Debating Turkey in the Middle
East: The Dawn of a New GeoPolitical Imagination?
İBRAHİM KALIN*
ABSTRACT
The interest Turkey has generated
in the Arab world over the last few
years is caused by the convergence
of changes in Turkey, the Middle
East and the global power-balance.
Turkey’s domestic political process,
its new foreign policy and the EU
membership process are closely
followed in the larger Muslim world.
The new configurations of power
in the Middle East and the world
at large lead to new types of geopolitical imagination. From Turkish
soap operas and import products to
Turkey’s involvements in Lebanon
and Palestine, Turkey is claiming a
new space in the Arab public opinion
in a manner never seen before. While
AK Party’s ties with the Arab and
Muslim world are partly responsible
for Turkey’s renewed foreign policy
activism in the region, the current
debate is also reflective of the failures
of the international system and
heralds the advent of a new balance
of power in Turkey’s immediate
neighborhood.
O
n two separate visits to the Arab
world recently, I was asked about
Turkish soap operas shown on Arab TV. My
hosts were surprised that I didn’t know much
about the programs, the characters in them or
their stories. One Saudi friend had on his mobile MP3 player the soundtrack of the series
“Ihlamurlar Altında,” which was translated
into Arabic as “Years of Loss” and dubbed into
the Syrian dialect of Arabic. Using the original
Turkish soundtrack, the Arab producers have
put Arabic words to the song, domesticating
it in a way that blurs any distinction between
what is Arab and what is Turkish. Layla Abu
Shama, a social worker from Saudi Arabia,
thinks that Turkish soap operas are gaining increasing popularity among women in particular because “these programs deal with topics
that correspond to their own personal issues
and aspirations,”1 Commenting on “Noor,”
another Turkish soap opera dealing with the
sensitive issue of divorce, Lebanese Christian
housewife Ibtissam Issa says that “they are a bit
* Dr., Director General, SETA, [email protected]
Insight Turkey Vol. 11 / No. 1 / 2009
pp. 83-96
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İBRAHİM KALIN
Defining Turkish
modernization as a total
surrender to Western
modernity, many Arab
intellectuals had dismissed
Turkey as a non-player in the
Muslim world
like us. I really like their belief in tradition and their loyalty to the family.”
Hania Bissat from Lebanon thinks
she has solved the riddle: “Noor’s secret
is that it’s about people who live Western
lives, but they’re Easterners; they’re easy
to relate to.”2
Yet there are also those who see these
Turkish series as more presenting subversive Western values than the genuine
concerns of a Muslim society. Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti Sheikh Abd al-Aziz alSheikh, head of the country’s highest religious authority, issued a religious ruling
against the series “Noor” and called it “subversive” and “anti-Islamic.”3 Strangely
enough, one Iranian commentator sees all of this as a “plot” cooked up by Saudis
and Turks (and probably with Americans behind them) to “culturally and politically isolate the Islamic Republic of Iran.”4
Despite its detractors, the fact that Turkish cultural products are being accepted into Arab homes and the halls of Arab popular culture is in itself important and intriguing. The excitement Turkey has recently been generating in the
Arab world and beyond is sustained by the confluence of substantial changes in
three areas: Turkey, the Middle East and the world. The current international
order functions without a center or with multiple centers, which amounts to the
same thing. The center(s) of the world are up for grabs, and there are no selfproclaimed winners on the horizon. The talk about a “post-American world,” to
use the title of Fareed Zakaria’s recent book on the state of American power, is
increasingly becoming a debate about a post-imperial America on the one hand,
and the “Rise of the Rest” on the other.5 Considering the new configurations of
global power, the Cold War seems to have never come to an end but has simply
taken on new forms. America’s rise from the status of a superpower to a hegemonic power raises questions not only about American power but also about
the legitimacy of the international order. For the time being, the Chinese model
of the global power structure seems to be accepted by all: one superpower, many
great powers.6 For years, the experts have been talking about the rise of China
as a major economic-cum-political power. The 2008 Beijing Olympics showed
that the Chinese have more than cheap Wal-Mart products to show to the world.
