Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans,
Volume 5, Number 2, August 2003
Turkey after Copenhagen: walking a tightrope1
BÜLENT ARAS and BÜLENT GÖKAY
The Copenhagen summit on European Union (EU) enlargement, held on 12–13
December 2002, declined to give Turkey a firm date for accession negotiations.
However, the summit has opened a crucial stage in Turkey’s relations with the
EU. The European Council declared that if the Council in December 2004, on
the basis of a report and a recommendation from the Commission, decides that
Turkey fulfils the Copenhagen political criteria, the EU will open accession
negotiations with Turkey ‘without delay’. It was also decided in Copenhagen
that in order to assist Turkey towards EU membership, the accession strategy
for Turkey would be strengthened; the process of legislative scrutiny would be
intensified; the Customs Union would be extended and deepened; and the
Union would significantly increase its pre-accession financial assistance for
Turkey.
Since the 1960s, Turkey has had an association agreement with what was
then the European Economic Community, and since December 1999, Turkey
has had the status of an EU candidate state. In December 2000, the EU agreed
on a document setting out terms on which Turkey could begin negotiating its
membership of the EU. Accordingly, in August 2002, the Turkish Parliament
voted in favour of a reform package aimed at preparing the country for EU
membership. Parliament abolished the death penalty in peacetime, granted
rights to minority Kurds and took steps to ease press restrictions. The Harmonisation Laws of August 2002, taken together with other changes such as lifting
the State of Emergency in the south-east and improving the conduct of
elections, are important steps to improve Turkey’s general human rights, and
political and social harmony.
The EU has given a cautious welcome to Turkey’s programme of social and
economic reforms. The Commission’s Progress Report on Turkey which was
issued in October 2002, noted that Turkey had taken significant steps, and that
Turkey was progressing on the right track. The report, on the other hand,
criticized Turkey for restricting freedom of expression, religion and association.
It also pointed to torture of prisoners and calls for stronger civilian control over
the military.2
1
A shorter version of this paper was first published in the Turkish Daily News, 11 February 2003.
The most obvious embodiment of the dominant role of the military in Turkish civic and political
affairs is the National Security Council, which exerts a powerful constitutional mandate over
government policy in a way unparalleled in Europe. According to Article 118 of the Turkish
Constitution, ‘the National Security Council shall submit to the Council of Ministers its views on
taking decisions and ensuring necessary coordination with regard to the formulation, establishment
and implementation of the national security policy of the state. The Council of Ministers shall give
2
ISSN 1461-3190 print/ISSN 1469-963X online/03/020147–17  2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1461319032000097914
148 Bülent Aras and Bülent Gökay
It is critical to remember just how far Turkey had come to even enter the
frame for realistic consideration as a modern functioning democratic state with
appropriate respect for human rights. That has truly been a long road, and as
many strides as Turkey has taken along it, many more remain. It is equally
crucial to recall that genuine reform of the sort needed to meet the Copenhagen
criteria in both form and spirit, particularly the requirement of ‘stability of
institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect
for and protection of minorities’ needs more than formal legal change. It
requires a demonstrable commitment on the part of authorities at all levels to
enforce and ensure the new frameworks in practice. That in turn necessitates
both a determined ideological commitment to reform on the part of major
decision makers, and a period of transition during which new modes of
institutional and administrative behaviour are established and learned and
those officials entrenched in old modes of thinking and action are replaced. The
Copenhagen decision is based on this observation that Ankara still needs to
prove the practical implementation of the reforms and improve its political and
human rights record, and that is why there needs a further two years to
observe the implementation of the reform.
A new government for reform—a new beginning for Turkey?
On 3 November 2002, Turkey has broken sensationally with its political old
guard. The former governing parties all recorded less than 10 per cent of the
national threshold and are no longer represented in the National Assembly.
Turkey’s voters turned in vast numbers to a new political party with firm
Islamic roots. The Justice and Development Party (AK Party) was formed in
August 2001, by moderate members of Turkey’s outlawed pro-Islamic Virtue
Party. The AK Party was led by Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan, once mayor of
Istanbul. Its roots lie in two former Islamic parties, Welfare and Virtue, both
banned by Turkey’s secular establishment.
The elections throw up a number of fundamental questions. Will Turkey
become a more Islamic country? What was behind the election victory? Why
did the traditional parties fail? How will the election results affect Turkey’s
relations with Europe? But more significant than the above questions the recent
election results revived a deep-rooted perception in the Western world: liberal
democracy cannot exist in an Islamic country!
Is Islam compatible with liberal democracy?
Western critics often claim that Islam is incompatible with major aspects of
liberal democracy because of the fact that it has not gone through necessary
reformation and re-structuralization processes. Underlying the argument is the
assumption that the majority of Islamic people live today under backward and
totalitarian regimes because of Islam’s lack of individualism, which stultifies
intellectual growth and encourages despotism. The centuries old Western
Footnote continued
priority consideration to the decisions of the National Security Council concerning the measures that
it deems necessary for the preservation of the existence and independence of the State, the integrity
and indivisibility of the country and the peace and security of society.’
Turkey after Copenhagen 149
misperception (if not negligence) and its hegemonic approach to the Islamic
world are probably the main reasons for this simplistic image. For centuries,
the West has constructed an image of Islam as ‘the Other’, identifying Islam
with its most exotic elements. Islamic faith has been equated with fanaticism,
and Islamic political authority with despotism, Islamic tradition with backwardness.
