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    On Ukraine, Turkey Is Moving Cautiously Toward the West

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    Just days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the chief commentator of the Turkish daily Sabah, Mehmet Barlas, summed up his assessment of the situation with the sentence, “If we had to reckon with a war, President Erdogan would not have left today for a four-day trip to Africa.” He added that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, is in constant contact with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

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    “All experts,” the avowed Erdogan supporter continued, agreed that Washington was escalating the crisis to solidify its dominance in Western Europe. With that, Barlas also echoed the general mood in Turkey. It is fortunate, he said, that Russia’s president is much more reasonable and wiser than his American counterpart, Joe Biden.

    The Bond Between Erdogan and Putin

    This positive image of Putin and Erdogan’s familiarity with the Kremlin leader is no accident. Particularly since the failed coup attempt in Turkey in 2016, Erdogan has, with Putin’s help, been able to position himself independently of — and sometimes even against — the United States and Europe on key foreign policy issues.

    In Syria and Azerbaijan, Ankara and Moscow succeeded in marginalizing Western actors. In Libya and the eastern Mediterranean, Turkey acts as a competitor or even adversary to member states of the European Union.

    Turkey’s flirtation with Moscow led to concerns that Ankara might turn away from Europe altogether. That contributed to the EU’s kid-glove approach to Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean and Cyprus. It also resulted in Washington’s belated reaction to Turkey’s acquisition of Russia’s S-400 missile defense system with sanctions. It is true that Turkey has experience with Putin as a cool strategist and ruthless power politician in conflicts such as the one in Syria. But Erdogan has always seemed to succeed in avoiding escalation.

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    Despite all of Ankara’s tension with Moscow, Erdogan’s rapprochement with Russia has brought him much closer to his goal of strategic autonomy for his country from the West. Turkey skillfully maneuvered between the fronts of global rivalry and was able to considerably expand its scope and influence in just a few years.

    In this seesaw policy, however, Turkey is behaving much more confrontationally toward Western states than toward Russia. For years, the government press has painted a positive picture of Russia and a negative one of the United States and Europe. This is not without effect on Turkish public opinion. Around a month before Russia attacked Ukraine, in a poll carried out by a renowned opinion research institute, a narrow relative majority of 39% of respondents favored foreign policy cooperation with Russia and China instead of Europe and the United States.

    In the first days after Russia’s invasion, Ankara’s policy followed exactly the aforementioned pattern. Turkey condemned the attack, but it is not participating in sanctions against Russia. In the vote on suspending Russia’s representation rights in the Council of Europe, Turkey was the only NATO state to abstain and, as such, is keeping its airspace open to Russian aircraft.

    The West is paying particular attention to whether and how Turkey implements the Treaty of Montreux. The 1936 treaty regulates the passage of warships through Turkey’s Dardanelles and Bosporus Straits into the Black Sea. It limits the number, tonnage and duration of stay of ships from non-littoral states in the Black Sea. In the event of war, the convention stipulates that the waterways must be closed to ships of the parties to the conflict, and it entrusts Ankara with the application of the treaty’s regulations

    Ankara Swings Around

    It took Turkey four days to classify the Russian invasion as “war.” However, Ankara is still reluctant to officially close the waterways — as the treaty stipulates — to ships of parties to the conflict, Russia and Ukraine. Instead, Ankara is warning “all countries, Black Sea riparian or not,” against sending warships through the straits.

    In the literal sense, this step is not directed unilaterally against Moscow, but it also makes it more difficult for NATO ships to sail into the Black Sea. According to the treaty, however, the waterways may only be closed to warships of all countries if Ankara considers itself directly threatened by war. Consciously creating ambiguity, Turkey has triangulated between the West and Russia.

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    Almost imperceptibly at first, however, a reversal has now set in. There are four reasons for this. First, the West is showing unity and resolve unseen since the Cold War, and its sanctions are undermining Russia’s standing in the world. Second, Putin is losing his charisma as a successful statesman and reliable partner. Third, Ankara realizes that Putin’s vision of a great Russian empire could provoke more wars. Fourth, the ranks of the adversaries are closing and it is becoming more difficult for Turkey to continue its seesaw policy.

    Thus, strongly pro-Western tones have emerged from Ankara in recent weeks. Turkey will continue to support Ukraine in consultation with the West, according to the president’s spokesman. Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu now claims to have contradicted Russia’s wishes for the passage of warships through the Bosporus “in all friendship.” President Erdogan is also in favor of admitting Ukraine to the European Union and Kosovo to NATO.

    Moreover, Ankara is not contradicting reports by Ukrainian diplomats that Turkey is supplying more armed drones and training pilots to fly drones. On March 2, Turkey joined the vast majority of states in the UN General Assembly’s condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that asked Russia to “immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces.” Two days later, during the extraordinary meeting of NATO’s foreign ministers, Turkey supported the deployment of NATO’s Response Force to NATO countries neighboring Ukraine.

    It looks like Putin is not only bringing long-lost unity to the EU, but he is also reminding Turkey of the benefits of its Western ties. Western states should realize that only more unity among themselves and more determination will make Turkey reengage with the West.

    *[This article was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions relating to foreign and security policy.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Is There Any Place Strategic Ambiguity in Europe?

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      The world is watching Ukraine. This is a historic moment that leads to a significant deterioration in relations between Russia and the West. When Europe faces a geopolitical challenge that reminds everyone of the World Wars of the past century, the divisions deepen between the traditional West — mostly democracies — and “others.”

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      The inclination will be to put China in the same basket as Russia, even if China is still being cautious about its next steps. Many other countries will be pushed to choose. One country, Turkey, will soon face difficult choices, since balancing acts may not be enough this time around.

      A Tough Balance Between the West and Russia

      Turkey has been trying to diversify and balance its alliances between the West and others for a long time now. Turkey is a NATO member that possesses Russian anti-aircraft missile systems, namely the S-400. This purchase not only led to CAATSA sanctions by the United States — which was a first against a NATO ally — but also the removal of the country from the F-35 program.

      These measures did not hinder Turkey’s special relationship with Russia. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan always maintained personal relations with his counterpart in Moscow, Vladimir Putin. Even when they were at opposite ends of the theater of power — in Syria or Nagorno-Karabakh, for example — they kept talking. This did not change even after Turkey shot down a Russian plane in November 2015. Turkey’s dependence on Russian gas and tourism has also been a reason for their continued dialogue. Turkey also awarded the construction of its nuclear power plant — the Akkuyu plant — to Russia.

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      Today, Turkey is staying out of the sanctions schemes of the European Union and NATO. It has also tried juggling the Ukrainian demand to close the Turkish Straits to Russian warships — even if the Montreux Convention upholds the demand. Turkey stated that the Russian attack “is a grave violation of international law and poses a serious threat to the security of our region and the world.” It has hesitated, however, to move beyond that declaration. When the pressure mounted — masterfully and publicly handled by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — and other actors continued to announce historic decisions one after the other, Turkey had to make a decision on the Straits.

