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

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5 The Western Condition: Turkey, the US and the EU in the New Middle East
Introduction Introduction While in the Middle East, the ripple effects of the Arab uprisings continue to shake up the post- WWI status-quo, the West, and above all, the European Union, is still embroiled in the aftermath of its greatest financial crisis since the 1930s. This concurrent occurrence may be fortuitous but it has no doubt exacerbated one of the defining tensions of our age. The West is no longer able to dictate the terms of modernity beyond its borders - indeed, in its very close neighbourhood when it comes to the European Union. But for all the talk of a post-western world, the appropriation, transformation and subversion of standards and norms developed in and by the West remain ubiquitous. It is this tension between declining and inescapable West which we call the Western condition, acknowledging of course that there are several Wests relevant to our story. As such, the Western condition is both a condition of the West – in the case at hand, the differentiated modes of reactive engagement and disengagement of the US and the EU from the Middle East - and a characteristic of countries which remained conditioned by the West, be it through formal or informal conditionality invoked by the EU or the US, or more broadly through the constraints imposed by the rules of the game underpinning the western international order. In this paper, we use the prism of Turkey to ask what is happening to the Western condition in the ‘new’ Middle East. Nowhere is the Western condition more entrenched, resented and actively engaged with than in Turkey which has spent the last century coping and negotiating with it. And nowhere, we believe, is the current tension so consequential, in part because Turkey stands at the intersection between worlds and between different geostrategic logics. In this context, that the relative economic and political stability earned over the last decade in Turkey is proving to be increasingly precarious undoubtedly affects the changing Western condition in the region. To the extent that the ‘West’, broadly speaking, exacerbates, mitigates or ignores conflict between states and between peoples in the Middle East, Turkey is usually part of the equation. For the ambitious and increasingly self-assured foreign policy makers in Turkey’s Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) government, the geopolitical vacuum generated by the uprisings has represented an opportunity to advance Foreign Minister Davutoğlu’s long standing vision of Turkey acting as an ‘order setting agent’ in its former Ottoman territories. What kind of order then is emerging? It has been widely observed that these events have intensified deep running regional and global rivalries and created a geopolitical tug of war for hegemony and survival that has been playing out violently above all along one sensitive dimension: the Sunni-Shia fault line. It may well turn out to be the case that Turkey has the potential to tip the scales in western interest but under its own terms. To demonstrate how this is happening, we explore Turkey’s relationship with the West as it affects both democratic reform domestically and geo-strategic alliance-making externally – and as 6
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The Western Condition - St Antony's College - University of Oxford

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