The ‘invisible hand’ that made the ‘nationalist Turk’
Rightly or wrongly, Mr. Erdogan and his governance since 2002 have been perceived by many Turks as “collaborators.” The root cause of the “rising Turkish nationalism” is the ‘lenience’ Mr. Erdogan’s government is perceived to have displayed vis-à-vis what a majority of Turks view as enemy.
This is a selected assortment of book titles on best-seller shelves one can easily find in the nearest bookshop:
- The Turkish Union
- O, Turk here is your enemy!
- In the name of Crescent (the Crescent of the Crescent and Star / BB)
- The Inmate with a medal (a biography of Korkut Eken, an intelligence officer who was sent to gaol for links to organized crime / BB)
- Invasion and resistance: 1919 and today
- O, the son of Turkish future
- The rising nationalism
- The bloody game (featuring an international conspiracy theory against Turkey / BB)
- Gates of hatred (a book featuring international Turk-hating / BB)
- The rise of the Turkic world
- Sultan’s army
- Turkey under siege
- Code name Attila
- The Turkish-American war
- A nation awakens
There are of course many other readings featuring the same theme and appealing to the same reader in addition to DVD collections like “The Republic” and “The Salvation.” But what is happening? Are we at war; or do we visualize that we are?
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Politics as an irrational corporate boardroom
In tough corporate boardrooms, managers are often assessed – ceteris paribus – by a simple criterion: what was he/she expected to achieve at a given time and how much of that did he/she really achieve at that same given time. Politics, of course, is a different story in which characters are often assessed with a malign bias. Politics is like a corporate boardroom where board members may stand up and applaud a manager, order champagne to celebrate and promote the manager as the financial figures tell the Board that the company has actually gone bankrupt!
I hope that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister, will forgive the analogy. But what did his ‘western’ supporters expect him to politically achieve during 2002-2007? Allow me to ‘fantasize/guess’ a few of those expectations:
1. Turkey gives a carte blanche for a planned American military offensive against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from its north i.e. from the Turkish soil.
2. Turkey safely and irrevocably sails towards the harbor that is called the European Union – albeit for a pre-planned quarantine as she approaches the lighthouse.
3. Turkey allies with Iraq’s Kurds; Turks and Kurds in and outside Turkey embrace each other along ‘trading’ lines that should in the future turn into ‘political’ lines; all previous hostilities end, and, as the miracle goes, there is a secular bloc against Arab Islamists.
4. Turkey privately becomes a staunch and reliable western ally in the American war against the Axis of Evil.
5. Turks, under the ‘chosen leader,’ become pro-western but devoutly Muslim men who are so much fond of America, who truly love America; they, therefore, become the role model for less democratic parts of the Islamic world. In the meantime Turkey becomes systematically Islamized.
6. Meanwhile, the ‘chosen leader’ wins the cold war against what his supporters have the habit of calling the ‘fascist state establishment.’
7. The ‘chosen leader,’ in the meantime, maximizes his popularity and his ‘mildly Islamic’ grip over the state establishment; and he fully cooperates with his ‘western admirers.’ The Turks, at the same time, become Muslims, not Turks any longer – hence a more predictable crowd than that made by the ‘unpredictable Turk.’
8. Everyone is happy: the ‘chosen leader,’ for having achieved his ideological, religious and ‘pragmatic’ ambitions; his supporters, for having won the new cold war; and the rest of the others who think Turkey the pirate ship belongs to no port but its crew must be controlled so that ‘they don’t harm.’
And what actually happened at the given time that was 2002-2007? Well, this is the picture:
1. Nearly two-thirds of Turks see the United States and U.S.-controlled Iraq as top threat to their country; anti-Americanism has never been this sharp. Remember some of today’s anti-American Turks will tomorrow occupy governmental/parliamentary/bureaucratic posts and guess how that would translate into the Turkish policy calculus vis-à-vis America.
2. The EU process is effectively on hold, probably with no clear destination in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the Turks’ support for EU membership drops from around 75 percent to less than 50 percent.
3. Turks who are controllable ‘good Muslims’ i.e. who, like Mr. Erdogan, are more pragmatic than Islamist, are happy to be able to enjoy the finer things of life; while the others silently become impatient over Mr. Erdogan’s failure to resolve the highly symbolic turban dispute. Meanwhile, the uncontrollable ‘good Muslims,’ from time to time, tend to kill whom they deem as the enemy of Islam.
4. A visibly large majority of the Turks become nationalists while a marginal group becomes ‘Islamic nationalists,’ a dangerous blend of violent ideology, which this columnist warned of more than a year ago. Mr. Erdogan and his ‘western admirers’ sit down and think what went wrong in the game plan. A lot of things…
What, really, went wrong?
A few book volumes could be written on what went wrong. But most notably, the ‘missing link’ between the game plan and the simple reality looks like it is the result of a grandiose miscalculation (of course, if not miscalculated on purpose).
When nations feel their governments, to put it mildly, “collaborate” with what is a potential threat/enemy, they turn to nationalism and collective reaction, which may take non-violent or violent forms. Rightly or wrongly, Mr. Erdogan and his governance since 2002 have been perceived by many Turks as “collaborators.” The root cause of the “rising Turkish nationalism” is the ‘lenience’ Mr. Erdogan’s government is perceived to have displayed vis-à-vis what a majority of Turks view as enemy.
What could better explain the etiology of that perception than the words to Washington bigwigs of Mr. Erdogan’s most influential advisor: “Use this man instead of putting him to drain.”