      It is important to remember that Turkey has also sold drones to Ukraine in the recent past and signed a free trade agreement, meaning that it was in a strong position to claim that it has supported Ukraine. Turkey even offered to mediate between Russia and Ukraine, but the offer has not been accepted as of yet.

      The longer Russian aggression continues, the more Turkey will be pushed to move more decisively. Even Switzerland declared that it will apply the EU’s sanctions on Russia. Candidate countries are also encouraged to follow the course. Soon, there will be no more room for strategic ambiguity.

      And When the Dust Settles?

      However, there is even a broader question that requires strategic thinking. When the dust settles, where would Turkey like to stand when the European security architecture of the 21st century is being discussed? Where it was in the 20th century — a member of NATO, the Council of Europe, an integral element of the so-called Western order — or with the “others”? Turkey has spent recent years trying not to choose and playing all sides against each other when necessary.

      The year 2022 was going to be decisive with regard to the European security architecture, even without a war on the continent. Europeans are already working on the publication of the “strategic compass” in addition to NATO’s strategic concept, which will be discussed in Madrid in June. These thought-provoking exercises have become even more significant in light of recent developments.

      The historic steps that both the EU and some of its member states are taking will set the tone when it comes to the European security architecture. In addition to the sanctions package, the EU is sending lethal weapons to a third country under the European Peace Facility. Germany is increasing its defense spending to more than 2% of its GDP while facilitating a one-off investment of €100 billion ($109 billion) for the Bundeswehr.

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      One should also underline the exemplary coordination between the EU and NATO. Nothing strengthens the transatlantic bond more than a Russian threat to the continent. Geopolitical challenges that were not expected in the 21st century are going hand in hand with the necessity for drastic moves. Concepts such as sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity, which are protected under international law, have become even more visible. One thing to expect now is that different camps across the world will close ranks.

      Will Turkey’s importance increase for the West, as it had during the Cold War? Maybe. It will surely play an important role in the Black Sea, especially when it comes to the Straits. However, once the cleavages between democracies and autocracies deepen, the state of affairs in Turkey will be even more important.

      Right now, these changes have caught Turkey off guard. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) is tired after 20 years in power. The government it leads is mostly seen as authoritarian by many in Europe. The Turkish economy is in never-ending decline. It is hard to look for long-lasting consensus in a society once it has become extremely polarized. This is not necessarily the best time to set directions for the decades to come. But the country may have no choice.

      Last but not least, the Ukraine crisis has demonstrated the importance of well-functioning relations with neighbors for European sovereignty. It is important to underline once again that European security is not only about the EU, but also its neighborhood. As an integral piece of European security architecture in the 20th century, Turkey will need to define where it stands very clearly. It is not only about who wins and who loses, but also about who will adapt to the changes that Europe is going through. It is time for reaffirmations for everyone. It would be beneficial for the European continent as a whole if Turkey also closed ranks with its traditional allies.

      *[This article was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions relating to foreign and security policy.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The War on Terror Was Never Turkey’s Fight

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      Do you know where you were on August 14, 2001? Perhaps not, since it isn’t a defining day in world history in quite the same way as September 11, 2001, or 9/11, as it’s become known. Yet in the Turkish political landscape, August 14, 2001, can now be seen as something of a watershed moment.

      It was on this day that the Justice and Development Party (AKP) was founded. One of its founding members was a man named Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was the latest in a long list of parties catering to a religiously devout and socially conservative constituency in Turkey. All the previous ones had been banned.

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      What makes August 14, 2001, so significant is the simple fact that the AKP was never banned. Despite the party’s daring to tread on secularist principles that few others had dared, this time, the country, with strong European Union support, had no appetite for military-backed bans.

      Turkey Says No

      Just as September 11 didn’t really come out of a clear blue sky for anyone observing the tide of Islamist militancy, so too the success of the AKP in Turkey did not come unannounced. It was a long time in the making, but its assumption of power, so soon after 9/11, has been defining for the country.

      By 2003, when George W. Bush’s war on terror was swinging into action in Iraq, the AKP took control of Turkey‘s government. Despite repeated attempts to shutter the party and even a failed 2016 coup, the AKP remains in power. As perhaps the most successful Islamist party in the Middle East, its relationship to both the events of 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror has always been a strained one. The Turkey of the 20th century would have been an unquestioning supporter of US policy. The new Turkey was not.

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      I was in Turkey on 9/11 and I saw the immediate reaction of ordinary people to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the hours after the towers fell, there were wild, yet in retrospect on-the-mark rumors that the US was about to bomb Afghanistan. The mood among ordinary Turks was not one of support.

      Visceral anger and anti-American sentiment were clearly palpable. While not outright cheering al-Qaeda, it was obvious that most people wouldn’t take the US side in a fight. This mood was reflected when Washington eventually went to war with Iraq and hoped to use the airbase at Incirlik in southeastern Turkey.

      The parliamentary vote that vetoed the use of the base for flights into Iraq was a pivotal one. It was the first strong sign of demonstrable national action in reflection of a national mood. In the post-Cold War world, Turkey’s Islamist government was ready to plow its own furrow.

      Who Defines Terrorism?

      The years that have followed have seen an ambiguous and often highly contorted relationship with the war on terror. Sometimes, Turkey has used the anti-terrorism concept to its own ends, as have many other US allies. At other times, it has turned a blind eye to activity that surely fell under the banner of terrorism.

      The Arab Spring of 2010 offered Islamists across the Middle East their big moment. Secular autocrats, long propped up by the West, tottered. Turkey’s Islamist government was one of the most vocal and active in attempting to ride this wave that they hoped would bring Islamist governments to a swathe of countries.

      Initially, the signs were good. The Muslim Brotherhood won the first free and fair elections in Egypt. Meanwhile, in neighboring Syria, the long-suppressed Islamist movement threatened to overwhelm the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. For a time, Turkey became a beacon of hope and a model for how the rest of the Middle East might evolve.

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      Turkish flags were being waved by demonstrators in Syria, and President Erdogan became the most popular leader in the region, loved by people far beyond his own nation. Then the Egyptian coup destroyed the Brotherhood, and Russia and Iran stepped in to save Assad’s regime in Syria. The mood soured for Turkey.

      In an attempt to rescue something in the Syrian conflict and in response to the collapse of domestic peace talks between the government and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, Turkey’s border became a very porous route for jihadists entering into Syria. In time, these jihadists named themselves the Islamic State and declared a caliphate. This audacious move severely upped the stakes on al-Qaeda’s attempts of 2001, with an even more brutal brand of terrorism. Turkey’s ambiguous attitude to these developments was hardly a war on terror.

