Resurgence of Nationalism and Islam Threaten to Turn Turkey Away From West
ANKARA, Turkey -- Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and several conspiracy-themed books depicting Turkey as under attack by American and European influences sell briskly in local bookstores. Turkey's $10 million movie "Valley of Wolves," the most expensive to date, vilifying Christians and Jews pulls in record crowds. A 28-year-old lawyer shoots a secularist judge to death inside Turkey's High Court. The Islamic and far-right press is filled with stories of missionaries within Turkish borders converting "defenseless" Muslims to "infidels."
Masked by Turkey's 80-year Kemalist embrace of secularism, these recent trends reflect a hard fact: Beneath the surface of the West's most crucial ally in the Muslim world, a dismaying anti-Western blend of political Islam and nationalism is blossoming. A series of recent patriotic shows of force -- including angry mobs protesting the arrival of Pope Benedict or deriding Elif Shafak for "insulting Turkishness" in a growing chorus for restriction of freedom of speech -- have revealed an increasing backlash in Turkey towards Western values. Even as Turkey aspires to join the European Union, the current administration led by the pro-Islamic Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made several attempts to roll back Turkey's brand of draconian secularism: criminalization of adultery, passage of punitive taxes on the wine industry, and decriminalization of Hezbollah-backed Quran courses were but a few items on the administration's agenda as recently as 2005.
So how did this Mediterranean nation often promoted by Western politicians and media as a "model Islamic nation" develop such a taste for pro-Islamic nationalist sentiments? In a recent Pew poll asking why Islam's role is gaining strength in Turkey, the largest reason cited was "growing immorality in our society." "The current mood is a reaction to an anxiety felt by some people that some of the values that are important to us are being sold out by the EU drive," Suat Kiniklioglu, head of German Marshall Program in Ankara, commented in The Christian Science Monitor in 2005. Last year, "the country's hopes and forward-looking vision were behind the EU drive. Now people are becoming confused. There is fatigue, and nationalism becomes an escape route," he lamented.
Across the ocean, Jim Stroup, former Marine Corps foreign area officer and now head of Bosphorus Consulting in Istanbul, echoed similar sentiments: "The form of pro-Islamic nationalism we are witnessing today is largely defensive and reactionary," he said in an October interview. "It arises in response to what are seen as attacks on Turkey's viability or the honor inherent in being a Turk." But perceived hemorrhaging of Turkish values hardly explains why many Turks are taking to the flag and political Islam; ethnic rivalries between Kurds and Turks and an increasing distrust of the West, heightened by the Iraqi war and the cold shoulder given by the EU have also been touted as possible causes for the resurgence of nationalist pro-Islamic fervor.
A Wounded Pride
It would be simplistic to speak of a single nationalist current in this country that has long been the guardian of the secular Kemalist heritage. Indeed, it is viable to speak of two nationalist currents; one "strongly positive and forward looking," as Stroup sees it, and the second, injured and angry -- the kind that is making headlines during Turkey's infamous controversies. The first sees grounds for optimism on both political and social fronts and revels in the achievements of the last decade. The country has managed to shake off some its most dated laws against its ethnic minorities, achieved full EU candidate status, and tamed inflation from a high 70 percent in 2002 to below 8 percent in 2005. During this period, Turkey has also managed to attract record flows of direct foreign investment, while doubling its foreign trade in the last three and a half years.
In the last decade, the positive and West-looking brand of nationalism prevailed as each subsequent government led Turkey increasingly closer to the European Union. The fiery eruption of nationalism that we are witnessing today, however, feels humiliated and cast aside by its European and American friends. Suggestions that Turkey is unfit to join the EU, coupled with "campaigns of everyone from revisionist nationalist groups such as Armenians and Kurds, and religious personages such as the new pope," claims Stroup, which paint Turks as "backward barbarians," gravely offends the Turkish sense of dignity. To the Turk on the street, the seemingly endless demands for reform and trickle of criticism from Europe are not only deeply wounding to Turkish pride, but also spark some historical resentment.
The perceived sense of public humiliation should come as no surprise; the EU issue is just the contemporary face of a much older history. Turkey was, after all, the central figure of a formidable 400-year-old Empire, now forcibly condensed to its Eurasian backend. In the same fashion as Arabs, the Turks perceive themselves as heirs to a rich and diverse Islamic tradition, the focal point of all things in their heyday. Stroup cautions that we shall see more of the vengeful, unproductive expressions of wounded pride "that express the sentiments of 'enough' and 'we are Turks, we ruled the world, and we will again.'" The ferociously anti-American movie "Valley of the Wolves" that pits Turks against Americans, he concludes, reflects this longing for a resurgence of a new Ottoman Empire, combining the Turkish identity with principles of Islam.
