region were enough to narrow the new Ukrainian government’s room

for manoeuvre and delight the credulous Russian masses drugged with Moscow’s propaganda.

But they were also enough to start a process of reassessment in the West’s relations with

Russia – timidly at first, as this new crisis in the eastern approaches seemed to Europeans and

Americans as the last thing they needed at that moment. Indeed, it was a horror for those in

the West – including individuals, companies, football clubs, indeed entire political parties –

who had allowed themselves to be entangled in complex business and personal ties with

Russia’s kleptocrats and the Kremlin regime intertwined with the business empires of those.

This, after all, was an age when a former Chancellor of the Bundesrepublik could sit on the

board of a Gazprom subsidiary and be on Mr Putin’s payroll. The West was going to try to

kid itself for a long time that it can persuade Russia to change its behaviour in Ukraine

through “surgical strikes” – limited sanctions against specific individuals and companies.

But it was enough. Even before these events, from 2009 onwards, during what was still a

period of commodity price boom, Russian economic growth was already on a downward

path. Increasingly arbitrary meddling with business by the Kremlin was souring the appetite

of Western companies for the Russian market and scaring off Russia’s own entrepreneurs.

Now, those limited sanctions added to the effects of a sharp decline in oil and other raw

material prices. That, in turn, was driven partly by deteriorating confidence in China’s growth

prospects – something the Chinese autocrats seemed unable to reverse – and a fracking14

revolution that promised to turn the US into an oil exporter – something well beyond any

autocrat’s control. The result was going to be economic meltdown in Russia from 2014

onwards.

By that time, what had started as a spring of hope in the Arab world back in 2011 had turned

into a winter of frustration, and parts of it had become an arena of contest among autocrats,

local and adjacent. Convinced of his invincibility – and perhaps infallibility – Mr Erdoğan was

well ahead of Mr Putin in throwing his country into this foray. He could claim multiple

justifications for his action. First, there was the question of making up for decades-long

                                                                                                               14 Hydraulic fracturing, which enabled a substantial increase in the ability to extract oil from rocky soil formations.

 

 16  

Kemalist neglect for Turkey’s relations with the nearby Arab brethren. Regardless of the

current state of imbroglio in Turkey’s involvement in the Syrian conflict, that remains a valid

point. Besides, with hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees pouring in, to escape the

murderous tyrant of Damascus, it was not as if Turkey had the option of not being involved.

But obtaining the desired results turned out to be more difficult than getting involved.

What we nowadays call the Near East15 has not had strong locally based and viable states

since around the 10th century AD when much of the region came under the overlordship of

Turkic chieftains16, sometimes ruling as autonomous Atabegs17, at other times subsumed

under predominantly Turkic imperial structures such as the Seljuk or the Memluk, until the

whole thing was absorbed as a set of governorates under the Ottoman Empire in the early

16th century. “Modern” states drawn on the map after WWI have never been independent

and solid either, except when they were run as ruthless Baathist tyrannies (in Baghdad and

Damascus between the 1970s and the 1990s) or governed directly by Europeans themselves

(as in the case of Israel).

For instance, it took Lebanon as a theoretically independent nation-state no more than twelve

years (from the de facto ending of French rule at the end of 1946) to require its first American

military intervention to quell its first bout of civil war in 1958 and prevent it from breakup.

The subsequent civil wars and foreign invasions (1967, 1976, 1983) brought little change to

the predicament of that geographical expression of Lebanon, drawn on the political map for

the sole purpose of having a state with a Christian majority on the Levant coast. It never

worked. Nearby Jordan consisted in half of refugees from Palestine – the most educated and

economically advanced Arab society in the 1940s – who had to make room for Jewish settlers

to whom Europe could not offer enough space and security even after the defeat of Nazism.

And the Hashemite State there has been all but an Israeli protectorate since the 1970s. Since

also the 1970s, the ossified state of Egypt has been underwritten by the US and oil-rich Gulf

Arab states. The latter could not exist for more than 45 minutes without Anglo-American

military protection, as Saddam Hussein demonstrated in 1990. The invention of Libya, as a

unified state enclosing Tripolitania, Cyrenaic and Fezzan, was a silly Italian idea. Even the

Roman Empire had always kept these as separate provinces – so did its Ottoman successor.

                                                                                                               15 Comprising Greater Syria (Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan) and Mesopotamia (Iraq). 16 The first recorded military coup in Turkish history actually took place in 861 AD, with the assassination of the Abbasid Caliph al-Mutawakkil by his Turkish royal guard. 17 Roughly, the equivalent of a “Lord”.

 

 17  

The impotence of states in this region was one reason behind the uprising of Arab masses

from 2011, in search of jobs, hope and respect, possibly in the reverse order. But the

destruction of even those feeble and inept states quickly transformed popular uprisings into

inter-locked civil wars.

The net effect of America’s military actions against and within Iraq between the first Gulf

War of 1990 and their “retreat” in 2011 has been the destruction of Iraq as a centrally run

state. While Iraq’s Kurdish North had been run as a de facto independent state since around

1991, its Shi’ite Arab majority was now perfectly happy to let the Iraqi space come under

considerable Iranian influence.

To outsiders, especially those of pious Sunni Muslim persuasion like Mr Erdoğan, it was

difficult to banish the thought of an Iran interconnecting the different regions under Shi’ite

control across the Fertile Crescent, from southern Iraq to Hizbullah-ruled southern Lebanon.

It is doubtful that the Iraqi or Lebanese Shi’ites were interested in anything more than making

use of Iran’s resources (and zeal) to advance their local agendas, and probably couldn’t give a

fig to the fantasy of resurrecting the old Iranian Empire of older (Achaemenid or Sassanid)

days. But, you never know. History – including that of 700 years of Roman-Persian wars18 -

shows that, from a “Mediterranean” point of view, the Persian leadership is not entirely

immune to a fanatical pursuit of expansionism.

In the centre-stage of this chequered political terrain now erupted a new civil war in Syria.

