The Loom of Time, page 11
Kurdish rebellions in Anatolia were crushed by Atatürk’s new republican army in the 1920s and 1930s. The Kurds had fought with Atatürk against the Greeks and other Christian invaders, believing that they were defending Islam. Yet the new nationalist regime betrayed them.[37] Henceforth Kurdish identity was officially denied and Kurds were designated by Ankara as “mountain Turks.” During the Cold War the United States supported Turkey’s efforts to destroy the Marxist Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, led by Abdullah Öcalan. In the 1980s and 1990s, Turkey fielded as many as 130,000 troops in the southeast of the country against the PKK insurgency.[38] In the early twenty-first century, the collapse of Iraq due to the American invasion and the Syrian civil war only quickened Turkey’s fears, as it led to self-governing Kurdish regions on Turkey’s borders. The fact that Kurdish fighters were indispensable in defeating Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, raising their international prestige, only frustrated Turkey more.
Because the Iraq and Syrian wars led to chaos on Turkey’s ethnic-Kurdish border areas, the Kurdish issue was now bigger than Turkey itself and thus harder to solve than ever—as it involved three nations, two of which were in varying phases of anarchy.
“The Kurdish question, like others in the Middle East, emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire,” explained Mithat Sancar, a Turkish politician and academic who grew up speaking Arabic and Kurdish in southeastern Turkey. “The Ottoman Empire, like the Habsburg Empire, was decentralized and protected minorities. What followed, however, were nation-states dominated by a single ethnic group. In fact, the nation-state model only deepened the problem of the Kurds,” since they don’t fit in easily anywhere. The only long-term solution, he told me, was a “decentralized,” federalist-like millet system throughout Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, governed “in the spirit of the European Union,” but with a vague similarity to the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. Sancar envisioned a sort of neo-Ottoman peace among the various ethnic groups and Muslim sects, with no single sultan at the top. Of course, he admitted, this ran completely counter to Erdoǧan’s authoritarian and nationalist-Islamist agenda.
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However, in foreign policy Erdoǧan did not start out as a hardliner. When his Justice and Development Party came to power in 2002, he and Ahmet Davutoǧlu, his brilliant foreign minister, believed that in order to transform their inward-looking Kemalist state into a regional force, they had to look beyond the confines of Europe and engage the former Ottoman imperial space.
Davutoǧlu’s strategy became known as “zero problems with neighbors.” Thus, Turkey engaged with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad; with Iraq’s Nouri al-Maliki, despite Maliki’s anti-Sunni sectarian worldview; with Turkey’s historical adversaries the Greeks and the Armenians; and so on. It was an outreach that implicitly “accepted the regional status quo” and sought to better integrate Turkey within it, explained Burhanettin Duran, the head of the Erdoǧan government’s own think tank, the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research. The turning point was the Arab Spring in 2011, when Erdoǧan and Davutoǧlu adopted a more assertive policy in the Middle East, believing they could help shape an emerging new order more friendly to radical and democratic forces, which they thought would eventually benefit from the regional uprising. Turkey, as a stable Muslim democracy, was well placed to offer advice in this regard, they felt. They specifically counted on an alliance between Turkey and Egypt’s newly elected leader, Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, to counterbalance the Saudi-Iranian regional rivalry. “But we misjudged Morsi’s capacity as a leader, because we lacked sufficient intelligence and subtle knowledge about Egypt and the Arab world,” Duran admitted to me. Morsi was toppled by Egypt’s pro-Western strongman, former General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. What emerged was not a new order in the Arab world as Erdoǧan and Davutoǧlu had hoped, but the reassertion of old conservative and authoritarian forces, so that as time marched on, Turkey was left allied with only the Muslim Brotherhood, radical Qatar, and the Palestinians.
Making matters worse was the fact that neither the Americans nor the Europeans would intervene in war-torn Syria, so that NATO proved useless there. This left Turkey with little choice but to intervene because of the Kurdish threat and the cross-border refugee crisis. And because the Russians intervened in Syria as well, Erdoǧan has had little choice but to more closely engage Putin. “Erdoǧan,” Duran summarized, “learned over time, especially in Syria, that soft power alone is not enough. But within the realm of hard power calculations, Erdoǧan is prepared to be pragmatic and back down when necessary.”
