ERDOGAN, THE ANTI-ATATURK
The National Interest
September 2013 – October 2013
by Aram Bakshian Jr.
THIS NOVEMBER 10, at precisely 9:05 a.m., for the seventy-fifth time
in the history of the Turkish Republic, the nation will grind to a
halt. In Istanbul, for sixty seconds sirens will drone, ferryboat
horns will blare in the Golden Horn and traffic will freeze.
Throughout the country, millions of ordinary Turks will stand still
and mute to mark the death anniversary of their nation’s founding
father. It is an impressive moment, and deservedly so. Mustafa Kemal,
known to history as Kemal Ataturk (“Father of the Turks”), was an
indomitable blend of soldier, diplomat, politician, intellectual and
nation builder. One of the twentieth century’s most remarkable leaders,
he was a man of iron will and incredible vision.
A war hero even as the Ottoman Empire he served crumbled around him,
Ataturk was instrumental in defeating an invading British army at
Gallipoli. At the end of World War I, when the victorious Allies
occupied Istanbul and began to partition Ottoman territory, he
took to the Anatolian heartland, forged a new citizen army, routed
Greek forces that had seized Smyrna (now Izmir) and much adjoining
Turkish territory, and then drove the Allied occupation forces out
of Istanbul. But that was only the beginning. As president of his
own newly minted, custom-designed Turkish Republic, with inspired
eloquence and brute force, he dragged his fellow countrymen,
many of them literally kicking and screaming, into the twentieth
century. The Turkish language was modernized and systematized. The
Latin alphabet replaced an archaic Arabic script. Massive industrial,
education and infrastructure initiatives were launched and a new
sense of Turkish identity-part authentic, part invented in rewritten
history textbooks-replaced the old Ottoman way of thinking. In
most respects, this was a great plus for the vast majority of poor
urban and rural Turks. Under the Ottoman Empire, even in the glory
days when it ruled large chunks of Europe, Asia and Africa, and was
mistress of the Mediterranean, most ordinary Turks were part of the
impoverished peasant masses. Commerce, finance and other professions
were monopolized by a small, educated elite, many-in some cases,
most-of them non-Muslim Greeks, Armenians and Jews.
The end of the empire changed all that. At times it was not a pretty
picture; transforming the truncated remains of the multiethnic Ottoman
Empire into a cohesive, racially rooted nation-state was achieved at
great human cost and more than a little tampering with historical
truth. While Ataturk had condemned the extermination of Armenians
during World War I by his Young Turk predecessors, calling it a
“shameful act,” he presided over a brutal but less horrific forced
mass transfer of populations in which Anatolian Greeks-who, like the
Armenians, had lived there for centuries before the arrival of the
first nomadic Turkic invaders-were driven from their homes. The same
fate, it is worth noting, awaited a smaller number of ethnic Turks
living in Greek territory.
The only substantial minority that remained in modern Turkey were
the Kurds, fellow Muslims but with their own language and customs,
who are still a source of considerable friction today. Even they were
subjected to a clumsy attempt at what might be called bureaucratic
assimilation. The republic invented a new name for them: until a
few years ago, they were officially classified as “mountain Turks,”
denied a legitimate identity of their own.
A charismatic speaker and popular hero, Ataturk stumped the republic,
defining a new sense of “Turkishness” and denouncing anything and
everything he considered divisive or reactionary-from fez and veil
to traditional Ottoman music and religious orders. Like Peter the
Great in Russia two centuries before, he was determined to overcome
centuries of backwardness and decline, by brute force if necessary-and
it often was. Also like Peter the Great, he had seen the greater world
outside his homeland, and he liked what he saw. Once firmly in power
in the mid-1920s, he would declare:
“~SI have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the
bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold
his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My
people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates
of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go.”~T
Only it didn’t. Today, many informed observers feel that Ataturk’s
achievement is at risk, threatened by a rising Islamist tide led by
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an unashamed-and historically
uninformed-admirer of an idealized version of the Ottoman-Islamic past
that exists mainly in his own imagination. It is both significant and
ironic that the mass anti-Erdogan protests that swept Turkey this
June were initially triggered by his arbitrary decision to destroy
Gezi Park, one of Istanbul’s few remaining green areas, to replace it
with a “replica” of Ottoman-era military barracks and a shopping mall.
