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Improbable Embrace
Melik Kaylan, 10.23.09, 12:01 AM ET
Turkey and Armenia are about to restore diplomatic relations. At the
very least, they signed a landmark agreement to do so on Oct. 10 in
Switzerland–after some tense last-minute wrangling in a Zurich hotel
room with Hillary Clinton mediating. An astonishing development. A
marvel to see in one’s lifetime, not unlike the fall of the Soviet
Union. Two ancient peoples in eternal enmity. Sounds utterly
implausible. Ancient hatreds never go away.
That, at any rate, is the narrative–an arguably fraudulent one–that
we’ve been fed for several generations. In fact, depending on how you
calculate it, Turks and Armenians lived peaceably together for almost
600 years–or almost 900 years–until the 20th century. The
calculation depends on whether you date their time together from the
Seljuks or the later Ottomans–and where you end the timeline. Either
way, it was an epoch or two, possibly an unprecedented achievement.
Then, according to the prevailing interpretation, the Turks turned
suddenly on their cheek-by-jowl neighbors, unprovoked, and wished to
obliterate them from the Earth entirely as a people. It’s possible.
Strange things have happened in the annals of genocide, though not
after that long a duration of mutual tolerance. If so, why then? What
changed?
Here you enter into difficult terrain. Because you can easily slip
into an alternate viewpoint, one that goes something like this: Turks
and Armenians lived in peace until Czarist Russia began to move
southward down the Caucasus, purging Muslims downward into Turkish
territory–throughout the 19th century. All those fiery Daghestanis,
Chechens, Abkhaz, Kurds. Many ended up in Ottoman lands, some say half
a million. At one point, Russia actually occupied a whole swath of
Turkey, including the provincial capital of Kars, for several decades
until World War I ended. The Russians did their conquering explicitly
as a Christian Crusade, claiming the complicity of all Eastern
Christians (including Armenians) in that part of Turkey, an area
seething with displaced Caucasus Muslims and Muslim Kurds. In short,
if you are curious about a proximate cause for catastrophic bloodshed,
look no further than Russkie provocation–a plausible scenario
considering their conduct right up to the present in Georgia–of
stirring one ethnicity against another for imperial ends.
Discretion being the better part of valor, let us leave the historical
dispute delicately hanging there for professional historians to sort
out. The present is complicated enough. What happens if Turkey and
Armenia bury the hatchet? Azerbaijan gets upset, for sure, and Azeris
are close kin to the Turks. Why does that matter to America and the
West? The Armenians carved out a slice of Azerbaijan in a secessionist
war with Russian help during the post-Soviet chaos in the Caucasus.
Azeris want it back. Armenians wish to keep it. Azeris don’t want
Turkey to make peace with Armenia. Azerbaijan is a critical source of
non-Middle Eastern oil to the West via pipeline through Turkey. Azeri
oil will help liberate Europe from Moscow’s oil. No wonder foreign
minister Sergei Lavrov attended the signing ceremony in Switzerland:
Russia would benefit from driving a wedge between Turkey and
Azerbaijan. The Azeris are already threatening to re-route their oil
through Russia. So why is Turkey ready to alienate Azerbaijan?
As many have observed, Turkey is pushing a neo-Ottoman strategic
vision under Prime Minister Erdogan and his busybody foreign minister
Ahmet Davutoglu. Until their collapse in the 20th century, the
Ottomans pursued a centuries-long game of diplomatic promiscuity with
other world powers, allowing Venetians and Genoese trading rights
early on, giving Sephardic Jews a new home after their expulsion from
Spain, letting the British help them against the Czars and against
Napoleon, inviting the Russians and Hapsburgs to compete over
privileges in Ottoman lands.
As the Ottomans declined militarily they used the country’s strategic
position diplomatically to stay afloat. Under the more insular
nationalist republic of Ataturk, Turkey allied exclusively with NATO
and stayed out of regional engagement. Now Ankara is making friends
with all its neighbors. Suddenly, the minefields along the Syrian
border are being lifted and Syrians may enter Turkey with minimal red
tape. Georgians have similar status. Baghdad and Ankara have just
signed a slew of deals involving water, oil and trade. Greece and
Turkey are friendlier than they’ve been in, say, 200 years with Greece
actually backing Turkey’s candidacy to the E.U. Natural gas comes in
from Russia while Turkish construction companies are doing more than
anyone to build infrastructure across the Russian Federation. In
short, a neo-Ottoman approach means that Ankara is allowing all the
neighbor countries to gain so much benefit from Turkey’s
evenhandedness that all are invested in keeping the country stable and
prosperous.