The world is moving in multiple directions, and no one is sure where it will go.
What is certain is the perception that the dike of a Euro-centric and American
world has been broken.7
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by Emad Hajjaj
Debating Turkey in the Middle East: The Dawn of a New Geo-Political Imagination?
“(The wife is entering the court) the husband: “Please don’t divorce me!! I’ll do anything you want!!
Tomorrow I’ll even do a nose job surgery to look like (mohanned) on the TV show (Noor)!!””
The feeling of a new dawn is ubiquitous in much of the non-Western world,
but it has a special flavor to it in the Arab world. While it has an effect of empowerment on the new generations, it also reveals the limits of the longue durée of the
so-called Arab awakening. The Arab world has been taken hostage by the memories of a glorious past, a painful present and a precarious future, unknown yet
filled with promises. It is searching for a presiding idea and a leadership that it can
trust. Much of the Arab (and Muslim) world today is far from the model of Madina, the first city of Islam, from al-Farabi’s Virtuous City (al-Madinat al-Fadilah)
or such cosmopolitan and creative centers of learning as Baghdad, Samarqand,
Cordoba or Istanbul. Against all odds, however, Arab societies are resisting the
whispering of the current world-system that they cannot be the self-conscious
agents of world history again. The Arab world, just like much of the non-Western
world, is seeking to reclaim its agency. Hence the constant search for new models,
paradigms, experiences.
As for Turkey, it is a modern country larger than a nation-state and smaller
than an empire. Turkey is just beginning to act like the self-conscious heir of an
empire whose power of imagination still hovers over those of Turks, Arabs, Per85
İBRAHİM KALIN
The old Turkish images of
“Arab traitors” and the Arab
perception of “Ottoman
imperialists” speak very little
to the realities of the Arab and
Turkish societies today
sians, Kurds, Bosnians, Macedonians
and others in its vast neighborhood.
Willingly or unwillingly, Turkey is at
center stage of the fault lines of EuroAsian and Middle Eastern geo-politics.
The recent crisis in the Caucasus proved
once more that Turkey does not have the
luxury of turning its back on history and
geography. Blessing or curse, Turkey will remain in the middle of the international maelstrom.
It would be too simplistic to explain Turkey’s rising profile in the Arab world
with the Islamic credentials of the AK Party leadership alone. Political personalities play a significant role in international relations. The personal investment and
engagement of a political leader makes a difference in times of normalcy as well
as crisis. To their credit, both President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan have taken risks to open up new venues of engagement and influence for Turkey. But it is equally true that strong personalities do not come out of
the blue for no reason. They emerge at the intersection of a number of factors and
go beyond personal genius and individual heroism. Furthermore, there are novelties as well as continuities in Turkish foreign policy.8 What the Arab world sees in
Turkey today, for real or for fantasy, is more than the warmth of personal relations.
Turkey represents a new type of agency that crosses over the binary oppositions
of the ancien régime of the 19th and 20th centuries and the boundaries of tradition
and modernity, East and West, center and periphery, and hard and soft power.
Kuwait Times, for instance, interprets Turkey’s aspirations to be a ‘facilitator’ in
the regional conflicts as an attempt to “boost [the] East-West role.”9 Dr. Basheer
Nafi, a prominent Arab intellectual and an expert on Turkey, explains the AK
Party’s foreign policy in terms of what he calls neo-Ottomanism, which seeks to
project the Ottoman legacy of world politics into today’s global system of power.10
This seems to be one of the features of the new Turkey that have resonated well
with the Arab world: embracing globalization with a non-isolationist regionalism.
The political vocabulary of the Arab world is saturated with references to the
failures of the international power structure and the ways to overcome them.
What is interesting is how the talk about Turkey is tied into this debate. One finds
a striking example of this in Anthony Shadid’s masterful narrative of the lives of
Iraqis in his “Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War.”