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It was time for me to meet Ahmet Davutoǧlu, who by Turkish standards is a Kissingerian force of nature—once an ally of Erdoǧan but by the time of my visit his bitter enemy. Because he’s uninterruptible, I just let Davutoǧlu talk for ninety minutes in Ankara, in his yawning office at the new political party he leads.
In the beginning, as Davutoǧlu explained to me, the idea wasn’t specifically imperial: it was only about bringing Turkey’s experience of forging a secure and democratic nation-state to the wider region. After all, for too long Turkey had been psychologically estranged from its neighbors, which in Turkish eyes were Greek and Armenian enemies, once-traitorous Arabs, rival Iranians, and so forth. Why not make friends with everybody, and thereby construct a regional order emanating from Turkey’s strength and stability? “If the region could experience more freedom, there would be more security and fewer problems,” Davutoǧlu observed. In this spirit, Davutoǧlu spearheaded various mediation efforts: in the former war-torn Yugoslavia, between Sunnis and Shi‘ites in Iraq, and even between Israel and Syria in the time before Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power. It was all familiar historical terrain for Turkey, since from the Balkans to Mesopotamia, the Ottomans had ruled through a millet system of self-governing communities, which had provided for intercommunal peace under an imperial umbrella. But particularly in the Balkans, where the Ottoman experience had often been harsh and bloody, Turkey’s enemies accused Davutoǧlu of “neo-Ottomanism.” It was a term used in this case to discredit his efforts, downplaying the cosmopolitan and decentralized aspects of Ottoman rule.
Davutoǧlu’s essentially liberal vision suffered from one, pivotal flaw, though. He underestimated the fragile nature of Arab states and their institutions, which, as it turned out in the Arab Spring, could not remain stable or even intact once their dictators were severely weakened or dislodged. Erdoǧan and Davutoǧlu would be devastated by Morsi’s and the Muslim Brotherhood’s inability to properly govern Egypt. But for Davutoǧlu, it was his experience with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad that constituted a real reckoning.
Davutoǧlu originally saw Assad as “a young modernizer and potential progressive: not like the old corrupt dictators [Hosni] Mubarak in Egypt and [Zine El Abidine] Ben Ali in Tunisia.” And Assad, for his part, “saw Turkey as a good model.” Moreover, largely for geographical reasons, “Syria was essential as an entry point for Turkey into the Arab world,” Davutoǧlu explained. Thus, when the Arab Spring first ignited in early 2011, “we urged Assad to loosen up, to allow other parties besides the Ba‘ath to form, to liberalize the economy, to lead Syria towards a semi-democracy. I advised Assad to hold an election. ‘You’ll win,’ I told him. ‘You’re not Mubarak or Ben Ali who were overthrown. You have real credentials as someone whose family dynasty never compromised on the question of the Palestinians.’ ”
But then Assad, upon whom Davutoǧlu had invested so much hope, gave his devastating reply: “But what would happen to my people if I lose the election?” the Syrian dictator said. By “my people” he meant his fellow Alawites. “At the end of the day,” Davutoǧlu recounted, “Assad saw himself as a communal leader only,” not as a leader of a whole nation-state. Alas, both Syria and Iraq were riven by sectarianism, worsened by the French, who had favored the Alawites in Syria, and the British, who had favored the Sunnis in Iraq.
“Assad’s dilemma,” Davutoǧlu observed with the wisdom of hindsight, “was that he needed Turkey in peace, but he needed Iran in war.” And it was war that Assad was heading into. Thus, he leaned on his father Hafez Assad’s old Iranian allies, thereby strengthening the Shi‘ite-Alawite alliance.
