The Western Condition - St Antony's College - University of Oxford

The Western Condition: Turkey, the US and the EU in the New Middle East
• First, ‘model’ refers to Turkey as a referent for revolutionary Arab countries and their
new emerging leadership, a relevant and attractive source of inspiration for domestic
governance, publicly discussed in these countries (especially in Tunisia and Egypt, and to
a lesser extent, in Libya) and openly subscribed to by some factions and prominent
individuals within their ascendant Islamist movements, including Mohammad
Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s an-Nahda movement, and the Egyptian President
Mohammad Morsi, and his Muslim Brotherhood. These groups and individuals tend to
view the AKP with a certain affinity because of a shared Sunni Islamist political heritage
and express interest in its social and economic policies that combine references to
Islamic ideas of social welfare with neo-liberal growth strategies. Using the referent
explicitly can strengthen their hand in domestic power struggles. More ambiguously,
Islamic parties as well as sections of publics in the region are groping for ways of
accommodating ostensibly pluralistic constitutional frames and Islamic hegemony in the
longer run and can look at the AKP as having accumulated a decade-long experience on
this front. The attractiveness of the Turkish model revolves around competing notions
of “secularism”, a point we will come back to.
• Second, while a national ‘model’ can be a passive referent, interpreted and re-interpreted
irrespective of the country’s own action, external perceptions can be used as part of a
regional strategy of ‘model promotion’. This would correspond to the recycled idea of
Turkey serving as a ‘moderate Islamist’ model in the Middle East; an idea that has once
again become popular within the US foreign policy establishment, subscribed to by the US
government and actively promoted by security-driven think tanks, lobby groups and
pundits since the outbreak of the Arab uprisings. Their immediate concern rests not so
much in the model’s domestic implications for the recipient countries or for Turkey, but
rather in its strategic benefits for the US-led western security establishment in the wider
region. These interests include ensuring that emerging political actors maintain friendly
relations with the US and its regional allies, consider Iran, and not Israel, as the main
security threat in the region, and subscribe to market liberalisation policies, keeping barriers
for trade and investment with the West and the US-led regional alliance at a minimum.
It is at this intersection that the ‘Turkish model’ has come to be used and promoted by Turkey’s
foreign policymakers as part of a pro-active regional leadership strategy. In Davutoğlu’s grand
strategy, if there ever was one, these two dimensions –Middle Eastern ‘admiration’ and imitation
on one hand Western promotion on the other – were expected to mutually reinforce each other
and radically change Turkey’s national identity as well as its place in the region and the world.
What Davutoğlu has long envisioned, and the AKP has thought to assert through the
charismatic persona of Prime Minister Erdoğan, was turning Turkey into the pivotal actor in its
various neighbourhoods, while increasing its strategic worth and autonomy vis-à-vis its Western
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