Other plans included building an enormous new mosque in adjoining
Taksim Square, site of the Monument of the Republic.
Why this nostalgia for a romanticized, not to say imaginary,
Ottoman-Islamic past? Perhaps it begins with a deep sense of grievance
on the part of Turkish Islamists, shared by their brethren throughout
the Middle East-the belief that a golden age of Islamic dominance
was destroyed by the forces of Western Christianity and Western
technology. Whatever is driving this nostalgia for a romanticized past
of Islamic vibrancy and power, it has become a compelling force in
modern Turkish politics. The late Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard,
a leading political scientist of our time, called Turkey a “torn
country”-a nation belonging culturally to a particular civilization
but whose leaders wish to redefine it as belonging to another. Hence,
any effort to understand the dynamics of Turkish politics today must
begin by probing the rise to power and remarkable national stewardship
of Kemal Ataturk, as well as the leadership vacuum that ensued upon
his death.
HE WAS one of many bright, young Ottoman officers of his generation
who had been posted as military attaches in Europe before World War I.
These young men often came home dazzled by Western society and
technology, with a newfound contempt for traditional Ottoman culture
and religion and with an indiscriminate zeal for all things Western
and modern. At the dawn of the twentieth century, this often meant
embracing fashionably “enlightened” free thinking, anticlericalism,
and the rather naive belief that science and rational materialism
could solve all of society’s ills if only the right people (i.e.,
themselves) could take charge from their elders.
In 1908, they did, pressuring the reactionary Sultan Abdul Hamid II
to hold parliamentary elections and embrace constitutional government.
When he tried to renege a year later, Young Turk officers and their
troops deposed him, replacing him with Sultan Mehmed V, an elderly
nonentity who served as a ceremonial figurehead. But rather than
arresting the imperial decay, the Young Turks actually accelerated
it, suffering a string of humiliating defeats in the first Balkan
War, losing most of what was then European Turkey. The humiliation
only ended when the Christian victors-Serbia, Greece, Montenegro
and Bulgaria-turned on each other in the second Balkan War and the
Turks managed to reclaim some of their lost territory. Total disaster
followed after the Young Turks plunged their creaky old empire into
World War I on the side of the Central powers, proclaiming a jihad
against the ultimately victorious Allies.
Unlike Enver Pasha and the other members of the Young Turk junta,
Kemal Ataturk put no stock in jihads. While he would sometimes invoke
the name of Allah to rally the masses during the early days of the
republican struggle following World War I, his mission was modernizing
and Westernizing Turkey.
While a new class of privileged, Westernized Turks rose to the top of
republican society and replaced most of the old minority-dominated
commercial and professional elites, millions of poor city dwellers
and the vast majority of the rural peasantry remained poverty
stricken, uneducated and, for better or worse, true to their old
customs and Muslim faith in a quiet, low-key way. The shallow tide of
Western modernity swept over them but did not carry them with it. If
Ataturk-who played as hard as he worked and was a notoriously heavy
drinker-had not died early, he might have completed his modernizing
mission by sheer force of character. But his passing in 1938 at
the relatively young age of fifty-seven left a void no successor
could fill. His loyal wartime aide, Ismet Inonu-a brave soldier and
a staunch patriot, but a leader of limited vision-succeeded him,
but Ataturk’s initial reforms froze in place.
When he died on the morning of November 10, 1938, in his small, modest
bedroom in Istanbul’s vast old Dolmabahce Palace, all the clocks
in the building were stopped. They remain so to this day. Like the
static moment of mourning each year commemorating Ataturk’s death,
the stopped clocks in the Dolmabahce Palace serve as an unintentional
reminder of what that premature death meant to Turkey: the beginning
of a long era of suspended animation, of social and political inertia
bordering on stasis.
