Tag: Soner Cagaptay

Turkey’s Kurdish Calculus

By SONER CAGAPTAY

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, has made a bloody comeback in Turkey. According to a recent report by the International Crisis Group, PKK-related violence has killed some 700 people since the summer of 2011. This deadly toll recalls the horrors of the 1990s, when thousands of civilians were killed in PKK terror attacks and a brutal war in eastern Turkey between the government and Kurdish militants.

The resurgence of PKK violence is no accident. It is directly related to Turkey’s defiant posture in support of the Syrian uprising and against the Assad regime and its patrons in Iran. The upside for the West is that Ankara is starting to re-embrace its old friends in Washington.

The breakdown in Turkish-Syrian ties began in the summer of 2011. Since then, Damascus has once again allowed the PKK to operate in Syria. Meanwhile, to punish Ankara for its Syria policy, Iran’s leaders have made peace with the Kurdish rebels they had been fighting, letting the PKK focus its energy against Turkey.

This was not Ankara’s plan. When the Syrian uprising began in spring 2011, Turkish leaders initially encouraged Bashar Assad’s regime to reform. In August 2011, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu spent six hours in Damascus asking Assad to stop killing civilians.

The Syrian tyrant not only disregarded Turkey’s pleas; he also sent tanks into Hama hours after Mr. Davutoglu left the capital. Thereafter, Ankara broke from Assad and began calling for his ouster. Turkey began providing safe haven to Syrian opposition groups, and media reports have even indicated that Ankara has been arming the Syrian rebels.

European Pressphoto Agency

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu

Assad responded by letting the PKK operate in Syria after keeping a lid on the group for more than a decade. In 1998, Assad’s father had cracked down on the longtime presence of Kurdish militants in Syria, after Turkey threatened to invade if Syria continued to harbor the PKK. This spring, Assad allowed the PKK to move some 2,000 militants into Syria from their mountain enclave in northern Iraq. Assad, in effect, signaled to Ankara: “Help my enemy, and I will help yours.”

The Iranian regime has spoken in similar tones. In September 2011, immediately after Ankara started to confront the Assad regime, Tehran reconciled with the PKK’s Iranian franchise, the Party for Freedom and Life in Kurdistan. Tehran had been fighting its Kurdish rebels since 2003, as part of a strategy to take advantage of the rift between Turkey and the U.S. at the onset of the Iraq War. By helping Turkey defeat Kurdish militias, Iran had hoped to win Ankara’s favor at the expense of its own archenemy: Washington. But Iran flipped this posture last year, and by making peace Kurdish militants, it gave the PKK freedom to target Turkey.

The new stance on the PKK could not have worked so well against Turkey had the Syrian uprising not excited Kurds across the Middle East, including in Turkey. As Syrian rebels eroded the regime’s power in northern Syria this summer, Kurds started taking control of cities there, just across the border with Turkey.

Encouraged by this development, the PKK has tried to wrest control of Turkish towns, targeting especially vulnerable spots in the country’s rugged and isolated southernmost Hakkari province, which borders Iraq and Iran. Although the PKK has not yet secured any territory, the battle for Hakkari has caused hundreds of casualties over recent months.

Iran appears to be complicit in this new PKK assault, at least in part. Last month Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc told reporters that the government had “received information that [PKK] terrorists infiltrated from the Iranian side of the border” before launching a massive assault on the town of Semdinli in Hakkari. Tehran denies this.

Rejuvenated by its welcome in Syria and Iran, and also by Ankara’s stunted “Kurdish Opening”—an aborted effort in 2009 that had aimed to improve Kurds’ rights in Turkey—the PKK is now spreading tension beyond the Kurdish-majority areas of southeastern Turkey. On Aug. 20, the group killed nine people with a car bomb in Gaziantep, a prosperous and mixed Turkish-Kurdish city that had been spared from PKK violence. Once again, the Syrian-Iranian axis cast its shadow over the assault: Turkish officials alleged Syrian complicity in the Gaziantep attack, and when Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili met with Turkey’s prime minister in Istanbul on Sept. 18, he was also reportedly admonished.

Ankara’s Middle East policy rests on one basic premise: that anyone who supports the PKK is Turkey’s enemy. It follows that Ankara has a problem with Damascus until Assad falls, and a long-term problem with Tehran even after Assad falls.

