Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 5, October–November 2009, pp. 105–120
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When President Barack Obama visited the mausoleum of Turkish Republic founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in April 2009, he finished his inscription in the ceremonial Honor Book with one of Atatürk’s most famous maxims: ‘Peace at home, peace abroad’. This is an ideal Turks and their leaders have always aspired to but consistently failed to live up to. Even now, as Ankara enjoys unprecedented influence abroad, Turkey’s domestic ideological struggles have taken on a new intensity, threatening both the impressive reforms enacted earlier this decade and the country’s new-found international standing. Turkey is more polarised now than at any time since the left–right violence that engulfed the country during the 1970s. Although bloodshed seems unlikely, the consequences of political instability in Turkey will reverberate in the Middle East, Europe and the Caucasus. Western, and particularly American, policymakers need a Turkey strategy that goes well beyond getting Ankara to help in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East in favour of an approach that also addresses Turkey’s domestic tribulations.
Ankara’s current dilemmas may surprise even those well attuned to foreign affairs. Turkey rarely rates more than a passing mention in major American and European newspapers. It is hard not to see why. Ankara’s tortured relations with Brussels, periodic flare-ups between Turkish forces and the terrorists of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, and the culture wars between secularists and Islamists seem to be permanent and unremarkable features of Turkey’s politics. Yet the predictability of these issues has obscured a multi-dimensional power struggle under way in Ankara.
The year of living dangerously
The present crisis in Turkey is part of a long-running drama pitting the country’s dominant secular elite against a new, more pious or Islamist (for lack of a better term) segment of society whose bases of support are not necessarily in major cities such as Istanbul, Ankara or Izmir. The different and seemingly irreconcilable world views of these competing camps tend to raise the stakes in the political struggle over who will control the state’s resources. It was the General Staff’s fears that the Refah Party (the forerunner to today’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)) was packing the bureaucracy with activists who could direct state largesse to Islamist causes that motivated the officers to push the party from power in the ‘blank’ or ‘post-modern’ coup of June 1997. Ten years later, the end of President Ahmet Necdet Sezer’s term in office triggered the intensification of the battle between the AKP and its secular antagonists within the military, judiciary, press and academia.
The president of the Turkish Republic holds a largely ceremonial role, but the presidency is vested with a number of powers that can affect the political trajectory of the state. The most important is the duty to approve or veto legislation passed in the Grand National Assembly. For secular nationalists, Sezer, former chief justice of the Constitutional Court and ardent secularist as well as nationalist, was a critical firewall against what they perceived to be the AKP’s hidden Islamisation agenda. During...
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Steven A. Cook is the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Ruling But Not Governing: The Military and Political Development in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey (Johns Hopkins University Press).
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