Even with the strongest of wills and best of intentions, Ataturk’s
successors would have had a hard time continuing his work. He had
died at the worst possible time. In 1938, the Western democracies
were still reeling from the Great Depression. To many politicians
and intellectuals, Communism and fascism-both with a heavy emphasis
on police-state tyranny and centrally managed economies-seemed to
be the wave of the future. Europe was also about to plunge into a
disastrous Second World War, and Turkey’s leaders would have their
hands full simply protecting the sovereignty and neutrality of their
impoverished, militarily vulnerable nation.
Ataturk’s whole life had been spent broadening his understanding and
seeking sensible new solutions. The Turkish future he envisioned
was one of expanded education, opportunity and prosperity for the
poor, uneducated Turkish masses with gradually evolving democratic
institutions as progress was made. While his rhetoric remained in
place, most of his vision died with him. Until free-market economic
reforms were ushered in by Turgut Ozal, who served as a genuinely
reformist prime minister and then president from 1983 to his suspicious
death in 1993, Turkey did remain a secular state-but it also remained
a 1930s-style corporate state based on crony capitalism, government
corruption, and a senior military and moneyed class that defended
its own special privileges at least as zealously as it protected
the secular state. When politicians-Islamist or otherwise-got in
the way, they were removed by force. One of them, Adnan Menderes, an
economic reformer who courted religious voters by promising to remove
restrictions on the traditional Arabic-language call to prayer and
to allow new Muslim schools and the building of new mosques, was not
only removed in a coup d’etat but also hanged by the military after
a hastily improvised trial.
The sad case of Menderes-a genuine reformer but also a rabble-rousing
populist who jailed opposition journalists and politicians and openly
appealed to voters on religious lines-starkly illustrates the fault
line in modern Turkish politics. On the one hand, all too often
the advocates of needed economic and social reform have also been
political demagogues willing to play the religion card and trample
on the rights of their political opponents. On the other hand, when
the republic has been “rescued” from such men by the military, and
the secular nature of the state has been preserved (along with the
special privileges of the “rescuers”), desperately needed economic
and social reforms have been either tabled or rescinded.
This pattern is far from unique to Turkey. The same scenario has played
out repeatedly in Muslim countries as different as Egypt, Pakistan and
Bangladesh. What makes it particularly tragic in the case of Turkey
is that-unlike new postcolonial nations with artificial borders and
no strong patriotic tradition to draw on-it possesses most of the
raw materials for a healthy, modern civil society. Indeed, Turks
have been trying to “modernize” since at least the last quarter of
the eighteenth century.
Admittedly, the results have been mixed at best. Sultan Selim III,
who reigned from 1789 to 1807, attempted to revive the empire and
modernize the obsolete Ottoman military system only to be overthrown
by the traditional Janissary corps and murdered shortly afterward.
Sultan Mahmud II, who reigned from 1808 to 1839, managed to establish
a “new model” army of sorts, abolish the Janissaries and modernize
the civil service. But the empire had already begun to disintegrate,
with Greece gaining full independence and Egypt remaining nominally
Ottoman but autonomously ruled by its own hereditary dynasty of
Khedives. The Western-oriented technocrats of the “Tanzimat” reform
era of the mid-nineteenth century and the later Young Turk movement
that overthrew the reactionary Sultan Abdul Hamid II had both tried to
inject new life into the Ottoman Empire to little or no avail; indeed,
it was Young Turk leader Enver Pasha’s insistence on entering World
War I on the side of the Central powers that sealed the empire’s fate.
Only with the death of the empire, which left a smaller but more
cohesive core Turkish nation, was Ataturk able to succeed where
the best and brightest of Ottoman soldiers, sultans and statesmen
had failed. And yet a strong residue of sentiment remained in the
country that resisted any impulse toward Westernization and longed
for a return to that golden age of Islam that lit up the world before
the West’s inexorable rise.