The West -- Foe or friend?
The nationalist outburst is not limited to perceived displays of public humiliation. Inside the country, simmering tensions between Turks and ethnic Kurds proves to be a fertile cause for nationalist zeal. While today's escalating violence is nowhere near the bloodshed witnessed in the 90s, which claimed the lives of an estimated 35,000, the potential of Kurdish separatist violence has come back to haunt the Turkish social landscape. Images of mothers and wives wailing in wretched sorrow, kneeling over their sehit (martyr) wrapped in the Turkish flag have become commonplace in the mainstream media. The emotionally charged funerals are not only public events for the soldiers who died fighting Kurdish rebels in the rugged southeast, but are also becoming the focus of growing anti-U.S. sentiment.
Many Turks cite the U.S. invasion in Iraq as the most important factor in the rise in Kurdish terrorist group PKK's violence. Despite stabilization in U.S.-Turkish ties after the immediate fallout of the war, Turks have come to believe Washington's inaction against the PKK is a ploy to divide the Middle East. As Yektan Turkyilmaz, a Ph.D. candidate at Duke University, observes, the current nationalist outburst is a reaction to perceived imperialistic goals to divide Turkey along ethnic lines, "in order to destabilize the entire region and intensify exploitative efforts." Turkish media is rife with provocative articles about the pro-American activities of Kurds in Northern Iraq, as well as stories linking the PKK with the U.S. occupation force or the CIA. "There is widespread belief in Turkey that the U.S.'s new Middle East project also entails the formation of an independent, but satellite, Kurdish state not only in the Iraqi soil, but also on Turkey's southeast," Turkyilmaz said in an interview earlier this month. Convinced that the West is fueling ethnic tensions in the same spirit with which European influences brought down the Ottoman Empire, a growing number of Turks have come to "take on an anti-EU and more specifically anti-American position," he explains.
Add to this the perceived illegitimacy of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, Turks' confidence in most Western projects has plummeted to record levels. Probably nothing characterizes this disillusion more graphically than the recent figures published by the Pew Research Center: Seventy-one percent of Turkish people believe that the United States may someday threaten their country, while a mere 12 percent held a favorable opinion of Americans. Similarly, positive opinions about Christians have fallen from 31 percent in 2004 to 16 percent, just one percent higher than their dislike of Jews.
With only 35 percent of the public in favor of the EU (half of what it was in 2004), a sense of drift away from the EU accession has also deepened in the country -- a mood that is unlikely to change with the just-released highly critical "Progress Report" by the EU Commission. The report lists a host of problems in human rights, freedom of expression, and judiciary and military reform, and highlights Turkey's failure to make concessions about the Cyprus issue. In a thinly veiled cautionary note, the Commission indicates it will suspend some parts of the EU negotiations if there is no further progress over Cyprus.
Meanwhile, Turks fault the country's old rivals Cyprus and Greece for the acrimonious report, claiming they are lobbying Brussels to take a stance against Turkey's refusal to open its ports to Greek-controlled Cyprus. Today, demands that Turkey acknowledge the Greek part of Cyprus, as well as the changes aimed at bringing Turkey closer to Europe, are seen by many as undermining the integrity of Turkey. In a recent poll, 51 percent of Turks claimed to see the EU-inspired reforms as a reproduction of the widely despised 1920 Treaty of SËvres, which led to the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire by Western interests. Echoing a populous sentiment held by everyone from storekeepers in villages to college students relaxing in cafes, Ahmet, a cab driver in the boisterous streets of Ankara, expressed the point in percipient bluntness: "Europe is asking a lot. I believe all these reforms are designed to weaken the state in order to break it up."
For a very long time Turkey has been touted as a model secular Muslim state. But the sweeping tide of Muslim nationalism might leave Turkey more isolated by the West than it has ever been before. For decades, Ataturk's Turkey looked to the West for political, social and economic cues. That, however, is fast changing as a result of bitter relations with the EU and the Iraqi war, which has everyone from leftists to Islamists angered. The rocky relationship with the West would not be so alarming if it weren't for the shift in Turkish attitudes towards the Muslim Middle East. Alliances with neighboring Damascus, Dubai and Tehran, as opposed to Washington and Brussels, now seem to make more sense to Turks. For the first time since the inception of the Turkish republic in 1923, a growing number of Turks, primarily of the populous rural constituency, seem comfortable with the notion of aligning with the greater Islamic ummah, rather than traditional American and European allies.
Indeed, Turkey's next presidential and parliamentary elections should help determine the country's direction. If center-right and center-left parties manage to defeat the Islamists, Turkey's Western ambitions might continue. If the current pro-Islamic and nationalist AKP is victorious, then what will happen is anybody's guess.