Struck by the rare appearance of the word hurriyah (freedom) in the daily conver86
Debating Turkey in the Middle East: The Dawn of a New Geo-Political Imagination?
sations of Arabs, Shadid notes that the
It is not only Turkey
word ‘adl (justice) commands a heavy
rediscovering the Middle
presence in all political talk in the Arab
East but also the Middle East
world. It is a “concept that frames attirediscovering and embracing
tudes from Israel to Iraq. For those who
Turkey
feel they are always on the losing end,
the idea of justice may assume supreme
importance”. Yes, there is much talk about grand theories of world order, great
power plays, globalization, Arab awakening, the pains of a unipolar world, regionalism, and so on in both the so-called Arab street and the halls of Arab politics.
But the bottom line is a simple plea for justice coupled with a thirst for honor,
respect and self-esteem. Extending from the traditional to the modern period,
the Muslim notion of good governance is grounded in a strong notion of justice.
What all of these have in common is a call for a reconfiguration of the global
power structure. The old, modern definitions of power have sought to shape geopolitics through the geo-cultural and international economic priorities of the big
powers. While American expansionism has not been interested in the crude forms
of cultural imperialism of the 19th century European states, it has promoted democracy, human rights, free market and other liberal values as essential for maintaining the global power balance in favor of the strategic interests of the US.11 The
post-modern configurations of power have put more emphasis on international
treatises, institutions and alliances than military power, and have tried to create a
kind of global consciousness to deal with the world’s problems. Yet they have not
changed the main framework of how power works or should be used with a sense
of equity and just distribution of power. “International community” as a term
of legitimacy has lost much of its meaning, function and credibility. The present
world order is far from the ideals of Kant’s “perpetual peace” and his model for
a just international order in which the agents of the international system would
treat each other as equals, behave in a spirit of comity and act in strict obedience
to international law.12
In a world bleeding from the wounds of human greed, ignorance and injustice,
every act of justice is immediately owned by countless people around the world.
Turkey has been able to capture the imagination of Arabs and other Muslim nations since its multifaceted policies are seen as serving justice, not just for the
Turks and the Turkish national interest but for everyone yearning for justice in the
region. The recent examples of inspiring people beyond the national borders of
Turkey include a long list of foreign policy issues: the Turkish Parliament’s refusal
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İBRAHİM KALIN
Turkey is projecting a new
cultural imagination, an
imagination that goes beyond
the fixed borders of East and
West, North and South or the
Muslim and Western worlds
to allow US troops to use Turkish territory to invade Iraq in 2003, Turkey’s passionate and somewhat risky attempt to
create a united island in Cyprus in 2004,
its active involvement in Iraq since the
invasion, its eagerness to enter the EU
as a full member, the infamous Hamas
visit in 2006, sending Turkish troops to
Lebanon after the Israeli-Lebanese war, its engagements in Palestine, attracting
Gulf capital, and the countless visits of Turkish officials to practically all Arab
countries. Consider the moral boost and sheer exhilaration the Syrians got from
a match between Fenerbahce and the Syrian football team watched by Turkish
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Syrian President Bashar Asad, at a
time when Syria was trying hard to get itself out of suffocating self-containment
and years of isolation. While not yielding any concrete results, consider the symbolic significance of the meeting between Hamid Karzai and Pervez Musharraf in
Ankara or Mahmud Abbas and Shimon Peres at the Turkish Parliament or Javier
Solana and Ali Larijani in the Turkish capital. Still, consider the potential of the
Ankara Forum headed by the Turkish Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges (TOBB) to improve the economic conditions of the Palestinians.13
Turkey and the New Geo-Politics of the Middle East
What is new and exciting in all of this is the willingness of the new generation of Turkish policy makers and civil society actors to engage in the corridors
of regional diplomacy while at the same time maintaining good relations with
traditional power-holders, i.e., the US, Europe and Russia. This is more than a
matter of will. It heralds a new imagination, a different geo-strategic map and a
new set of principles by which Turkey wants to engage its immediate neighbors
and global actors. Skeptics see these attempts as too ambitious, too idealistic and
far from achieving concrete results. It is true that the meeting between Abbas and
Peres in Ankara before going to Annapolis did not end the Palestinian problem.
