“Where are you going Turkey?” the Western media is asking.
It’s a legitimate question. Turkey is now making headlines so often that it’s hard to follow, even for the well-informed:
- Mediating indirect talks and coming very close to a peace agreement between Israel and Syria until the Israeli war against Gaza last year;
- Falling out with Israel over that war;
- Beginning to normalize relations with Armenia;
- Forging closer relations with fellow Middle Eastern countries;
- Supporting Tehran and its controversial nuclear program;
- And, most important, losing enthusiasm for EU membership.
Evaluations of Turkey’s new “bearing” are diverse: they range from genuine concern that Turkey is drifting away from the West (such as this article on TIME) to a positive assessment of its growing clout in the Middle East (as the New York Times has pointed out) to outright hostility (“Turkey has no place in the European Union,” says former U.S. Congressman Michael Huffington).
So, where is Turkey going?
The answer is quite simple: Nowhere. Or, more accurately, anywhere and everywhere it can.
Since the early eighteenth century, Turkey has perceived Europe as the role model for its modernization. From the Ottoman times through the revolutionary reforms under Atatürk’s rule in the 1920s and 1930s to the present day, being modern in Turkey meant becoming part of Europe and creating a free, prosperous, and egalitarian country.
Even though there had been a general consensus on those points among the elite in the past, nevertheless, the merits of equating modernity with Europe and the West are now being questioned.
It is an ironic development because the only secular country with a Muslim-majority population had never been more democratic and prosperous as it is today. To be sure, the conservative government of Prime Minister Tayyip ErdoÄŸan’s AKP (Turkish for “Justice and Development Party”) still retains authoritarian tendencies. But it was also Mr. ErdoÄŸan’s bold reforms – curbing the power of the politically powerful military, lifting restrictions on free speech, accelerating the privatization of the state’s economic enterprises – allowed Ankara to start accession talks with the European Union in 2005.
Recent political liberalization has progressed concurrently with economic growth. Since the AKP came to power in late 2002, Turkey has undergone a significant boom. A decent share of that recovery came from the unprecedented increase in foreign trade (from a mere $87 billion in 2002 to a record $333 billion in 2008). And a good deal of that increase came from Turkish businessmen either expanding the scope of their operations in areas where they’ve been active, such as the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central Asia, or venturing into new areas, such as North America and Sub-Saharan Africa.
In this context, the flag has followed the lira, so to speak. Turkey has elevated its political relations with countless countries by signing agreements in the fields of security, energy, trade, education, and tourism. Since last year, Ankara has opened 12 new embassies on the African continent. And for the first time since the 1960s, with the overwhelming support of developing countries, Turkey gained one of the non-permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council in 2008.
It is therefore ironic that, as Turkey’s global prestige increases and it becomes an international force to be reckoned with, anti-Turkish xenophobia skyrockets in Europe. Never had opposition to Turkey’s EU membership earned European politicians so many cookie points as they do today. The anti-Turkish position of characters such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel is decreasing popular support in Turkey for EU membership.
For some time, diminishing interest in EU membership has slowed down the pace of reform in Turkey. Whereas the prospects of joining the EU had been the prime motivator for implementing reforms in the recent past, the opposite is now the case. Turkey still has a long way to go before it becomes a genuinely prosperous, democratic, and egalitarian country (the Constitutional Court’s recent decision to close down the Kurdish nationalist party is a case in point) and such a slowdown is of no use.
As Turkey becomes more prosperous, democratic, and egalitarian, it will gain more clout in the international scene. Hence, Turkish people and their leaders are realizing that there are other opportunities out there; other directions on the compass than just “The West.” That doesn’t necessarily mean that Turkey is walking away Europe. It simply means that it is coming closer to the rest of the world. Why is that a bad thing?
E-mail: kayaoglu@virginia.edu
