One of them was the economy. After the crisis that knocked Turkey down in 2001, a vast consensus was formed and the roadmap drafted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) clearly identified what needed to be done with respect to the economy. What the government was supposed to do was to carefully implement this program without much deviation by using the advantages of being a single-party government. This discipline has resulted in a great success, securing growth for 27 consecutive periods -- also thanks to global economic circumstances -- and this success was a first in Turkey’s history.Another area in which the AK Party found a very detailed roadmap was the reforms that needed to be implemented in the political and legal arenas. Support for Turkey's EU membership was at 70 percent at that time. Almost all social groups declared their support for the country's EU bid. Moreover, the list of things that needed to be done in this quest had been clarified though numerous meetings with EU officials. Indeed, the AK Party took surprisingly swift steps with respect to EU membership, as it did with respect to the economy, and secured the honor of being the government that managed to start negotiations with the EU for full membership, after getting the go-ahead with respect to the Copenhagen criteria.
Of course, we must be fair to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his colleagues, who have been working hard for six-and-a-half years. Yet we cannot ignore the positive contributions made by these two advantages to the success this newly established political party achieved in such a short time. As a matter of fact, if the uncertainties and hesitations observed during the last two years, in which these two parameters were no longer guiding the program, are taken into consideration, a better assessment of the role played by these two advantages in the success of the government can be observed.
The course of action the government needed to follow with respect to these two areas was clear, but the situation with respect to foreign policy was full of uncertainties. First, the Cyprus issue, the country's national issue for the last fifty years, had progressed to a crossroads. The fate of the country's EU bid, supported by the majority of Turkish society, was dependent on the Cyprus issue. On the other hand, there was another and greater crisis coming. Washington was drumming up a war against Iraq. The US wanted to deploy tens of thousands of soldiers in the Southeast for a war rejected by almost everyone in Turkey. If only there had been a road map for the AK Party in this field. But there was none. Even the National Security Council (MGK), which was quick to express its opinion about many issues not related to security in the least and which was chaired by President Ahmet Necdet Sezer at the time, kept its mouth shut. The intention of those people whose coup plots we now read from the indictments of Ergenekon was simple: If the government said yes to the US, it would be labeled a US collaborator and lose its prestige in the Muslim world. If it said no, then it would distance itself from the West.
The same applies to the Cyprus issue. If the government supported a settlement on Cyprus, it would be accused of betraying this national cause. If it pursued a nationalist policy, this would block the EU bid. Indeed, in diaries that are said to belong to Mustafa Balbay, Gen. Şener Eruygur, a defendant in the Ergenekon case, saw the Cyprus issue as bait for the government. "To make sure that they [the government] are crushed by the Cyprus issue and, at the same time, Cyprus is not lost... A very delicate balance, " Eruygur reportedly said in summation of his Cyprus plan.
The biggest responsibility in this unguided and dangerous voyage fell on the shoulders of Ahmet Davutoğlu, who was recently appointed as Turkey’s new foreign minister. Later we will touch on the efforts by Davutoğlu, acting as ambassador and chief foreign policy adviser to the prime minister, to translate these “deep” and “shadowy” crises into opportunities and on the rational and irrational aspects of this process. We will try to describe this foreign relations philosopher, whom I have encountered numerous times during trips abroad, diplomacy briefings and private conservations, within the confines of a few articles.