Accordingly, these shifting stones in the Middle East are also bringing Ankara closer to its longtime ally the U.S. Turkey has agreed to host NATO’s missile-defense system, which aims to protect members of the Western alliance from Iranian and other nuclear threats.

After weeks of attacks and riots against their embassies elsewhere in the Middle East, Americans may well be wondering if the Arab Spring has had any positive consequences at all for the U.S. The severing of Turkish-Iranian ties, at least, can count as one.

Mr. Cagaptay is a Beyer Family Fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

via Soner Cagaptay: Turkey’s Kurdish Calculus – WSJ.com.

September 26, 2012
Cagaptay: Don’t expect Turkey to invade Syria

Cagaptay: Don’t expect Turkey to invade Syria

Editor’s Note: Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a GPS contributor. You can find all his blog posts here. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Soner Cagaptay.

By Soner Cagaptay – Special to CNN

A visit to Gaziantep, a Turkish city near the Syrian border, suggests that Turkey’s policy on Syria is evolving in parallel to Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown: The more brutally al-Assad acts against its own people, the more serious Ankara’s steps.

When the uprising began a year ago, Ankara initially took the more diplomatic road, suggesting that al-Assad launch political reforms and refrain from using violence when dealing with the demonstrations. Damascus, however, chose not to listen to Ankara’s advice. Locals in Gaziantep who have relatives and business partners in Syria add that the regime’s crackdown has only intensified over the past months.

Increasing violence against the civilian population brought Ankara to the second phase of its Syria policy – namely taking the issue to the U.N. in the hopes of securing a Security Council resolution to call for an end to the regime’s brutality. That effort, too, did not bear fruit: Russian and Chinese vetoes have thus far blocked U.N.-sponsored action to end the conflict in Syria.

Al-Assad has found encouragement in the fact that the U.N. Security Council will not condemn him, increasing the ferocity of his crackdown. Hence, Ankara’s Syria policy, which evolves in tandem with the brutality of al-Assad’s crackdown, is now moving into its next phase, building a case for delivering humanitarian assistance to the civilian population.

With the U.N. Security Council unable to help innocent Syrians, Ankara envisions putting the “Kosovo model” into action. In 1999, when Russia blocked a U.N. Security Council decision for action in Kosovo, the United States, Turkey, and other powers formed an ad hoc international coalition to end the conflict. That coalition effort succeeded.

Recently, a “Friends of Syria” initiative has coalesced, composed of countries calling for international action to end the al-Assad regime’s crackdown. Ankara’s next step against al-Assad is to turn to this coalition, as well as the Arab League, to lead the international community’s efforts to deliver humanitarian assistance to the civilians of Syria from cities in southern Turkey.

This step may in fact succeed, bringing relief to conflict-stricken Syrians. However, it is unlikely that delivering humanitarian assistance will end the conflict. Al-Assad appears poised to continue his crackdown in the hopes of crushing the opposition. This, unfortunately, suggests even more casualties. That, in turn, begs the question of what Ankara’s next step will be.

Ankara will likely not sit idly by as the al-Assad regime continues to kill fellow Muslims next door. Accordingly, Turkey’s policy will become more active in the coming days. One such scenario could involve Turkey arming the Syrian opposition.

Ankara already hosts part of the Syrian opposition, including members of the civilian Syrian National Council in Istanbul and elements of the Free Syrian Army in Antakya (ancient Antioch) along the border.

While the nuts and bolts of Ankara’s potential decision to arm the opposition would need to be worked out in greater detail, if such a policy also fails to convince al-Assad to stop his crackdown, Turkey would likely move to implement the next phase of its Syria policy, calling for no-fly zones inside Syria to protect civilians.

Akin to similar zones previously established in Iraq and Bosnia, such a no-fly zone would keep the al-Assad regime out of designated areas in which the civilians would come under the protection of the international community. NATO, Arab, and Turkish forces could each play different roles in protecting these safe havens. This strategy would not only protect civilians but also provide a likely counter-balance against the al-Assad regime in order to facilitate his downfall.

At the moment, however, a no-fly zone in Syria is likely Ankara’s last resort. Turkey appears determined to steer clear of a full-scale military intervention to end the conflict.