      Yet by this stage, the concept behind the war on terror had become so nebulous and the AKP’s relations to the US so strained by Washington’s support for the Kurds in Syria, that it was a case of realpolitik all the way. To any accusation of soft-handedness toward terrorists, Turkey pointed to US attitudes vis-à-vis Kurdish militants.

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      President Erdogan has, over time, began to carve a space for himself as an anti-Western champion, a leader of some kind of latter-day non-aligned movement, a spokesman for Muslim rights worldwide. This political and cultural position has made Turkey’s place in a liberal, democratic world order highly questionable.

      What seems clear in retrospect is that both 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror were never Turkey’s fights. Due to the longstanding Turkish alliance with the US and NATO, these have been constantly recurring themes in Turkish politics. But the events that have been so central to US policymaking for the past two decades have generally been used to advance Ankara’s own strategic goals in light of the assumption of power and entrenched hegemony of the Islamist movement in Turkey’s contemporary politics.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Why Headscarves Matter So Much to Turkey

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      Many news outlets carried stories in mid-July of the Turkish government’s condemnation of a ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) upholding a ban on headscarves in certain circumstances, in which an employer wishes to convey a “neutral image.” In doing so, it is weighing into the culture wars over religious symbolism that Europeans will all be well aware of. Many European countries, in particular France, have seen high-profile clashes over the issue of religious symbols in state institutions.

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      Many readers would see Turkey’s condemnation as a simple case of an Islamist regime railing against Western suppression of Islam. Indeed, the government’s statement was full of accusations of Islamophobia in Europe. Yet such statements, coming out of Turkey, are not as simple as that.

      Those same readers might be surprised to discover that Turkey itself had banned headscarves in state institutions until very recently. This might make a governmental condemnation of a ban in Europe seem nonsensical. The reality helps to give context to the Turkish reaction.

      Wear Western Hats

      Condemnations of headscarf bans might ordinarily be expected to emanate from regimes such as the Iranian theocracy or the Saudi conservative monarchy. Coming out of the secular republic of Turkey, they might appear more curious, if it wasn’t for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s global image as a religious conservative.

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      His government’s sensitivity to headscarf bans is very personal indeed. In 2006, his own and other politicians’ wives were not invited to an official event by the then-Turkish president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, due to their wearing of headscarves. In 2007, there was an attempt by the military — a traditional guardian of Turkey’s ruling secular elite — to deny the presidency to Abdullah Gul of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) because his wife wore a headscarf.

      Such attitudes, which might appear highly intolerant in countries such as the United Kingdom, make more sense in places like France where the separation of church and state is a foundation of the republic. When modern Turkey was created in 1920, France became the model for how to build a modern state. A key element in the imitation of the French was the desire of Turkey’s first military rulers to suppress Islam.

      The Ottoman Empire, of which Turkey was the successor state, was an Islamic empire. Indeed, it was ruled by a caliph, the Islamic equivalent of the pope in Rome. The caliph was the leader of the Muslim world. Turning Turkey into a modern secular republic was akin to removing the pope from the Vatican and banning the wearing of the Christian cross in Catholic Europe. Needless to say, it has created cultural fault lines in Turkey that persist to this day.

      To drive home his cultural revolution in the 1920s and 1930s, modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, instituted a ban on the fez — that most famously Turkish of hats — and the turban. He insisted on men wearing the Western brimmed hat, traditionally rejected since it doesn’t allow the wearer to bow their head to the floor in Muslim prayer whilst wearing it.

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      The veil and headscarf were also discouraged, though the state’s ability to enforce changes in female clothing was slower to be realized than with men’s. The persistence of female cultural clothing as opposed to male could be the subject of an entire essay of its own.

      Alongside many other measures, such as the banning of the Sufi Muslim brotherhoods, the closure of mosques, a ban on the call to prayer in Arabic and the removal of the Arabic script, the Turkish authorities attempted to forcibly Westernize Turks.

      The Illiberal 1980s

      Yet it was not until the military coup d’état of 1980 that Turkey finally outlawed the headscarf officially. It was then that it was banned across all state institutions, including schools, universities, the judiciary, the police and the military. In effect, this meant that girls from religious backgrounds had to choose either to remove their headscarves or not get an education. Only with the rise of the AKP to power in the 2000s did official attitudes begin to shift.

      In 2010, Turkish universities finally admitted women who wore headscarves. This was followed a few years later by state bureaucratic institutions, except the judiciary, military and police. In 2016, policewomen were allowed to wear headscarves beneath their caps, and finally in 2017, the military was the last institution to lift the ban.

      This is the backdrop against which the Turkish government condemns a headscarf ban — in certain circumstances — decreed by the ECJ. It is a backdrop in which the religiously conservative in Turkey read a narrative of European coercion running back to the founding of the modern state and even earlier.

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      The ideas that inspired the military officers who won the Turkish War of Independence — the war with Allied powers that followed the conclusion of the First World War — were imported from Western Europe. Having carved out an almost entirely religiously homogenous Muslim state, they set out to utterly secularize it.

      The banning of the headscarf is therefore seen by religiously conservative Turks as an idea imported from Europe and, in some sense, an idea dictated to Muslims by secularized Christian nations. Given the last century of experience in Turkey, it is clear how this view is generated.

      Ultimately, the question is one of whether people who like the use of headscarves should tolerate those who don’t wear them, and whether those who dislike the use of headscarves should tolerate those who do wear them. Examples of intolerance abound on either side. A lack of understanding will bring no peace to Turkey or to countries across Europe and the world.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Role Turkey Can Play in Afghanistan

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      Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan caused waves at the NATO summit in June, announcing that Turkey would continue to protect Kabul airport following the complete NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan. Kabul airport is Afghanistan’s principal air connection to the outside world, and it is vital for the security of diplomats and aid workers in the country.

      The proposal needs to be seen in the context of the broad militarization of Turkish foreign policy. In recent years, Ankara has deployed armed forces for geopolitical leverage in Syria, Somalia, Libya, the Eastern Mediterranean and Azerbaijan. The associated costs have remained very low, further emboldening Turkish policymakers. In Somalia and Syria, the Turkish military also gained experience operating in theaters where armed militants pose significant security challenges.

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      The main factor behind the airport proposal, however, is Turkish-American relations. Ankara hopes to regain favor with Washington after a string of diplomatic crises. The Turkish side knows its hand is weakened by issues such as its acquisition of the Russian S400 air defense system and Washington’s responses, including CAATSA sanctions and removing Turkish manufacturers from the supply chain for the new F35 warplane. The Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, known as CAATSA, is a law passed by the US Congress in 2017 that intended to penalize Russia. In December 2020, Turkey was added to the sanctions list for its purchase of the S400. The proposal to help out in Afghanistan emerged as an obvious way to improve bilateral relations with the US.

