Dr. Gene Callahan noticed that Niall Ferguson’s dire warning of the rise of a neo-Ottoman Empire is not based on any real evidence. Ferguson wrote the column in the wake of the AKP’s significant electoral victory earlier this month. He wrote:
And yet we need to look more closely at Erdogan. For there is good reason to suspect he dreams of transforming Turkey in ways Suleiman the Magnificent would have admired.
In his early career as mayor of Istanbul, Erdogan was imprisoned for publicly reciting these lines by an early-20th-century Pan-Turkish poet: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers.” His ambition, it seems clear, is to return to the pre-Atatürk era, when Turkey was not only militantly Muslim but also a regional superpower.
It is true that Erdogan recited the Gökalp poem in question, and he was then imprisoned for it. Such was the absurdly illiberal nature of the old Kemalist order for which so many Westerners now seem to be pining. It was Erdogan’s imprisonment that served as the catalyst for the reinvention of Islamist politics in Turkey that led to the emergence of the AKP as the ruling party in Turkey. It might be worth adding that Gökalp was a member of the Committee of Union and Progress, which was the ruling party in the years following the 1908 revolution, and it was also the political organization to which Mustafa Kemal belonged before and during WWI. Gökalp was a leading ideologue of Turkish nationalism, and his thought was an important influence on the shape of Turkish nationalism in the republic. Sibel Bozdogan describes the intellectual milieu in which Gökalp was working in Modernism and Nation-Building:
It was after the consolidation of power of the nationalist wing of the CUP in 1913, however, that the primacy of Islam in the official definition of Ottoman identity was replaced by an emphasis on Turkishness. The emerging definition of nationhood on the basis of shared cultural, historical, and linguistic heritage, rather than shared religion under the patrimony of the Ottoman sultan, differentiated the new nationalist ideology from the earlier patriotism of the Young Ottomans. The classical texts of Turkish nationalism were written in this period, especially after the founding of the nationalist organization Turkish Hearth Society and the publication of its journal, Turkish Homeland…. [ed. -Gökalp was a major figure in this organization.]
The leading ideologue of Turkish nationalism was Ziya Gökalp. Before everything else, Gökalp differentiated “nationality” (the Ural-Altaic group of Turkic peoples) from “religion” (the Islamic community, which was supranational), although both were constitutive of Turkish identity….Second, on the basis of of the sociological theories of Emile Durkheim and Gabriel Tarde, who identified the locus of social life in “culture groups” and “civilization groups,” respectively, Gökalp formulated his well-known distinction between “culture” (hars) and civilization (medeniyet). This was a distinction between “beliefs, morals, duties, aesthetic feelings, and ideals of a subjective nature” on one hand, and on the other, “scientific truths, hygienic or economic rules, practical arts pertaining to public works, techniques of commerce and of agriculture–all of an objective nature.” From this he observed that whereas civilization could be borrowed from the West, culture had to reside in the nation’s own people and history. (p. 35)
Like many non-Western nationalists, Gökalp saw Westernization as a technical process that would aid in the defense of the nation, but which did not have to involve abandoning national culture. Most important for understanding Gökalp’s nationalism was his attitude towards the “high culture of the Ottoman sultans.” As Bozdogan explained:
The Turkish nationalism of Ziya Gökalp (ironically himself of Kurdish origins) was anticosmopolitan in cultural terms. From his perspective, it was not the high culture of the Ottoman sultans but the folk culture of Turks that could be the real source of “national culture”–as it would indeed be in the late 1930s.
I hope that this shows just how misleading the opposition Ferguson sets up between Gökalp and Atatürk really is. It creates the impression that Erdogan wants “to return to the pre-Atatürk era.” All that it really shows is that Erdogan was drawing on some of Gökalp’s use of Islamic imagery and rhetoric in this poem to link himself and the Welfare Party to which he then belonged to a famous Turkish nationalist figure whose ideas continued to be influential during Atatürk’s tenure as president and afterwards. In other words, linking Erdogan to Gökalp doesn’t prove the point Ferguson wants to make, but mostly contradicts it.
It is entirely appropriate to be skeptical of Erdogan, as it is appropriate to be skeptical of any powerful politician. He clearly has authoritarian instincts and a willingness to demagogue issues to benefit himself and his party, and he has been content to exploit rising Turkish nationalism. He has presided over a perceptible shift in Turkish foreign policy that takes greater account of Turkey’s regional interests and aims to establish stronger ties with all of Turkey’s neighbors, but this makes Erdogan’s Turkey a new Ottoman Empire as much as Germany’s preeminence in the EU makes it into a new Kaiserreich. If there are problems with Erdogan, and I don’t dispute that there are as far as people living in Turkey are concerned, they are the problems of a popular, successful religious-nationalist leader presiding over a system of increasingly one-party rule.
Ferguson’s misunderstanding of Erdogan and Gökalp seems to be driven to a large degree by his misunderstanding of Atatürk. Atatürk was a Westernizing and modernizing ruler, but he wasn’t “pro-Western” or aligned with the West in the way that Westerners today think of post-WWII Kemalists, and instead set policy according to what would best serve the interests of Turkey. Atatürk was strongly opposed to aligning Turkey internationally with any grouping of states, and he was also against the sort of foreign adventurism that Enver Pasha’s later career exemplified. Not only did Turkey need to recover from the decade of war that preceded the formation of the republic, but Atatürk saw the CUP’s involvement of the empire in WWI as a major blunder that he would try to avoid making in the future. His successor likewise maintained strict neutrality during WWII. Because of Turkey’s experience after WWI and the attempted partition of Anatolia by European powers, Atatürk understandably retained a strong distrust of Western powers. To portray Erdogan as significantly less interested in good relations with the West than Atatürk and his successors is to misunderstand both Atatürk and modern Turkey, and to see him as a would-be restorer of the Ottoman Empire credits him with too much power.