Ankara believes that putting Turkish boots on the ground would make Turkey a party to the Syrian war, opening up a Pandora’s Box of risky issues, such as the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a group which has traditionally possessed a significant infrastructure inside Syria. Although the al-Assad regime froze all anti-Turkish PKK activity in Syria in 1999 when Ankara threatened Damascus with war, it is not far-fetched to suggest that the PKK in Syria is merely sleeping and could awaken at the sight of Turkish troops in that country.

Visiting towns in southern Turkey that have suffered from past PKK attacks, one can see this fear visibly, with the locals suggesting: “A Turkish intervention in Syria might just boomerang, ratcheting up PKK attacks.”

Add to this other concerns: Turkish troops on the ground could cost Ankara dearly, eroding the soft power it has painstakingly built in the Middle East in the past decade, and it becomes nearly certain that Turkey’s options in Syria are not without limits.

via Cagaptay: Don’t expect Turkey to invade Syria – Global Public Square – CNN.com Blogs.

March 23, 2012
The Empires Strike Back
OPINION

Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis

French and Ottoman armies at the Battle of Aboukir, 1799, in “Victoires et Conquêtes des Armées Françaises,” around 1860.

By SONER CAGAPTAY

Published: January 14, 2012
AS Egyptians and Tunisians vote to replace ousted despots and the Syrian government teeters on the brink, two old imperial powers are competing to exert their political influence over Arab countries in upheaval. And they are not America and Russia. After years of cold-war competition over the Middle East and North Africa, it is now France and Turkey that are vying for lucrative business ties and the chance to mold a new generation of leaders in lands that they once controlled.

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This rivalry is nothing new. Since Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, France and Turkey have competed for dominance in the Middle East. France’s rise as a Mediterranean power has been an inverse function of Turkish decline around the same sea. As the Ottoman Empire gradually collapsed, France acquired Algeria, Tunisia and, temporarily, Egypt. The French took one final bite from the dying empire by securing control over Syria and Lebanon after World War I.

This rivalry subsided in the 20th century, when Turkey became an inward-looking nation state. During the era of decolonization, France lost political control of lands extending from Morocco in the west to Syria in the east. Paris, however, maintained economic and political clout in the region by supporting large French businesses, which established lucrative ties with the region’s rulers. Even Turkey once looked to France as a model: when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded modern Turkey in 1923, he championed the French model of hard secularism, which stipulates freedom from religion in government, politics and education.

While France has dominated much of the region over the past two centuries, that is now changing. And if Turkey plays its cards right, it could match France’s influence or even become the dominant power in the region.

In the last decade, Turkey has witnessed record-breaking economic growth. It is no longer a poor country desperately seeking accession to the European Union. It has a $1.1 trillion economy, a powerful army and aspirations to shape the region in its image. As political turmoil paralyzes North Africa, Syria and Iraq, and economic meltdown devastates much of Mediterranean Europe, Turkey and France have largely been spared. And their growing rivalry is one reason France has objected to Turkey’s bid for European Union membership.

Taken together with France’s efforts to create a European-Mediterranean Union, which Nicolas Sarkozy conceived in 2008 as a way to place France at the helm of the Mediterranean world, one thing has become obvious to the Turks: Paris won’t allow Turkey into the European Union or let it become a powerful player in a French-led Mediterranean region.

Turkey’s newly activist foreign policy has therefore shifted away from Europe. The ruling Justice and Development Party, known as the A.K.P., is now cultivating ties with former Ottoman lands that were ignored for much of the 20th century. Of the 33 new Turkish diplomatic missions opened in the past decade, 18 are in Muslim and African countries.

This has resulted in new commercial and political ties, often at the expense of Turkey’s ties with Europe. In 1999, the European Union accounted for over 56 percent of Turkish trade; in 2011, it was just 41 percent. Over the same period, Islamic countries’ share of Turkish trade climbed to 20 percent from 12 percent.

New trade patterns have led to the emergence of a more socially conservative business elite based in central Turkey, which derives strength from trading beyond Europe and is using its new wealth to push for a redefinition of Turkey’s traditional approach to secularism. Since 2002, Ataturk’s French-inspired model has collapsed; the A.K.P. and its allies have instead promoted a softer form of secularism that allows for more religious expression in government, politics and education. This has made the Turkish model appealing to Arab countries, which for the most part regard French-style secularism as anathema.

