On the other hand, if Turkey is to turn more authoritarian and nationalistic, the EU path will be blocked and relations with the United States will deteriorate. In this second scenario, authoritarian states such as Russia, Iran, Syria and China will emerge as Turkey's closest partners. It is no coincidence that this second path, sometimes called the “Eurasian alternative,” stands in sharp contrast to a pro-Western Turkey.Although this correlation between domestic dynamics and foreign policy appears simple and predictable, the foreign policy orientation of Turkish domestic actors has become increasingly complicated and counterintuitive. Until 10 years ago -- during the Cold War and the 1990s -- the Turkish military and the Kemalist political elite were firm believers in the pro-Europe, pro-American and pro-Western camp. They had no illusions about a “Eurasianist” alternative to Atatürk's dream of a Westernized and modernized Turkey. It was the Marxist dissidents and the Islamists that challenged this pro-Western vision. The socialist Turkish left romanticized communist Russia while Turkish Islamists nurtured fantasies of a Muslim union against the Judeo-Christian West. But something strange began to happen with the arrival of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power. This reformed and previously Islamic party discovered the connections between democratization and foreign policy.
Abdullah Gül and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan represented the young and more pragmatic wing of Turkish political Islam in the 1990s. They learned serious lessons from the 1997 soft coup which ousted former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan. When the Welfare Party (RP) was closed and Erbakan banned from politics, Gül and Erdoğan began their journey toward Turkey's political center. They eschewed any reference to Islam in their newly formed political party and opted for a pro-European Union platform. The economic crisis of 2001 and the bankruptcy of the old political elite greatly helped the AKP's rise to power in 2002.
Once the AKP came to power, Turkey's domestic and foreign policy dynamics turned upside down. This moderately Islamic party became the strongest advocate of EU reforms. More pro-EU legal reforms passed Parliament between 2003 and 2005 than under any government in Turkish history. This formerly Islamist party was now the strongest advocate of Turkey's EU membership. Yet, the Kemalist opposition was skeptical. What had caused this sudden change of heart? Was it tactical? They came to the conclusion that the AKP was engaged in taqiyya, “dissimulation of real intentions.” According to this logic, the Islamists were pushing for EU reforms in order to weaken the role of the Turkish military. After all, the secularist military was the main bulwark against political Islam. Once it was tamed, there would be no obstacle for the AKP's hidden agenda of Islamization.
It is not surprising that such an interpretation of the AKP's intentions changed the way the Kemalist elite approached the EU. The military already had concerns because of the EU's human and minority rights agenda vis-à-vis the Kurdish problem. Now, with the additional complication of political Islam in the mix, there was no longer any willingness in the Kemalist camp to see Turkey move closer to the EU, a move that would end up Islamizing Turkey while simultaneously granting minority rights to separatist Kurds. This was the end of the love affair between Kemalism and Europe. The tables had turned. The Kemalist elite was now increasingly anti-Europe while former Islamists were in favor of pro-EU reforms. The fact that Washington, under the Bush administration, praised the AKP as a model for the Islamic world and spoke of Turkey as a “moderately Islamic” country exacerbated the Kemalist sense of frustration with the West. It is under such circumstances that Kemalism came to be associated with the “Eurasian” alternative to Turkey's pro-EU and pro-US orientation.
Yet even this complex turn of events fails to accurately capture what is going on in Turkey today. The Cyprus debacle, the EU's reluctance to embrace Turkey and the AKP's rising populist nationalism since 2006 drastically changed the picture that dominated Turkish politics between 2003 and 2005. I will explore these new dynamics in my column next week.