In fact, in its origins, Islam was highly individualist. Bringing to the tribal
Arabs a new religious doctrine in juxtaposition to Judaism and Christianity,
early Islam emphasized the responsibility of the human individual for his/her
own actions. This in turn meant that virtue was transferred away from the tribe
and into the hands of its individual members. Historically, this reflects the
transition in the Arabic peninsula from a nomadic and tribal society to a more
settled, agricultural and mercantile one. The old tribal solidarities were replaced by a strong emphasis on the rights and responsibilities of individual
members of the society. All this was happening as Mecca was emerging as the
new trading centre in the Middle East.
From the beginning of the emergence of the Koran there was quite a large
degree of flexibility in interpreting the message of the holy book. Of the 6000
or so verses in the Koran, less than a tenth are concerned with legislation and
of these the vast majority are concerned with religious matters. Those that can
be strictly defined as legal do not touch on any form of social relationship
outside the family. The result is a huge legislative area where all kinds of
practical and pragmatic interpretations and improvisation are possible.
During the Prophet’s time, Muhammad himself clarified any ambiguity or
contradiction in law. In the years following his death it became increasingly
apparent that the holy book on its own, or the Prophet’s various sayings and
practices, could not serve as an adequate basis for the formulation of Islamic
law. Then codification of Islamic law came on to the agenda through human
interpretation that was thus intimately connected to the need for political
stability and consensus.
This openness, however, lost its ground in the following long periods. The
Islamic reformers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, looking at their own
societies, felt that reason had been weakened as a result of the closing of the
door to individual interpretations in the medieval ages. They wanted to recover
what they saw as the rationalism of early Islam. Once this door was re-opened,
they supposed that the exercise of reason would stimulate Muslims to find
modern solutions to current problems. The individual was thus reintroduced as
a significant category in Islamic thinking. Most importantly, they emphasized
that the principles of Islamic faith did not necessarily contradict with those of
modernity. While Islamic law in early Islamic societies was remarkably precise
as regards the rules concerning devotion and worship, it is rather imprecise as
regards the rules concerned with social relations. The reformers argued that
this invited individuals to exercise reason and free will in order to solve their
social problems. They, therefore, concluded that it was possible to reconcile the
Islamic rules concerning devotion and worship with the secular law of modern
times.3
3
Bernard Lewis, ‘Islam and liberal democracy: a historical overview’, Journal of Democracy, 7(2),
1996, pp. 52–63.
150 Bülent Aras and Bülent Gökay
Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of studies done in the West
have concentrated on radical Islam and fundamentalist Islamic movements,
most Muslims follow principles—such as democracy, the separation of religion
from politics, women’s rights, freedom of expression and support for progress—
that can be described as liberal. There is a growing number of Muslims who
share common concerns with Western liberalism, one of which is peaceful
multi-religious coexistence. Three historic developments stimulated the increasing relevance of liberal approaches in Islam: the spread of secular education in
the Islamic world, as a result of which the monopoly of the seminaries over
religious discourse was broken; the growth of international communications,
which has made Muslims more aware than ever of the global liberal norms and
institutions; and the failure of Islamic regimes to provide an attractive alternative in practice. The regimes in Sudan and Pakistan, for example, have proved
to be no less corrupt and totalitarian after the Islamization of the polity than
before. Taliban rule in Afghanistan horrified most Muslims.4
Today, there are about 18 million Muslims living within the countries of the
EU. It is now more difficult to draw the boundaries of the Islamic world in
comparison to early periods.5 The vast majority of these Muslim immigrants in
Western Europe identify strongly with Islam, but have so far shown no interest
in extremist or fundamentalist movements. On the contrary, these immigrants
are increasingly taking part (sometimes as citizens) in the democratic processes
of their adopted societies. Their Islam is individualistic and pluralistic, allowing
flexibility for a personal and selective experience of their faith, in which there
is room for internal debate and tolerance towards other ways of belief and
thinking.6
This is, indeed, very similar to the historical experience of most of the
Ottoman period. Islam in the Ottoman Empire generally remained under the
state’s guidance as a matter for the private sphere. A body of laws and
regulations existed independently from Islamic Law, giving elasticity in formulating state policies and interpreting the stipulations of Islamic Law in the most
liberal manner. It was encouraged that religious institutions should adopt
flexible attitudes toward the changing socio-economic conditions and the
requirements of new situations. The commercial and criminal courts existed as
secular courts side by side with the Sharia’t courts. Moreover, the rulers of the
empire accepted the practical fact that it was a multi-religious state in which
Christian and Jewish subjects should better be governed by the rules of their
own churches. The Republic of Turkey, on the other hand, has had a completely
different historical experience so far.
Emergence of a new ‘religion’ of the state: Secular Republicanism in Turkey7
From the start, the Turkish republic emerged as a state with a military backbone,
possessed of an official ideology—known as Kemalism after the founder of the
4
Charles Kurzman, MERIA Journal, 3(3), September 1999, pp. 1–9.
M. Katik, ‘A changing Turkey awaits European recognition’, Eurasia Insight, 18 December 2002.
6
Bernard Lewis, ‘Islam and liberal democracy: a historical overview’, Journal of Democracy, 7(2),
1996, pp. 52–63.
7
Most of this section is based on the research provided by Kumru Baser in her unpublished paper,
‘First steps toward secularisation, centralisation and Turkification’. We are grateful to her for allowing
us to use her material here.
5
Turkey after Copenhagen 151
republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk—committed to statism and a tight information policy and administered by a militantly secular small modernizing elite.