Although both countries once coddled dictators — Mr. Sarkozy allowed Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to occupy central Paris and pitch a tent near the Élysée Palace in 2007, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accepted the Qaddafi international prize in 2010 — Turkey threw its support behind the Arab revolts early on, winning fans across the region.

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Until it backed Libya’s rebels last year, France had bet on the enduring nature of dictatorships and never forged ties with the democratic forces opposing them; Turkey did so, perhaps unwittingly, by expanding its soft power into Arab countries, building business networks and founding state-of-the-art high schools, run by the Sufi Islam-inspired Gulen movement, to educate the future Arab elite. Now, the Arab Spring is providing Turkey with an unprecedented opportunity to spread its influence further in newly free Arab societies.

As France’s business ties with the old secular elite fray, its influence is waning. It remains a military and cultural power, and will continue to attract Arab elites, even Islamist ones, seeking weapons and luxury goods. However, France will find it hard to market its brand of secularism across the region or match Turkey’s grass-roots business networks, especially in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, where Turkey already has significant clout.

EVEN so, the road ahead will be rocky. Turkey ruled the Arab Middle East until World War I, and it must now be careful about how its messages are perceived there. Arabs might be drawn to fellow Muslims, but like the French, the Turks are former imperial masters. Arabs are pressing for democracy, and if Turkey behaves like a new imperial power, this approach will backfire. At a recent conference at Zirve University, a gleaming private school in Gaziantep financed by the local businesses that have made Turkey a regional economic powerhouse, Arab liberals and Islamists from various countries disagreed on most matters but agreed on one thing: that Turkey is welcome in the Middle East but should not dominate it.

In September, when Mr. Erdogan landed at Cairo’s new airport terminal (built by Turkish companies), he was warmly met by joyous millions, mobilized by the Muslim Brotherhood. However, he soon upset his pious hosts by preaching about the importance of a secular government that provides freedom of religion, using the Turkish word “laiklik” — derived from the French word for secularism. In Arabic, this term loosely translates as “irreligious.” Mr. Erdogan’s message may have been partly lost in translation, yet the incident illustrates the limits of Turkey’s influence in countries that are far more socially conservative than it is.

Turkey may have the upper hand in soft power, but France has more hard power, as the recent war in Libya and its veto power at the United Nations make clear. And despite Turkey’s phenomenal growth since 2002, the French economy is over twice the size of Turkey’s, and France is still dominant in North Africa.

Turkey’s relative stability at a time when the region is in upheaval is attracting investment from less-stable neighbors like Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Ultimately, political stability and regional clout are Turkey’s hard cash, and its economic growth will depend on both.

If Turkey wants to become a true beacon of democracy in the Middle East, its new constitution must provide broader individual rights for the country’s citizens, including the Kurds. It will also need to fulfill Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s vision of a “no problems” foreign policy. This means moving past the 2010 flotilla episode to rebuild strong ties with Israel and getting along with the Greek Cypriots who live on the southern part of the divided island of Cyprus (Turkish Cypriots control the north). The conflict there has lasted for decades; poorer Turkish Cypriots want a loose federation and the Greek Cypriot majority wants a strong central government.

The recent discovery of natural gas off the south coast of Cyprus is a major opportunity. Turkey could rise above the fray by proposing unification of the island in exchange for an agreement to share gas revenues. Such a deal, coupled with improved Turkish-Israeli ties, could facilitate cooperation in extracting even larger gas deposits off Israel’s coast; Turkey is the most logical destination for a pipeline from there to foreign markets.

Turkey will rise as a regional power only if it sets a genuine example as a liberal democracy and builds strong ties with all its neighbors. This is Mr. Erdogan’s challenge as he tries to undo Napoleon’s legacy.

Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
January 16, 2012
Turkey moves far beyond Europe

Cagaptay: Turkey moves far beyond Europe

Editor’s Note: Soner Cagaptay is a Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and is the co-author, with Scott Carpenter, of Regenerating the U.S.-Turkey Partnership.

By Soner Cagaptay – Special to CNN

The Turks are selling pasta to the Italians, educating Papua-New Guineans in their universities, building airports in Egypt, running schools in Nigeria and establishing diplomatic missions in Latin America. Turkey has not felt and acted like the confident global player it is today since the heyday of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century.