This squandered years of patient work by Ankara, which since 1999 was deploying every

diplomatic and commercial effort within their means to nudge this fanatical pan-Arab

Baathist autocracy towards becoming a more normal neighbour with whom one could engage

in mutually beneficial commercial and human relations – and with any luck strengthen the

prospects for broad-based prosperity. Except that, anything broad-based in Syria would

necessitate that considerable economic and political power shifts from the 10 per cent Alawite

minority who ruled the country to the 80% Sunni majority who have been suffering quietly

under the brutal regime of Al-Assad – less quietly during brief moments such as the quashing

of the 1982 Hama rebellion (estimated 10,000 to 40,000 dead), to which no one had paid

much attention in the West or in Turkey.

                                                                                                               18 At least from the Battle of Carrhae (present-day Harran) in 53 BC to the Great Byzantine-Persian War of 629 AD at the time of Emperor Heraclius, just before either empire’s Near Eastern possessions were going to be overrun by the nascent Arab Muslim empire, Rome (including in its Byzantine variety) and Iran were in a semi-permanent state of war. Once Ottomans took control of the Eastern Roman Imperial domain, they also came into conflict with a resurgent (Safevid) Iran, which conflict lasted from the early-1500s to the mid-1700s.

 

 18  

The young al-Assad (Bashar), or those in the Alawite leadership who pulled the strings that

made his long limbs move, wouldn’t have any of that. This was now an opportunity for

Damascus to reassert control in the country through the time-honoured brutal methods they

knew how to apply and deliberately fuel a civil war. Iran was too happy to give them a hand

in extinguishing the timid attempt towards a more open society. Other regional mini-

autocracies were now moving in (Qataris, Saudis), delighted in the prospect of playing mini-

great power games. Money was not a problem. The lives to be lost were enthusiastically

provided by the frustrated youth of Syria, who finally found something to do with their

otherwise dull existence.

Who was to stop those outsiders from pouring oil on Syria’s fires? A confused and budget-

sequestrated America, fed up with Muslim world imbroglios and unwilling to afford new wars

in the Middle East? Or Europe’s historic powers (Britain, France) which were not great

enough to intervene in Libya on their own without practical help from the US? France was

just about great power-enough to police Mali – albeit imperfectly.

A French saying attests that “when the cat isn’t around, the mice dance”. With Europe

impotent and America unwilling to get involved, everyone could now play great power in the

Near East. It is possible to argue that, with his religious upbringing, Mr Erdoğan had no

difficulty to see the conflicts in the region as an emerging titanic struggle between the Sunni

and Shi’ite strands of Islam. Besides, all other direct participants did the same. But it is also

possible to interpret Turkey’s positioning in purely secular terms, as pursuit of national self-

interest in what is primarily a national conflict, i.e., one about influence and control of

territory and access to resources and denial of them to others.

The net effect of America’s clumsy interventions, interspersed with benign neglect, were now

promising to offer a huge swath of the ancient Fertile Crescent to Iranian control, with the rest

risking to be turned into a string of medieval fiefdoms stretching from the Zagros Mountains

to the Mediterranean, controlled by various factions of Kurds – who, remember, in the final

analysis speak an Iranian tongue.

It was bad enough that life was reduced to rubble for Sunni Arabs who constituted a third of

Iraq including the ancient city of Baghdad, which is revered in so many Turkish proverbs.19

Now the same fate beckoned the four-fifths of Syria’s population that was also Sunni Muslim,

including in the venerable city of Halab, so close in character to Turkey’s southeast, and yet

                                                                                                               19 “No love like mother; no place like Baghdad.” (It rhymes in Turkish.)

 

 19  

kept so far from it since the French intrusion into the area. The French had placed their seat

of control in Damascus, which they could reach more easily from their beachhead in Beirut.

Yet, Halab had managed to hold its own as the economic capital of the country, to this day.

Everyone on the chessboard of Syria and Iraq could count on some external “friend”. The

Alawite regime of Damascus was preferable for Israel principally as “the devil they knew”.

The Shi’ite in general (including the Alawites), of course, had their elder brother and

protector in Iran. Europe was all-attentive to do what it could to protect the dwindling

numbers of Christians in the Near East – especially France, now too happy to dump its pan-

Arabist supporter cloak, which it had worn from the 1970s up until the Iraq War of 1990, and

revert to its 19th century role as protector and promoter of les Chrétiens d’Orient. Kurds – Syrian

or Iraqi – were always held in romantic light by the European intelligentsia and had now

become useful allies on the ground – or stepping-stones – for the American military. That the

political organisation (PYD) controlling Syria’s Kurdish areas – with Damascus’ consent – was

an affiliate of the one (PKK) that was waging war against the Turkish state since 1984 did not

matter. Kurds were tactful enough not to harm Westerners directly.

This gave a perfect opportunity for Mr Erdoğan to throw his hand – alongside the Gulf Arab

monarchies – as the great protector of Sunni Muslims – the ordinary Joe of Syria. A self-

interested move, no doubt. But was it entirely devoid of sincerity and moral high ground?

And, how was one to exercise, in practical terms, support for the ordinary Muslims of Syria –

who were doing most of the fighting and dying – if not by backing the most effective rebel

groups? Some in America and elsewhere kidded themselves in the early days of the Syrian

civil war that an effective challenge to Damascus could be put up by sophisticated Syrian

expats returning from comfortable exiles in the West.

Just what does it take to sustain fighting, without air cover, in the face of near-certainty of

death under barrel bombs from an enemy that does possess an air force and is free to use it –

because the respectable “international community” cannot afford to take on Syria’s dense

Russian-built air defence system? It turns out that a religious “fanatic” is better equipped –

intellectually-speaking – for this type of combat, which is a suicide mission even when one isn’t

trying to be a kamikaze. American security experts to this day engage in semantic

contortionism to justify why it might be necessary “to work with” some “extremist” rebel

groups which may be just about “moderate” enough. Alas, America’s efforts to pick and chose

rebel groups that might deserve its material support in Syria have ended up producing the

greatest of fiascos in the history of covert war.

 

 20  

In the end, it was the juxtaposition of religious sensitivities (or perhaps grander designs) by Mr

Erdoğan and his close supporters with a totally rational pursuit of national self-interest by the

Turkish state that drove Turkey’s dealings in the medieval chessboard of Syria.

