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 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. 59
Faces of the West: Can Europeanisation, Americanisation and Autonomisation be reconciled? European states and institutions to create a strictly secular and ‘western’ state and society, also because they realised that this was the only way to escape colonisation and domination. 159 The logic of this ‘westernisation’ was a direct result of the hegemonic West, represented at that time by the European powers. For Turkey’s authoritarian modernisers, who subscribed wholesale to the dichotomous worldview associated with the European Enlightenment, the West symbolised modernity and civilisation, while the East stood for religion and tradition, also bywords for backwardness and ignorance. 160 Turkey’s western condition is an old affair. During the Cold War, Turkey found itself under the same ‘western’ security umbrella with those European countries that its founders had sought to emulate. Yet despite the geostrategic convergence, deepening economic ties, and the heightened level of cultural and societal exchange, its European engagement during this period was also marked by visible mutual distrust. Across Europe, a subtle but persistent antipathy towards Turkey, which was viewed widely (and not entirely inaccurately) as a corrupt, repressive and patriarchal state and society, was coupled by a popular (and often openly racist) dislike of the ‘uncivilised’ Turks now populating European cities, a trope that was ironically also shared by many elite cadres of the Kemalist establishment. Meanwhile, the mainstream Turkish discourse featured both a sense of jealousy and admiration for Europe’s cultural appeals and material prosperity and a feeling of anger and suspicion towards European policies and attitudes vis-à-vis Turkey. Historically-rooted socio-political tensions largely determined the cycles of Turkey’s engagement with Europe throughout and as well as right after the Cold War, such as its troubled relationship with Bulgaria and Greece over each other’s treatment of their religious minorities (and over Cyprus with Greece), 161 or strained ties with France for the latter’s suspected support for the Armenian terrorist organisation ASALA. 162 With the arrival of thousands of Kurdish political refugees in the 1980s across northern Europe, the Turkish state’s repressive policies and the plight of Turkey’s Kurds came under the spotlight in Europe and found critical audiences across the continent. Consequently, as Turkey’s US-equipped security forces engaged in a brutal campaign of suppression against the Kurds during the 1990s, Turkish officials repeatedly 159 As is well known, the Kemalist idea of secularism corresponded to French laicite, which stood more for state control (and often suppression) of public expressions of religiosity than the separation of church and state, as in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The young republic translated its penal code from that of Fascist Italy and its civil code from the Swiss. Ironically, the country that was designed to be a purely ‘European’ nation-state had become recently purged of many of its non-Muslim communities and consisted of an overwhelming majority of Muslims. Throughout the republican period, policies against non-Muslims further reduced their numbers. 160 This dichotomy was regularly emphasised by Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkish republic. In a 1923 interview, he stated that “Turks have followed only one destination over the centuries. We have always walked from the East towards the West. […] Our whole effort is to establish a modern, and therefore, western government in Turkey. What nation desires to enter civilisation but does not turn towards the West?” Nimet Arsan (ed) Atatürk’ün Söylev ve Demeçleri, Vol. 3 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1989), p. 91. 161 Othon Anastasakis, Kerem Öktem, Kalypso Nicolaids (eds), In the long shadow of Europe: Greeks and Turks in the era of Post-Nationalism (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 162 William Echikson, ‘Armenian bombing at Orly ends pact between Socialists and terrorists’, Christian Science Monitor, 19 July 1983. 60
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