      A Good Reputation

      As the only Muslim-majority member of NATO, Turkey played important roles in Afghanistan. Former Turkish Foreign Minister Hikmet Cetin served as NATO’s first senior civilian representative in Afghanistan and Turkish officers twice commanded the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). There are currently 500 Turkish soldiers serving with the NATO mission. Turkey never deployed a combat force, however. The Taliban, in turn, avoided targeting Turkish forces; there has only been one attack on a Turkish unit.

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      Additionally, Turkish state institutions and NGOs conduct a broad range of cultural and educational activities and supply extensive humanitarian aid. Reports confirm the ability of Turkish officials and volunteers to engage with Afghan society on equal terms. Shared religious and cultural elements certainly help. Although the Taliban accuses of Ankara being too pro-Uzbek, Turkey is viewed very positively across Afghan society. This, together with its ability to talk with all sides and its non-combat role in ISAF, places Turkey in a unique position.

      However, protecting Kabul airport would change the nature of Turkey’s involvement. While the Afghan government welcomed the idea, the Taliban have repeatedly declared that they will not tolerate even a residual foreign force. That implies that the Taliban would target Turkish troops, risking drastic consequences for Turkey. To avoid this, Turkey’s extended stay requires prior agreement with all Afghan parties, and Ankara will use its diplomatic capacity to seek such an agreement. Moreover, rather than focusing solely on leaving a residual force, Turkey could use its diplomatic and humanitarian leverage to pursue a more comprehensive approach to the Afghan problem.

      Intra-Afghan Agreement Needed

      The current peace agreement involves only the United States and the Taliban. There is as yet no peace agreement between the Afghan government and the Taliban. As the withdrawal of NATO forces accelerates, the conflict is now between the Taliban and Afghan government forces. Despite NATO’s decades of investment, the Afghan army is no match for the Taliban. In fact, a major Taliban offensive is already underway. Kabul may not fall immediately, but time is on the side of the insurgents. But if the Taliban overplays its hand and tries to dominate the entire country, there will be a backlash, particularly from the non-Pashtun ethnic communities.

      In that case, Afghanistan is likely to descend back into civil war. Under such circumstances, a Turkish military presence would be too risky and unsustainable, even with agreements with the government and the Taliban. Rather than focusing only on protecting Kabul airport, Turkey should place its diplomatic weight behind a peaceful settlement between the Taliban and the government before violence spirals out of control. The first step toward a broader agreement between the Afghan parties themselves would be for Ankara to reach an agreement with each of them. This road is arguably a stony one, but it offers much greater rewards. Turkey would certainly need the support of other countries to overcome the obstacles involved.

      The first challenge is to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table with the Afghan government, which Turkey and the international community have so far failed to achieve. Here, Turkey can benefit from its exceptionally good relations with Pakistan and Qatar. Qatar is home to the Taliban’s only external office and relations are cordial. Pakistan, where many senior Taliban leaders reside, has the greatest leverage. Even though large segments of Afghan society frown on Pakistan’s involvement in their country, its influence over the Taliban would be crucial for reaching a negotiated settlement.

      Europe should be more active and support Turkey’s efforts diplomatically and economically. As well as that being the morally right thing to do, Europe has a tangible interest too. A resurgence of fighting in Afghanistan would trigger a wave of migration. Afghans are already the second-largest migrant community in Turkey after the 3.6 million Syrian refugees. They also formed the second-largest group of new asylum applications in Germany in 2020. Given Iran’s open-door policy, it would be realistic to expect waves of Afghan migration to Turkey and on to Europe. The specter of a new refugee crisis looms.

      *[This article was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions relating to foreign and security policy.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Good Old Days: Nostalgia’s Political Appeal

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      Donald Trump is gone, yet his specter continues to haunt American politics. The UK is no longer part of the European Union, yet Brexit continues to provoke emotions on both sides of the Channel. Both Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election and the outcome of the Brexit referendum of 2016 were driven by a range of widespread and profound emotions. One of the most prominent was nostalgia.

      Nostalgia has been around for ages. The first one to recognize its significance was a Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer. In 1688, Hofer coined the word — a compound derived from the Greek nostro, meaning “home,” and algos, meaning “pain” — to describe what he considered to be a medical malaise he detected among Swiss mercenary soldiers, expressed as a profound yearning for their home (what in German is called Heimweh — homesickness).

      Hofer might have drawn inspiration from Homer’s Odyssey. Its hero, after spending seven years in the company of the sea nymph Calypso, felt compelled to return home. The longing to see his home was so overwhelming that he rejected Calypso’s offer to make him immortal if he stayed.

      The Meaning of Nostalgia

      Since Hofer’s times, the meaning of nostalgia has both substantially changed and significantly broadened. It is no longer associated with homesickness. Instead, in today’s parlance, nostalgia stands for “a sentimental longing for one’s past.” More specifically, nostalgia stands for a yearning for an idealized, lost past, a past more often than not seen through rose-tinted glasses. For a long time, nostalgia was seen as a pathology, reflecting the refusal to confront an unpleasant present and an even worse future.

      In this view, the yearning for “an irretrievable past becomes a narcissistic illusion,” a “deflection from current unpleasant circumstances.” More recently, however, nostalgia is predominantly seen as a positive emotion, an effective coping mechanism in times of turmoil and crisis. In this case, nostalgia serves as “an important resource that helps people find meaning in life and regulate meaning-related distress.” In the face of tectonic demographic, technological and geopolitical changes, seeking comfort in a past where life was arguably simpler and easier to navigate is human, all too human. As Edoardo Campanella and Marta Dassu have put it, nostalgia “offers relief from socio-economic angst. Yesterday is associated with progress; tomorrow with stasis or regression.”  

      This type of nostalgia — because nostalgia comes in different guises — reflects “an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world.” In this context, as Matthias Stephan has recently suggested, nostalgia represents “both a look back to an idealized past (whether real or imagined) and a hope that the romanticized past will become our future.”

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      Here, nostalgia “inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.” The author of these lines, Svetlana Boym, characterized this iteration as “restorative nostalgia.” Against this, Boym sets what she called “reflective nostalgia.” Reflective nostalgia accepts the fact that the past is past, that it cannot be retrieved. As Hal McDonald has put it, “This acknowledgment of the irretrievability of our autobiographical past provides an aesthetic distance that allows us to enjoy a memory in the same way that we enjoy a movie or a good book.”

      At the same time, it engenders a realistic, and perhaps even critical, view of the past. It is this constellation that makes nostalgia extremely political. In fact, because of its inherently binary nature, nostalgia is ideally suited to inform both progressive and reactionary politics.