After the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century, the Turks tried to belong to Europe in hopes of eventually becoming an ordinary country subsumed by it. That dream has passed. In the past decade, a new Turkey was born, shaped by unprecedented political stability, domestic growth and new-found commercial and political clout overseas. This has instilled a sense of global confidence in the Turkish people, not seen since Suleiman the Magnificent ruled in Constantinople. “And the new Turkey is here to stay,” says Namik Tan, the Turkish ambassador to Washington.

Like a Eurasian China, the new Turkey is interested in building influence across the globe and is no longer confined by a regional, European rubric.

Recently, visiting Istanbul, I attended a conference on the Arab Spring organized by Abant Platform, a local NGO that gathers Turkish intellectuals of different stripes for policy debates. The conference – this time with attendees from Washington, Tel Aviv, London, St. Petersburg and Arab capitals in addition to Turks – debated Turkey’s leadership role in the Arab Spring.

The venue was Ciragan Palace, a former Ottoman residence on the Bosporus and an apt selection for the new Turkey. Over Turkish coffee served a la Ottoman with double-roasted Turkish delight on the side, Ali Aslan, a Turkish journalist, summed up the new Turkey for me: “Ten years ago, the Turks would not have organized a conference on the Middle East lest this made them look non-European. And if such a conference were ever conceived, it would be run by the government and staged in Ankara, with all the participants making arguments in favor of following Europe’s footsteps.”

The new Turkey looks beyond Europe and thinks globally for a variety of reasons. Turks feel confident as the world around them suffers from economic meltdown while Turkey booms: In the third quarter of 2011, the Turkish economy grew by a record 8.2 percent, outpacing not only the county’s neighbors, but also all of Europe.

Furthermore, since 2002, the Turkish economy has nearly tripled in size, experiencing the longest spurt of prosperity in modern Turkish history. The Turkish daily Sabah wrote that in 2011 alone, another 9,755 millionaires joined the country’s wealthy. Just as sudden spread of middle-class prosperity in 1950s United States instilled a can-do attitude in American sentiments towards the world, the same is now happening in Turkey. A young cab driver I spoke with in Istanbul said: “Europe is too small an arena for Turkey; we need to be a global player.”

Turkish trade is already heading away from Europe. The continent’s economic doldrums coupled with Turkey’s new trans-European vision means that the country’s traditional commercial bonds with Europe are eroding while its trade links with the non-European world flourish. In 1999, for instance, the European Union accounted for over fifty-six percent of Turkish trade. In 2011, this number went down to forty-one percent, while the share of members of the Organization of Islamic Countries in Turkish trade climbed from twelve percent to twenty percent in the same period.

Paralleling this trend, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has pursued a foreign policy that transcends Turkey’s European vocation, irreversibly re-molding Turkey’s identity. “After suffering through eight coalition governments and four economic crises, the Turkish people have welcomed ten years of a stable AKP government even if it has meant entrenched single-party rule” says Asli Aydintasbas, a columnist with mainstream Turkish daily Milliyet.

Elected in 2002 and slated to pick the country’s next president in 2014, the AKP has already run Turkey longer than any other party since Ankara became a democracy in 1946. As it is likely to outlive even Ataturk’s fifteen-year domination of Turkish politics in the early twentieth century, the AKP’s global vision will continue to prevail.

Buoyed by economic dynamism, political stability, and a new supra-European vision, the Turks have accordingly reached far and abroad to build soft power in places they had earlier ignored, such as the Middle East, Africa and even far-flung countries such as Vietnam and Mongolia.

The private sector, universities and NGOs are driving this agenda, shaping the new Turkish supra-European identity. This trend can best be observed in cities dominated by the middle class: in Gaziantep, the country’s sixth largest town, as well as other middle-sized towns such as Kayseri, Konya, Malatya, and Denizli. Dubbed “the Anatolian Tigers” for driving the country’s record-breaking growth rate, these towns have also provided solid support to the AKP while linking Turkey to the Middle East, Africa and beyond.

Gaziantep, near the Syrian border, has factories that manufacture almost everything, selling goods to over 70 countries. The town’s pasta ends up on Italian dinner plates. In this sense, Gaziantep is like an Anatolian Guangzhou, the Chinese hub famous for selling its wares to the most distant and unlikely places.

But unlike Guangzhou, Gaziantep is also building soft power for Turkey. Zirve University in Gaziantep is a testimony to this. Funded by the local billionaire Nakiboglu family, which made its wealth recently in international commerce, the university has a gleaming campus that rises amid Gaziantep’s famous pistachio groves.