The current talks between Syria and Israel facilitated by Turkey may go nowhere.
Turkey may or may not succeed in projecting a post-American Iraq that will be
united, democratic, safe and prosperous. It will take more than the will of Turkey
to create a post-ethnic and post-sectarian Iraq. Turkey’s possible role in bringing
together Fatah and Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza may fail, too. To the north,
Turkey’s Caucasus Stability and Partnership Platform may not achieve much in
the short term.
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Debating Turkey in the Middle East: The Dawn of a New Geo-Political Imagination?
Yet none of this changes the fact that Turkey is moving ahead with a new vision and energy that resonates with the sense of justice and honor shared by the
Arab and Muslim world. Writing in Al-Ahram Weekly, Mustafa El-Labbad, one of
Egypt’s experts on Turkey, points to Turkey’s desire of “vigorously asserting itself
as a major player in the new Middle East, a national objective that the Justice and
Development Party shares with other Turkish political parties.” According to Labbad, “Turkey is determined to make its presence felt, and it has achieved considerable inroads here, not least of which are its success in improving the conditions
of its alliance under the American umbrella and the considerable transparency
and general harmony of objectives that characterize the manner in which it has
steered its economic recovery.” Echoing the same theme, another commentator
writing in Al Hayat draws attention to a different aspect of Turkey’s foreign policy
engagements: “The Turkish experience aims at regulating coexistence between a
party with Islamic roots and a secular constitution, between Turkey’s desire for a
bigger role in the Islamic world without having to take off the NATO beret or giving up its dream to join the European house. Turkey is searching for a role in the
Middle East by reinforcing its ability to speak to all parties.”14
What is the conclusion to be drawn from this? Not surprisingly, it is the multifaceted nature of the new Turkish experience with everything from Islam and
democracy to regional and global politics. Perhaps to the chagrin of old Arab
nationalists, Labbad ends his analysis by advising his Egyptian compatriots and
other Arabs to “study at least these two facets of Turkey’s rising star. Istanbul is
not just a bridge between cultures but also between political outlooks.”15 In this
sense, it is not only Turkey rediscovering the Middle East but also the Middle East
rediscovering and, yes, embracing Turkey.16
A Fragmented Vision or a New Imagination?
The Turkey debate in the Arab world, however, is more than regional politics.
Turkey is projecting a new cultural imagination, an imagination that goes beyond
the fixed borders of East and West, North and South or the Muslim and Western
worlds. Some may call this the best of the two worlds. But even this falls short of
capturing the dynamism of the new forms of cultural formation and over-crossings; “bridge models” still conjure up an imagery of fixed cultures, frozen identities and rigid collectivities. The real world is more fluid than conceptual abstractions. Furthermore, defining Turkey, or any country, for that matter, assumes that
Turkey does not have a standing on its own. It is only a bridge crossed over by others. Straddling several continents and cultural fault lines, however, Turkey can be
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Turkey is a modern country
larger than a nation-state and
smaller than an empire
seen as a living example of what the 14th
century Muslim thinker Ibn Khaldun
called ‘umran, a mode of cultivating the
world with universal principles, a strong
tradition, and an open horizon. Cultural imagination requires adaptability and an
ability to learn from different sources and multiple histories. This, it seems, is what
Turkey is trying to do with its Ottoman-Islamic past and its modern presence.
For the Arab world and beyond, Turkey’s soft power is increasingly becoming a
topic of discussion among academics, policy makers, experts, journalists and even
businessmen.17 Obviously, the issue is more than a matter of academic interest.
Turkey’s potential to influence its region economically and culturally forces Turkey, to quote Ahmet Davutoglu, the architect of the new Turkish foreign policy, to
take a position of “providing security and stability not only for itself, but also for
its neighboring regions.”18 Besides security and stability, Turkey is quickly moving
up on the world economic scale. Nearing a GDP of $700 billion, Turkey is now
the 17th largest economy of the world and the seventh in Europe. Turkey’s ability
to attract FDI from all corners of the world is in tandem with its economic growth
and its promise for lucrative business. But it is also predicated upon democratic
credentials, a system of transparency and accountability, and a reasonable level of
political stability. This is what the global investor looks for in any country, and it is
certainly true for the Gulf economies of the Arab world looking for safe places to
invest after the events of 9/11 and George Bush’s war on terror.