      Today, nostalgia is primarily evoked on the nationalist right. More often than not, this is a type of nostalgia that depends on the “disparagement of the present,” which Christopher Lasch once considered the “hallmark of the nostalgic attitude.” Feeling discombobulated by and disenchanted with the present, as well as uneasy about the future, a growing number of people feel tempted to go down the memory lane and retreat to the past where, as the German expression goes, the world was presumably still in order.

      When the World Was in Order

      On the nationalist right, it is particularly radical right-wing populist parties and actors that have drawn the greatest political benefit from the appeal to nostalgia. Donald’s Trump is a prominent case in point. His campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” implies that there was a time when the United States was still great, that today it no longer is, but that tomorrow it will be great again — as long as the people follow The Donald.

      The promoters of Brexit played a similar tune. Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), holding up his new non-EU passport and triumphantly exclaiming, “We got our passports back!,” evoked a time when Great Britain still maintained the pretense to be a great power rather than one among 28 EU member states where it was not even primus inter pares. Once freed from the shackles of the EU, a once again completely sovereign Great Britain would regain its lost glory. Or, as Britain’s Secretary of Defense Gavin Williamson claimed in late 2018, once Britain was out of the European Union, it would become a “true global player,” establishing new military bases all over the world. As an article in the Financial Times from early 2016 put it, “Brexiters are Nostalgics in Search of a Lost Empire.”

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      Public opinion polls conducted a few months prior to the referendum provided ample evidence of the extent to which the British public glorified the country’s past. In early 2016, a YouGov poll found more than 40% of British respondents expressing pride in Britain’s colonial history; about the same number thought the British Empire had been a good thing. Only a fifth of respondents had a negative view. In a similar survey, two years earlier, around 50% of respondents thought that Britain’s former colonies were better off today because they had been part of the British Empire, while a third thought that it would be a good thing if Britain still had an empire. At the same, there were strong sentiments that Britain was in decline. In fact, some 80% of “leavers” shared that view in 2016.

      Hardly surprising that, in the wake of the referendum, one of Britain’s leading tabloids, The Daily Star, called on its readers to “Make Britain Great Again!” Nostalgia, paired with mass delusion and a portion of righteous resentment, obviously paid handsome political dividends — at least for Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and their comrades in arms.

      Similarly in the United States, Trump’s main slogan “Make America Great Again” appealed to widespread nostalgia, particularly among the country’s white majority. In September 2016, for instance, half of the respondents in the annual American Values Survey agreed with the statement that their country’s best days were “behind us.” A few months earlier, a Pew survey found more than 45% of respondents agreeing with the statement that compared to 50 years earlier, life for people like them had gotten worse.

      Among Trump supporters, three out of four agreed with that statement. In a similar vein, one year earlier, around half of US respondents in a representative poll thought that “America’s best days” were in the past. At the same time, in 2016, more than 60% of Americans believed their children would be worse off than they were. This is also reflected in surveys that seek to gauge what Americans think about, for instance, the American dream — the notion that hard work will allow them to get ahead.

      Most notably, these sentiments were particularly pronounced among America’s white population, far more than among African Americans, Hispanics and other minorities. Donald Trump, ever so tuned in to the grievances of white America, stoked the fire of white resentment, charging, at a town hall meeting in the fall of 2015, that “the American dream is in trouble,” only to add the promise that with him in the White House, “we will get it back.” To be sure, this was hardly original. Four years earlier, the Republican Platform already committed to “Restoring the American Dream.”

      The Good Old Days

      Conjuring up idealized images of the good old days is a crucial tool in the ideational repertoire of nativist and national-populist parties and actors. And for good reasons. For one, the evocation of nostalgic fantasies creates a sense of collective identity, community and a common purpose, all of them of central concern on the radical populist right. At the same time, in the hands of radical right-wing populists, nostalgia serves as an indirect indictment of the present, linked to an appeal to the notion that the best of the past could somehow replace the current situation.

      Here, nostalgia represents what S. D. Chrostowska has called a “malaise of dissatisfaction with the present and the direction that present” has taken. The more profound and widespread collective disenchantment with the present happens to be, the more pronounced is the appeal of the past. An exemplary case in point is a sociological study from 2016 in Poland, whose authors explored the extent to which nostalgia for the communist period was prevalent among current-day Poles. The results were striking. They showed that people who felt they had been better off during that period than at present were much more nostalgic and had a significantly better opinion about the communist government than other respondents.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Poland is hardly unique. The arguably best-known case of post-communist nostalgia is what in German is known as Ostalgie. Ostalgie entails a revaluation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) — former East Germany — on the part of a substantial part of its population following reunification. To a large extent, this was in response to “the perceived threat of a West German depreciation of their life experiences.” Substantial numbers of citizens in the east had the feeling that they and their past were treated with condescension, if not outright disdain. Even 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the sentiment that easterners are second-class citizens finds widespread resonance in what once was the GDR. Ostalgie is all about a demand for recognition, dignity and respect rather than crude material interests. As sociologist Cecilia Ridgeway has noted, we tend to forget “how much people care about public acknowledgement of their worth.”

      Yet they tend to “care about status quite as intensely as they do [about] money and power.” They want “to be someone.” Ostalgie is also informed by the sentiment that in the GDR, ordinary workers were valued — they were someone. Not for nothing, the GDR prided itself on being an Arbeiter und Bauernstaat — the state of workers and farmers.

      Nostalgia in post-communist societies might be somewhat puzzling to outside observers, yet politically it is of no consequences. There is no craving for a return of what in German was known as Realsozialismus — loosely translated as “actually existing socialism.” A regime that imprisoned its citizens behind walls, barbed wires and minefields in order to prevent them from fleeing the country has nothing in common with the radical humanist spirit of socialism, reflected, for instance, in Karl Marx’s “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” and the writings of leading exponents of the Frankfurt School.

      Radical Reconstruction

      Matters are entirely different when populist leaders use nostalgia for the dismantling and radical (from the roots) reconstitution of a society’s collective identity. This is what has happened with two of the most important contemporary populist regimes: Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey and Narendra Modi’s India. At first sight, the two cases could not be more different. Here, a representative of political Islam, there, of political Hinduism. Yet below the surface, the similarities are quite striking.

      These similarities are seen, in particular, in the place nostalgia — and the appeal to nostalgia — has in the rhetoric of both leaders. In the Turkish case, nostalgia is reflected in what Turkish observers have called neo-Ottomanism. Erdogan, as Hakan Yavuz has argued, has been seeking “to remold Turkey in the form of an imagined, ahistorical conceptualization of the former Ottoman Empire.” The ultimate objective is “to resurrect a powerful Muslim state in the ancestral mold of the former Ottoman Empire.”