But could that also justify apparent collusion – even benign neglect – of Daesh20, that

unholiest of unholy conspiracies that erupted to the centre stage of the Fertile Crescent in

2014? Was Turkey at fault for not placing in the highest category of evil those who murdered

in the most modern, internet-assisted, manner, targeting with maximum visual effect the

contemporary Western man’s hyper-sensitivity to the image? Should Turks and their

government have concluded, like Western nations, that those who cut throats “online” and

deliberately destroy ancient ruins should be considered a higher form of evil than Bashar al-

Assad, who, behind his impeccably Western attire, oversees a “civilised” aerial massacre of

hundreds of thousands of civilians and, in fact, deliberately lets Daesh flourish by not

attacking it? Probably they should have, but not for the above reasons, but because Daesh’s

extreme level of cynicism that rivalled with al-Assad’s – for example in prostituting girls they

ostensibly punished for their lack of piety, or in making money by selling antiquities they

banish as idolatry, etc., etc. Perhaps above all, for the extreme unpredictability and freedom

from principle incarnated by this most curious chimera born out of an intercourse between

frustrated Muslims and a bigoted West.

What was behind the cruelly innovative barbarism displayed by Daesh anyway? In what ways

was its savagery an emanation from something that might be deeply wrong within Islam on its

own? To what extent was its ruthlessness grew out of impurities poured upon the Muslim

world – especially the hapless youth of Europe’s Muslim internal proletariat that now

indulged in murder games?

A partisan point of view may see truth in one or, alternatively, the other, and it would be

waste of time to seek a discussion among partisan points of view on this sort of a subject. A

“Toynbeean” point of view of history21 encourages us to consider that it is perhaps the

unfortunate “intercourse” between the West and an Islam-in-exile as underclass within its

intellectually and culturally abandoned suburbs that Europe’s Daesh contingent was born.

                                                                                                               20 The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), alternatively translated as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), is a Salafi jihadist militant group that follows an Islamic fundamentalist, Wahhabi doctrine of Sunni Islam. The group is also known as Daesh, which is an acronym derived from its Arabic name ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī 'l-ʿIrāq wa-sh-Shām (Wikipedia). 21 Inspired by the work of Arnold J. Toynbee, arguably the historian who has thought in the most systematic way about the life and death of civilisations, and more crucially about “intercourse” between them. See his principal work A Study of History in eleven volumes (Oxford University Press). For the impatient, there is also an Abridged Edition of only 2 volumes.

 

 21  

Many have already noticed the prominent part Muslims brought up within the West play

within Daesh. That facet of the phenomenon is even better appreciated when “European”

Daesh members are seen as share of the Muslim population within their country of birth or

adoption (Figure 10). That said, these numbers only reveal the higher intensity of (or

propensity for) extreme Islamism within the West. There is no doubt that, in absolute terms,

the bulk of Daesh rank-and-file and its zeal have been manufactured close to where they are

operating.

And whether the advent of Daesh is “Islam’s fault” or the West’s, by now the apportioning of

the blame scarcely mattered. What counted was who was hurting whom. The moment Daesh

began decapitating captured Westerners in cinematographic fashion, Syria’s skies could turn

into an Abilene-style shootout, even with the feeble Jordanian Air Force getting a chance for

target practice with live ammunition.22 The day Daesh sympathizers hit deep inside the West

with the Charlie Hebdo murders of January 2015, the stakes were raised further. French intellos

could now proudly express, with something akin to satisfaction, that Islamic terror was

attacking their country “for its way of life and its values” – a conclusion that many of them

had greeted with scorn when it had been reached by Americans post-9/11. The day when

Daesh appeared to have something to do with the 2015 suicide attacks in Turkey (Suruç, July;

Ankara, October), even it began to go through motions of doing something about Daesh.23

Nevertheless, these developments were now sufficient to put in motion several processes of

repositioning; in Turkey’s involvement in the Near East; in its military relationship with the

US – who was now given permission to use bases inside Turkey to attack Daesh – and even in

Turkey’s relations with the European Union.

By 2015, it was remarkable how the Near East and Europe seemed intertwined. It became

impossible to see a cover page on a major European newspaper or a European TV news

bulletin without a top news item on the Europe-Near East interaction – Islamic terror threats,

treatment of Islam within the West, the impact of those on the public opinion and elections,

Western air strikes in Syria or Iraq, streams of hapless refugees from the Near East’s failed

states drowning, swimming or marching they way from Syria to Europe, etc., etc.

It was unthinkable that this intensifying coupling between Europe and the Near East would

not also shift Europe’s relationship with Turkey, which, after all, straddled both regions.

                                                                                                               22 In addition to aircraft from the US, Gulf Arab countries, Iraq (some flown by Iranian Air Force pilots), and God knows who else. 23 Given the present state of opacity in Turkish politics, we may never know who was behind the Suruç and Ankara attacks.

 

 22  

Naturally, the shift began with tentative and hesitant moves. Still, Turkey’s relations with Iran

soured quickly, despite expectations of a bonanza in trading with it in the post-sanctions era.

Silly gestures such as going to through the motions of buying weapons systems from China

were put aside. And these reinforced earlier signals of rapprochement with the Atlantic

powers, such as the establishment of a ballistic missile defence system to face potential threats

from the same Iran. But they were not enough to break the ice completely. Visibly, Mr

Erdoğan had successfully built up enough antipathy (and perhaps suspicions as to his ultimate

attachments) for any Western leader conscious of public opinion to contemplate, much less

articulate, closer ties with Turkey.

Shifts in the fundamental determinants of power are necessary to instigate realignments in the

diplomatic sphere, but they are not sufficient. Those require action by decisive operators (call

them leaders, if you worship the apex of the power structure) willing and able to make bold

moves, including ones that might turn out to be stupid. In the present juncture, boldness is a

characteristic that is nigh impossible to associate with any democratically elected leader in the

Euro-Atlantic sphere. Neither America’s philosopher king Mr Obama, nor the political party

apparatchiks whom events propelled to leadership positions in countries like France or

Germany have done anything that qualifies for the adjectives decisive or bold. Despite his

reputation for recklessness, Mr Erdoğan does not differ much from them and most of his

moves in the Near East have been covert and tentative ones.