A SUPERFICIAL glimpse at the medieval world would seem to bear
out this wistful view of history. As the doyen of Near and Middle
Eastern historians Bernard Lewis has pointed out, “In the course of
the seventh century, Muslim armies advancing from Arabia conquered
Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, all until then part of
Christendom, and most of the new recruits to Islam, west of Iran and
Arabia, were indeed converts from Christianity.” Further gains would
be made in Spain, much of which was overrun by Muslim North African
Arabs and more recently converted Berber tribesmen. Eventually other
non-Arab converts to Islam, most notably primitive but tough Tartar
and Turkic nomad warriors, would carve out Muslim empires in large
parts of Eastern Europe, Russia, the Levant, India and the Balkans.
More important than this military success was the fact that, in the
early years of the Muslim surge, cities like Baghdad, Damascus,
Alexandria and, to a lesser extent, Cordoba were centers of a
cultural flowering that preceded and-by preserving, recovering
and building on classical knowledge lost in most of the surviving
Christian West-helped make possible the brilliant achievements of
the European Renaissance. This, in turn, led to the development of
the modern Western civilization that would, in a few centuries,
leave the Islamic world behind in the dust. Was the rise of the
Christian West responsible for the decline of the Muslim East? Or was
the relatively short period during which Muslim-conquered cities in
the formerly Christian world of antiquity became centers of progress
and learning a mere blip on the screen, a temporary, albeit benign,
“hijacking” of more advanced, more populous societies by a primitive,
desert-sprung society of warrior-conquerors that overran them?
Surely it is no coincidence that nearly all of the cultural blossoming
under early Islamic rule occurred in places far from Mecca and Medina
(the cradles of Islam), and with centuries of history rooted in the
Greco-Roman and early Christian past. Other centers of high Islamic
culture like Persia and Mughal India were also homes to ancient
civilizations long predating Islam. Thus, the intellectual, spiritual
and aesthetic roots of the short-lived golden age of Islamic culture
were almost entirely pre-Islamic in their origins and nature. Even
the system of “Arabic” numerals that revolutionized mathematics was
not really Arabic at all; it was borrowed from India by Arab traders.
The decline of Islam’s golden age occurred as Islam tightened its
grip on the cultures it had overrun and, in the case of Europe,
as a rapidly progressing Christendom began to push back the Islamic
advance. The more pervasive Islam became in the territories it had
conquered, the more those territories fell behind, perhaps because
of the Islamists’ belief that their religion contains a complete,
hermetically-and prophetically-sealed formula for the running of every
aspect of human society. Such a mind-set has a built-in hostility to
the spirit of inquiry and the desire to subject prescribed notions
of faith and fate to the tests of intellectual rigor. Ask no new
questions and you will discover no new answers.
The decline of the once-mighty Ottoman Empire mirrored the earlier
decline in the rest of the Islamic world, culturally, militarily,
economically and intellectually. “The Ottoman experience,” writes
Turkish historian M. Sukru Hanioglu in his Brief History of the
Late Ottoman Empire, “provides a superb opportunity to examine the
impact of modernity in a non-European setting.” Leaders like Ataturk
who lived through the imperial collapse attempted to build a modern
Turkish alternative. It was a daunting task, and even its partial
success was a remarkable achievement, remaining so to this day.