Visiting this campus is like visiting the new Turkey. Gokhan Bacik, a professor of international relations who studies Turkey’s new active Middle East policy, told me that already, over ten percent of the university’s student body is foreign despite the fact that the university opened only two years ago. Many students hail from the Middle East, especially nearby Syria, as well as the Balkans, Africa, the former Soviet Union, and even Europe. “We have students from Austria and Papua New Guinea,” he added.

Gaziantep is the epitome of the new Turkey. For years, it was known in Turkey for its heavenly pistachio nut-filled baklavas. Today, shops in the town’s gentrified medieval old city and along tram-lined streets in leafy middle-class districts proudly display the “world’s best baklava,” making a culinary claim to Turkey’s new global identity.

Additionally, businesspeople from Gaziantep and other Anatolian Tigers are busy financing and managing construction projects across the world, including Cairo’s new airport terminal and major projects from Russia to Mongolia. Others are launching schools to educate future elites in countries around the globe, including Nigeria, Morocco, Brazil, and Vietnam, demonstrating further soft power in the making. Most of these businessmen and schools belong to the Sufi-inspired Gulen Movement, a force to be reckoned with in the new Turkey. Mustafa Sungur, who sympathizes with the movement, says that the “Movement has Turkish schools in almost all countries of the world with the exception of authoritarian places such as North Korea, Iran and Saudi Arabia.”

In the end, it all comes down to Istanbul. By securing itself in the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, Asia, and Africa, the new Turkey is anchoring these regions in Istanbul. The city was the center of the Ottoman, Byzantine, and Roman empires for 1,700 years, and it is once again reclaiming its dominance as a global capital. Accounting for one-third of Turkey’s 1.1 trillion dollar economy, Istanbul’s wealth already dwarfs all of Turkey’s neighbors, expect for oil-rich Iran.

Yet, the city reaches even beyond Turkey’s immediate neighbors. Ten years ago, you could fly direct from Istanbul to a mere seventy-five international destinations, most of them in Europe, on Turkish Airlines, the country’s flagship carrier. Today, Turkish Airlines offers direct flights from Istanbul to over 150 international destinations. The majority of the new destinations are in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, including Dhaka, Dar es Salam, and Damman. In Iraq alone, the airline serves six cities, providing the most connections between that country and the outside world, and in December, the company provided the first international connection to Misrata, Libya, beating the competition to reach Libya’s oil capital.

Turkey’s new global identity is increasingly shaping its foreign policy, as well. Like the country’s national airlines, its diplomats seem to be following Turkey’s businesspeople and reaching even further beyond. In the past decade, Turkey has opened up over forty new diplomatic missions, most of them in Africa and Asia, including Basra, Maputo, Accra, Juba and Yaoundé. It has also set up posts in Latin America and now has diplomatic reach in Bogota and Santiago.

This posturing suggests that Turkey’s new supra-European identity and global confidence is here to stay. That, of course, requires the Turkish economy to keep humming and the country to remain stable. If Turkey plays its hand well, the same economic factors responsible for facilitating its rise beyond Europe will continue to help it maintain its confident global outlook.

Take, for instance, Turkey’s current accounts deficit which stands at a whopping 9.8 percent, the highest figure among the forty-two developed economies recently reviewed by The Economist. Most economies cannot sustain such a high deficit, but it is likely that Turkey can due to its position of stability amongst its neighbors, causing a steady flow of money into the country.

My brother Ali Cagatay, Bloomberg Turkey’s news editor, told me that as much as six billion dollars have flowed into Turkey from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the former Soviet Union in the first ten months of 2011 alone, helping the country’s economy to finance its deficit. In Hatay province, which borders Syria, bank deposits have increased by 1.1 billion dollars in the past year, thanks to wealthy Syrians who are putting their money into Turkey for safeguarding. “In addition to money coming in from its non-European neighbors, Turkey also attracts massive inflows from European and other Western banks which see Turkish markets as a rare safe haven in these tumultuous times,” adds a Turkish banker based in London.

This is why it is essential that the new Turkey is a responsible global player. The need for continued stability is the very reason Turkey cannot afford to be a bully. Take, for instance, Ankara’s threats to Israel over the flotilla incident. After Israel refused to apologize, some officials threatened to send the Turkish navy to confront the Israelis. It is in Turkey’s best interest to avoid conflict, which is the reason Ankara stepped away from confrontation with Israel.