      At the same time, Erdogan’s political project represents a frontal assault on and complete disavowal of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s foundation of the modern “Kemalist” Turkish state. This project was based on a progressive, secular vision of equality adopted from the French Revolution. Here, citizenship and identity derive from a common adherence to civic principles; in the case of Erdogan’s project, citizenship and identity derive from adherence to a common ethno-religious community, which bodes ill for Turkey’s minorities such as Kurds and Armenians.

      In the Indian case, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party, BJP), has never made a secret of the fact that it seeks to eradicate the legacy of Nehruvian secularism and replace it with Hindutva. Long before Modi became prime minister, the BJP mobilized against what it called Nehru’s “pseudo-secularism.” In reality, the BJP charged, secularism discriminated against Hindus while according concessions to India’s sizeable Muslim minority. In fact, in 2018, Sonia Gandhi admitted that the BJP had managed to convince a sizeable portion of the Indian public that the Indian National Congress was a pro-Muslim and, implicitly, anti-Hindu party.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Central to the BJP’s ideology is the myth of the Vedic golden age, exemplified, in particular, by the reign of the mythical Ram, largely seen as the epitome of India’s golden age. This golden age came to an abrupt end with the Muslim invasion and conquest, which ushered in what Modi has characterized as “1,200 years of slavery.” This is the central trope of Hindu nationalist historiography and victimology — the juxtaposition of “a glorious Hindu golden age followed by an era of Muslim oppression.”

      In order to bolster their case of that golden age, Hindu nationalists have gone to great lengths, in some cases transcending into the ridiculous. A case in point is the various claims that in ancient times, India already achieved stunning scientific and technological accomplishments, from advanced reproductive technologies to stem cell research, “spacecraft, the internet, and nuclear weapons — long before Western science come on the scene.” More often than not, these claims were advanced not by crackpots but by respected scientists fallen under the sway of Hindu nationalist nostalgia.

      In both cases, the combination of nostalgia and populism serves to mobilize the “true” people against a Westernized elite, from — but not of — the people. At the same time, it serves as a means to eradicate national humiliations: in the case of India, centuries of being subjugated to Islamic rulers; in the Turkish case, the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, symbolized by the Treaty of Sèvres which, had it ever been implemented, would have left only a small area around Ankara under Turkish rule.  

      Erdogan’s recent decision to reclassify the Hagia Sophia — once the “ultimate icon of Christian civilization” — as a mosque, constitutes a reversal of Kemalist “secularist suppression.” Similarly, laying the foundations of a Ram temple on the site of an ancient mosque, known as Babri Masjid, in the city of Ayodhya in northern India, serves as highly visible expressions of the will to reverse — and perhaps even avenge — the past.

      Resurrecting Grievances

      The arguably most successful populist resort to this combination of grievance-based nostalgia and the exploitation of national humiliation is epitomized by Hungary’s Victor Orban. To be sure, Hungarians have good reasons for historically-grounded grief — the bloody suppression of the Hungarian people’s 1956 uprising against the communist regime and the Soviets is a prominent case in point. The most important episode, however, which continues to haunt Hungarian collective national consciousness until today, dates back to 1920, when the victorious powers imposed on Hungary the Trianon Treaty. The treaty deprived Hungary of two-thirds of its prewar territory and three-fifths of its prewar population, which turned Hungary into what Stanley Payne has called “the most nationally aggrieved state in all of Europe.”

      Victor Orban has been particularly adroit not only in manipulating diffuse sentiments of humiliation and resentment but also in evoking nostalgia for Hungary’s golden age. This was the period spanning from the formation of the dual monarchy following Vienna’s defeat in the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, which put the Hungarians on par with the Austrians until the end of the First World War — a period which saw all ethnic Hungarians united in the same state. Together, these two ideational elements constitute the core of Orban’s national-populist project, which over the past decade or so has progressively gained cultural hegemony in Hungary.

      Orban, Modi and Erdogan are prominent examples of how nationalist-populist actors have weaponized nostalgia for political gain the same way they have weaponized other emotions such as anxiety, anger and empathy. As Yale professor Paul Bloom has recently pointed out in his indictment of emotional empathy, “unscrupulous politicians use our empathy for victims of certain crimes to motivate anger and hatred toward other, marginalized, groups.” Emblematic of this strategy is Donald Trump’s exploitation of “our empathic feelings toward victims of rape and assault to build hatred toward undocumented immigrants.”

      Here, Trump instinctively exploited a central characteristic of this emotion, namely its intrinsic in-group bias. Neuropsychological studies suggest that more often than not, empathy extends significantly more to those we feel close to rather than out-groups, “potentially making them likely targets for prejudice and discrimination.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      The same is true for nostalgia. Experiments in social psychology have shown that collective nostalgia — the type of nostalgia routinely evoked by national populist actors — tends to confer “sociability benefits,” such as support and loyalty, to the in-group while tending to evoke exclusionary sentiments toward out-groups. Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut have argued that “Collective nostalgia’s sociality is amenable to exploitation and can have controversial ramifications.” A recent empirical study on the effect of national nostalgia on out-group perceptions in the context of the 2016 US presidential election shows that national nostalgia “significantly predicted racial prejudice and this relationship was mediated by perceived outgroup threat.”

      This also holds true for Europe. A Bertelsmann study on nostalgia from 2018 found that more than three-quarters of European respondents classified as nostalgics (two-thirds of the sample) agreed with the statement that recent immigrants did not want to integrate into the host society; more than half thought they were taking jobs away from the natives. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that radical right-wing populist parties have found fertile ground for their nativist politics of exclusion.

      A case in point is the adoption of the concept of the folkhemmet by the Sweden Democrats, the country’s radical populist right. The folkhemmet (people’s home) stands for the heydays of Sweden’s Social Democratic welfare state, a golden age that spanned four decades, from the 1930s to the 1970s. This was a time of ethnocultural homogeneity, civic egalitarianism and social solidarity. The Sweden Democrats’ adoption of the sentimental notion of the folkhemmet appeals to nostalgic sentiments while, at the same time, serving as a justification for the exclusion of non-ethnic minorities such as refugees from social benefits.

      The Sweden Democrats’ manipulation of nostalgia in the service of their politics of welfare chauvinism is exemplary of the flexible and polyvalent possibilities of applying this emotion. It is for this reason that nostalgia lends itself ideally to national populist mobilization. One of the central ideational tropes informing populism is the notion of the united people, a unity derived from a shared past and a common destiny, confronting a common adversary, if not an enemy. The evocation of a glorious past is a great way to make people feel good about themselves at a time when there is little to be cheerful or optimistic about.

      These days, the glorious past is not far away, not more than two years, the time before social distancing, lockdowns and vaccination jitters. Under the circumstances, nostalgia is likely to persist, ready to be exploited by populist entrepreneurs for political gain. Those who still think that the pandemic will substantially weaken support for the radical populist right might take a look at Spain. There, Vox, whose rhetoric is replete with nostalgia, is the only party that has substantially increased its support base over the past several months.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      What Lies Behind Turkey’s Withdrawal From the Istanbul Convention?

