When Nixon made his historic visit to China in 1972 at the height of the Cold War, Kissinger, who was behind the policy of opening up to China, went with him to meet Chinese President Mao Zedong. In the reception, Kissinger got a conversation going about the French Revolution and the great transformation of Europe and the rest of the world. At one point, he asked Mao what he thought about the French Revolution and its impact on history, inquiring politely when the Chinese would have their own French Revolution. Mao looked at Kissinger and said: “The French Revolution? It is too early to tell.”For the Chinese, who belong to a 5,000-year history of culture and civilization, the French Revolution is too recent to claim historic proportions. One needs a much broader and longer view of history to see how the march of history moves. Davutoğlu is one of those people who take the longer view of history. He does not force history’s hand. But he knows that history is made by human beings and by their political and moral choices.
One fashionable way of analyzing Turkish foreign policy these days is to attack its main architect, Minister Davutoğlu. And this comes in the form of amateurish political psychology. Davutoğlu’s personality is analyzed as over-confident, idealistic, overambitious, stubborn and so on. These personal traits are presented as a way to allegedly unveil the failures of Turkish foreign policy under his watch. So much for serious political analysis!
Personalizing Turkish foreign policy through psychological analyses of Davutoğlu (or anyone else for that matter) reduces everything to the emotions and choices of one man and ignores the deeper changes in Turkish society which Davutoğlu’s intellectual vision (and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s political leadership, one must add) reflects and leads. Davutoğlu does not shy away from acknowledging his debt to the history and society to which he belongs. As a matter of fact, his frame of reference for “Turkey’s Place in the World,” the subtitle of his book “Strategic Depth,” is not to himself as a person or even to his generation but to Turkey’s deep history and geography and what the two entail for a modern republic like Turkey.
Davutoğlu is not ashamed of the history, culture and geography to which he belongs. Nor is most of the “new Turkey.” The problem is that the old guards are still at a culture war with the two invariables of their identity: history and geography, and they are giving a bitter fight to revert back to the “old Turkey.” But that Turkey is no more. The vast majority of Turks no longer see their history and geography as a curse or a burden. To the contrary, they see them as assets that few nations in the region have. As a first-rate thinker who knows how to operate in the halls of power, Davutoğlu understands this. So do President Abdullah Gül, Prime Minister Erdoğan and others. But the catch is that this is not the personal dream of a few individuals but a reflection of the much larger and deeper realities of the “new Turkey.”
Those who personalize Turkish foreign policy through Davutoğlu also fall short of appreciating the tectonic changes taking place in the international political system and its impact on Turkey. The world can no longer be ruled and regulated from a single center, and new players will rise up to new challenges with their own ideas, values and commitments, not with orders from others.
“Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.” Davutoğlu’s internal rivals and external detractors repeat this phrase to themselves these days. They must have discovered a magical way of measuring success. Kudos to them if they have! But if they’re measuring Davutoğlu’s success or failure according to the rules of the “old Turkey”/“old world,” we have a serious problem of delusion here. What they measure as failure is probably a thousand times better than inaction and inaptitude, which have characterized our policies for so long.
Davutoğlu could have run Turkey’s foreign policy like “normal,” i.e., as if we still lived during the Cold War; as if Turkey was a small, weak and impoverished country; as if Turkey never wanted to make peace with its history and geography; as if Turkey was ashamed of being its true self. But he did not. Instead, he raised the stakes, took the lead, plunged into the world of optimistic uncertainties, altruism and idealism, and gave a sense of confidence and pride to everyone. But none of this would have been possible without the objective realities of the new Turkey on the ground. That’s where the subjectivist, personalizing and patronizing analyses of Turkish foreign policy come to an end.
Those who wish Davutoğlu’s vision to fail want not just him but the new Turkey to fail. But that’s only wishful thinking. My proof? Take a longer view of history and you’ll see.