Turkey is confident and can afford to look beyond Europe because it continues to grow. And Turkey grows because it is deemed stable and investment grade while the world around it goes through economic and political convulsions. A belligerent foreign policy and political instability would almost certainly usher in economic instability, ending Turkey’s run for global influence. In short, the new Turkey’s soft power rests on Turkey being a soft country.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of Soner Cagaptay.

December 23, 2011
From Ataturk to Erdogan, reshaping Turkey

By Soner Cagaptay

As the Ottoman Empire vanished after World War I, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk created a new Turkey in the mold of Europe. Controlling all levers of power, including the military, Ataturk implemented his vision by mandating a separation between religion, public policy and government, and by telling his compatriots to consider themselves intuitively Western.

It took a century and a democratic revolution invoked by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) — a coalition of conservatives, reformed Islamists and Islamists that came to power in 2002 — for Turkey’s “Kemalist Occident,” or dalliance with the West, to end. With the mass resignation of Turkey’s military leadership last month, the last standing Kemalist institution, the army, has succumbed to the AKP’s decade-long political tsunami.

This political bookend for Kemalism suggests that AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan is Turkey’s “new” Ataturk. He doesn’t have the cachet of being Turkey’s liberator, but he enjoys as much power as Ataturk once had.

Simply put, the Kemalists had it coming. When Turkey became a multi-party democracy in 1950, various parties sought for decades to maintain Ataturk’s legacy, while the military guarded the system.

Eventually, however, lethargy took hold. Far from remaining the progressive, forward-looking movement of the early 20th century, Kemalism stagnated and then shifted into an ideology for protecting the past. To those of us growing up in Turkey in recent decades, the most visible sign of this process was the emergence of mass-produced Ataturk statues, on almost every town square, after the 1980 coup that ended anarchy on the streets but also gave the country its highly restrictive and military-written constitution.

By turning Ataturk into a cult, the generals also ensured Kemalism’s demise.

Even after Turkey became a democracy in 1982, this process would not be reversed: The governing parties, mostly from the center-right, failed to produce ideas for change. The nascent Islamist parties sensed an opportunity and began building grass-roots networks and incubating a forward-looking vision for Turkey, one that cultivated permeable walls between religion, public policy and government, and that embraced the country’s Islamic identity in foreign policy.

When the dominant center-right parties collapsed after a debilitating economic crisis in 2000 and 2001, the Islamists used a platform of moderation to attract voters. Once in power, the AKP garnered popular support for change, succeeding in part because of the decade of stable economic growth the party has provided. A buoyant AKP established itself as Turkey’s new elite, gradually replacing Kemalist power centers in the media, business, academia, civil society, unions and, after amendments to the constitution last year, the high courts.

The military was the final institution of Kemalism. Since 2007, a court case known as Ergenekon, which alleged that the army was plotting a coup against the government, has crippled the military’s power. The army has been criticized for allegedly planning a vicious takeover bid and accused of planning to bomb Istanbul’s historic mosques to precipitate a political crisis. Although the assertions remain unproven, the effects are clear: The military’s status as the country’s most trusted institution is plummeting. In 1996, 94 percent of Turkish respondents to the World Values Survey said they trusted their military, while in 2011 the same poll found that barely 75 percent do.

Recognizing this and the AKP’s dominance, the military leadership threw in the towel on July 28.

Now, the AKP, as the dominant elite, can repeat the cycle of a powerful force shaping the country.

Just as Ataturk molded Turkey in his rigidly secular and Western image because he could, Erdogan will remake Turkey to match his image of rigid social conservatism and Islamic identity.

Domestically, this means a blend of government-imposed social conservatism and popular will. An example of this occurred days after the AKP’s victory in the June national assembly elections; officials of the AKP-run Istanbul city government raided downtown drinking establishments and banned outdoor tables (and, hence, publicly serving alcohol). The change prevents potential “sins” in the public eye.

Overnight, drinking disappeared from parts of downtown Istanbul.

In Erdoganist Turkey, the line between public morality and religious values will blur, and the government’s popular power will make opposition impossible.

