by Peter G. de Krassel
Turkey’s Founding Father Mustafa Kemal Attaturk, like America’s Founding Fathers, wanted Turkey to be a secular country modeled on the West. Unfortunately, Turkey, like the U.S., has been hijacked by religious extremists that both countries Founding Fathers would find offensive.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist-based Justice and Development Party, have taken Turkey off its secular political path. The party has infused the country with an authoritarian caliphate that jails journalists critical of the regime and is determined to become a 21st century Turkish empire starting with Syria.
The leadership of the Free Syrian Army is based in Turkey and thousands of refugees from Syria have fled to Turkey. Turkey has imposed sanctions against Syria and has become the Muslim model of democracy for the region. Turkey clearly wants to carve out and re-establish a sphere of influence in the Middle East. It has been less than a century since the British released the Arabs from the dominion of the Ottoman Empire.
France, like Turkey, has taken a pro-active role and has demanded that the EU freeze the assets of the Syrian Central Bank. While America and China sit on the sidelines, it is France and Turkey that are vying for lucrative business ties and the chance to mold a new generation of leaders in the lands they once controlled. This rivalry is nothing new. Since Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, France and Turkey have competed for dominance in the Middle East. As the Ottoman Empire gradually collapsed, France acquired Algeria, Tunisia and, temporarily, Egypt. The French took one final bite from the dying empire by securing control over Lebanon and Syria after World War I.
This rivalry is one reason France has objected to Turkey’s bid for European Union membership. It is also the reason that the French Senate periodically introduces legislation to criminalize the denial of the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Turks that continuously sours relations between the two countries.
Turkey looked to France as a political model after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. When modern Turkey’s Founding Father Attaturk founded the Republic in 1923, he championed the French model of hard secularism, which stipulates freedom from religion in government, politics and education. Since 2002, Attaturk’s French-inspired model has collapsed and a softer form of secularism has been promoted that allows for more religious expression in government, politics and education. This has made the Turkish model appealing to Arab countries. The Arab cleansing is providing Turkey with an unprecedented opportunity to spread its influence in newly free Arab societies.
Turkey today is striving to become the dominant power in the region – something I predicted would happen in Custom Maid Knowledge when I encouraged Europe to embrace Turkey as a member of the EU. France’s strong opposition to Turkey’s membership and its efforts to create a European-Mediterranean Union, which Nicolas Sarkozy conceived in 2008 as a way to place France at the helm of the Mediterranean world, has only encouraged Turkey to become more active in cultivating ties with former Ottoman lands that were ignored for much of the 20th century. Of the 33 new Turkish diplomatic missions opened in the first decade of the 21st-century, 18 are in Muslim and African countries.
If Turkey wants to become a true beacon of democracy in the Middle East, its new constitution must provide broader individual rights for the country’s citizens, especially the Kurds and journalists. It must also fulfill Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s vision of a “no problems” foreign policy. Today, Turkey’s foreign policy, like its domestic policy has too many problems and Taksim Square is starting to look like Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
It is time for Turks to talk Turkey if the country is to fulfill Attaturk’s vision in the 21st century.
Photo by Associated Press