Erdoǧan, who intimidates everyone around him, listened for some years to Davutoǧlu’s advice, because Davutoǧlu was not seen by Erdoǧan as political; rather, Davutoǧlu was seen as an intellectual and an academic who could instruct his boss. Erdoǧan’s increasing authoritarianism resulted in a general rupture between the two men, and to a foreign policy that was neo-Ottoman only in the worst sense, creating enemies instead of friends. This led eventually to Davutoǧlu forming his own political party, composed of all groups in the country, including Kurds and members of the various Christian communities.
“There is only one solution to the Kurdish question,” Davutoǧlu told me before I left. “Full democratization, that is, empowering local governments in the southeast, making Kurdish a language of the country like Turkish, and establishing excellent relations with the Kurds of Syria and Iraq.”
Leaving Davutoǧlu’s office I thought of the concept of Tufts University professor Malik Mufti, who writes that Turkish strategic culture has oscillated between Atatürk’s Republican paradigm that “seeks security by turning inward in pursuit of a homogeneous and harmonious polity insulated from foreign threats” and an imperial paradigm that “views Turkey’s external environment as capable of yielding great rewards if only one is open to engaging with and trying to reshape it.”[39] Özal’s unleashing of the Turkish business community generated Republican Turkey’s first truly active engagement with the former Ottoman near-abroad, something which Davutoǧlu built upon before Erdoǧan, having left Davutoǧlu behind, undermined neo-Ottomanism with Muslim identity politics.
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The Presidential Palace Complex in Ankara was completed in 2014, after Erdoǧan had been in power for over a decade. Unlike the Çamlica Mosque in Istanbul, it is not reminiscent of Ceauşescu’s House of the Republic. The Palace Complex appears bigger than that—bigger than the Kremlin or Versailles, fifty-eight times the size of the White House.[40] Combining Seljuk and Ottoman architectural motifs, its size is truly otherworldly; with over a thousand rooms, marble atriums, fountains, a great mosque, and a price tag—with additions and renovations—of close to a billion dollars: an enormous sum given the much cheaper cost of labor in Turkey than in the West. The level of pretension and ambition that the complex exudes is frightening. Here Erdoǧan reputedly worked eighteen-hour days, including one or two rousing speeches daily, making key decisions near midnight. Following almost two decades in power, he was surrounded by a “swirling courtier system,” with perhaps no one to challenge him. This was especially the case after the failed 2016 coup against him, after which he purged the military “and really took power,” according to Burhanettin Duran.
Erdoǧan had always pushed into voids: intervening in Syria to protect his borders; intervening in Libya to obtain energy concessions and help an ideologically sympathetic regime; helping his Turkish brothers, the Azeris, against the Armenians; and challenging the Greeks, the Cypriots, and the French in the Aegean, because he could not countenance their interpretation of maritime rights that violated Turkey’s economic and geopolitical interests. There were good reasons to intervene in all these cases. Yet a more cautious leader would not have done so, or would not have done so as often. But the longer Erdoǧan remained in power, the more he learned what he could get away with—despite the caviling of the policy communities in Ankara, Istanbul, Brussels, and Washington. The 2016 coup attempt made him at once more self-confident and more paranoid. And the more that economic problems mounted at home, the more he shook his fist in populist style at the world, in order to impress his political base at home. But don’t confuse Erdoǧan with someone like Donald Trump. Erdoǧan was methodical, self-disciplined, and always thinking several steps ahead in a system without the venerable and sturdy democratic institutions of the United States. True authoritarians crave power and the consolidation of it more than they crave attention. How lonely it must be at the top, I thought, staring at this colossal building. I also thought of what the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis had observed upon meeting Mussolini in 1926: “He feels a power constantly pushing him. He cannot stop; if he does he knows he is lost. It is the most characteristic and most tragic agony of Dictators. It is necessary that they do battle incessantly, and win. They are lost…if they are overcome by indecision…”[41]
Could a normal democratic process dislodge Erdoǧan from this Palace Complex, whose proportions were such that only someone with his amount of ambition could feel at ease inside of it? Actually, Turkey’s second president, İsmet İnönü, a virtual dictator, surprised the world by stepping down from office in 1950 after losing an election that he didn’t even have to hold, paving the way for the birth of Turkish democracy.[42] Thus, I tried to imagine a post-Erdoǧan Turkish Weimar Republic against the backdrop of this architectural monster, or some such other scenario that will surely play out in the months and years to come. Actually, I could imagine it, after a fashion. The fantastically grand buildings designed as the administrative heart of British India by Sir Edwin Lutyens in New Delhi were constructed mainly in the interwar years, with the assumption of eternal colonial rule. Yet the British empire came crashing down some years later. And an act of God, namely an earthquake, may undo Erdoǧan. There was irony aplenty in history, as Gibbon knew.