The Turkish soft power, however, cannot be explained by the sticks and carrots
of American-style international relations. As much as Joseph Nye deserves credit
for explaining the intricacies of modern power, soft power in the non-Western
world involves more than packets of economic incentives or diplomatic gestures.
It is grounded in some larger concepts of cultural affinity, historical companionship, geographical proximity, social imagery and how all of these create a sense of
belonging. Combine this with a Turkey that is democratic, strong and prosperous,
and you have a very different picture of regional dynamics. The old Turkish images of “Arab traitors” and the Arab perception of “Ottoman imperialists” speak
very little to the realities of the Arab and Turkish societies today.19
The sense of disunity in the Arab world cuts deep into the psyche of Arab
intellectuals. Some in the region believe that Turks and Iranians managed to get
one state out of their old empires. The Arabs, however, made their entry into the
modern world with 22 countries, each questioning the others’ legitimacy and relevance. One often hears passionate talk about how this disunity allows Arabs to
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Debating Turkey in the Middle East: The Dawn of a New Geo-Political Imagination?
be manipulated by Western powers and
Cultural imagination requires
Israel, as well as the Turkish and Iranian
adaptability and an ability to
states. Yet the fact that the Arabs cannot
learn from different sources
make sense of their state of disunity unand multiple histories. This, it
dermines all nationalism. Having tried
different forms of nationalism from Abd seems, is what Turkey is trying
al-Rahman Kawakibi and Sharif Husayn to do with its Ottoman-Islamic
to Michel Aflaq and Gamal Abdel Nasspast and its modern presence
er, the Arab world in the 21st century will
have to go trans-national and post-nationalist. This is despite the fact that nationalism and regionalism with a post-modern outlook are back in full swing in
the post 9/11 world. Yet still, this is countered by the increasing awareness of the
fact that the petty nationalism of the old nation-state in Arab and Muslim countries has become completely dysfunctional and counterproductive. This is where
non-Arab actors in the region gain a new significance. Considering the historical
and sectarian problems Sunni Arab states have with Iran and given Iran’s regional
ambitions, Turkey has a unique place, and it is not just the forward-looking Turks
who know about this.
The prominent Lebanese intellectual Dr. Radwan al-Sayyid, for instance, laments the fact of disunity among Arabs when he considers the adventures of Arab
states in the 20th century. Al-Sayyid thinks that Turks and Iranians got the best out
of the turmoil of the 19th century: They got their own nation-states, underwent
constitutional reforms, entered into an alliance with the West after World War
II and did not fight each other. By sharp contrast, the Arabs “suffered, as both
sides forgot their presence, due to their long absence from the historical stage.
Whereas both the Iranian and Turkish nations succeeded in safeguarding what
they considered to be essential national rights, the Arabs failed to unite and build
a modern nation (even in Egypt); the crux of their national wound remains the
establishment of a Zionist entity in Palestine. Another wound might emerge in
Iraq.”20 While al-Sayyid argues for a greater role for Arabs themselves in the affairs of the Middle East, he notes that “we are on the verge of a new era and a new
Middle East. But, interestingly, it is Iran and Turkey who are molding it and not
Israel or the United States.”
Developing a regional perspective without falling into the trap of “Third
Worldism” is no easy goal. Yet it is not impossible to achieve. Many post-nationalist Arab intellectuals and politicians have been trying to formulate a framework
to overcome this dichotomy. They are tired of deriving their ‘strategic significance’
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İBRAHİM KALIN
from two things they do not control: oil
and Israel. While oil makes them the
rich pariah of the world, “Israel” cuts
deep into their sense of national humiliation and collective misery. The sense
of dispossession and dislocation disfigures, if not completely undermines, all
attempts to avoid the perils of a rootless globalization on the one hand, and a selfimposed ghettoization in the name of national pride on the other.