Mustafa Kemal was a brilliant general who was the key person in saving
post-World War I Turkey from being carved up by Britain, France, Italy, and
Greece. Under the extremely unfriendly conditions of the immediate postWorld War I years, it was a truly commendable achievement for the founders
of the republic to establish an independent state in 1923. Just 5 years earlier, at
the end of World War I it had seemed to many that a regional system
controlled by the British Empire would be successfully established over the
lands of the Ottoman Empire.
Within this hopeless situation the leaders of the Turkish national movement
utilized every possible opportunity presented by post-war circumstances. They
used their ethnic and religious prestige among the Muslim populations of the
Caucasus to increase their credibility in the eyes of the Bolsheviks. On the
diplomatic front, the Turkish nationalists exploited the divergence of policy
within the Allied camp and the antagonism between Soviet Russia and Britain.
In the end, the independence of Turkey was safeguarded as securely as
possible between Soviet Russia in the north and British controlled lands in the
south.
The symbols and values employed to mobilize people during the War of
Independence were very much religiously determined and the emphasis in the
discourse was on Ottoman nationalism and Muslim solidarity.8 Various
promises made to protect and preserve the sultanate and more importantly the
Caliphate provided the Anatolian movement a much wider support among the
Kurdish population than they would otherwise have had.
The first steps of departure from this wider understanding (Ottoman and
Muslim rather than Republican and Turkish) of the state were taken even
before the declaration of the republic. In January 1921, the Grand National
Assembly adopted the Law on Fundamental Organisation which declared that
‘sovereignty without any conditions belongs to the nation’.9 In November 1922, the
assembly adopted decisions which abolished the sultanate, but retained the
Caliphate. In October 1922 the leader of the War of Independence, Mustafa
Kemal signalled the change when he said, ‘three and a half years ago we were
living as a religious community […]. Since then we are living as a nation’.10
The year 1922 witnessed the military triumph of the Turkish nationalist
movement, which evolved from its original role of liberating the country from
European occupation into a movement with the more far-reaching goal of
modernizing the Turkish state and society. In this way a new Turkish state
emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. This was at the cost of a
struggle that had extended Turkish involvement in World War I by four years.
The social cost, however, was far greater.
The year 1923 was a time for the establishment of the basic institutions of
8
This point is supported by many historians. According to B. Lewis for example the National Pact
adopted in January 1920, spoke of Ottoman Muslims and not of the Turks, in The Emergence of Modern
Turkey, p. 346. Also according to S. Kili, the opening ceremony of Grand National Assembly in Ankara
in April 1920 incorporated several Islamic rituals, in Turk Devrim Tarihi [The History of Turkish
Revolution], pp. 54–55.
9
K. Kirisci and G. M. Winrow, The Kurdish Question and Turkey, p. 93.
10
In Ataturk’un Soylev ve Demecleri [The Interviews and Speeches of Ataturk], p. 45.
152 Bülent Aras and Bülent Gökay
the new Turkey. An economic congress was held in Izmir in February–March
1923. During the same month, Mustafa Kemal developed his critique of the
economic backwardness of his country and its Ottoman–Islamic culture, and
introduced his main goal as to achieve Western standards of political and
economic management. The principal task was to establish the infrastructure
necessary to reduce the social and cultural differences and economic gap
between Turkey and the West.
At the beginning of the Anatolian struggle, Mustafa Kemal had said to
Halide Edib that ‘they [the Western powers] will find that we are as good as
they are’. He tried to prove this in many different ways for the rest of his life.
The Turkish delegation at Lausanne sought to convince the British, French and
Italian delegates that the Ankara government had nothing in common with the
‘old Eastern Turk’ represented by the Ottoman Empire. The new Turkey
identified itself directly and immediately with the history and culture of the
Western world, claiming a total break with the Ottoman and Islamic past.
This was a period during which the new regime started to transform social
and political life in Turkey. The opposition began to manifest itself through
two major events that took place soon after the proclamation of the republic:
the abolition of the Caliphate followed by the expulsion of all the members of
the former imperial family on 3 March 1924. On 8 April, a National Law Court
Organisation Regulation (Mahkeme Teskilati Kanunu) abolished the old
Islamic Shari’a courts and transferred their jurisdiction to the secular courts.
The religious schools and teaching foundations were closed, and were replaced
with a modern secular education system by another law. The religious brotherhoods and their publications were banned in 1925.11 These events were seen as
marking the beginning of a series of reforms that would shake the foundations
of the country’s social and cultural life.
The Caliphate was a source of identification for the Muslim subjects of the
Ottoman Empire and therefore provided a strong bond between the Turks and
the Kurds for centuries.12 First the abolishment of the sultanate, then the
Caliphate ‘removed the secular and spiritual bases from which the authority of aghas
and shaikhs, however indirectly, derived’.13 The abolishment of the Caliphate was
only the first step in secularization.14 It was immediately followed by other
laws which crushed the foremost expressions of Kurdish identity in the public
sphere. The religious schools and brotherhoods together were the main vehicles for the Kurds to maintain their language and other aspects of their cultural
existence. Therefore, standard and secular education in Turkish as the official
language deprived the Kurds of the most important means to preserve and
maintain their cultural identity. The use of the Kurdish language was further
limited by the judicial reforms. The Kurds had to use the official language in
the new courts. These reforms also marked the beginning of the turkification
process, in other words the beginning of building a Turkish nation, based on
the elements of the Turkish ethnicity, on the remains of what was left of the
11
The religious brotherhoods to a large extend went underground and were politicized more than
ever. They still remain remarkably powerful.
12
Eric J. Zurcher, Turkey: A Modern History, p. 178.
