Today’s Zaman, Turkey
Aug 5 2012
Collapse of ‘iron curtain’ in Middle East
by Murat Sofuoðlu*
As the Ottoman Empire headed towards a sealed fate, a new political
force inspired by the Young Turks’ “Grand Coalition” emerged: the
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).
First the members of this committee wanted to topple the autocratic
government of Abdülhamit II. They eventually did so and came to power
after the 1908 revolution. After they began establishing their own
government, they wanted no credible opposition like their great
political adversary, Abdülhamit II. The question is: What did they
want?
They were expressly against the autocracy and oppression symbolized by
Abdülhamit’s rule. They wanted liberty, equality and justice — ideas
coined by the French Revolution of 1789, which they admired. As time
went by, they led a style of government that for outsiders did not
appear to be much different than that of their autocratic
predecessors. When things went from bad to worse, they even took over
the state by military force on Jan. 23, 1913. With the “Bab-ý Ali
Raid,” an armed attack at a cabinet meeting of the Ottoman government
in the imperial capital, they showed they were ready to suppress any
kind of resistance, mobilize the “crowd” for the sake of the country
and, if necessary, die for the eternal patriotic cause. At the end of
World War I, things went from bad to worse, and the empire was
dissolved. During this phase, they were not finished; some of them, as
tradition dictated, were simply liquidated.
Unlike the Anglo-Saxon tradition, in Turkey and most parts of the
Middle East, institutions of state and people are not saved or given a
good chance for transformation for the sake of historical continuity
and integrity. People in those institutions are faced with a definite
choice about new and old, and the choice of rejection is enough to
liquidate them by the powers that be. They shall choose either full
obedience or complete destruction. Maybe some would call this way a
kind of “creative destruction” in some parts of the Western world,
which does not seem to be very creative at all in the Middle East.
Whatever it is, the rest of the CUP was successfully able to establish
the Republic of Turkey after giving a fierce fight to European-backed
Greeks and others. But equally important are the remnants of the CUP
aligning themselves according to new conditions in the Middle East
under the mandates of colonial powers. After the colonialists left,
not much changed and the Middle East was dominated by Nasserist,
Baathist or Zionist regimes.
And the essential picture was eventually completed: The Middle East
looked to be divided among Kemalist (Turkey), Nasserist (Egypt),
Baathist (Syria and Iraq) and Zionist (Israel) regimes in the
post-World War I period, with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire as
the successor ideologies of the CUP in the successor states of the
empire. In addition, significantly either secularist or Islamist
movements in the Middle East are mostly affected by the results of the
Ottoman modernization efforts, and its most primary political result,
the CUP. As a grand coalition and the apparatus of a new “Grand
Politics” of the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim world, the CUP included
Ottomanists, Westerners, Islamists and Turkists (later, Turkish
nationalists) among their ranks. And according to political
conditions, they could rearrange and readjust their political
allegiances, too.
Under the pressure of the Cold War conditions, this picture has mostly
continued to exist in the Middle East. Right after the collapse of the
Berlin Wall, communized Eastern Europe and the Balkans of the Ottoman
Empire were dissolved and the democratization and integration process
into the European Union began. The Balkans, where the CUP was
originally established, was one of the most critical corners of the
empire. The other communized and essential corner of the empire,
Caucasia, got through a bloody and difficult phase toward
democratization probably because of a delicate equation of
historically prevalent Western geopolitics with Russia. The
Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over the disputed region of
Nagorno-Karabakh, the failed Chechnyan war of independence from Russia
and the last Georgian “Rose Revolution,” followed some years later by
Russian intervention, are all marks of this bloody and difficult
transition in the region.
The last corner of the Ottoman Empire (the Ottoman Empire, as one of
the past major political empires in world history, was built on a
geopolitical triangle between the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle
East in Eurasia) was the Middle East, which has waited for a
democratization process for such a long time and came last to it. The
Middle East is the cradle of human civilization and the root of the
world’s monotheistic religions. It has many invariables, unknown and
unpredictable forces of historical resistance, and a record of
conflicts unparalleled in other corners of the world. But now it seems
the “iron curtain” of the Middle East has finally collapsed with the
Arab Spring. And yet the question has not changed. Instead, it stands
out there and blurs our vision: Will the Middle East be democratized?
Or, as is well known in the history of the CUP and its successor
regimes, after one autocratic regime is toppled, will we witness
another one in a different form?
It is clear secularist and autocratic successor regimes of the CUP are
losing ground in the Middle East, from Islamist-rooted Justice and
Development Party (AK Party)-led Turkey — which is carrying out the
Ergenekon trials against Kemalist generals — to the Arab Spring
countries dominated by Baathist and secularist Arab nationalist
regimes. But what will come next? If the spirit of the CUP is not
dead, then there is good reason to believe that the Islamic wing of
the CUP could emerge all over the Middle East.
And there is no historical guarantee and adequate evidence it will be
democratic or vice versa.
*Murat Sofuoðlu is the director of the Process (Süreç) Research Center
based in Ýstanbul, Turkey ().
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