There are side benefits too. A Syria dependent on Turkey may become
less dependent on Iran economically. Ankara’s deals with Baghdad show
Iraq’s Kurds that hostility to Turkey will only leave them out of the
loop economically. In the past, almost all neighboring capitals had a
hand in aiding the Kurdish insurrection within Turkey–Moscow, Athens,
Damascus, Baghdad and all the Iron Curtain belt nearby played that
game. These days only the E.U. and the U.S. are pushing the issue of
Kurdish rights. Prime Minister Erdogan calculates that as Turkey gains
increasing leverage through befriending one and all indiscriminately
while shifting an inch this way or that (such as publicly snubbing
Israel), even the U.S. and E.U. will have to ease pressures or risk
pushing Ankara further into the arms of rivals. The Erdogan government
may calculate that Azerbaijan, too, will come around and realize that
it will only lose from a rift with the Turks as the Azeris can, in
reaction to the Armenia demarche, only befriend the Russian bear–and
only for a while before it swallows them whole.
Meantime, Ankara is going about eradicating the leverage of outside
powers over Turkey over such matters as ethnic rights. The Kurds now
have broadcasts in Kurdish. Armenia may finally have a partner other
than Russia to trade with–that’s a lot of incentive. It’s a lot of
incentive for the U.S. to climb on board too. Turkish-Armenian amity
in the region will soon de-fang the various genocide bills so beloved
of the Armenian diaspora.
All this comes under the rubric of "neo-Ottoman" for another reason.
The Ottomans held Islam’s Caliphate for five centuries, and it was
under Islamic laws that they extended rights to religious minorities
while ostensibly treating all Muslims as equals with no preference to
ethnicity. Erdogan’s slide toward Islamist inclusiveness ironically
stirs a beneficent echo in the hearts of Armenians in the region. They
have flourished relatively unhindered in the Middle East under
countries hostile to the West, such as Syria and Iran. They’ve had no
problem living under anti-Western regimes such as the Soviet Union.
Their historical sense of identity is anchored in ambivalence toward
the West going way back to their doomed alliance with the Persians
against Roman power. Throughout the Middle Ages they identified with
Eastern Christianity against the Vatican. The Armenian patriarch
showed no friendship toward proselytizing Protestant missionaries in
the Ottoman era. In short, Armenians of the region feel no discomfort
with Mid-eastern traditions or Islamization, and certainly not
Erdogan’s apparently moderate version of it.
One can only dream and hope for the day when Armenians, like Greeks do
now, interact with Turkey in large numbers and perhaps even settle
back into their interrupted history there. But that it happens under
an Islamizing umbrella–and there’s the rub. For it’s not at all clear
that once you drift in that direction, there can be any way back–that
is, short of a Kemalist or, much worse, a Soviet-style enforced
secularism. Erdogan’s strategy of giving all comers a stake in the
stability of Turkey also anchors them in Turkey’s renewed Islamist
pull. Israel is unlikely to benefit from this, except perhaps in the
leverage it gives Turkey to negotiate for Israel with Islamic
countries. The Europeans will soon lose all purchase on Turkey’s
cultural and political center of gravity as the Turks learn that money
from non-Western allies outdoes any expected benefits from the E.U.
Erdogan’s policies are neo-Ottoman in this way too: in decline,
Ottoman state policy, the Sultan or the Sublime Porte in Western
parlance, was open to the influence of the highest bidder outside or
inside the country. Everyone may benefit in the short term, especially
the Turks with their new-found diplomatic clout. But in the long term,
that kind of polity cannot be transparent. It can be enlightened in
all sorts of ways except a fully Westernized one. Erdogan’s government
is already swallowing up independent news media a la Putin. Backroom
deals fill his party’s coffers and reward party loyalists at all
levels of the economy. This kind of thing went on aplenty under the
secularists too, but you can manifestly turn back from secularism,
whereas Islamism looks like a one-way street and derives larger
financial benefits from Saudi and Gulf investment. As money flows
in–the IMF ranked Turkey as the world?s 17th-largest economy last
year–the Turks can easily leave off struggling for their own
freedoms.
Republican Turkey has offered the single example, thus far, of a
Muslim country living under Western democratic laws, however clunkily.
But Islamic nostalgia is a powerful and insidious force. What people
forget is that, from the 1400s onward, Turkey was as much based in
Europe as in Asia. The Turks do not harbor a fundamentally eastern
identity as many in the West mistakenly believe. The U.S. and E.U. can
still keep the Turks in their camp. But first they must want to do so.
And finally, they must start bidding higher.
Melik Kaylan, a writer based in New York, writes a weekly column for
Forbes. His story "Georgia In The Time of Misha" is featured in The
Best American Travel Writing 2008.