That left the judo wrestler who reigns from the Moscow Kremlin. The opportunity must have

been irresistible for the fighter mind ruling over his actions, and thus, Russia’s. All factors

seemed to encourage him in that direction: The chance to annoy the guardians of the

(Western) world order; Enjoyment of heightened power derived from supporting the weaker

side in the conflict – the Alawite faction, which can only be a minority in a pluralist Syria; The

chance to fascinate the growing masses of Right-wing extremists and Christian identitarians

within Western electorates. With tremendous surprise effect, Mr Putin could now launch his

crusade in Syria, ostensibly to destroy Daesh, yet in reality pummelling the only forces that

checked it within that country’s Sunni areas, and with tremendous disdain for human life that

is so characteristic of the Muscovite state. Heaven knows what recruitment boost he gave to

yet unknown extremist factions whose future horrors we cannot even imagine.

Russian military aircraft were now crowding Syria’s already busy shooting range and openly

destroying the West’s pathetic effort to build a non-fanatical coalition against al-Assad. So

successful was his media assault as well that, for instance the French Press could be kept busy

 

 23  

for days by Mr Putin’s instruction to the Russian Mediterranean squadron to cooperate with

the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. The leadership of the Western world was paralysed

as ever vis-à-vis this newly assertive Russia.

The view from Ankara, however, was now becoming crystal clear. This was no longer simply

a question of containing a fanatical Iran trying to push through a zone of influence through

Turkey’s southern fringe. A whole ring of Russian-inspired trouble spots and Russian-

controlled military outposts now appeared to surround Turkey, from the Black Sea

(Transnistria, Crimea, Donbass, and Abkhazia) through the Caucasus (Southern Ossetia,

Armenia proper – where the two Soviet army divisions never left – and Mountainous

Karabakh), all the way to the Russian base in Lazkiye (Lattakia) on the Mediterranean coast

of Syria. With the sort of international behaviour that was now typical in Mr Putin’s Russia,

there would be precious little that can stop it from paralysing Turkey’s patiently built but

fragile economic and diplomatic ties from the Black Sea basin to the Near East, or disrupt the

flow of energy from Azerbaijan. Conspiracy theorists who until yesterday were busy lamenting

America’s imaginary effort to drive a Kurdish-Armenian wedge from the Mediterranean to

the Caucasus through Turkey’s southeast were now scrambling to find wider maps to illustrate

the thickening Russian ring, three-quarters complete around Turkey.

Except that, with the sort of unpredictable gambler ruling in Moscow, the conspiracy theorists

had more of a point. Decidedly, Turkey now appeared increasingly bottled up in all

directions, except the West, with which it had allowed its relations to sour. As 2015 drew to a

close, Turkey’s opportunistic relationship with Russia suddenly deteriorated. Whether or not

the downing of a Russian military aircraft on 24 November 2015 was an accident or a

deliberate signal, whether it was a justified response to a specific24 deliberate violation of

Turkish airspace or an overreaction, it scarcely mattered. It was time to say “good bye, Mr

Putin”. And the message was given in a language he could understand.

A tyrant cannot afford to look weak even for a day. Mr Putin had no option other than

appearing tough and menacing in his response to this daring challenge to the great power that

Russia was by a despicable lesser power. By doing so, he only accelerated Turkey’s

reassessment of its relations with his country.

                                                                                                               24 Similar aggressions had been frequent in the preceding weeks, including not only through transgressions into Turkish airspace but also through instances of Russian aircraft locking their fire-control radars on Turkish aircraft flying within Turkish airspace – a blatant sign of hostility.

 

 24  

A few selective trade sanctions on their own may not have had much effect in Russian-

Turkish economic ties in the longer term, other than making the ordinary Russian’s dinner

plate – from which American and EU products had already been excluded – even more dull,

and his leisure travel options even more limited. Besides, economic sanctions rarely change

political behaviour on their own. But the deliberate and arbitrary mistreatment of Turkish

businessmen – who have been active in Russia by the thousands for decades – was bound to

encourage a reassessment of Russia’s de facto worth as an investment destination even by the

battle-hardened Turkish business community, which normally excels in doing business in

countries with poor governance. This was happening at a time when Western entrepreneurs

still in Russia were also rushing to the gate.

The crumbling of economic ties with Russia could not be anything but painful in the short-

term. Yet, a rebalancing of its unhealthy liaison with Russia could also bring benefits to

Turkey. Less of that cheep and flashy Russian mass tourism could perhaps be turned into an

opportunity for innovation and investment to attract higher quality visitors. A somewhat more

serious approach – at least discourse – was evident regarding the diversification of the sources

of energy imports and building much needed storage capacity for natural gas. In time,

perhaps, the Turkish government would also find the necessary resolve to get out of the deal

to have Turkey’s first nuclear power plant built by the heirs of Chernobyl know-how!

And, that now perfectly fitted with the about-turn in the diplomatic sphere that Ankara was

bound to carry out. Such about-turns are anything but a rarity in Turkish history, vis-à-vis

Russia or, for that matter, vis-à-vis the West.

Some two centuries ago, at a time when Turkey was rapidly descending from great power

status, it had taken little more than a generation from 1827, when the combined naval forces

of Britain, France and Russia destroyed the Turkish fleet in Navarino – to make Greece

independent – to the Crimean War of 1853-1856 when the somewhat reformed Ottoman

Turks could now count the same Britain and France as allies in checking Russian

expansionism. The Crimean War is seldom depicted in the West as an act of alliance with

Turkey, but it marked the high point of Turkey’s 19th century alliance with the West.

However, by the time Russia attacked Turkey again in 1877, Turkey could count on no allies,

with France freshly defeated by an ascendant Germany and desperately in need to turn Russia

into an ally, and Britain sufficiently fed up with trying to prop up a perennially weak Ottoman

Empire incapable of carrying out decisive reforms. By the next encounter in 1914, things had

turned full circle, with Turkey again battling against Britain, France and Russia as a group.

 

 25  

Relations with Russia saw wide swings too, from the war of 1827 to the cosy partnership of

the Treaty of Hünkâr Iskelesi (1833) – when the ruling Ottoman dynasty received military aid

from Russia to defend its throne against a hostile takeover bid by Mehmed Ali Pasha, their

Viceroy in Egypt, and guaranteed to block the Turkish Straights to foreign warships when

Russia asked for it. Relations reverted back to wars (1853-56, 1877-78, 1914-18) and again to

cooperation from 1921 onwards – which is where we started our story.

