Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 5, October–November 2009, pp. 163–172
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Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West
Christopher Caldwell. New York: Doubleday, 2009. $30.00. 422 pp.
Winning Turkey: How America, Europe, and Turkey Can Revive a Fading Partnership
Philip H. Gordon and Omer Taspinar. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008. £10.99/$18.95. 115 pp.
Rebel Land: Among Turkey’s Forgotten Peoples
Christopher de Bellaigue. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. £20.00. 270 pp.
Political Islam in Turkey: Running West, Heading East?
Gareth Jenkins. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. £25.00/$84.95. 274 pp.
Secularism and Muslim Democracy in Turkey
M. Hakan Yavuz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. £17.99/$32.99. 301 pp.
Turkey was a lot easier for Westerners to deal with when it could be stereotyped: fragmented or unitary, secular or Islamic, European or Asian, democratic or authoritarian, all you had to do was mix and match terms to come up with your own description. Better, you could assign different combinations to different time periods to create a historical narrative. For some, this exercise produced a story of progress: Turkey had evolved from a fragmented, Islamic, Asian dictatorship under the Ottomans into a united, secular, European democracy.
Conservatives like Financial Times columnist Christopher Caldwell, on the other hand, like to cast the narrative in darker hues:
Since Kemal Atatürk founded the state in the 1920s, religious moderation has been enforced not by popular consensus but by an army that sees repressing political Islam as its main role. Europeans insisted that Turkey ’democratize‘ in order to join the EU – starting with removing its army from politics. Turkey complied. As popular will has come more and more to the surface, the country has drifted further from the army-imposed ‘secularism’ that was Europe’s main rationale for recruiting it in the first place.
This sort of revisionism holds itself up as the new conventional wisdom. Scratch the surface, however, and it is just another attempt at stereotyping the Turks.
The problem is that Turkey never fit the stereotypes, and the United States and Europe can no longer afford to ignore the many subtle distinctions in play. As Philip Gordon and Omer Taspinar reveal in Winning Turkey, Western misunderstandings now entail significant consequences. This is perhaps easiest to see in the unexpected failure of the March 2003 vote in the Turkish parliament to allow US troops to open a northern front in the war against Iraq. The subsequent collapse in Turkish popular attitudes toward the United States, and conflicts between the United States and Turkey over Palestine, Armenia and the Kurds, are further examples.
The European–Turkish relationship has problems of its own. Although many Europeans may have celebrated Turkey’s opposition to the war in Iraq, disagreements with Turkey over Cyprus remain unresolved. The prospect of Turkish accession to the European Union (EU) has further muddied the picture. Caldwell may not have the measure of Turkish political development, but he does manage to capture some of the anxiety among...
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Erik Jones is professor of European Studies at the SAIS Bologna Center of the John Hopkins University and a Contributing Editor to Survival.
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