Tag: AKP

Like many of Asia’s antique cities, Istanbul is a palimpsest, continuously inscribed by new movements of people and ideas, even as older writings on its parchment remain faintly visible.

Few Istanbul neighborhoods manifest a multilayered identity as much as Kuzguncuk, which lies on the Asian shore of the Bosporus. Legend has it that Jews expelled from Spain in the late 15th century first settled here. Their neighbors were Greeks, Armenians and other Christians, part of the Ottoman Empire’s extraordinarily cosmopolitan mix of merchant and trading communities.

The local population is almost entirely Muslim now. Strolling through the neighborhood’s dappled streets one afternoon last week, I came across a synagogue and an Armenian Orthodox church. Both seemed permanently shut. The man who opened the door to the Greek Orthodox church only to wave us away had the sullenness of a minority under perpetual siege.

My companion remarked that the few remaining Greeks in Istanbul have little reason to be bon vivants. She is right. It has been nearly half a century since Istanbul lost the last of its non-Muslim minorities, driven out by a vengeful (and secular) Turkish nationalism. Rural migrants from the Black Sea region moved into the houses vacated by the Jews, Greeks and Armenians.

A Trendy Enclave

Ethnically cleansed Istanbul is now one of the port cities — Shanghai and Kochi, India are among the others — to be self- consciously, and profitably, recovering their multicultural past. Kuzguncuk, too, is being gentrified, helped by Istanbul’s creative class of architects, artists, journalists and designers, as well as visitors like myself, looking for a glimpse of old Istanbul in the neighborhood’s renovated Ottoman houses with overhanging wooden balconies.

Even as it frantically re-establishes its links with “old” Europe, Istanbul demonstrates how a city’s exotic past can be enlisted into a high-end consumption of culture — without any sustained national reckoning with a painful history of pogroms and expulsions. Kuzguncuk itself reveals how Turkish identity today is being revised through careful negotiations and compromises with the past and present.

For all its gentrification by latte-sipping liberals, this old working-class neighborhood is still dominated by socially conservative middle-class Muslims, constituting a solid vote bank for the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, which just won a third consecutive national election by a landslide.

via Rising Turkey Is No Neo-Ottoman Threat to West: Pankaj Mishra – Bloomberg.

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.

Author: Morten Messerschmidt and Robert Ellis

The remarkable thing about the Turkish election result is not that Prime Minister Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) won but the unanimity in the international press that it would not be good for Turkish democracy if they gained 330 seats or more in the Turkish parliament. In the event, half the votes only resulted in 326 seats, falling short of the 330 seats needed to change the constitution with a referendum and the 367 seats which would have made it possible for the government to change the constitution alone.

The other common denominator was the fear that an overwhelming victory would reinforce what the Financial Times called the AKP’s “unsettling authoritarian tendencies”. This was demonstrated when The Economist recommended that Turks voted for the opposition CHP (Republican People’s Party) to put a brake on Erdoğan’s autocratic style of government.

The reaction was not long coming. Erdoğan blasted The Economist for being part of  “a global gang” which took its orders from Israel, and for good measure blasted the CHP’s leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu for also being “a project of international gangs”. The Wall Street Journal in turn accused Erdoğan of “reviving the crackpot anti-Semitic media theories of former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad”.

In a report published five days before the election the Pew Research Center confirmed the reasons for Prime Minister Erdoğan’s success. 49% of the Turks interviewed were upbeat about the economy as opposed to 14%  in 2002  (when the AKP was first elected) and 46% in 2007 (the second election). In addition, 62% expressed confidence that Erdoğan would do the right thing in world affairs.

Correspondingly, strong majorities of Egyptians, Jordanians and Lebanese expressed confidence in the Turkish prime minister whereas, somewhat surprisingly, he enjoyed less support in the Palestinian territories. Predictably, Erdoğan received resoundingly negative ratings (95%) from Israeli Jews, whereas 60% of the minority Arab community expressed their confidence.

The AKP government’s foreign policy orientation was clearly displayed in Erdoğan’s victory speech when he declared: “Today Sarajevo won as much as Istanbul, Beirut won as much as Izmir, Damascus won as much as Ankara, Ramallah, the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza won as much as Diyarbakır. Today the Middle East, the Caucasus, the Balkans and Europe won as much as Turkey.” ´

Another reason for Erdoğan’s popularity is his no nonsense style of speaking – that of the Kasımpaşa (district of Istanbul) kabadayı (tough guy). He won acclaim not only in Turkey but also the Middle East for his “you know well how to kill” confrontation with Israel’s president Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2009.

Erdoğan also laid it on the line at a meeting of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly in Strasbourg in April, when he was confronted with critical questions. Here it should be noted that Turkey has been a member of the Council for 61 years and Turkey now chairs both the Parliamentary Assembly and the Council of Ministers.

According to Burak Bekdil, a Turkish columnist, Turkey behaves like a nouveau riche businessman. “With a newly-gained self-confidence and the deep layers of an inferiority complex that stems from a past full of poverty and disgrace, he insults, provokes, agitates and tests the limits of his powers.”

As Erdoğan underlined in Strasbourg, Turkey is no longer the supplicant at the gates, but Turkey needs Europe as much as Europe needs Turkey. Nevertheless, the Pew Research Center’s survey points out that only 17% of Turks believe their country should look to Europe in the future, whereas 25% look to the Middle East. 37% believe that both regions are equally important.

The exercise of Turkey’s “soft power” and its policy of “zero problems with neighbours” have already met their first setbacks in Libya and Syria, and Erdoğan has been forced to distance himself from Bashar al-Assad’s savage repression. A greater  challenge lies with the growing unrest in Turkey’s southeast and Kurdish demands for regional autonomy, which will not diminish now that the Kurdish BDP (Peace andDemocracy Party) has almost doubled its number of seats in the Turkish parliament.