Turkey’s last war with Russia thankfully ended in the winter of 1917-18 as the Tsarist armies

disintegrated from exhaustion and their country’s takeover by the Bolsheviks who were in

favour of a settlement with Germany. But, contrary to what Europeans may be taught at

school, WWI did not end everywhere in 1918. Turkey remained effectively at war with

Britain and France up until 192225, as the latter waged a proxy war in Anatolia through local

allies to impose the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), which, incidentally, had been ratified

neither by Turkey nor by those Western powers – only Greece had ratified it, to no avail. The

Lausanne Treaty (1923), which the Kemalist victory in Anatolia forced upon Britain and

France, was, however, ratified by everybody, including Greece.

Soon after the following major conflict among great powers was over in 1945, Turkey could

once again position itself under the protection of the West, which was now unambiguously led

by the US. Notwithstanding short-lived episodes of cozying up with the Soviet Union, such as

during the final years of the Menderes government (1950-1960) which was struggling (and

failing) to manage the economy’s first bout of opening and the boom and bust that it entailed,

or during the late 1960s when Turkey was exceedingly cross with America for siding with

Greece on Cyprus conflicts, the “staunch ally” remained by and large anchored in the

Western harbour. It is only in the late 1990s and early 2000s that a new type of flirt emerged

with Russia– this time primarily in the economic sphere – by the brave new emerging Turkey

as a trading nation.

Thus, we can identify no less than five reversals in Turkey’s relationship with Russia, and

perhaps as many as four vis-à-vis the West, in the last 175 years (Table 1). Could Turkish

foreign policy magicians now pull a new rapprochement with the West out of their hats,

complete with accelerated integration in the EU? Or, at least, could there be a somewhat

more decent arrangement – call it special relationship if you will – that will confirm that

Turkey is coming out of the pale, again?                                                                                                                25 To be precise, France was persuaded first to reach a settlement with Turkey through the Ankara Agreement of October 1921. Incidentally, although the US fought with the Entente powers in 1917 and 1918, Turkey has never been at war with the US – Turks are not that stupid – and the US had no reason to attack it.

 

 26  

There is no doubt that Turkish diplomacy is trying it. An unmistakable change in tact and a

heightened effort is evident in restoring cooperation with Europe, for instance on the question

of circulation of persons and management of frontiers and refugees, issues for which the

Turkish government – and perhaps to some extent Europe as well – had shown cynical

neglect for years. Issues that have just got more daunting as well.

And, in the process, the prospect of visa-free in the EU by Turkish nationals just got more

real. Visa-free travel to the EU by Turkish citizens – the only EU accession candidate that did

not have it, though they had enjoyed it decades before some current EU members were

invented as states – had been blocked for decades not so much by the EU but by Ankara

bureaucrats who always held a disdain for any additional freedom to be enjoyed by the

ordinary Turk and thus have not prioritised the necessary reforms to comply with the new EU

rules. Some might consider this to be a marginal issue, but it represents much more than a

cosmetic one. While this has nothing to do with the free circulation of labour envisaged under

EU accession, in some ways it is more significant. If it were to become a reality, it would

represent recognition of Turkish nationals as normal opposite numbers – not undesirables.

The recent willingness to accelerate preparations for Turkey’s EU accession, including

negotiations on “chapters” previously blocked by France on grounds that these constitute

areas where only a country with a “European vocation” should negotiate convergence,

represent an even clearer shift in the signal from Europe. De facto, by the force of events,

Turkey is falling in line regarding a whole raft of foreign policy positions on how to deal with

Moscow, Teheran and Damascus.

Does all this amount to a decisive change of wind in Turkey’s relations with the Western

democracies? Not so fast. There is one major snag.

Turkey has never really enjoyed the rule of law in a genuine sense. But he period since 1945,

which also corresponds to the last era of rapprochement with the West, had witnessed the

accumulation of a number of democratic, pluralist institutions and the observance of

unwritten laws that make their functioning possible. For instance, even in the tumultuous

1970s, when the party with the largest number of seats in the Parliament failed to secure

absolute majority alone or in coalition with other parties, the task to form the government

would be given – by the President of the Republic – to the second largest party. Not anymore.

The last several years have seen the triumph of arbitrary rule in Turkey. Mr Erdoğan has

scarcely lefty a democratic institution or tradition untarnished. So sharp had the arbitrary turn

been that, a previously symbolic neutral presidency could be turned into an all powerful and

 

 27  

blatantly partisan authority without a single word changed in the laws or the constitution.

From the appointment (or banishment) of judges, prosecutors and police chiefs, to the content

of TV programming, every decision under the sun now has to follow presidential writ.

There has never been a free Press in Turkey in the Western sense. But now the President of

the Republic could make it his business to make and unmake columnists, newspapers, TV

stations and entire conglomerates controlling any of the latter, through the most arbitrary

quasi-judicial procedures in the crudest Putinesque style. Owners of uncooperative companies

risked facing the full arsenal of regulatory and tax abuse against their businesses.

Can the West now contemplate a serious and meaningful upgrade of its relationship with an

Oriental autocracy under such arbitrary rule? This is not the same thing as maintaining

arrangements of convenience with the likes of Saudi Arabia which is subject to a perhaps

more repulsive form of autocracy. Saudi Arabia entirely depends on America for its military

survival. Turkey ultimately does not26. And the type of relationship to which Turks have been

aspiring with the West – the dominant civilisation since the 19th century – has been one of

mutual respect and eventual incorporation in it.

The upgrade – or reset, or pivot, whichever you wish to call it – in relations with the West that

some Turks may now be wishing, and the government may be desperate to secure, can only

be achieved with a counterpart in Turkey that can be trusted. And can a country be trusted,

especially as a key ally, or as a partner in an economic and political union (i.e., the EU), unless

it can be trusted to practice rules-based government in its domestic affairs? In sum, can we

really expect a tangible improvement in Turkey’s relations with the West, merely because the

menace from Moscow is heightened?

