I was not surprised to see Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan appoint Professor Davutoğlu as the next foreign minister, but I was surprised to see Davutoğlu accept this appointment. He was the man behind the scenes, with no institutional responsibilities, and, thus, he was able to spare all his time for strategy making. Now he has all kinds of paperwork to sign, foreign mission buildings to equip, thousands of hands to shake and lots of media criticism to cope with. He was the brain, and now he has accepted the responsibility of being the brain and the body at the same time. Strategy making? He has to do that on the eighth day of the week. What comes next is pure speculation. If I am wrong, I will be quite happy.
Professor Davutoğlu was appointed foreign minister not because he was having difficulty controlling foreign policy from behind the scenes during the tenure of Ali Babacan, but because the prime minister badly needed Babacan in the economy's driver's seat. The vacant seat created by Babacan's appointment was to be filled by somebody else, and the prime minister did not have the luxury of trying to see whether another person would be able to work with Davutoğlu's team or not. Davutoğlu comes from an established Muslim scientific tradition. In this tradition the separation of scientists and state posts is as crucial as the separation of religion and state. I am sure that Davutoğlu is missing his small and humble university room and the knowledge-hungry eyes of his students. I personally am feeling the lack of a book penned by Professor Davutoğlu that would complement his seminal book, "Strategic Depth." Professor Davutoğlu, in my mind, should have stayed the subject of foreign policy studies. Now he is going to be the object.
This doesn't mean that I have a single doubt in my mind about Professor Davutoğlu's ability to become an effective foreign minister. For the last five years he has already negated the generally held conception that academics cannot perform well in actual conditions where experience rules over pure knowledge. But the fact that he can be the best foreign minister Turkey can have does not mean that he had to leave the academic position where he was already the best. To me, a university professor as productive as Davutoğlu is no less important than a foreign minister. Ten years from now, nobody will remember the name of the foreign minister of Turkey. The name of Davutoğlu will forever live in his intellectual production.
Foreign Minister Davutoğlu must have thought about this issue a lot. The first thing he did as foreign minister was not to give a foreign minister's speech; it was a university lecture. During the handover ceremony he briefed the content of an imaginary book, which will certainly be written in the future and will probably be titled "Turkish Foreign Policy under Professor Ahmet Davutoğlu." What he suggested to his group in the Foreign Ministry was not what a minister would do. He apparently positioned the ambassadors, consuls, secretaries and new, young diplomats like university students listening to the rector of the university on the first day of school: "The Foreign Ministry community is not a community that runs to crisis situations like firemen. It is a community that provides for the continuity of the state. In that sense, its work time is not limited by hours. This is a community that works seven days a week and 24 hours a day."
In fact, "seven days a week and 24 hours a day" was not enough for Davutoğlu. He explained how he and his predecessor, Babacan, were able to find an eighth day in the week to finish a mission.
He will need that eighth day to continue with his strategy-making endeavors. I wish him success in his new post.
Still, when we meet I will call Davutoğlu "hocam" (master/professor), not "Sayın Bakanım" (Mr. Minister).
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