13
D. McDowall, The Kurds, p. 15.
14
For a detailed account and analysis of the secular reforms, see Niyazi Berkes, The Development
of Secularism in Turkey, especially Chapter 15 for the relevant period.
Turkey after Copenhagen 153
Ottoman Empire. The first Prime Minister of Turkey, Ismet Inonu, best expressed this grand aim in 1925:
Nationalism is our only factor of cohesion.… In the face of a Turkish majority other
elements have no kind of influence. We must turkify the inhabitants of our land at any
price and we will annihilate those who oppose the Turks or ‘le Turquism’.15
In addition to the religious establishment, other elements in Turkish politics
opposed the new secular measures from a non-religious position. For many
members of the opposition, it was not worth passing from a constitutional
monarchy to an absolutist republic. The people did more than just ask questions—they rioted and rebelled. The most important resistance to the regime
came from the Kurdish minority in this early period. When the Turkish
Republic was created, its citizens were faced with the problem of identity. The
population was predominantly Muslim because most of the non-Muslim population of Anatolia had fled Turkey as a result of the conflicts between 1913 and
1923, and the transfer of populations agreed to at the Lausanne Conference
largely completed this process. The population of the new Turkish Republic
was, however, ethnically still mixed, with the Kurds being the largest minority
group. The minorities in Turkey were defined by the religious differences
in the Lausanne Treaty. Therefore, the Kurdish population never enjoyed
minority status in modern Turkey due to their affiliation to Islam.
On 29 October 1924, the Grand National Assembly accepted a new constitution and declared Turkey a republic. The constitution forbade the use of
Kurdish in public places. Law number 1505 made it possible for the land of
large landowners to be expropriated and given to the new Turkish settlers in
Kurdistan. The word ‘Kurdistan’ was omitted from all educational books and
Turkish geographical names were gradually substituted for Kurdish throughout the country. Kemalist elite’s centralizing policies sparked insurrections.
During the immediate post-war years, the Kemalist leadership explicitly
defended the right of self-determination of the Kurds and considered their
participation in the establishment of the republic as an expression of their free
will.16 An interview given by Mustafa Kemal as late as 1923 is only one of
many documents supporting this suggestion. Answering the questions of
Turkish journalists Mustafa Kemal says:
the regions which are populated by the Kurds will have their own autonomous
administration. Other than that they have to be considered as part of the nation of
Turkey.17 The Grand National Assembly of Turkey consists of both Kurdish and Turkish
representatives and both elements18 united all their benefits and their future.19
15
Quote in B. Simsir, Ingiliz Belgeleriyle Turkiye’de Kurt Sorunu: 1925–1938 [The Kurdish Question in
Turkey in British Documents: 1925–1938], p. 58.
16
Dogu Perincek supports his argument with speeches made by M. Kemal in the Grand National
Assembly in Ankara found in the parliamentary archives. For details see D. Perincek, Kurtulus
Savasinda Kurt Politikasi [The Kurdish Policy during the War of Liberation].
17
It should be noted that M. Kemal does not speak of a Turkish nation but instead uses the term
‘nation of Turkey’ here.
18
The term ‘element’ was used to indicate ‘nation’, ‘ethnicity’ or ‘community’ in Turkish political
language at the time.
19
Quote in Mustafa Kemal, Eskisehir-Izmit Konusmalari, 1923 [Mustafa Kemal, the Speeches of
Eskisehir-Izmit, 1923], p. 105. Translated by the author of this thesis.
154 Bülent Aras and Bülent Gökay
However, the first republican constitution of Turkey in 1924 did not have any
reference to the promised autonomy.
The first Kurdish uprising after the proclamation of the republic, that of
Sheikh Said, occurred in February 1925. This uprising, aimed at Kurdish
national goals, was led largely by the Nakshbandi order and its sheikhs due to
their traditional position and the high regard in which the Kurdish population
held them. While the Sheikh Said rebellion was basically nationalist in nature,
its mobilization, propaganda and symbols were those of a religious rebellion.
The Sheikh Said rebellion was the first large-scale uprising by the Kurds in
Turkey. It took a full-scale military operation to put it down. This was followed
by a number of other Kurdish rebellions that were more nationalist in tone.20
The consequences of the rebellions for Turkey, however, were far more
important than the rebellions themselves.
These rebellions gave the leaders of the republic an opportunity to silence
the opposition. It contributed to the creation of a harsh political culture
whereby most serious subsequent opposition to government policies or comprehensive disagreement with its progress laid open the possibility that disaffected groups would be labelled as traitors. The post-Ottoman Turkish mind
has been formed with a security-first approach to societal problems and new
security culture placed Islam and Kurds at the core of its cognitive map of
threat perception. The leadership became less and less tolerant of dissent and
increasingly disillusioned with the masses, particularly the peasants.
It was in this atmosphere that the social reforms were undertaken, starting
with the one known as the ‘Hat Revolution’. The Hat Law was introduced in
August 1925, when the traditional turban, or fez (traditional male headgear),
was replaced by a European hat. Women were prevented from wearing the
veil. State employees were forbidden to grow beards and were not allowed to
wear ‘un-contemporary’ clothing, or traditional Islamic dress. Dress in
Ottoman society had been a mark of social as well as official status, and
without his turban and gown a Muslim cleric was nobody. Mustafa Kemal
chose Kastamonu, one of the most conservative towns in Anatolia, to launch
his ‘Hat Revolution’. There was a serious reaction from the religious circles.