AT THE height of the Cold War, it used to be said that Vienna, which
had repulsed a Turkish attack at the height of Ottoman power, was
two different cities. Approached from the Communist-dominated East,
Vienna was a bustling, modern metropolis compared to anything Hungary,
Poland or Czechoslovakia had to offer. But approached from the West,
Vienna seemed more like a charming but antiquated relic than a living
center of modern commerce and culture. Earlier this year, while
reviewing Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s novel Silent House,
it occurred to me that the same is true, though in a very different
way, of contemporary Turkey:
“~SStraddling the great divide between Europe and Asia, Christendom
and Islam, Turkey wears two faces. Viewed from the East, it looks
like a prosperous pillar of stability and civic order, especially
when compared to any of its Muslim neighbors. Viewed from Western
Europe, however, it presents a different picture, that of a country
dangerously divided: on the one hand, a pampered and often corrupt
pseudo-Western economic and social elite relying on the Turkish
military to protect both its privileges and its secular values; on the
other hand, a growingly militant and sometimes violent mass movement
of Islamists-many of them poor urban immigrants from the backward,
neglected countryside-determined to purge their country of alien
“impurity” and turn it into a theocracy by whatever means necessary.”~T
For ten years now the latter of these two flawed factions has had the
upper hand, thanks mainly to one man-the determined, driven visionary,
Erdogan, who wants to remake Turkey in his own image and his own
imagination. A powerful orator and skilled political organizer with
a strong autocratic streak, boundless energy and an obsessive sense
of his (self-perceived) historic mission, Erdogan was described by
one observer I spoke with in Istanbul this May as
“~Sa strange joke played on Turkey by history. If Kemal Ataturk had
had an evil twin, it would have been someone exactly like Mr. Erdogan.
Most of his views are mirror opposites of Ataturk’s, but he is the
first overwhelming, larger-than-life figure in Turkish public life
since the Ghazi [Ataturk] himself.”~T
Like Ataturk, whose father was a minor government official, Erdogan
rose from obscure origins through intelligence, drive and unbounded
ambition. But there the similarity ends. Ataturk was, at most, an
agnostic who felt that Islam, as practiced in the Ottoman Empire,
was an enemy of progress; Erdogan is a devout Muslim who often waxes
nostalgic about the good old imperial days. But that was after his
party-the Justice and Development Party (AKP)-came to power in 2002
with a 34 percent plurality in the national parliamentary elections.
On his way to the premiership, Erdogan had run as a democratic
reformer, promising to fight entrenched corruption, open up the economy
to competition and growth, and bring basic services such as improved
schools and sanitation to the poorer regions of the country, just as
he had done to Istanbul’s poorer neighborhoods as a reforming mayor.
Erdogan kept many of his promises. Government graft and cronyism
still exist, but the swag is no longer the privileged preserve of a
small, old elite. Corruption has not been eliminated, but it has been
democratized. And Erdogan has devoted billions of lira to development
projects, especially in poor, rural areas where they are most needed.
As a self-made business millionaire himself, he also understood-and
delivered on-economic and regulatory reforms following the
earlier example of Turgut Ozal, mentioned above. Under Erdogan’s
leadership-although not entirely due to it-in less than a decade
the Turkish economy became the eighteenth largest in the world and
per capita income nearly tripled, which helps to explain the AKP’s
strong showings in the 2007 and 2011 elections (it received nearly 50
percent of the vote in the latter). It can truly be said that, as prime
minister, Erdogan delivered on much of his public agenda. The problem
is with his private agenda. According to Der Spiegel he once said,
“Democracy is like a train. We shall get out when we arrive at the
station we want.”
After his party’s record victory in the 2011 elections, Erdogan seems
to have decided he was approaching his station. Wall Street Journal
correspondent Joe Parkinson summed it up rather neatly:
“~SSince [the 2011 elections], the prime minister has sought to
impose further restrictions on alcohol consumption and abortion and
repeatedly called for all women to have at least three children to
grow Turkey’s population. He has held forth on what citizens should
eat at the family dinner table, and intervened to censor sex scenes
in prime-time television series. His government has sought to muzzle
the press; Turkey now jails more journalists than Iran or China.”~T
He has also denounced raki, an anise-based liquor similar to the Greek
ouzo-Turkey’s alcoholic beverage of choice for centuries-declaring
ayran, a drink made from diluted yogurt, the new national beverage. He
has even declared war on white bread, his personal preference being
the brown variety. On the brighter side, unlike the unhinged Latin
American dictator in Woody Allen’s comedy classic Bananas, he has
yet to order everyone to wear their underpants over rather than under
their trousers.