Skip Notes
*1 Today, The Decline and Fall is controversial for a related reason. Gibbon’s assault on Christianity has been challenged by the well-known Princeton professor Peter Brown. Brown has written voluminously about how the centuries of Gibbon’s so-called decline were really those of great intellectual flowering under the very Christian thinkers Gibbon despises. Brown calls this epoch Late Antiquity, which he believes is every bit as distinctive a period as antiquity and the Dark Ages. See for example Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971). Also see Mark Whittow’s “Do Byzantine Historians Still Read Gibbon?” in The Cambridge Companion to Edward Gibbon, ed. Karen O’Brien and Brian Young (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
*2 Gülen, a charismatic scholar and cleric-like figure, has been living in exile in the United States.
*3 Subsequently, Erdoǧan decided to purchase the Russian-made S-400 missile defense system, enraging NATO and the U.S. Congress.
*4 Erdoǧan’s regime sees not only Atatürk as problematic, but also the Westernized Ottoman Empire of the 1800s. Cagaptay, p. 294.
*5 The Ottoman sultan was also the caliph who led the entire House of Islam.
*6 The Shi‘ites were literally the Shiat Ali, the “Party of Ali,” the rightful successor to the Prophet, who was assassinated in A.D. 661.
*7 I interviewed Erbakan in the spring of 1993 on assignment for National Geographic and that was also the impression I got from him.
*8 In fact, Erdoǧan’s presidential palace complex in Ankara, completed in 2014 and housing over a thousand rooms, has been compared to Ceauşescu’s House of the Republic.
Chapter
4
LOWER NILE
My lifetime has seen the continued advance of political science at the expense of the study of geography. I refer to geography in the nineteenth-century sense of the term: in which the relief map constitutes the starting point for the study of people, culture, trade routes, natural resources, and so on. More problematic has been a burgeoning in the ranks of experts drawn mainly from the most cosmopolitan and economically privileged backgrounds—people who have never known financial or physical insecurity—which can make it harder rather than easier for them to understand the ground-level reality of distant countries. As expertise becomes narrower, rarefied, and compartmentalized, reality itself becomes obscured. There is the illusion of knowledge where little may actually exist. Too few of the categories experts use to judge and define countries can really tell you how honest the taxi drivers are, if you need a fixer to make it through customs at the airport, if people stand in organized lines at shops and government offices, if the streets of major cities are safe to walk at night, what the level of infighting and corruption in government is, and what is the ability of bureaucratic institutions to service citizens. The pages of leading foreign policy journals don’t help much in this regard. But the accounts of travelers, foreign correspondents, and expatriates will. And what they will immediately begin talking about is the culture of the country in question. Yet “culture” is the very word that makes political scientists and other professional social scientists uneasy. To raise the issue of culture as a factor in geopolitical analysis is to risk being accused of determinism and essentialism, fancy academic terms for fatalism and stereotyping. Of course, I myself am generalizing about all of this. But not to be able to generalize is to immobilize argument.
Indeed, not to consider culture as a factor in the fate of nations is a contradiction in terms. Nations, if they are anything, are cultural entities. For culture is the sum total of a people’s “collective” experience inhabiting a particular landscape for hundreds and thousands of years.[1] To dismiss the relevance of culture in politics is, in essence, to dismiss the whole field of anthropology, which is the study of the cultures of peoples and ethnic groups, and their social meaning. The policy elite is uncomfortable with all of this because in many cases it does not concur with their own life experience: that of having grown up in international settings among a global class that has transcended national and ethnic culture. But because most of the world has still not transcended it, culture must remain a vital element of political analysis.