The AK Party as a center-right
party with Islamic credentials
has upset the simplistic
categorizations of Islam versus
the West
Turkey, Islam and Democracy
One of the areas in which Turkey is closely followed by the Arab intellectual
scene is the post-Islamist experience of the AK Party with Islam and secularism.
While AK Party officials have made clear all along that theirs is not a party based
on religious identity, many in the West as well as in the Arab and Muslim world
discern in the AK Party a new experimentation, a new approach to the old problem of secularism versus religion or tradition versus modernity in the lands of
Islam. The AK Party’s adventures with Turkish secularism, backed up and fiercely
defended by a military-bureaucratic establishment at the expense of a fully functioning democracy, have taken the debate beyond two extremes: a soulless and
oppressive secularism on the one hand, and aspirations for a narrow and mostly
legalistic interpretation of religion on the other.
What is fascinating is how this is translated into the public debate in the Arab
world about Islam, modernity, secularism and the West. Ever since the abolishing
of the caliphate by the new secular Turkish Republic in 1924, Arabs have looked at
Turkey as leaving dar al-Islam both theologically and geo-politically. In a famous
episode of modern history, Ahmad Shawqi (d. 1932), Egypt’s first and greatest
modern poet, had praised Ataturk as the pioneer of the Muslim war of independence against the onslaughts of Western powers. The same Ahmad Shawqi blasted
Ataturk and his movement upon the abolishment of the caliphate. Defining Turkish modernization as a total surrender to Western modernity, many Arab intellectuals had dismissed Turkey as a non-player in the Muslim world.21 Now, the
outlook is very different. Writing in Al-Ahram Weekly, Amr Hamzawy argues that
the development of the AK Party’s political identity has serious ramifications “on
Islamist activity in the Arab world.”22 One commentator goes so far as to say that
“even if Turkey is an atypical Muslim country ... its experiment with democracy is
a beacon of light in a dark landscape. What is happening in Turkey today stands
as a denial of the “clash of civilizations.”23 Even at the official level, there are im92
Debating Turkey in the Middle East: The Dawn of a New Geo-Political Imagination?
portant changes. Presumably keeping his Arab audience in mind, Saudi Foreign
Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal said that “the secular character of Turkey will not
be an obstacle on the way of forming a strategic partnership between Riyadh and
Ankara.” The minister made this statement during King Abdullah’s visit to Turkey
in August 2006, the first of the Saudi king’s unprecedented back-to-back visits to
Turkey.
AK Party leaders and officials stay away from any suggestion that Turkey is or
should be a model for other Muslim countries.24 The fact, however, remains that
the AK Party as a center-right party with Islamic credentials has upset the simplistic categorizations of Islam versus the West. Instead, it has been able to mobilize
the most conservative segments of Turkish society to take a different approach to
Turkey’s EU membership goal. While AK Party skeptics dismiss its EU drive as an
instrument to advance their “hidden agenda,” the political leadership of the AK
Party insists that Turkey’s EU goal represents something more than an economic
and political alliance with Europe, a fact that Turkey already enjoys in a number
of areas. Rather, Turkey’s EU membership, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has
said on a number of occasions, is also a “project of civilization,” a project based on
shared values and common concerns. Included in these values are representative
democracy, transparency, rule of law, human rights and free market economy. As
these principles open up more space for a free market of ideas, the old Turkish
secularism feels cornered and disenfranchised. The result is a reversal of traditional positions. Now, the traditional bastions of secular Turkish modernizationcum-Westernization are against Turkey’s EU membership on grounds of national
security and pride, and the groups traditionally opposed to Europe as a political
and cultural identity embrace it as part of Turkey new identity.