In foreign policy, a Turkey satisfied with its Islamic identity would stop considering itself intuitively Western, especially given the resonance of the notion of a politically defined “Muslim world” since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. This means an increasingly tense relationship between Turkey and NATO, the symbol of all Western institutions. It also means that Turkey will be open to all sorts of non-Western dalliances. An AKP decision to buy Russian weapons, say, or invite the Chinese to a joint naval exercise in the Mediterranean would be applauded by Turks, including the military.

For a century, the Turks emulated Ataturk because his political descendants controlled all power. Now, it is Erdogan’s turn. He has a vision and controls all levers of power. Time will tell how far he is able to shape Turkey in his conservative design.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

via From Ataturk to Erdogan, reshaping Turkey – The Washington Post.

September 6, 2011
What if Turkey invaded Syria?

Soner Çağaptay – S o n e r C @ w a s h i n g t o n i n s t i t u t e . o r g

SONER ÇAĞAPTAY

Turkish-Syrian ties are unraveling. After becoming Assad’s close ally, Ankara is now worried about the Syrian conflict. Turkey has expressed outrage at the situation, calling the crackdown in Syria a “savagery,” and a Turkish army commander recently issued a tacit warning while visiting the Syrian border. Meanwhile, Damascus has positioned tanks along its border with Turkey.

Still, when reacting to the unrest in Syria, the instinct of the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, government in Ankara will be to avoid conflict and opt for a buffer zone inside Syria to manage the likely flow of refugees on Syrian territory. But if that does not work, Turkey could take matters into its own hands, sending troops into Syria. Did I just say Turkey might invade Syria? Yes. And what a can of worms such an intervention would open, humanitarian though it would be. As the Syrian crisis spills over into Turkey, the AKP’s conflict avoidance policy may not be sustainable. Should the Assad regime carry out massacres in large cities, the AKP might find Turkish sympathies for the persecuted fellow Muslims next door too unbearable to ignore. Massacres in Syria, coupled with the breakdown of law and order, would make Turkish intervention almost inevitable. A Turkish intervention in Syria could change almost everything about the Turkey we know today. For instance, domestic politics. Although Turkey is split down the middle between the AKP’s supporters and their opponents, war would unify domestic opposition behind the AKP leader and Turkish Prime minister Erdoğan. But it is worth considering that a successful military campaign would also re-empower the secular Turkish army, which has lost face in recent years for purported involvement in a coup plot against the AKP. As for foreign policy, a Turkish intervention would nearly revolutionize the AKP’s regional agenda.

Strong ties with Syria that the AKP has cultivated since 2002 would crumble in the case of an invasion. In 1998, Damascus stopped allowing the Kurdistan Workers Party to use it territory to launch terror attacks into Turkey, when Ankara threatened to invade Syria. Since then, the Turks have come to believe that Syria is neither a threat nor a source of instability and that Israel is the true problem in the region. This view would change with a Turkish intrusion into Syria, as would Turkey’s relationship with Israel, harkening back to the 1990s, when the two countries united against Damascus for its harboring of terrorist groups. The AKP’s decision to pressure Turkey’s NGOs to disengage from this year’s Gaza flotilla signifies the renewal of a Turkish realization that Israel could be an ally in an unstable region. In addition to reconfiguring Turkish-Israeli-Syrian ties, a Turkish incursion would drive a wedge between Ankara and Tehran, thus, ending the honeymoon Ankara has pursued with Tehran since the Iraq War, when the two countries found themselves allied in their opposition to the U.S.-led campaign. Today, Ankara and Tehran are at odds; their policies on Syria are diametrically opposed. In the event of a Turkish intervention in Syria, the competition between Ankara and Tehran for influence in Iraq would further compound the situation. Such an intervention would deteriorate Turkey and Iran’s increasingly problematic relationship. A Turkish invasion would rejuvenate Turkish-U.S. ties, which have yet to recover fully from the Iraq War. Since 2003, many Turks have come to believe that the U.S. does not care for Turkey and that the two countries have conflicting interests in the Middle East. But now, Turkey and the U.S. are on the same page. Both countries resent crackdown and fear a likely refugee crisis. The crisis in Syria is leading the U.S. and Turkey to coordinate their Middle East policies to an extent not seen for nearly a decade. A Turkish intervention in Syria and backed by the U.S. to uphold the nascent doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” would indeed warm up U.S.-Turkish ties beyond imagination. A can of worms, indeed.

July 11, 2011