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

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The Western Condition: Turkey, the US and the EU in the New Middle East indicator of this competition, as well as a sign of the limits of Turkey’s independence from the western security alliance, the AKP government agreed to participate in NATO’s missile shield programme, pointed at Iran, and even conceded to host its radars on Turkish soil, close to the Iranian border. 92 In other words, at the same time as cooperation drew the Turkish and Iranian governments closer together, as evidenced in the Turkish rejection of the UN sanctions vote, the underlying rivalry was pushing the AKP government deeper into the US fold. This, in other words, was autonomisation with a western anchor. In sum, while the AKP government largely succeeded in reminding its regional and global counterparts of Turkey’s ‘strategic’ importance thanks to its multi-directional and pro-active foreign policy under Foreign Minister Davutoğlu, the net achievements of its ‘zero problems policy’ and the extent of its autonomy proved much more modest than the AKP decision makers and western observers of Turkey assumed during this period. In 2011, Turkey stood as a country that had failed to heal its widening socio-political divides, annulled its Kurdish, Alevi and Armenian openings, backtracked on its democratic reforms, all but abandoned its bid for the EU membership, increased its control over Northern Cyprus, and started watching its much touted ‘soft power’ influence over Syria, Iraq and Iran wither away with the Syrian uprising. Some of these developments, such as the failure of the EU bid, were in large part products of external constraints and dynamics over which Turkey did not have much control. The problem, it seems, was that in their growing self-confidence, Turkish leaders thought (and still think) that they had. Americanisation and overstretch (2011 - …) The period since 2011 has been one where Turkey’s domestic and foreign politics became fully enmeshed, with socio-political dynamics beyond the country’s borders directly influencing events inside, and the government’s confrontational domestic rhetoric and illiberal policies fuelling its increasingly hubristic regional leadership agenda. This has also been the period when the AKP finally completed its domination of the Turkish state and politics. Wresting control of the judiciary from the Kemalist establishment with the constitutional referendum of September 2010 it won a resounding third consecutive general election victory in June 2011. At the same time, the ruling party has become effectively synonymous with its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Driven by a powerful ambition to introduce a presidential system in Turkey and to become its first president in 2014, Erdoğan handpicked the new AKP deputies out of loyalists, leaving out 92 The Turkish government only agreed to sign up to the programme upon convincing other members not to single out Iran as a specific target. This was hailed by the AKP government as a victory for its delicate balancing act, satisfying the West without alienating Iran and all the while maintaining an independent posture. In reality, Turkey’s achievement was little more than a face saving measure towards Iran, having accepted to participate in a weapons system that targeted the Islamic Republic directly, regardless of whether this is explicitly stated or not. 39
An ambivalent decade: Three variations in the AKP’s foreign policy names deemed to be either too independent or too close to Abdullah Gül, his long-time comrade but potential rival in a future presidential race. The collusion of domestic and foreign politics and Erdoğan’s vision of himself at the centre of the party, the party at the centre of Turkey, and Turkey at the centre of a vast Muslim domain corresponding to the former Ottoman territories and beyond were powerfully conveyed in the victory speech that the prime minister delivered on the eve of the 2011 election from the balcony of his party’s imposing headquarters in Ankara. “Believe me,” he said, addressing tens of thousands of passionate supporters, “Sarajevo won today as much as Istanbul, Beirut won as much as Izmir, Damascus won as much as Ankara, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, the West Bank, Jerusalem won as much as Diyarbakir.” 93 The AKP had just run its most self-congratulatory and confrontational election campaign. Pandering to the supporters of the far-right opposition Nationalist Action Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) in an attempt to keep it below the 10% election threshold that would give the ruling party the absolute majority required for unilateral constitution making powers, the AKP adopted an aggressively nationalistic rhetoric with sectarian undertones to attack both the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi, BDP), which had succeeded the outlawed DTP, and the secularist CHP, where the hardliner Kemalist old guard has been engaged in a power struggle against a younger leadership advocating a cautiously social democratic programme. 94 At almost every campaign stop, Erdoğan made subtle yet stinging remarks to remind his audiences that the new leader of the CHP, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, was an Alevi, thus contributing to the hegemonic discourse of prejudice and discrimination that the government’s Alevi opening was meant to counter. 95 At the same time, in a bid to maintain the party’s support among the conservative Sunni sections of the Kurdish population in the face of the government’s increasingly militaristic policies, the AKP decision makers chose to exploit sectarian sensitivities among Kurds. They repeatedly claimed that the members and supporters of the pro-Kurdish movement, many of whom are leftists and/or secular nationalists, lacked proper Islamic beliefs and morals. This has continued beyond the election, with such examples as the newly appointed 93 Kerem Öktem, Ayşe Kadıoğlu, ‘Introduction’, in Another Empire, p. 4. 94 Over the years, especially since the collapse of its Kurdish, Alevi and Armenian ‘openings’, the AKP’s rhetoric has frequently overlapped with that of the MHP, as the ruling party increasingly appealed to religious nationalist voters, who make up the MHP’s core constituency. While there appears to have been some movement of support from the MHP to the AKP, this was not enough to push the MHP below the election threshold, as it ended up receiving 13% of the vote. The two parties went on to cooperate closely in the new parliament, with the MHP acting as the unofficial junior partner of the ruling party on a number of issues. 95 Sedat Ergin, ‘Erdoğan and the CHP leader's Alevi origin’, Hurriyet Daily News, 18 April 2011. 40
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The Western Condition - St Antony's College - University of Oxford

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