This fact has not been lost to many in the Arab world. The Arab commentator
Mohamed Sid-Ahmed interprets the AK Party’s EU drive as key to its first national victory in the November 2002 elections. But he adds that “this development has
introduced a wholly new dimension to the age-old problem of relations between
Islam and the Christian world.”25 What this particular Arab writer has to say about
Europe’s resistance to Turkey’s full EU membership is indicative of a mood widely
shared in much of the non-Western world: “Turkey is required to be part of the
West when it comes to the security set up to defend the West’s strategic interests
but rejected in its bid to become part of the Western identity.” It should be pointed
out that Turkey does not want to become part of a fixed “Western identity.” But it
is certain that Turkey’s EU bid has exposed the limits of European cultural liberalism. For many in Europe, including French President Sarkozy and German Chan93
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cellor Merkel, the cultural borders of Europe stop at the gates of Turkey, which is
another way of exposing the limits of Europe as a global player. This, too, has not
been lost to many in the Middle East.
Conclusion
It is fair to say that the Turkey debate in the Arab world is tied into a larger
debate about the past images, present grievances and future hopes of the region.
The debate is also about the predicament of modernity, alternative visions of the
international system and the aspirations of the Muslim world. While the global
balance of power continues to alienate a good part of the world, new geo-political
and geo-cultural maps are emerging to open up more space for new regional and
global perspectives. A geo-political imagination different from that of both the
19th and 20th centuries will invite new definitions of power and a different set of
values and principles that may lead to sustainable, if not “perpetual,” peace. This
would also mean questioning and problematizing such terms of 19th century geopolitics as the “Middle East.”
The impact and pace of new ideas will develop not according to the old model
of a snowball, which is too linear and clumsy, but according to a butterfly effect, which is much more dynamic, invisible and surprising. Yes, Turkish cultural
products will eventually be replaced by other fashions in the market. And perhaps
new regional rivalries will put Turkey and other countries at loggerheads on key
strategic issues. But the debate about new regional players and global contenders
is already under way to produce a new geo-political imagination.
Endnotes
1. “Turkish Drama Series Gain Popularity in Arab World”, al-Sharq al-Awsat, April 27, 2008;
http://www.aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=7&id=12568.
2. Roula Khalaf, “Arab Women Fall for Soap’s Turkish Delight,” http://www.ft.com/cms/
s/0/1d14872c-762a-11dd-99ce-0000779fd18c.html?nclick_check=1.
3. The Daily Star, http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=4&Article_
id=95379.
4. Hassan Hanizadeh, “Turkish Soaps not so Clean,” Tehran Times, Aug. 28, 2008.
5. See for instance, Alice Amsden, The Rise of “The Rest”: Challenges to the West from LateIndustrializing Economies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
6. Robert Kagan, “End of Dreams, Return of History: International Rivalry and American Leadership,” Policy Review, No. 144, (August & September 2007), http://www.hoover.org/publications/
policyreview/8552512.html.
7. I say “perception” because the economic and military disparity between the West and the Rest
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Debating Turkey in the Middle East: The Dawn of a New Geo-Political Imagination?
remains huge. As Paul Collier demonstrated in his The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are
Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), global poverty and
the problems associated with it continue to cause major rifts in the present world-order. One may
say with Tom Friedman that the “world is flat”; but what really comes out as the dominant feeling is
that the world has been flattened at the expense of the weak.
8. The former Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer’s official visit to Syria in 2005 is an example that disproves the commonly held view that Turkey’s Middle East initiatives are due solely to
the AK Party’s Islamic roots and special ties in the Arab world. Sezer, who, far from being an impartial president, was openly opposed to the AK Party on key policy issues, did not cancel his visit to
Damascus in spite of American pressure. Another example is a 1995 United States Institute of Peace
(USIP) report on Turkey in the post-Cold War era. The report summary reads as follows: “The end
of the Cold War seemed to portend a decline in Turkey’s strategic importance to the West; however,
the political changes in the world since 1989 have also loosened the constraints within which Turkey
can act. As a result, Ankara’s foreign policy has been redirected from its strictly western orientation
to one in which the countries of the Middle East have become potentially more significant. The
changing relationship between Turkey—uniquely positioned in both the West and the East—and its
neighbors in the Middle East was examined at a United States Institute of Peace conference entitled
“A Reluctant Neighbor: Analyzing Turkey’s Role in the Middle East” held on June 1–2, 1994.” For the
report, visit http://www.usip.org/pubs/peaceworks/pwks1.pdf.