Remember that back in the 1940s and the 1950s, the West embraced Turkey as an ally and

partner not only because of the Soviet threat, but also because, from 1946 onwards, albeit in a

confused manner, Turkey has made tangible improvements in its domestic governance, with

the introduction of genuinely free elections, leading to a real change in power through

elections (in 1950), coupled with a willingness to open its economy to international trade. The

steps may not all have been decisive and complete, but the espoused direction of movement

was the right one. Incidentally, the preceding era of rapprochement with the West from the

1840s onwards had also fully coincided with a period of political reforms in favour of rules-

based government (Tanzimat) and opening up of the Empire to international trade.

                                                                                                               26 Anatolia is a tough nut to crack militarily. The last time it was successfully and durably invaded was in 1071 (by Turks). This, however, does not mean that someone like Russia could not inflict it considerable damage.

 

 28  

Objective conditions in favour of a rapprochement with the West may now be ripening. But

that rapprochement can only happen if Turkey can show signs of moving, once again, in the

direction of a rules-based country in its domestic affairs as well as international relations. Can

that happen with the sort of government and governance that rules Turkey today?

Certainly not. And if Europeans are serious diplomats – hopefully a small if – they are likely to

insist, this is not simply a question of getting rid of Mr Erdoğan, ostensibly the culprit behind

the recent deterioration in Turkey’s never too high governance standards. In any event, he is

far from being removed from power. On the contrary, despite foreign policy setbacks and

slower prospects for economic growth – his principal tailwind in the earlier days – his grip on

power appears complete.

Turkey is not going to begin to become a more rules-based polity unless the process of change

in political power through democratic means is resumed. That, in turn, is not likely, unless

what passes as democratic opposition in the country becomes electable and capable of

governing. Even if they were to come to power by some miracle, what passes as opposition in

Turkey today is not likely to steer the country towards stronger ties with Western democracies,

unless their relationship with the concept of power also evolves. For that to happen, the

Kemalists (as the two principal opposition forces in Turkey define themselves) need to

reassesses their own stand on the subject of arbitrary power. To get rid of Mr Erdoğan in

order to replace him with another tyrant merely because he looks or sounds more modern (à

la Messrs al-Assad, al-Sisi or, worse, Putin) is not likely to fool anyone.

Those Turks who aspire for a change of direction for their country have to realise and

recognise the evil of arbitrary power regardless of who is exercising it. They need to recognise

that their idol Atatürk had been just as, if not more arbitrary. If a few may have admired him

and benefited from his arbitrary decisions and choices for Turkey, those choices have also

stoked up much of the conservative and religious backlash that has ensued. Turkish Islamism

in its essence is a counter-revolution to Kemalism’s arbitrary – and clumsily executed –

wardrobe modernisation. Indeed, Mr Erdoğan represents little more than Atatürk’s shadow.

Not only that getting rid of Mr Erdoğan may not be sufficient for setting Turkey in the

direction of rules-based governance, but convincing the present opposition of the virtues of

rules-based, limited power may be near-impossible, without another condition to be fulfilled.

Whether they are convinced Islamists, mildly devout conservatives, pro-AKP opportunists,

Kemalists, superficially secular nationalist MHP-supporters or Kurdish separatists, nearly all

 

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participants in Turkish politics share one fundamental characteristic – they all worship power.

All seek salvation in an all-powerful leader – not unlike the hapless Russian moujik who longs

for a good Tsar to save him from his exploitative overlords. The notion that limiting arbitrary

power by checks and balances can actually make the whole nation more powerful has no

following in any significant section of the Turkish society.

Yet, the dramatic events in Turkey since 2013 provide almost a laboratory experiment on

how unchecked power of an individual and a small clique of faithful supporters around him

can wreck a country’s prospects for peace and prosperity. But, will Turks – especially those

who identify themselves as Kemalists – be able to seize the opportunity to take a stand against

arbitrary power in principle?

There remains one more issue. Even if, by some miracle, Turkey’s westernised class were

redeemed and suddenly stopped worshipping Atatürk for his wardrobe elegance and the like

and started asking serious questions about the accountability of power, there remains the

other half of the country who are devoted to Mr Erdoğan and his party and deeply in need for

religion and piety in public life. Can they be convinced to consider that there is something

deeply wrong in unchecked power? After all, Islam, unlike Christianity, contains no teaching

warning against tyranny and cultivates little in the way of compassion for “the meek”.

Yet, one cannot make today’s Turkey more democratic by marginalising half of the

population. Can a pious Muslim take stand against arbitrary and absolute power? Can the

follower of any Abrahamic, Middle Eastern religion take a stand against absolute power, while

worshiping the idea of an all-powerful God? Unless, that is, his religion has been tamed,

reformed and civilised in the hands of a more humanist worldview, as it happened to Judaism

and Christianity in Europe since the Age of Enlightenment? Can the same happen to Islam

one day? If it did, would that creed still be Islam? What would remain distinctive about it?

Must Turkey and the rest of the Middle East suffer as much as Europe did in the wars of

religion during the 16th and 17th centuries before they find out how to organise the

relationship between religion and the state in a more humane and humanist manner? By one

estimate, as much as 40 per cent of Germany’s population disappeared during the last act in

the wars of religion, between 1618 and 1648. The Treaties of Westphalia (1648) ending the

Thirty Years’ War have helped contain religion-based intransigence in European

international affairs, by establishing the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (whoever rules

politically determines the predominant religion), which would delight the supporters of

Turkish-style laicism. But the real solution to religious fanaticism that has so wrecked Europe

 

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in the early modern times has come afterwards, when, during the Age of Enlightenment,

religion (all sort of it) was gradually pushed outside politics and public life.

How to even contemplate, in present-day Turkey’s religious and political turmoil, acts that

would reduce religion’s sway on people’s mind? A starting point might be to recognise that,

contrary to its official ideology and pretence, the Turkish state has never been secular. With its

clerics (imams, muezzins, muftis, and so on) on government payroll officially as civil servants, a

Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı) more powerful than most

ministries27, with sermons centrally written by religious technocrats (theo-crats?), Turkish-style

Sunni Islam is little more than a government instrument to control the meagre spiritual life of

the average Turk. Indeed, Diyanet is a government agency that, in a blatant and unashamed

manner, serves not just Islam, but one particular variant of it that is preferred by the

ostensibly secular Turkish state. In this respect, it is part and parcel of the broader panoply of

instruments that the Turkish state deploys to control the mental life of the Turkish population.