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      Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a decree in the early hours of March 20 withdrawing Turkey from the Council of Europe treaty — dubbed the Istanbul Convention — on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. The convention sets comprehensive standards for protecting women against all forms of violence.

      The withdrawal prompted widespread protests from women’s groups and an uproar on social media, criticizing that it signals a huge setback for women’s rights in a country with high rates of gender-based violence and femicides. Just in 2020, at least 300 women were murdered in Turkey.

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      Following the public outrage over the withdrawal, government representatives unconvincingly responded that women’s rights are guaranteed in national laws and that there is no need for international laws. The Directorate of Communications defended the decision with the claim that the convention was “hijacked by a group of people attempting to normalize homosexuality,” and that this is incompatible with the country’s social and family values.

      Turkey was the first state to ratify the Istanbul Convention and became the first to pull out. What lies behind the withdrawal?

      Erdogan’s Rationale: To Remain in Power at All Costs

      In August 2020, officials in the Justice and Development Party (AKP) signaled that Turkey was considering withdrawing from the Istanbul Convention after religious conservatives began an intense lobbying effort against the convention, lambasting it for damaging “traditional Turkish family values.” Although they claimed that the treaty destroys families and promotes homosexuality, conservative women’s groups supporting the AKP defended it. The row even reached Erdogan’s own family, with two of his children becoming involved in groups on either side of the debate. Due to these internal tensions within the AKP and the symbolic achievement with the reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque in 2020, the debate was postponed.

      Although opinion polls had shown that 84% of Turks opposed withdrawing from the Istanbul Convention and a majority of conservative women were in favor of it, Erdogan decided to pull out of the treaty, thereby disregarding not only the international law anchored in the constitution, but also the legislative power of parliament. This move comes amid significantly eroding support for the president and his informal alliance with the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Action Party (MHP). The withdrawal from the convention gives Erdogan three political advantages that will help him retain power.

      Embed from Getty Images

      First, Erdogan and his AKP aim to reenergize their conservative voter base, which has been dissatisfied with the economic downturn — a reality that has only been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. The ruling AKP government cannot curb the high level of inflation, and unemployment and poverty rates remain high. Leaving the convention is a symbolic gesture to his base, but it will bring short-term relief, as did the reconversion of the Hagia Sophia.

      Second, with a potential electoral defeat in mind, Erdogan is looking for new allies. He thus made an overture in January to the Islamist Felicity Party (SP), which is in an oppositional alliance with secularist, nationalist and conservative parties. With its 2.5% of the vote in the 2018 parliamentary elections, the SP shares the same Islamist roots as the AKP and is popular among ultraconservative voters, who enthusiastically back the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention.

      In his meeting with the SP, Erdogan used the withdrawal as a bargaining chip for a possible electoral alliance in the future. He is not only aiming to strengthen his own voting bloc, but also to break the oppositional alliance, which has increasingly gained confidence since its success in the 2019 local elections and been effective in challenging Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian rule.

      Third, to bolster his image as a willful leader, the Turkish president has intensified the level of repression by suppressing democratic civil society organizations that dare to challenge his rule. This time, he has targeted women’s rights advocates, who frequently criticize the government for not strictly implementing the protective measures of the Istanbul Convention.

      Political Conditionality as a Necessary European Reaction

      While increasing the level of repression in domestic politics, Turkey intensified its diplomatic charm offensive to reset Turkish relations with the European Union. Against this background, Brussels should not only condemn the decision, but also revise its EU-Turkey agenda by imposing political conditions regarding human rights and the rule of law, which have once again been breached with Ankara’s withdrawal from the convention.

      This approach is necessary for two reasons. First, the EU can send a motivating message to democratic segments of civil society and the opposition by underlining that the Istanbul Convention is an issue of human rights and that its sole purpose is protecting women from violence rather than undermining Turkey’s national values and traditions. Second, calling Ankara out is also in Europe’s own interest. The withdrawal can have spillover effects on other member states of the Council of Europe.

      Considering the latest attempts by the Polish government to replace the Istanbul Convention with an alternative “family-based” treaty that also finds support in other Central European governments, the backlash against women’s rights in Europe is not a myth, but rather a reality.

      *[This article was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions related to foreign and security policy.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Turkey Doubles Down on Hard Power

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      A few years ago, the very notion of Turkish foreign military interventions would have seemed extraordinary. The Turkish republic has been, for most of its history, determinedly introspective. Until the 20th century, it was largely disengaged from its immediate neighborhood, favoring ties with the West. Great power architecture tends to subdue regional tensions. Whether it’s unilateral US power or bilateral umbrella organizations like the European Union or NATO, a deterrent to regional conflict has been present.

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      Yet with the waning of such architecture and the changing internal dynamics of Turkish politics, Turkey has engaged in a number of foreign military interventions in recent years — in Iraq, Syria, Libya and, most recently, in Azerbaijan’s conflict with Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

      The prevailing assumption is that Turkey won a strategic battle in this war that has shifted the balance of power in the region. But this ignores a deeper malaise in Turkey’s foreign policy direction. It may be winning hot fights today, but the wider cold war it is entering with a ring of neighboring states will damage Turkey’s ability to project power in the longer term.

      Unfriendly Neighbors

      Only a decade ago, under the guidance of then-Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s “zero problems with neighbors” doctrine, Ankara was on historically good terms with Armenia. At the time, there was a sense that Turkey was leaving behind the traditional republican mindset of being beset on all sides by threats.

      This mindset, rooted in the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the war of independence that thwarted Great Power designs on the partition of Anatolia among the victors in World War I, persisted throughout much of the 20th century. However, by 2014, Ankara had signed bilateral High-Level Strategic Cooperation Council agreements with Iran (2014), Iraq (2009), Lebanon (2010) and even, strange though it may now seem, Syria (2010).

      Even Greece and Armenia, traditionally viewed as the most ardent foes due to the religious divide, had become amicable neighbors. In April 2014, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan even offered condolences to the grandchildren of Armenians killed in 1915, in a major shift in official Turkish rhetoric. This was perhaps the zenith of Turkish soft power in its neighborhood. All that has changed since Erdogan moved his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) decisively in a nationalist direction.

      It is often observed that Erdogan is a leader in the mold of Russian President Vladimir Putin. His increasing use of opportunistic hard power to meet strategic foreign policy objectives is seen as part of the classic Putin playbook. Yet this analysis overlooks some important facts.

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      At the most fundamental level, Turkey is not Russia. The two states have some striking similarities — such as an imperial legacy on the periphery of Europe that has tended to reinforce a sense of ethnic and cultural isolation and exceptionalism. However, they are simultaneously very different.