9. “Turkey seeks to boost East-West role,” Kuwait Times, April 01, 2007, http://www.kuwaittimes.net/read_news.php?newsid=MTY2NTUzODY4Mg.
10. Basheer M. Nafi, “al-‘Adala wa’l-Tanmiyya Yukhrij Turkiya min al-‘Uzla al-Ataturkiyya ila
al-‘Uthmaniyya al-Jadida,” al-Quds al-‘Arabi, Sept. 28, 2006.
11. Here is one recent confession: “The emphasis on democracy, liberalism, and human rights
has strategic relevance in part because it plays to American strengths and exposes the weaknesses of
the autocratic powers.” Kagan, “End of Dreams, Return of History.”
12. The three principles of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace,” published in 1795, are also the conditions
upon which a just world order can be established: 1. “The Civil Constitution of Every State Should
Be Republican”; 2. “The Law of Nations Shall be Founded on a Federation of Free States”; 3. “The
Law of World Citizenship Shall Be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality.” See Immanuel
Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006).
13. For an assessment of these initiatives, see Omer Taspinar, “Turkey’s Middle East Policies:
Between Neo-Ottomanism and Kemalism,” Carnegie Papers, No 10 (September 2008).
14. Ghassan Charbel, “Turkey and the Troubled Lake,” Al Hayat, 25/02/2008, http://english.daralhayat.com/opinion/OPED/02-2008/Article-20080225-51443145-c0a8-10ed-017c-43245454376c/
story.html.
15. “A tale of two cultures,” al-Ahram Weekly, No. 879 (10 - 16 January 2008) http://weekly.
ahram.org.eg/2008/879/re63.htm.
16. For an assessment of Turkey’s increasing role in the Middle East, see Stephen Larrabee,
“Turkey Rediscovers the Middle East,” Foreign Affairs (July/August 2007) http://www.foreignaffairs.
org/20070701faessay86408/f-stephen-larrabee/turkey-rediscovers-the-middle-east.html.
17. See, for instance, the essays by Bilgin and Elis, Beng, Altunisik and Altinay in the special
issue of Insight Turkey, Volume 10, No 2 (April-June 2008) on Turkey’s soft power.
18. Ahmet Davutoglu, “Turkey’s Foreign Policy Vision: An Assessment of 2007,” Insight Turkey,
Vol. 10, No. 1 (January-March 2008), p. 79.
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29. A major study of the image of Arabs in Turkish society by SETA, the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research, has shown that contrary to the common view, positive images of
Arabs outweigh negative perceptions among the Turks today.
20. Dr. Radwan al Sayyid, “Turkey and the Arabs... the Equilibrium of a New Middle East,” alSharq Al-Awsat, 14/08/2006, http://www.aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=2&id=5998.
21. The authoritarian secularism of the Turkish state and such symbolic battlegrounds of religious freedom as the headscarf ban in Turkish universities are puzzling, to say the least, to Arab
audiences. See, for instance, Omer Taspinar, “An Uneven Fit: The ‘Turkish Model’ and the Arab
World,” The Brookings Project on US Policy Towards the Islamic World, No 5 (August 2003), p. 7.
22. “Islamist Lessons in Turkey,” Al-Ahram Weekly, Aug. 16-22, 2007.
23. Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, “Turkey and Its New Islamic Rulers,” Al-Ahram Weekly, Jan. 16-22,
2003.
24. Speaking to Al-Ahram in 2004, Ahmet Davutoglu rejects the ‘model paradigm’: “Turkey
does not want to be a model for anyone. What we do we do for the sake of our own society beacause
our only source of legitimacy is the people of Turkey.” Al-Ahram Weekly, Nov. 11-17, 2007.
25. Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, “Turkey and Its New Islamic Rulers,” Al-Ahram Weekly, Jan. 16-22,
2003.
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