More importantly, this state of affairs is by no means an invention by the present Islamist

power in Turkey. This Turkish-style pseudo-secularism is the handiwork of the 19th century

Tanzimat modernisation, later perfected under the Kemalist regime. Moreover, it is hard to

imagine a European Reformation-style religious modernization movement emerging from

within such a state-run church.

Once again, the segments of the Turkish population that like to think of themselves as being

westernised and aspiring for better ties with Western democracies need to engage in a certain

amount of confession and self-introspection. This needs to start with realisation that Turkey

was anything but secular during Atatürk’s reign and those of his successors. Indeed, far from

it. Kemalism itself has come to acquire certain characteristics of a state religion, complete with

a holy figure (Atatürk himself), untouchable and infallible, a holy book (Nutuk28) and even a

temple – Atatürk's Mausoleum in Ankara, a visit to which is an unavoidable fixture of any

official event, from the opening of the Parliament to visits by foreign dignitaries.29

To sum up, if Turkey is once again to embark on a path towards democratisation and closer

integration with Western democracies, it needs to become a more rules-based society where                                                                                                                27 Representing 4.5% of government personnel expenditure in the 2017 budget request, or the sixth largest in this respect among 47 principal government agencies in the general public sector budget. See https://www.maliye.gov.tr/Documents/2015-2017_ovm_ekler.pdf. 28 Literally, “Speech” – a 36-hour speech, delivered by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk at the Turkish Parliament between 15 and 20 October 1927, that contains as much a réglement de compte against certain individuals that took part or were his opponents during the War of Liberation (1919-1922) as a treatise on his views regarding the construction of the young Republic. 29 Only visiting Iranian statesmen seem to have a dispensation from that requirement.

 

 31  

arbitrary power is checked. For that to happen, all major segments of the population need to

converge around a different idea of governance where they are all protected against

absolutism and concentration of power in the hands of any of them. For that to become a

reality, there is a need to reduce both the role of religion in public life, and the level of state

control in religion. The latter is a precondition for the former.

These may seem a tall order. But it is hard to see another way out. Turkey has tried forced

modernisation, perhaps more forcefully than any other nation, save, perhaps for the Russians,

and that did not make it Western. Instead, it has produced an Islamist backlash and Mr

Erdoğan. Russia too has tried forced westernisation to hold its ground against a triumphant

West. From time to time westernisation seemed to have gone deeper into the Russian skin and

produced a more convincingly Western veneer. After all, no Turkish composer achieved

anything like the mastery and renown in Western classical music of a Tchaikovsky or many

other 19th century Russian composers. No Turkish writer could impress Western readership

as a Tolstoy. But the same forced modernisation also gave Russia Lenin and Stalin and did

not equip it with a political culture that could prevent Mr Putin.

If Turks now have to say good-bye to Mr Putin, and their unhealthy relationship they have

built with his Russia, they also have to say good-bye to Mr Putin that lives within them. That

isn’t only a question of saying good-bye to Mr Erdoğan. It is about establishing a whole new

mental relationship with the likes of Messrs Erdoğan and Putin. What is needed for that?

Is the pious Muslim prepared to contemplate a political order in which he is not only free to

practice his religion without interference from the state and where he does not feel compelled

to capture and control the state to ensure his freedom of worship? Is the secular citizen

prepared to contemplate a political order in which he needn’t maintain state coercion to keep

religion under control and own the state to prevent religious diktat to be imposed on non-

believers? Can there be a deal between genuine religious freedom and freedom from religion?

Can we contemplate a form of secularism in which neither the pious nor the godless is afraid

to have the other’s choice be imposed upon him? That would be a form of secularism where

the state is free from religion; religion is free from state control and the individual free from

religious (or irreligious) imposition by either of the two. It is upon these questions that Turks’

attention must now turn.

We may seem to be quite far from this state of affairs today, but those are goals to which we

must aim, if we are one day to reach the type of internal peace and prosperity we admire in

 

 32  

the more advanced segments of the Western civilisation – principally the English-speaking

nations and others located around the North Sea basin.

But, who would have an incentive to move in this direction in todays’ Turkey? The pious

conservative majority that is in power needs to protect and nurture the sources of economic

growth – that has so far kept it in power – and avoid extreme risks in the foreign policy arena,

which requires a minimum of national unity – which is presently non-existent in a time of

grave external danger. To do that they need reconciliation or they need to establish a mode of

cooperation with Turkey’s Kemalists and Turkey’s old allies in the West. Turkey’s Kemalist

camp on their own have little capacity to coerce the ruling party to change its course, short of

threatening a dramatic rebellion, which would bring the gravest of risks in the current

international context. The Kemalists also need the support of the West in any effort to

convince the ruling party change its course in foreign affairs or alter its style and objectives in

domestic ones. The West in turn has an incentive to promote a sort of state in Turkey that

would be dissuaded from foreign adventures by means of checks and balances internal to the

country. The West can expect no benefit from promoting a superficially pro-Western, al-Sisi-

style authoritarian alternative to Turkey’s Islamists. Indeed, it is only a matter of time before

al-Sisi’s restoration of the ossified autocracy in Egypt will bring that country to its next

eruption.

The West has every interest in maintaining the new – much bigger – Turkish economy

anchored in its open multilateral system and would benefit immensely from a Turkey where

the religious and the less religious have learned to establish a political system in which neither

side needs an Erdoğan or an Atatürk in order to survive. Needless to add, the West has a clear

interest in avoiding a Turkey ruled by a sort of Putin or, worse, a sort of local Khomeini or a

Hitler. That of course also happens to be in Turks’ own fundamental interest.

All interests point in the direction of reconciliation around the principle of coexistence. What

stands in the way is not just Mr Erdoğan’s person. It is first and foremost the great void in the

minds of Turkey’s superficially westernised, self-appointed Kemalist “elite” who are unaware

of the opportunity before them.

Will they be able to wake up? Will they be able to say “good-bye Mr Putin”, “good-bye Mr

Erdoğan” and “good-bye Mr Atatürk” in the same breath? Time will tell.

Deniz Eröcal

Written in Sainte-Luce, Martinique, in December 2015. Finalised in Paris in March 2016.