Erdoğan, who in 2005 was the first Turkish leader to acknowledge “the Kurdish problem”, recently declared there is no longer a Kurdish problem in Turkey, and  stated he would have hanged the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan if he had been given the opportunity. As Öcalan has the same iconic status among many Kurds that Mandela has in South Africa, this statement can hardly have won many Kurdish votes.
The main stumbling block to Turkey’s EU accession prospects is Cyprus. To date only limited progress has been made in the current negotiations and the core issues of property, territory and the Turkish settlers remain to be broached. At a meeting of the European Parliament’s Friends of Turkey at the end of March Andrew Duff stated Turkey would be making “a profound and historic strategic mistake” if it put Cyprus before the European Union. But the onus now lies on Turkey – and in particular Erdoğan – to take the necessary steps to end the impasse.

Turkish columnist Semih Idiz recently mooted the notion that Ankara’s relations with Europe should be based more on economic self-interest than integration, and called for the establishment of a new “modus vivendi” and a new narrative between Turkey and Europe.

Now that a number of European and Turkish politicians are no longer labouring underthe illusion of Turkish EU membership, this might be an opportune moment to reassessthe situation.

Morten Messerschmidt, MEP, and Robert Ellis are the chairman and advisor to the EFD’s Turkey Assessment Group in the European Parliament

By Shahid Javed Burki

The writer is a former vice-president of the World Bank and a former finance minister of Pakistan

There is no doubt that the year 2011 brought about irreversible changes in the way the Muslim world is organised politically and the way it is likely to shape its relations with the West and in the West, in particular with the US. As the year 2010 gave way to 2011, even the most well-informed Muslim world watchers could not have seen what the next six months would bring. A fruit vendor in a small Tunisian town set himself on fire, not able to live with the insult heaped on him by a police-woman. This act of self-immolation had far-reaching and hard-to-imagine consequences.

Some of the more obvious results have already entered as important markers for the unfolding history of the Muslim world. The exploding streets in Tunisia and Egypt forced out of office long-serving presidents. While Tunisia’s Zine elAbidine Ben Ali has found a sanctuary in Saudi Arabia, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak was unable to leave the country. He is now facing the courts that he had once packed to serve his regime. He is defending a number of charges, some of which carry the death penalty. A third long-serving president, Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, after having been seriously injured in the bombing of the mosque in the presidential compound, is in Saudi Arabia being treated for the burns on his body. It is unlikely that he will be allowed to return.

Two other regimes — those in Libya and Syria — are under attack by large numbers of dissidents who have drawn courage from the actions of those who were successful in getting rid of the rulers in three other countries. The regimes have managed to survive by using the tactics that kept them in power for so long. The governments headed by Muammar Qaddafi in Libya and Bashar al Assad in Syria have used terror to stay in power. They may have bought some time but it seems unlikely that they will continue to hold on to power when so much change is occurring all around them.

One of these changes is in Turkey, a Muslim country that had once ruled the Arab world as part of the Ottoman Empire. When it was dispossessed of its imperial domain, it tried hard to turn the other way. Kamal Ataturk, the father of modern day Turkey, worked hard to de-Islamise his nation and to associate his country with Europe. But Turkey’s attempt to Europeanise itself was not reciprocated by Europe, especially after Islamophobia became a potent rallying cry in the continent. It was in this state of uncertainty that a new Turkish leader stepped in with a new political, economic and social philosophy. His impact on the Muslim world may also be of as much consequence as that of the explosion in the Arab street. In the elections held on June 12, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish acronym, AKP) took 50 per cent of the vote and comfortably retained its majority in the unicameral legislature. The party, whose roots are in Turkey’s Islamic movement, fell shy of the 330 seats needed in the legislature to send for a referendum to make the changes in the constitution written by the military. In fact, the prime minister had hoped for a super majority of 367 seats that would have made it possible to pass the constitutional changes by the parliament acting alone. Mr Erdogan wanted a French style republic with a strong presidency and himself as president. But the verdict from the electorate was clear: It liked the prime minister but wished to give him constrained powers. The re-elected prime minister seemed to have received the message. “We’ll go to the opposition and we’ll seek consultation and consensus,” he said, responding to the results. “We will bring democracy to an advanced level, widening rights and freedoms. The responsibility has risen, so has our humility.” While the exercise of people’s will was open and in full public view, there is a consensus amongst Turkey watchers that the country still had some distance to go before it could become a truly democratic state.

Turkey has important lessons for those busy designing new political systems in Muslim countries where the street won over the establishment. There are also lessons for Pakistan, another Muslim country that is trying hard to find its political feet. The Turks have shown that they can trust a political party that does not profess to be secular; one that has deep roots in the conservative elements within the society. It is of some comfort for the moderates in Turkey that Erdogan’s party has not made any attempt to impose its views on the society at large. It is happy to go as far as the electoral process will let it proceed. Prime Minister Erdogan has handled his relations with the powerful military with great restraint but also with firmness. He was not afraid to push the generals back if they attempted to assert their right to protect what they regard as the legacy of Kamal Ataturk. If ‘Kamalism’ is not what the majority of the people desire, then it would not be forced on them.

What the world is watching with breathless anxiety is the political and social transformation of the Muslim world. Change is occurring all over. The process has begun and cannot be resisted for too long by those who favour the status quo. America under President Barack Obama appears to recognise this and instead of resisting political modernisation in the Muslim world, as it did on several occasions in the past — in Iran, for instance, when Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh tried to assert its constitutional authority — it is prepared to go along with it.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 27th, 2011.

via Turkey back in the Muslim world – The Express Tribune.