The deep involvement by Turkey’s prime minister in the recent conflict between Israel and Gaza marked Ankara’s return, after an absence of nearly a century, into the fold of Middle Eastern politics. This was something Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, the architect of the post-Ottoman Turkish Republic, wanted very much to avoid.
Indeed, much to the chagrin of many of his compatriots, Prime Minister Receb Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist Justice and Development Party openly sympathized with Hamas in the recent war in Gaza, and that despite cordial relations between Turkey and Israel and Turkey’s neutral stance in the Arab-Israel conflict.
For many Turks, the prime minister’s change of direction in foreign policy is seen as a serious deviation from Kemalist tenet. Ataturk, the architect of the new republic, was a great visionary who wanted to take Turkey out of the Levant once and for all, and bring it into Europe, where he felt Turkey belonged.
“The larger problem that many either don’t see, or want to ignore, is the fact that Turkey’s identity is going through a speedy transformation,” says Tulin Daloglu, a Turkish journalist in Washington. Erdogan, some observers feel, is gradually eroding what Ataturk had put together and they are not comfortable with the notion.
“My first reaction is negative. Erdogan might have strong emotional attachment to Hamas,” says Daloglu. “But Turkey should not be competing with other leading countries in the region. It should be [working] in full cooperation with them.”
Shortly after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the close of World War I, Ataturk shifted Turkey’s horizons from its traditional eastward leaning to align it with Europe and the West. That included strict separation of religion and politics along the lines of France’s ‘laïcité’. Ataturk and subsequent leaders of modern-day Turkey have labored hard to make this dream of Europeanizing Turkey a reality.
But Europe did not do enough to help speed up the process, as it is perhaps somewhat reluctant to admit a country of more than 70 million Muslims into the European Union. As can be expected, Europe’s failure to seize that opportunity to befriend an important and moderate Muslim country risks sending the Turks back in search of alliances in the Levant, and even beyond, into the former Soviet republics of central Asia. The European Union failed to grasp the importance of bringing in a large — albeit Muslim — nation into the EU, a step that would have solidified European-Arab relations.
Still, in spite of the nearly 100 years during which the Turks stayed away from the Middle East, the three centuries the Ottoman Empire spent incorporating much of the Arab world seems to have left some traces of affinity, at least insofar as the current prime minister is concerned.
But with the continued rebuttal by Brussels, Paris and Vienna of Turkey’s application to join the EU, the inevitable was bound to happen: Turkey’s rapprochement with Arab Islamists and its involvement in the Middle East conflict as a mediator. The latter role was certainly facilitated by the political void left when the United States under the presidency of George W. Bush showed little or no interest in trying to mediate the various problems related to the Middle East crisis. Washington’s refusal to negotiate with Damascus is a prime example of the disastrous policy followed by the Bush neoconservatives and one upon which Ankara jumped to take the relay.
That being said, it is not too late for the Europeans to save the day. In fact, Turkey’s flirtation with Hamas may come as a mixed blessing to the West. On the one hand, a rapprochement between Ankara and the Arab world — particularly with the Islamist organizations, such as Hamas — will prove useful in mediating a future settlement of the Middle East conflict. When the current war between Hamas and Israel finally runs its course, a Turkey acceptable to Palestinian Islamists will prove to be quite an asset. Turkish troops positioned in a newly created buffer zone between Hamas and Israel could be one of the few armies in the world acceptable to both sides. Turkey has the largest, toughest military in the Greater Middle East, more likely than not, on par with Israel’s. Some of their units have seen action in the mountains of Kurdistan, where Turkey has been fighting a guerrilla war against the PKK (the Turkish Workers Party) for several decades now.
The drawback is that Turkey’s reemerging friendship with the Arab world, and its continued exclusion from Europe, will further ‘Islamize’ Turkey. The end result could be that instead of Turkey acting as a buffer between Europe and the Arab/Muslim world, a role Turkey played during the Cold War as a NATO front-line for the Iron Curtain, Europe may wake-up one day to find Turkey suddenly on the other side of that border.
Claude Salhani is editor of the Middle East Times and a political editor in Washington, DC.