 

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FIGURES AND TABLES Figure 1: Exports of manufactured products in billions of current US$

Source: Calculated from World Bank, World Development Indicators, March 2016 Figure 2: Exports of manufactured products per adult population in current US$

Source: Calculated from World Bank, World Development Indicators, March 2016

 

 34  

Figure 3: Total population in millions

Note: Data for Ukraine added for comparison. Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2015). World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision, custom data acquired via website Figure 4: Turkey’s population as percentage of Russia’s

Note: Data beyond 2015 represent projections. Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2015). World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision, custom data acquired via website    

 

 35  

Figure 5: Number of deaths under age 50 per thousand alive at age 15

 Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2015). World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision, custom data acquired via website  Figure6: Life expectancy at birth (years)

 Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2015). World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision, custom data acquired via website    

 

 36  

Figure 7: Intentional homicide rates per 100,000 population

 Note: Intentional homicide is defined as unlawful death purposefully inflicted on a person by another person. Source: United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) online data accessed in March 2016  Figure 8: GDP per capita in US $ at current market prices and exchange rates

 Source: International Monetary Fund (IMF) Data Mapper, online data accessed in March 2016

 

 37  

Figure 9: Gross Domestic Expenditure on Research and Development (GERD) as a share of GDP (both in Purchasing Power Parities) (%)

Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics online data accessed in March 2016, except for the following years: Russia 1990-1995: U.S. National Science Foundation, Science & Engineering Indicators 2002; Turkey 1990-1995: OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2001; Russia 2014: Higher School of Economics, Science and Technology. Innovation. Information Society: Pocket Data Book 2016; Turkey 2014: TÜBITAK news bulletin, 19.11.2015, https://www.tubitak.gov.tr/en/news/rd-activities-survey-2014-results-are-announced.  

 

 38  

Figure 10: Foreign fighters in Sunni militant organisations in the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts per million estimated Muslim population in their home country

 Note:  Where  a  range  of  estimates  has  been  given  for  either  variable,  mean  values  have  been  used.  Source:  Foreign  fighters  (2015  data)  from  Peter  R.  Neumann  (2015)  “Foreign  fighter  total  in  Syria/Iraq  now  exceeds  20,000;  surpasses  Afghanistan  conflict  in  the  1980s”,  ICSR,  26  January  2015:  http://icsr.info/2015/01/foreign-­‐fighter-­‐total-­‐syriairaq-­‐now-­‐exceeds-­‐20000-­‐surpasses-­‐afghanistan-­‐conflict-­‐1980s/;  Muslim  population  (2011  data)  from  “Islam  by  Country”,  Wikipedia,  accessed  in  March  2016:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_by_country      

 

 39  

Table 1: Outline of Turkey’s relations with the West and Russia since the Congress of Vienna (1815) Symbols: ⚔ Active war; ☓ Cold war or hostility; ♡ Significant rapprochement Period Relations with Western powers;

Domestic reforms Relations with Russia

1815-1829 ⚔ 1827 Battle of Navarino (British, French & Russian support to Greek independence)

⚔ 1827 Battle of Navarino ⚔ 1828-1829 Russo-Turkish War

1830-1844

♡ 1838 Anglo-Ottoman Treaty 1839 onwards, Tanzimat reforms

♡ 1833 Treaty of Hünkâr Iskelesi (Turkish pledge not to use her sovereignty on the Straights against Russian interests)

1845-1859

♡ 1853-1856 Crimean War alliance

⚔ 1853-1856 Crimean War

1860-1874

♡ 1867 Sultan Abdülaziz state visits to Britain, France and Austria

1875-1909

1876 First Ottoman constitution adopted 1877 First Ottoman Parliament elected 1878 Ottoman Parliament abrogated 1881 Ottoman Public Debt Administration (Düyun-u Umumî) established (a sort of IMF surveillance) 1878-1908 Period of heavy repression under Sultan Abdülhamid II 1908 Military coup and proclamation of the second Ottoman constitution

☓ 1875-76 Revolts in Bosnia and Bulgaria ⚔ 1877-78 Russo-Turkish War

1910-1919

⚔ First World War, including occupation of Turkey (1914-1922)

⚔ First World War, up until the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1914-1918)

1920-1929

☓ 1923 Treaty of Lausanne forced by Turkey upon the Entente powers

♡ 1921 Treaties of Moscow and Kars – 1925 Soviet-Turkish cooperation treaty

1930-1939

♡ 1939 Tripartite Treaty between Britain, France and Turkey

1935 Soviet-Turkish cooperation extended 1936 Montreux Convention

1940-1949

♡ 1947 onwards, Turkish assimilation into the Western block

☓ 1944 Soviet territorial demands on Turkey

1950-1959

♡ 1952 Turkish accession to NATO

1959 PM Menderes plans overtures towards the Soviet Union shortly before his overthrow

1960-1969

1964 US blocks Turkish effort to intervene against Greek takeover in Cyprus

1966 Soviet President Kosygin visit to Turkey; efforts towards détente

1970-1979

☓ 1975-78 American arms embargo on Turkey in response to Turkish intervention in Cyprus

Late ‘70s PM Ecevit speaks about “passing to the other side of the wall”

1980-1989

♡ 1980 Massive Western financial assistance for Turkish economic opening and reforms

☓ 1980s final flare up of the Cold War

1990-1999

1990s Growth of trade and investment relations with Russia

2000-2009

2001 Massive assistance from the West ☓ 2003 US refused use of Turkish bases ♡ 2005 Start of negotiations for EU accession

♡ 2006-13 Russia largest source of Turkish imports

2010-present

Deteriorating military cooperation with the US Deterioration in the EU accession process ♡ 2015 US allowed to use Turkish bases to attack Daesh; closer cooperation with the EU

♡ 2011-16 Visa-free travel between Russia & Turkey (still valid for Russians visiting Turkey) ☓ 2015 Conflict with Russia on Syria

For memory: Periods of entente between Britain-France (later with the US) and Russia: 1815-1853, 1902-1917, 1941-1945, 1992-early 2000s Periods of confrontation between Britain-France (later with the US) and Russia 1853-56 (for Britain, competition with Russia in inner Asia through the 1890s), 1918-22, 1946-92, 2014 - ?