Following the adoption by the assembly of the law mandating the wearing of
hats, on 25 November 1925, a series of explosions occurred in various places in
Anatolia. Between 15 and 20 people eventually lost their heads for wishing to
cover them as they saw fit.
By 1925 an independent Turkish republic was firmly established with its
new republican institutions and secular modernizing ideology. A completely
new social order was created under the rule of a small secular elite. Western
music, opera and ballet as well as the theatre became fashionable. In pursuing
their modernizing mission, the Kemalist leadership of Turkey believed it
necessary to dominate every aspect of the life of the people they governed. It
literally ripped out Turkey’s Ottoman–Islamic roots and replaced them with a
form of imitation Europeanism that provided the ground for a serious identity
crisis.
20
The last such insurrection was put down by the government in 1937 (British Documents on Foreign
Affairs, Part II, Series B, Turkey, Iran and the Middle East, 1918–1939, Vol. 34, edited by B. Gökay,
University Publications of America, 1997).
Turkey after Copenhagen 155
The events of these early years mark an important watershed in the
development of the Turkish state ideology. During those years, Mustafa Kemal
and his close associates by their actions resolved a fundamental question—
whether the new Turkish regime would reach an accommodation with the
people or rule over them. Any genuine accommodation with people would
have required a serious modification of the militantly secular Turkish nationalism. The leadership chose to decide what the country needed and enforced its
decisions, regardless of what the majority of the people thought about the
matter. In this way, a critical mass of repression was built up, at least until the
end of the one-party period. With the transition to a multi-party system the
harsh secularist policies of the state were softened to some extent, but the gap
already created between the governing elite at the centre and the people on the
periphery continued to grow as a result of firmly established bureaucratic
control of the centre.
The Turkish Republic emerged as a reliable ally of the West, as a bulwark
against Soviet Russia, which was the life’s achievement of Mustafa Kemal in
Lord Kinross’ words, but over its own people it had to establish a rigidly
secular system tightly enforced by the army. In the eight subsequent decades,
secularism itself has come to resemble a state religion in Turkey. Personal
expressions of faith that are protected as fundamental rights in the Western
world, such as a woman covering her hair, are grounds for denying admission
to state universities or employment as a civil servant. The Turkish nationalist
denial of the Ottoman–Islamic heritage constituted a major problem particularly in terms of understanding and connecting the majority Muslim people of
Turkey. The power and legitimacy of the new republic were from the start
based on a conflictual relationship between the secular centre and deeply
religious and traditional periphery. The prescriptions Mustafa Kemal strove to
enforce as solutions for a modernized Turkey were widely questioned or flatly
rejected by large groups in Turkey.
Social and political transformations
In the republican period, leaders of the Islamic movement, tarikat (religious
order) sheikhs and professional men of religion lost their status and official
power as a result of the introduction of the secular reforms, and their various
attempts to revolt were crushed severely by authorities in the 1920s and 1930s.
Islamic groups generally stayed underground during the one-party regime
between 1923 and 1946. With the transition to a multi-party system in 1946,
Islamic groups formed covert and overt alliances with the ruling Democratic
Party (DP), 1950–1960. This was the first period during which the secularist
policies of the state were softened to allow some moderate Islamist groups to
operate legally within a centre-right party. With the establishment of the
National Order Party (NOP) in 1970 by Necmettin Erbakan, Islamists for the
first time had an autonomous party organization through which they could
campaign for their agenda. Later in the mid-1980s the Özal government’s
flexible, perhaps even encouraging, response to Islamic activism and political
liberalization opened up new opportunities for Islamist groups, the activities of
which resulted in the Welfare Party’s election victory and its becoming a
coalition partner in 1997.
156 Bülent Aras and Bülent Gökay
All this political process was also accompanied by a social and economic
transformation which eventually prepared the ground for the recent victory of
the AK Party. The centre—made up of the civil servants, soldiers, bureaucrats,
intellectuals, and state-protected industrialists–businessmen—started to break
up in the 1970s, assuming new social and cultural characteristics. The main
reason for this was the fast growing and persistent movement from the
periphery towards the centre. Some of those social groups, that once made up
the periphery, started to gain more and more socio-economic mobility and
moved to the cities in large numbers. These made up an important section of
the young and dynamic middle class. Many of them have become effective
social and economic actors through their business activities and entrepreneurship.
This new and important group of people brought their provincial identity
and more traditional values and demands with them into the centre. As these
people place more importance on religion and Islamic practice, they wanted to
express their religious identity more openly, and hence some of these demands,
differentiating them from the more urban and secular old business elite, have
found a place in the centre.
This tension between the new urban middle class, whose members originally sprang from the provincial towns and the old established secular urban
elite is one of the key factors to understand the rise and increased support for
the Islamist political parties. In the recent elections, three other significant
groups joined this new middle class and became the basis for the AK Party’s
historic election success. First, the large university student population and
those who wait to enter into universities became seriously frustrated by the
inability of the established centre-right and centre-left parties to provide
solutions to Turkey’s long-standing social and economic problems. Secondly,
members of the unskilled young urban sub-proletariat have increased in
number with migration and high levels of unemployment. And finally, some of
the state-employed workers were affected by falling real wages and high
inflation, particularly since the early 1990s. The last two were the groups
hardest hit by the economic crisis.
One of the most dynamic changes in Turkish society has been transformation of the attitude of the Islamic masses toward the idea of Europe. Until
quite recently they were not well regarding the membership of the EU and
having a deep suspicion toward Europeans. There was a fundamental fear of
losing religious and national identity if Turkey joined the European club. The
allegations against Europeans were changing from having secret designs for
dissolving Turkey to following a hidden Zionist agenda against the Islamic
world in general. These were mostly the Islamic elite’s ideas that contributed
to shape Muslim perceptions of Europe and the West in general.