More significantly, Erdogan has pushed for constitutional changes that
would reduce parliamentary powers-and those of the prime minister-while
transforming the office of the president from a largely ceremonial post
to an “imperial” presidency his friends liken to that of Charles de
Gaulle and his opponents liken to that of Vladimir Putin. If he can
get the desired changes, he intends to run for the presidency and,
if elected, would be eligible to run again for a second five-year
term, giving him ten years as an elected autocrat. As Ilter Turan,
a political scientist at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, told the New
York Times, Erdogan “has a highly majoritarian understanding of
democracy. He believes that with 51 percent of the vote he can rule
in an unrestrained fashion. He doesn’t want checks and balances.”
ALL OF these factors help to explain how what began as the protest
of a few environmentalists to save a small wooded park in Istanbul
metastasized in hours into mass protests involving hundreds of
thousands-possibly millions-of Turkish citizens in major cities
across the country. In Washington before my recent trip to Turkey,
and in Istanbul days before the demonstrations began and were brutally
suppressed, I talked with Gareth Jenkins, a British journalist who has
resided in Istanbul since 1989. Jenkins is an expert on the Erdogan
government’s mass arrests and show trials of civilian and military
critics of its regime, as well as its mounting efforts to intimidate
journalists by arresting and trying reporters and applying economic
pressure-fines, litigation and the threat of the same-to newspaper
and broadcast owners.
Some of the allegations of planted evidence and rigged trials would be
funny were it not for the human price paid by the innocent victims. In
one case, a retired general returned to his home to find it had been
ransacked and to learn he was about to be charged with conspiring to
overthrow the state. He knew he was innocent, but he was told that
investigators had found incriminating documents in his home that named
him as a plotter. It turned out that the “evidence”-which must have
been planted and was probably concocted-had nothing to do with him,
but contained the similar name of another retired general who was
probably innocent as well: two cheers for the gang that couldn’t frame
straight. When I asked Jenkins why Erdogan’s power plays seemed to
be growing more and more blatant, he mentioned that in November 2011
the prime minister underwent emergency surgery for the removal of a
malignant growth in his intestines, that he had a second operation in
February 2012, and that he is now heavily medicated and subject to
frequent health checks-with a distinct possibility that his cancer
will return. Heavy medication could explain some of Erdogan’s odder
statements in recent weeks, such as his declaration that “there is now
a menace which is called Twitter. . . . To me, social media is the
worst menace to society” and that “the death of 17 people happened”
during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York. (The latter
was a totally false claim; there were no fatalities at all.) He also
repeatedly has claimed that anti-Erdogan demonstrators desecrated an
Istanbul mosque by smoking and drinking beer in it, even after the
imam of the mosque insisted that no such thing happened and that
the demonstrators had been invited to take shelter in the mosque,
suffering from police-inflicted injuries and tear-gas inhalation.
Whatever Erdogan’s physical life expectancy may be, the mass
demonstrations made it clear that time is not on his side. The
prodemocracy demonstrators, overwhelmingly nonviolent and well
behaved, were also overwhelmingly young, the vanguard of a rising
generation of Turks who care about personal freedom and will not be
bullied into silence. They represent a new political demographic that
can’t be pinned down as strictly right wing or left wing, observant
Muslim or secular. And they are a generation of young people with
access to electronic communications no tyranny can fully block, with
a strong awareness of their rights and of those who would deny them
those rights.
But you can’t beat something with nothing. The absence of strong,
credible opposition leaders has left the political stage to the
highly skilled Erdogan, who sometimes reminds this observer of a
cross between Huey Long, Margaret Thatcher and Juan Peron. In the
short term, growing doubts and divisions among his parliamentary
followers may put more of a brake on his aspirations than any number of
peaceful demonstrators. But, as Jenkins points out, even if most of the
protesters represent a specific section of society, the demonstrations
that swept the country “are arguably Turkey’s first ever spontaneous,
grassroots political movement . . . the participants [are] feeling
empowered, determined but also bewildered by what is happening. They
have never been here before. And neither has Turkey.”
One thing is certain. Except for the ones in the Dolmabahce Palace,
the clocks in Turkey have started ticking again.
Aram Bakshian Jr. is a contributing editor at The National Interest.
He served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan and writes
frequently on politics, history and the humanities.