      Russia only lost its empire in 1991, while Turkey’s vanished 70 years earlier. Despite the loss of empire, Russia maintains considerable de facto power in the ex-Soviet space. Not only that, but Russia can be said to still be a significant empire, given that Moscow controls what are effectively non-Russian republics within the Russian Federation.    

      The same is not true of Turkey. For half a century, the Turkish republic largely ignored the Ottoman Empire’s former imperial possessions. In the 20th century, ethnic outreach toward Turkic or co-religious communities in the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle East and North Africa has increased, but never with the same level of hard power control Russia wields in its former imperial space. Further, the only significant non-Turkish population under Ankara’s direct control is the Kurds of southeastern Turkey.

      The result is that the projection of purely hard power can have useful results for Russia in its former imperial space in a way that is more complicated for Turkey. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict can be said to occur in both Russian and Turkish former imperial space, but this is much more immediately true of Russia. Armenia is dependent on Russia as a client state in a way that Azerbaijan is not dependent on Turkey.

      What’s more, for Turkey, conflict with the states encircling it leads to far greater problems. Russia is difficult to encircle. It is geographically too extensive. There is always room to maneuver. Turkey currently has very difficult relations with Armenia, Iraq, Syria, Cyprus and Greece. This leaves precious little goodwill to help project soft power. Everything must be won by hard power.

      A High Price on Everything

      There is no question that in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Turkey’s backing of Azerbaijan was pivotal, leading to a strategic success akin to that achieved shortly beforehand in Libya. Turkish hard power had been decisive and influence dramatically increased in Baku, as it was in Tripoli.

      Yet it came at the price of establishing Armenia as an even more implacable enemy than it already was, just as the success in Libya established Egypt, Greece and the United Arab Emirates as even more implacable enemies than they already were. In the context of the eastern Mediterranean, it could be argued that the action in Libya was non-negotiable for Turkey. It had to act. But in Azerbaijan, it was much more nuanced.

      The Turkey of the Davutoglu era might well have acted as a go-between, defusing tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan, all the while quietly increasing Turkish influence across the entire region. Instead, the result is hostile battle lines. Turkey may have the upper hand today, but newly embittered enemies will await any opportunity to inflict harm. This does not build a sustainable, peaceful, long-term strategic vision for Turkey within its neighborhood.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Is Turkey’s Ruling Alliance on the Attack or the Defensive?

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      Since January 4, Istanbul’s prestigious and politically liberal Bogazici University has been gripped by student unrest. The protests were initially provoked by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decision to appoint a member of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) as rector. The government has responded harshly, detaining students, raiding homes, criminalizing protesters and their supporters as “terrorists,” and vilifying the university and its students as deviants from the “nation’s true values.”

      Condemnation was not limited to the government: On February 7, Alaattin Cakıcı, an organized-crime boss and a former member of the ultranationalist Grey Wolves, tweeted a hand-written note stating the protests aimed to “harm the state and the People’s Alliance [AKP/MHP], which is the guarantor of our state.”

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      This episode of interference in the university’s administration is not an isolated incident. Under the state of emergency decree of October 2016, all rectors at public universities are now selected directly or indirectly by the president’s office, in conjunction with the Turkish Higher Education Council. The extensive purges that followed the 2016 coup attempt have created opportunities for the president to distribute academic posts to his supporters. Erdogan also regards the universities as central pillars of the “nation’s cultural hegemony.”

      Ramping Up Repression

      The attack goes beyond the universities, however. Ankara is determined to suppress all opposition. About 90% of the country’s media outlets are linked to the AKP through personal and/or financial ties. Prosecution of social media users for insulting the president is common. A new law from 2020 permits multiple bar associations, aiming to create an institutional wedge between pro-government and opposition lawyers. Ankara has also expanded its oversight over civil society organizations and worked to rein in local governments by replacing elected mayors in Kurdish municipalities with government-appointed trustees, cutting funding for opposition-held councils. It also works to contain civil society through prosecution, police violence, propaganda and, recently, even open support from mafia figures. The aim is to create a political community of supporters operating as agents of regime control.

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      In reality, the AKP is far from achieving cultural hegemony, as Erdogan himself admitted last year. In fact, popular discontent is growing. The pandemic has exacerbated Turkey’s already mounting economic woes and limited the AKP’s ability to redistribute resources to its supporters. Big business is complaining, while many small and micro-businesses are in debt. The official figure for youth unemployment reached 25.4% last November. Even AKP supporters are not immune to discontent over the rising cost of living.

      The unexpected success of opposition parties in the 2019 local elections and their united front against the presidential system further complicate the picture. The government’s divide-and-rule tactics have so far failed to bring opposition actors fully into line. Moreover, tensions and cracks within the ruling alliance are increasingly visible. For all these reasons, Ankara is in attack mode and on the defensive at the same time, which explains its disproportionate reaction to the Bogazici protests. It is no coincidence that government officials and pro-government journalists have consistently compared them to the Gezi protests of 2013 to which the AKP responded with similar criminalization, vilification and repression.

      The ghosts of the Gezi protests continue to haunt Ankara. One stark manifestation of this is the Kafkaesque trial of Osman Kavala, a Turkish businessman and human rights defender who was detained in 2017. The charges included “attempting to change the constitutional order and to overthrow the government” by leading and financing the Gezi protests. A second wave of arrests followed in 2018 for alleged links to Kavala. While the Gezi defendants were acquitted in February 2020, an appeals court overturned the acquittals of nine in January 2021. On February 5, the court rejected a request for Kavala’s release and merged the cases against him. On the same day, Erdoğan accused Ayse Bugra, a retired faculty member of Bogazici University who happens to be married to Osman Kavala, of being “among the provocateurs” of the student protests.

      Europe Should Not Turn a Blind Eye

      Europe should voice stronger criticism of Ankara’s repression of its citizens. While first and foremost a matter of principle, calling Ankara out is also in the EU’s own interests. While European policymakers have often enough prioritized stability over democracy in relations with authoritarian states, in Turkey’s case, that logic is associated with two problems. For one, it is unclear whether an authoritarian but stable Turkey would cooperate harmoniously with the EU. Even more importantly, the stability of authoritarianism in Turkey is uncertain for several reasons.

      Firstly, Turkey’s economic capacity depends heavily on popular consent, in particular because the country lacks the kind of natural resources that can be exploited through coercion. Secondly, the country’s sociopolitical diversity makes it difficult for the AKP to thoroughly penetrate the civil sphere, making future protests highly likely. Finally, the personalization of power and the tensions within the ruling alliance make the government vulnerable. While the EU certainly cannot force Turkey to democratize, it can and should hold Ankara more accountable, especially at a time when it is turning to the EU for economic support.

      *[This article was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions related to foreign and security policy.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More