However, a number of recent developments paved the way for the change
from this negative approach toward the EU. One breakthrough development is
the success of Turkish migrant workers’ adaptation to the local conditions in
different countries of Europe. It was obvious that Turkish workers were
keeping their identity while living in another culture. In some cases, due to
tightening of control over Islamic activities in Turkey, some European countries
were found preferable in terms of practising their religious faith freely.
Another ongoing process was the enlargement of economic space. In the last
Turkey after Copenhagen 157
decade, the policies oriented towards greater liberalization and a shift to
export-oriented industrialization have led to the emergence of new, dynamic
export-oriented, industrialists on a small and medium scale, especially in
traditionally conservative Anatolian cities. The new industrialists, however,
developed out of establishment venue and created an alternative economy
widening the well-established boundaries and challenging the rationale of the
Turkish economy. These were the main beneficiaries of this export expansion
which was largely toward European countries and have been the main group
that wants further economic integration with Europe.
This transformation is clear evidence of the gap between elite segments of
the Islamic movements (that determine the cognitive map of Islamic identity)
and their followers. The recent polls show that almost 80 per cent of Turkish
people want to be within the EU and the discussion over the changing
perception of Europe shows that this desire is not baseless. What brought the
AK Party to the fore in recent elections is their ability to grasp the changing
realities of Turkish society. Older leaders of political Islam in Turkey proved
themselves not capable of understanding this shift and tried to explain their
lost popularity with some obscure international conspiracy approaches, and
this explains their total failure in the recent elections.
Among the more specific reasons for the AK Party’s election victory, there
is first and foremost the failure of the governing parties and also of the
opposition party, the Social Democratic CHP, which proved once again to be
nothing more than a selective ‘regime guard’. Since its establishment the AK
Party developed its political position on the basis of two distinct approaches.
It expressed the widely shared demand of religious freedom on the European
model of the relationship between state and religion. In this way, it brought the
issue of religious freedom to the centre of the political debate not as a religious
issue, but alongside with wider aspects of freedom of opinion and human
rights. In doing so, adopted a pro-EU stance.
The second reason is the AK Party’s fundamental criticism of the country’s
economic and social crisis. The party focused on the significant responsibility
of the centre parties, right as well as left, in bringing the country economically
to ruin and deepening social imbalances. There have been numerous corruption scandals in recent decades, although few have been proved by the courts.
Turkey ranked 64th out of 102 countries in the Transparency International
Corruption Perceptions Index for 2002, with a score of 3.2 out of 10. During the
election campaign, the AK Party focused on corruption, economic crisis, the
country’s indebtedness, and social injustice.21
On 3 November the AK Party came out of the elections as the single leading
party, winning an overwhelming majority of the votes. The party, which grew
out of popular Islamist support, won despite all the intense campaigns presenting it as a threat to the secular regime. The AK Party is described by its
founders not as a religious party, but a party in which religious people feel at
home. One way of looking at this is to attribute this result to the fact that the
people were very angry with the failure and arrogance of the established
parties and say that the election result is an expression of the growing
discontent with the country’s corrupt political elite. Certainly there is an
21
Oxford Analytica Daily Brief, 19 February 2001 and 6 January 2003.
158 Bülent Aras and Bülent Gökay
element of truth in this. Turkey has experienced a worsening economic crisis
over the past 18 months. Two million workers have lost their jobs and the value
of the Turkish currency has halved again against the US dollar. Still, it would
be wrong to reduce the AK Party’s success to just an expression of the people’s
anger and disappointment with the centre parties.
It was important that new and young people established the AK Party with
idealism. It was also important that they were new but not completely
unknown and therefore did not pose a threat as the unknown normally would.
Most of the founders of the AK Party came from the National View Organization. They were in the Welfare Party, and their leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan
served successfully as the mayor of Istanbul. They have adopted a democratic
attitude that is quite convincing because they were faced in the recent past with
a lot of anti-democratic oppression and injustice themselves.
The AK Party is consistent on the position that they respect traditional
moral values, but they do not want Turkey to shut itself out of the Western
world, but rather to join the EU instead. They represent not a militant religious
response to secularism in general but rather a European human rights perspective against the authoritarian aspects of the secular system in Turkey. They do
not want to establish a religious regime based on Shari’a law, but they wish to
establish basic human rights to allow people to freely express their beliefs—
religious, political or ethnic. This is what most of Turkey’s population has
wanted for decades: to exercise their faith freely and quietly. Is this an attempt
to undermine the state, or a source of strength in democracy?After the troubled
years of the 1970s, and later the Welfare Party’s confrontational government in
1996, an important and dynamic section of the Islamist movement seems to
have learned an important lesson from the past: in a democracy, moderation is
more effective than either extremism or confrontation. The AK Party is the
product of this important lesson. There are different ethnic, religious, and
political sections in Turkey. You cannot eliminate these differences. You have
to accommodate them. One has to learn to live with the permanent presence of
the other.
Facing the future
This is a truly new beginning, a new era in Turkish history. All the political
figures which dominated the past two decades of Turkish politics have been
swept aside, at least for the time being. The devastating rebuff to the centre
parties is also a strong signal for the coming of a shift in power in the top
economic players: the competitiveness and dynamism of resurgent Anatolian
capital, represented by the AK Party, against the old state-supported holdings
which have dominated Turkey’s post-war economy.
