Turkey Book Talk

[Published on openDemocracy (20th June 2012): http://www.opendemocracy.net/william-armstrong/turkey-as-test-case-in-multipolar-post-cold-war-order]

Much is made of Turkey’s ‘difference’ in the Middle East. Why is it being identified an inspiration to the region? Why is there talk of Turkey as a model for Egypt, and not the other way around? In a recent interview with Turkish Policy Quarterly, historian Bernard Lewis makes much of Turkey’s republican history of independence and self-criticism since the Ottoman era, which he says accounts for the country’s regional pre-eminence today. Whilst these differences are indeed significant, a reasonable case can be made that they were not nearly so pronounced as Lewis claims. In fact, after the Second World War, Turkey was no more immune to the hard choices that had to be made in a bipolar world order than other Eastern European and Middle Eastern states. As such, like many others, it was only ever nominally independent.The difference between Turkey and the other countries in the region, however, is that it was able to emerge much more quickly in the post-Cold War era, when states previously under Soviet influence became independent, and the ‘protection’ of those under U.S. sway was rendered unnecessary. This emergence can be ascribed to Turkey’s higher economic, educational, industrial and institutional development, as well as its important narrative of national sovereignty and proud republican history. Its regional pre-eminence today is therefore closely linked to its status as a pioneer of the new, multi-polar post-Cold War era. The sense that the country is now defining itself, as opposed to being defined by outsiders, is a crucial psychological hurdle.

For the duration of the Cold War, the Middle East was an object region acted upon by outside forces, rather than a subject acting for itself. In practice, this meant states being pulled into the influence of either the U.S. or the Soviet Union. Turkey was no different in this sense, and was considered by Washingtonan essential bulwark against communism on the south-eastern fringe of Europe. In order to anchor Turkey to the west, the U.S. bankrolled the Turkish military through the Truman Doctrine in the post-war era, and it was made a full member of NATO in 1952 (at the same time as Greece, the other subject state of the Truman Doctrine). U.S. support – tacit or otherwise – was crucial in the three military coups of 1960, 1971, and 1980, all of which helped to maintain the status quo order. Like so many others, during the Cold War period Turkey was barely democratic, with its western allies preferring a stable, reliable partner to one that genuinely reflected its people’s unpredictable wishes. The 1980 coup is particularly instructive, being seen by the U.S. at the time as necessary to prevent any danger of the country sliding towards communism, as the Turkish left was extremely mobilised throughout the 1970s. CIA Ankara station chief at the time, Paul Henze, is on record as saying that he cabled Washington – shortly after the coup had been carried out by the Turkish military – to say ‘our boys did it’. Gossip perhaps, but illuminating gossip.

The 1980 coup therefore illustrates the old Turkish model, and its similarities with the systems that have also characterised the Arab world in the recent past: U.S./western support for an essentially non-democratic state, in return for the guarantee of stability. Turgut Özal, who became Prime Minister in 1982, could therefore be seen as a kind of non-military Turkish version of General Pinochet. Coming to power shortly after an American-backed coup, Özal was pro-U.S., anti-communist, and neo-liberal – significantly opening up the Turkish economy to international market forces with U.S. support. It’s an interesting irony that in many ways it was these very reforms that helped prepare Turkey to develop economically in the post-Cold War era.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, it also – perhaps paradoxically – became increasingly clear that the old U.S.-dominant model had also become redundant, with much of the previous justification for U.S. support to stable but undemocratic regimes having been lost. Slowly, it became possible for new, popular movements to emerge in the region, and this goes some way to explaining both the revolts sweeping across the Arab world today as well as Turkey’s (less violent) development of a strongly independent government representing popular will. There are, however, significant differences that may legislate against post-Cold War Arab countries following the same trajectory as Turkey. Not least of these is the multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, multi-confessional nature of most of these countries – none can really be considered ‘nation states’ in anything like the organically-evolving western European sense of the world. Turkey’s own early 20th century nation-building project relied on an enormous amount of violently imposed state-directed social reorganisation, essentially imitating the western model, (in terms of the uniform cultural, ethnic, linguistic, religious cohesiveness that was stressed). On its own terms, the Turkish model of modernisation was successful – taking a multi-linguistic, multi-ethnic population and forging out of it a unitary, monolingual, officially mono-cultural state. In the modern nation states of the Arab world, with their fragmented and multifarious social, ethnic, religious, linguistic, sectarian structures, it is difficult to see how the same results can be achieved in the early 21st century – or even how such results would be desirable. The new Middle East is perhaps more likely to be one where – instead of two great outside powers seeking to impose their influence and maintain an unthreatening stability – a regional struggle will play out between multiple competing local forces. This struggle will be based on old fissures that the old Cold War order had previously kept an uneasy lid on.