According to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, “There is no shift in Turkey’s foreign policy.” Or at least that is what he told a luncheon gathering during his recent visit to Saudi Arabia. “Our efforts to boost cooperation with Syria are no less important than our efforts to boost cooperation with Bulgaria. We will side with Iraq in its difficult times as we did for Georgia. Our commercial activities with Jordan and Libya are as important as those with Russia. We attach as much importance to cooperation with Saudi Arabia as we do our bid to join the EU. No one should invent different meanings for all these,” he said.Let’s try his remarks the other way round. Would a Brussels think-tank audience have welcomed as reassuring Mr. Erdoğan’s promise that that he placed no greater importance on Turkey become a fully fledged member of the European Union (sharing sovereignty with 27 other nations to decide the big issues of defense, environment and trade) than he did with ensuring visa free travel to Saudi Arabia? The argument that one society makes it illegal for women to drive a car and in France the authorities are contemplating a ban on a full-face covering burqa doesn’t quite cut the mustard.
Part of the isolationist pressures Mr. Erdoğan faces are those faced by leaders elsewhere. Economic recession leads to demands to circle the wagons. Turkey now has an unemployment rate of some 12-13 percent and faces the real possibility that a return to growth will not be reflected in a growth in jobs. Not just striking, but hunger striking ex-workers of a former state-owned enterprise in Ankara has brought this point home. It is not the lackluster success of EU negotiations that concerns Mr. Erdoğan’s government but the lackluster performance of the EU economy which has affected Turkish exports. The prime minister’s flattering remarks to the Saudis are part of an attempt to woo investment and create opportunity. Success is far from assured.
All this comes on top of Turkey’s well-reported difficulties of sustaining the momentum of its EU application in the face of resistance from quarters within Europe itself. Though the Spanish presidency has already tried to create a more positive mood, this is not yet something which Mr. Erdoğan can take to his electorate. What is popular in the domestic arena -- being tough on Israel and holding back diplomatic relations with Armenia? Yet being tough here undermines the confidence of the foreign public in the sincerity of Turkey’s Obama-style commitment to positive engagement and sheer neighborliness.
Israel is a special example. Turkey maintains that its policy is not motivated by anything so vulgar as solidarity with the Arab street let alone anti-Jewish sentiment. Instead it expresses moral outrage at the Israeli government’s behavior over Gaza. Ankara’s outspokenness is predicated on its belief that Israel depends on Turkish good will and will suffer a super-sized helping of tough love. Yet Turkey does benefit from the relationship in as much as it can demonstrate to world opinion its own sophistication and demonstrate that a Muslim majority nation can maintain a healthy relationship with a Jewish state. So it was lucky that the hack-handed method of Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon’s reprimand of the Turkish ambassador detracted from the substance of his complaint. This concerned an episode of a popular Turkish television series that was overtly racist and which would not have been tolerated by most European broadcasting authorities.
So while Turkey was able to assert its dignity, it may not have come out of its latest round with Israel as unscathed as it believes. The same may even be true of its efforts to open not so much a Pandora’s Box but its Pandora border with Armenia. This initiative, valuable in its own right, was also designed to relegate to the back burner the congressional initiatives in America to recognize 1915 as a genocide. If Congress refuses to be distracted, a crisis might be in the offing.