It is clear that the new government faces difficult days. The economic and
social problems are enormous. But there are also good reasons to be optimistic
about the prospects of the AK government’s performance. There seem to exist
many of the important conditions for success. This is one of the most stable
governments Turkey has experienced for decades. The economy has clearly
bottomed out and is recovering reasonably strongly.
At the end of September 2002, Turkey ratified the International Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 30 years after it
Turkey after Copenhagen 159
signed it. And a 15-year state of emergency, which once covered 11 war-torn
provinces in mainly Kurdish south-east Turkey, was lifted as part of recent
EU-backed moves by Ankara to improve the status of the Kurdish minority.
More than 50,000 people have returned to villages from which they were
evacuated during the conflict with the PKK.22
The new government regards the continuation of the economic stabilization
process and EU accession as the main goals. There has been some criticism of
the tactics of Prime Minister Abdullah Gül and party leader Recep Tayyip
Erdoǧan, but their claim to have pushed forward Turkey’s accession to the EU
is credible. The government’s decision to implement the reforms needed to
obtain a certificate of good conduct from the EU in December 2004 will
determine the political agenda for the coming years. The government’s positive
attitude to the reforms enjoys widespread support.
With the Copenhagen summit out of the way, the government will most
likely concentrate on the economy. The focus is on priorities and short-term
perspectives. The main priority is to balance the needs and aspirations of the
AK Party’s voters, with its stated desire to reach out to the majority of Turkish
voters, who did not vote for the party. Given Turkey’s tight fiscal and external
balances it is clear that the new government cannot deliver more social
spending. It can, however, deliver on the anti-corruption agenda. To launch a
high profile cleaning up campaign is important in the short term also to
maintain its popular support. There are strong signals at present that the
campaign is cautiously under way. At the end of 2002, the economy was
responding to the programme better than had been expected. There are
positive indications, such as higher growth, lower inflation and lower interest
rates, and the markets seem to be reasonably confident that the AK Party
government will act responsibly. This confidence is probably justified.
It is likely that the AK Party will move carefully on the social agenda, wary
of triggering a reaction from the secular establishment, the judiciary and the
army. The leadership of the AK Party has displayed a good sense of priorities,
capturing centre stage with its campaign to hasten EU accession. The leader of
the party, Erdoǧan, appears to be both tough and prudent. Many observers do
not see any serious conflict when the AK leaders sit with the military brass in
National Security Council meetings.
***
Today, the political system appears to be a lot more stable and stronger than,
let’s say, in 1960 or in 1980. The AK Party’s commitment to work within the
system is the key to this balance situation. These are good signs for Turkey, and
for Europe. What better example could there be than a moderate Islamist party
that just swept to power in free and fair elections, which is consistently in
favour of democratic reform and closer relations with Europe?
All these changes potentially bring an altogether more flexible and positive
approach to various issues the country is faced with. In foreign policy, for
22
The PKK was an offshoot of the Turkish left, founded to establish a Marxist state in south-eastern
Turkey. The PKK has transformed itself into a Kurdish nationalist organization that manipulates the
symbols of left-wing ideology.
160 Bülent Aras and Bülent Gökay
instance, the new government seems to have easily adopted a more flexible
position than its predecessors on Cyprus. As a result, for the first time since the
1974 Turkish military intervention in the island, there is now a realistic
possibility that the Cyprus problem may be moving toward resolution.
The Iraqi situation presents a far more serious and complicated challenge to
the AK Party government. As the USA was moving towards a military
invasion of Iraq, the government in Turkey found itself in a particularly
difficult position. Its alliance with the USA was putting a strong pressure on
the Turkish decision makers to take a clear stand in a possible war against
Saddam Hussein. Yet, the AK Party government has presented itself as more
democratic, more responsive to the public than many of its predecessors. And
the Turkish public opinion, Islamist as well as secular, is strongly opposed to
war, acutely aware of the sufferings of the Iraqi people. Everyone in Turkey
remembers the columns of refugees that poured into south-east Turkey at the
end of the Gulf War 12 years ago. Economic considerations are also important
in understanding the difficulty the Turkish government was facing. Turkey
suffered severe economic losses in the first Gulf War as a result of its support
for the USA. Many in Turkey remained fearful about the economic impact of
a new war at a time when the country was trying to come out of its worst
economic crisis in decades. So far, several weeks after the start of the war in
Iraq, the AK Party government has been walking a tightrope between
conflicting pressures.
Ever since the US administration took a decision to attack Iraq to bring
about a regime change in Baghdad, even without UN sanction, pressures
accumulated on Turkey. For conducting a successful and short war to minimize the American and British casualties, the US administration had asked for
permission for use of Turkish bases in south-east Anatolia to station over
60,000 US troops, in order to open a second front against Iraq. It was done in
its usual intensive fashion of public and Western media led so-called bribing
and arm twisting. Finally, Turkey’s MPs surprised the world by voting ‘no’ to
US troops being based in the country. A bully who can browbeat or batter
smaller kids, sooner or later provokes antagonism and resistance in the whole
community. Something like that took place in late February–early March over
this issue. In the end, democratic institutions of the region’s largest democratic
republic rejected US troop presence on Turkish soil as American warships
waited off Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.
Many in Turkey share the opinion that powerful geopolitical interests are
fuelling the American war drive, and all these military ambitions are curtailing
democracy in Turkey and leading to more army intervention in politics. The
AK Party government is trapped between the pressures of the Bush administration and the large-scale anti-war sentiments in Turkey. A sizeable segment of
Turkey’s political and economic elite remains wary of the Bush administration’s grandiose plans to revamp the Middle East. Whatever might be the
differences between Turkey’s armed forces and its politicians, there seems to be
no dispute about their strategic objectives in relation to the US-led war in Iraq.
