Turkey’s Risky Politics Makes for Risky Business as Well

By Jon Gorvett


	EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso speaks in Ankara before the Turkish parliament, April 10, 2008. Urging Turkey to speed up democratic reforms, he said it had “a long way to go” to catch up with EU membership criteria (AFP photo/Adem Altan.)

WHEN, IN EARLY April, the international ratings agency Standard & Poor’s announced it was dropping Turkey’s investment grade from “stable” to “negative,” it cited “political and external uncertainties” as the reason.

While external uncertainties are a dime a dozen in a world of sub-prime mortgage fallouts, jumping oil prices and fears of a U.S.-led recession, the political uncertainties behind the move are much more country-specific.

In particular, there is the uncertainty generated by the March 31 decision by Turkey’s Constitutional Court to give the go-ahead to a case calling for the banning of the Justice and Development Party (AKP)—the country’s current government.

Given that the Court banned both of the AKP’s Islamist predecessors and is dominated by judges known to be fundamentally hostile to the party, Turkey may thus very well be heading toward a major political crisis.

In many respects, however, this is nothing new.

Turkish politics often is characterized as a contest between two drivers hurtling toward each other—but usually swerving away at the last minute, as one or the other blinks.

In one car are the secularists, represented by the military, the state bureaucracy—including the judiciary—and the main opposition parties, principally the Republican Peoples’ Party (CHP). The rightist National Action Party (MHP) is also generally in this vehicle, although it is currently saving up for its own car, too.

The “secularist” camp typically paints its chassis in rhetoric harking back to the Turkish Republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He began a process of rapid modernization of the country, 1920s style, that saw lots of nationalism—both economic and political—along with lots of concrete as the way to “contemporary civilization.”

In the other car, meanwhile, to continue the analogy, are the Islamists.

These are represented by the AKP, which is descended from a long line of far more Islamist parties. Some of its members also have shady connections to a host of even more religious groups, such as Turkey’s Sufi tarikats, or lodges, which, while Ataturk officially banned them in 1925, still flourish.

Rhetorically, however, here the binary narrative begins to fray. These days the AKP paints its car in the rhetoric of democracy, liberal economics and globalization, more than in the colors of the Qur’an.

More than any other party in Turkish history, the AKP has advanced the country’s march toward European Union (EU) membership, while also opening up Turkey’s economy to foreign investment and international trade more than any other.

Indeed, some Turkish intellectuals characterize the AKP as “post-modern,” versus the “modernist” secularists, with the AKP abandoning “ideological” positions in favor of the dominant global ideology of free trade and political relativism. None of this appears to sit well with the secularists’ characterization of them as religious reactionaries.

However, it does sit well with an increasingly dominant view within the secularist camp, namely that everyone is against Turkey—or, more specifically, the “Turkish Nation.”

Speak to Turkish judges or CHP and MHP members these days, and the closure case against the AKP takes on quite a different aspect. Many now see this not so much as an attempt to quash the country’s Islamic tendencies, but more as a battle against global—or, to be blunt, Western—imperialism.

At its most outspoken—although senior judges are often scarcely more subtle—this view cites as evidence of a global conspiracy the support the EU and U.S. have given the AKP.

Indeed, both Washington and the European capitals have often criticized attacks by the secularists on the Islamists. They also have praised the AKP’s blend of Islamism with business-friendly practices as offering a “Turkish model” for the rest of the Islamic world—praise which dovetails in the secular nationalist mind with the U.S. “Greater Middle East Project.”

The U.S. and EU also have backed the AKP in foreign policy, over, for example, the Cyprus issue.

The AKP’s decision to back the U.N.’s 2004 plan for the island’s reunification—one pushed by both the U.S. and EU—was seen by the more extreme secularists as such a betrayal of the Turkish Nation that they even plotted a coup, it has since emerged.

Those who were behind this, most likely the shadowy ultra-nationalist Ergenekon group, are now being rolled up by a government-backed investigation. This, too, of course, is seen by many at the grass roots of the MHP and CHP as the launching by the AKP of a political purge of secular patriots, probably with U.S. and EU support.

At the same time, many on the secular side argue that the AKP government did not move against the separatist guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) in northern Iraq until given an all clear by Washington. Then, when the U.S. had had enough of Turkish military operations over the border, the army withdrew.

Then there’s the headscarf issue. While to many outsiders it may appear baffling why a woman wearing a scrap of cloth on her head could arouse such passions one way or the other, the wearing of an Islamic headscarf in Turkey is a major political flashpoint.

For years, Turkish women had been banned from wearing them in public establishments, which included all schools and universities, as well as government departments.

Recently, however, the AKP moved to change this (see April 2008 Washington Report, p. 44), a move that many see as a final straw for the secularists. Soon after came the move to ban the AKP, which cited its attempt to remove the ban as evidence that the AKP is seeking to undermine the secular republic—a criminal offense.

The EU and U.S., oddly, are widely seen as supporting a lifting of the ban on headscarves (even if this is not the case, both have been largely silent on this issue, particularly the EU, given a similar ban in France) and of being against the closure case against the AKP (about which they have been more vocal, while not condemning it either).

For many secularists, then, this is evidence of how they are alone against the world. The Turkish Nation has been left to fight for its survival in a new independence war, against enemies both at home and abroad.

As the well-known secular Vatan(“Nation”) columnist Mini Kirikkanat put it in an “Open letter to the EU” issued to European Commission chiefs and foreign journalists in early April 2008: “If you do not have anything to say for the half of Turkey which supports the secular republic against all difficulties, please do not say what you have to say, just keep your silence. Just leave us alone so that we can, as always, defend our country against darkness alone and without any help.”

The belief that the EU and the U.S.—often characterized by both the left and right of the secular camp as “imperialists”—are acting in concert with domestic Islamist forces may seem paranoid, but it also has wide currency.

It has generations of nationalist teachings in school and university to feed upon, as well as a current scenario in which the AKP seems impossible to defeat electorally. As a result, the secularists have never felt more threatened.

This great uncertainty hanging over Turkish politics also is having an economic effect.

Investors are holding back to see what will happen, undermining many planned privatizations and government tenders. Nor is there a timeframe on the court case, which could take all year or could be over much more rapidly—further adding to uncertainty. The calculation among many, such as S&P’s, is that risk is increasing on Turkish investments. How much it will increase, nobody currently knows. Someone, many hope, will blink—and soon.

Jon Gorvett is a free-lance journalist based in Istanbul.