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

The Western Condition: Turkey, the US and the EU in the New Middle East
Brussels. 157 The same, of course, also applies to Turkey, where contending perceptions of
Europe reflect the on-going quest for self-identification within this country. This dynamic
presents us with a contradiction: Turkey’s engagement with Europe contains the potential to
become a profoundly transformative relationship for both sides thanks to this shared domestic
popular element, but that complex element does not always push the two sides towards more
cooperation, openness and liberal democratic reform. In fact, it usually does not.
For a long time, the popular image of Turkey in Europe oscillated between on one hand a fear,
awe and wonder inspiring entity and on the other hand a more familiar if uninspiring entity that
is ‘almost but not quite’ European, lingering awkwardly at the continent’s geopolitical, socioeconomic
and intellectual periphery. 158 The former category includes essentialising images of
invading Ottoman armies, pushing deep into the Christian heartland with their military and
moral prowess, conquering Constantinople and laying siege to Vienna; the lavish palaces,
mysterious courts and exotic harems recounted and fantasied by travelling storytellers; and more
recently, the image of an assertive, dynamic, yet unmistakably more Islamic country, whose
charismatic leader dares to publicly dress down Israel, which at once excites and unsettles many
European onlookers. In the second category, we come across images of the ailing Ottoman
Empire – the sick man of Europe – waiting to be dismembered by the French, British and
Russians; French and German inspired military officers, attempting to construct a strictly
European nation-state; immigrant guest workers arriving en masse to participate in post-WWII
reconstruction and “Wirtschaftswunder” or, to this day, a large and relatively poor country
desperately seeking inclusion in the European Union.
In Turkey, too, contending perceptions of Europe have long reflected the continuous quest for
self-identification. While for many Ottoman Muslims, especially during the formative centuries
of the empire, Europe beyond its borders constituted the ‘house of war’ (dar al-harb), the land of
unbelievers waiting to be incorporated into the ‘house of Islam’ (dar al-Islam), for many others –
Muslims and non-Muslims – it gradually became the prime inspiration for reform and fashion.
This second category included the Ottoman palace, much of the urban middle and upper middle
classes, and eventually most of the senior officers in the military, who founded the Turkish
republic in 1923. In the interwar period, the Kemalist leaders of the young republic looked to
157 It is probably not too farfetched to speculate that had the ‘Eurocrats’ actually possessed the ability to shape the
public debate on Turkey to the extent that the foreign policy strategists do in the US, Turkish entry into the EU
would have been a far more realistic prospect, as it is the rising grassroots opposition to European expansion and
not so much the political will of the EU elites that has stalled this process.
158 In fact, the term ‘Turkey’ was first was used in Europe in reference to the Ottoman Empire. Prior to the
founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the term meant little or nothing to the inhabitants of the geographic
area that the republic comprises today. A corresponding term did not exist in most languages spoken within the
Ottoman borders, including in Ottoman Turkish. For centuries, the Ottoman Empire was known to its subjects as
‘Devlet-i Âliye-yi Osmâniyye’, or the domains of the House of Osman. It meant little to the Ottomans that this
multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire ruled by a dynasty that almost exclusively married Christian/European
women, and had been engaged in the internal politics and alliance making of the continent at least since the 15 th
century, could be seen as a purely Turkish, Muslim or non-European entity.
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