Both civilian and military leaders are very reluctant to abandon the cautious,
almost isolationist, foreign policy principles of the republic. It seems the
multi-dimensional characteristics of Turkey’s geography and history are at the
root of this critical position. Turkey’s geographic location has always encour-
Turkey after Copenhagen 161
aged the policy makers to adopt a careful and balanced approach to the
conflicts in the region.
Geographically, Turkey provides a bridge, in a literal sense, between
Europe and the Islamic Middle East, and historically the country has been the
grand bazaar where European and Asian civilizations meet each other. For the
last 80 years, although the elements of an interesting and uniquely colourful
cultural blend are there, this has been far from being a peaceful blend. The
short republican history has not been a period of smooth and peaceful
coexistence between various ethnic, social and cultural sections, which together
made up Turkey’s multi-ethnic and multi-cultural population.
Most of this period has been dominated by the state’s failed experimentation in maintaining security through repression. Successive governments
have made some progress towards establishing parliamentary democracy and
fundamental reforms, but national security has consistently been left to the
discretion of the security forces. Since 1960 successive governments in Turkey
have lived in the shadow of the unelected state within the state. The Interior
and Defence ministries, regional governors, the military, the police force and
various intelligence agencies have ruled the country above the law. In the past
42 years the military overturned three governments, suspended three parliaments and closed legally established political parties and trade union and civil
society organizations. Martial law courts hanged a prime minister and two
other ministers, tried many members of parliament and imprisoned and
tortured thousands of civilians.23
Modern Turkey is plagued by a number of political anomalies, the legacy
of strong military intervention, which appears to be completely at odds with
the general direction that the country is developing. Turkey has one of the most
sophisticated newspaper and publishing industries in the world, and its own
communications satellite. There are 300 private TV stations and more than 1000
private radio stations competing with the services of the state broadcaster, TRT.
Yet, television producers and musicians and directors are frequently tried in
military courts, academics and novelists are imprisoned, and newspapers are
closed because they have dared to criticize the anti-democratic and arbitrary
actions of the state.24
Despite this gloomy picture there are many economic, social and cultural
factors which have strong potential to work in favour of a peaceful and
consistent change. Turkey is a modern and relatively wealthy country with
many of the institutions and traditions necessary to sustain a modern liberal
state and society. Although Turkey’s recent political history has been repeatedly interrupted by military interventions, there has also been nearly half a
23
Adnan Ekmen, the state minister responsible for human rights in Tansu Ciller’s government in
the late 1990s admitted that ‘Inhumane treatment under custody and during an interrogation is
widespread’ (Transition, 2(6), 22 March 1996, p. 59).
24
In September 2002, Reporters Sans Frontieres denounced the kidnapping and intimidation of
Ahmet Ün, a journalist on a weekly paper in Diyarbakir. In its 2002 annual report Reporters Sans
Frontieres noted that ‘despite the announcements of democratic reforms within the framework of
Turkey’s candidacy for membership of the EU, prosecutions for beliefs and opinions are still
systematically and severely punished by virtue of a repressive legislative arsenal aided at protecting
the state from demands by the Kurds, Islamists, and the far left’ (Reporters Sans Frontieres, 2002 Annual
Report, 9 September 2002).
162 Bülent Aras and Bülent Gökay
century of multi-party democracy. There is relatively little inter-communal
violence between ordinary people of Turkish and Kurdish origin. Nobody in
public life questioned the desirability of harmony between citizens of Turkish
and Kurdish ethnicity. None of the political parties are promoting racial hatred.
Now, in the new political climate which emerged after the recent elections,
there seems to be a good chance to move strongly and consistently in this
direction of peace and harmony, and to combine disparate elements in a
context of democratic reform, understanding and tolerance. The victory of the
AK Party in the recent elections was a significant moment in this country of
about 67 million people, which has long struggled with its identity as a largely
Islamic nation oriented toward the West. ‘There is a growing hope that we are
seeing the last days of creaking and outmoded political machine, and the
demise of an entire class of political antiques.’25 The political sophistication and
moderation of the leaders of the AK Party hold out the hope of a form of
Islamic democracy that can coexist with the country’s secular political structure
and traditions.
Most of the responsibility for making the experiment succeed lies with the
vital relationship between the AK Party government and the secular elites,
particularly the leadership of the army and the judiciary. Both sides will need
to accommodate one another. But overall, all these depend on the government’s ability to juggle the pressures and requirements of a fast-changing
regional and global environment and deep-rooted and increasingly interdependent domestic context of economic, cultural and political issues of Turkey. As
Turkey is moving towards the EU without discarding its geopolitical role as a
bridge linking Europe, the Middle East and the Caucasus and Central Asia, the
nexus between its domestic situation and external geopolitical context is
tightening. At the beginning of the new millennium, Turkey’s internal scene
and external environment are increasingly bound together. The significant
dilemmas and pressures emerged as a result of the recent US-led war in Iraq
are clear indications of both how this nexus is growing and the dangers it could
pose for Turkey’s long-term self-definition and international orientation.
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Bülent Aras is an Associate Professor of International Relations, Fatih University, Istanbul.
Address for correspondence: Department of International Relations, Fatih
University, Istanbul, Turkey. E-mail: [email protected]
Bülent Gökay is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations, Keele University.
Address for correspondence: SPIRE, Keele University, Staffs ST5 5BG, UK.
E-mail: [email protected]