The survey revealed, among other things, that while 57 percent of those interviewed supported Turkey's membership in the union, no less than 93 percent believed that the European Union was not treating Turkey equally with the other candidate countries, and 80 percent said that the EU will never accept Turkey even if it fulfills all conditions of membership.The more striking findings indicated that large majorities of respondents (80-85 percent), irrespective of religiosity or education, declared that both the United States and the EU pursued policies that aim to “dismember Turkey.” My interpretation of these findings was that they in the main reflected the deep distrust of the West among the Turkish public at large and that tensions with the Bush administration in the US and that the Nicolas Sarkozy-Angela Merkel discourse against Turkish membership in the EU were chiefly responsible for it.
Some readers did not find my arguments convincing. One of the responses to my column was as follows: “I do not at all want to defend the current French or German discourse on EU-Turkey relations. But the fact that there is nearly universal agreement among Turks that both the US and the EU are out there to ‘dismember Turkey' leads me to believe that a huge part of the problem is still the Turkish psyche. This is just another confirmation that the paranoia fed by so many [be they secular or religious minded Turks] on the Turkish political scene is alive and well, and to change this appears to me to be above all a task for the Turks themselves.”
I do admit that this objection was quite justified, and that I owe an account of the other side of the coin, that is, the psychological reasons that explain the distrust of the West among the Turks. In this context, it is necessary first to refer to the “love-hate” relationship between the West and Turkey, which began modernizing at the end of the 18th century in emulation of the European model. This love-hate relationship is surely not peculiar to Turkey but is relevant also to other countries in the periphery of the West, notably Russia and Iran, which have modernized on the Western model while being subjected to Western aggression and intervention. The love-hate relationship with the West basically means that the Turkish elites are caught between a feeling of admiration for the Western world due to its achievements and resentment toward its superiority, arrogance and bullying. It may also be argued that whenever the West, be it the US or the EU, treats Turkey well, the “love” side of the relationship prevails. “Hate” escalates when Turkey is treated unfairly or discriminated against.
In analyzing the “hate” side of the relationship with the West, an indispensable concept is the “Sèvres Syndrome,” which refers to the conviction (widespread among the Turkish elites, and not the least among the military) that Turkey is surrounded by enemies intent on dividing up the country, as aimed in the Treaty of Sèvres, which was imposed on the Ottoman government by the victorious Western powers at the end of World War I. The Treaty of Sèvres, which provided for the founding of Armenian and Kurdish states in Anatolia, was signed in 1920, nearly a century ago, and was in fact never put into effect, being rejected by the national liberation movement, whose success led to its replacement by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
The best scholarly treatment of the Sèvres Syndrome is the (forthcoming) article by Fatma Müge Göçek, of the University of Michigan, titled “Why is there still a ‘Sèvres Syndrome'?: An analysis of Turkey's uneasy association with the West.” The article discusses in detail the causes “behind the selective survival of the memory of this particular treaty through time, its transformation into a syndrome and the reasons for its persistence until today.”
Göçek concludes that the “Turkish republican elite in general and the Turkish military in particular initially generated the elements of the Sèvres Syndrome for purposes of nation-state formation and then reproduced it as a [national security] paradigm in order to sustain its political power. … The syndrome started to falter, however, in the post-Cold War era … when an alternate model based not on national security and the preservation of the state, but on the rights, well-being and prosperity of citizens” emerged. “The Sèvres Syndrome [then] fully articulated itself not as an anxiety disorder but a pathology; hence, the symptoms worsened as an alternate vision gained strength within the Turkish state and society.”
Göçek is also right in stating that “as long as the West remains a source of frustration and threat … evokes internalized inferiority and is not properly contextualized in history, the Sèvres Syndrome will persist.” That is why I believe tensions with the US administration during the Bush years, and with the EU since 2005, greatly help the perpetuators of the Sèvres Syndrome in Turkey, as witnessed by the survey results referred to above.
