Srdja Trifkovic: Turkey: A Threat, Yet Again

This article uses terrible neologisms like Neo-Ottoman to describe the foreign policy of resurgent Turkey in areas once dominated by the Ottoman Empire, and in those places with which this rising Anatolian power has cultural affinity. If Turkey was substituted with Russia and Neo-Ottoman with Neo-Tsarist or Neo-Soviet I would probably be posting about such article with the intention of tearing it up. But I am a Russophile and a Serbophile and view potential Turkish expansionism into Balkans, Caucasus and Central Asia with caution, although the disinterested me says that Turkey exercises power in its natural habitat. Still, this is Srdja Trifkovic and not some neoconservative moron writing from Estonia, and after all he is writing about Turkey, not Russia...

Trifkovic provides a very informative section on why Turkey no longer sides with Western interests. After a brief introducing paragraph where he recounts Turkish government's latest achievements in the world of 'Islamic revivalism', Trifkovic discuses recent change of attitude in Turkey's Westernizing effort...

Ankara's continuing bid to join the European Union is running parallel with its openly neo-Ottoman policy of re-establishing an autonomous sphere of influence in the Balkans and in the former Soviet Central Asian republics. Turkey's EU candidacy is still on the agenda, but the character of the issue has evolved since Erdogan's AKP came to power in 2002.

...

The neo-Ottoman strategy was clearly indicated by the appointment of Ahmet Davutoglu as foreign minister almost a year ago. As Erdogan's long-term foreign policy advisor, he advocated diversifying Turkey's geopolitical options by creating exclusively Turkish zones of influence in the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Middle East... including links with Khaled al-Mashal of Hamas. On the day of his appointment in May Davutoglu asserted that Turkey's influence in 'its region' will continue to grow: Turkey had an 'order-instituting role' in the Middle East, the Balkans and the Caucasus, he declared, quite apart from its links with the West.

Trifcovic writes that the Turks want to create this type of structure to counter and put pressure on the EU, this is apparently supported by Washington. Nothing surprising here, Washington always viewed the EU with caution and tried to play games with it. Let's recall the Old and New Europe dichotomy for instance. Support of Washington to Islamic revivalists is also nothing new, let us recall America's support for Afghan Mujahedeen, long term relationship of US with Saudi Arabia, and the more recent support for Bosnians and Chechens.  

Turkey is no longer a country that wants to Westernize but a country with its own vision. This vision is supposed to be Neo-Ottoman, Kemalism now is dead. While I would agree to an extent with the latter proposition, I do not quite get the Neo-Ottoman bit. Trifkovic continues with an attempt at elucidation of his Neo-Ottoman paradigm. However, I have a hard time comprehending what he is trying to convey.

Washington's stubborn denial of Turkey's political, cultural and social reality goes hand in hand with an ongoing Western attempt to rehabilitate the Ottoman Empire, and to present it as almost a precursor of Europe's contemporary multiethnic, multicultural tolerance, diversity, etc, etc.

Here I have to agree that Washington's policy vis-a-vis Turkey is shortsighted. When it comes to European justification for massive Muslim immigration, the 'myth of Islamic tollerance' was always a good servant. What follows is Trifkovic's assertion that the Ottomans used the Christians and Jews as administrators and granted them certain privileges. This was not a particularly tolerant society and the diversity of the Ottoman Empire was in fact its Achilles heel...

The Roman Empire could survive a string of cruel, inept or insane emperors because its bureaucratic and military machines were well developed and capable of functioning even when there was confusion at the core. The Ottoman state lacked such mechanisms. Devoid of administrative flair, the Turks used the services of educated Greeks and Jews and awarded them certain privileges. Their safety and long-term status were nevertheless not guaranteed, as witnessed by the hanging of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch on Easter Day 1822.

What is missing here is that the Ottomans demanded of their dhimmi subjects loyalty. I don't know the exact dates of the Greek revolution but I would bet my pants it was somewhere around the first half of nineteenth century. The loss of its Balkan territories created a virtual paranoia among the Turks and this eventually culminated in the unfortunate Armenian genocide. This is not to say that the Ottomans were particularly tollerant, but things have to be seen in their context. On top of that I do not know whether it is legitimate to compare Roman and Ottoman empires. So, what does the whole Neo-Ottoman paradigm rest on? It is the Islamic revivalism of Erdogan's government....

The Ottoman Empire gave up the ghost right after World War I, but long before that it had little interesting to say, or do, at least measured against the enormous cultural melting pot it had inherited and the splendid opportunities of sitting between the East and West. Not even a prime location at the crossroads of the world could prompt creativity. The degeneracy of the ruling class, blended with Islam's inherent tendency to the closing of the mind, proved insurmountable.

Kemalist Turkey was built on its ashes...

A century later the Turkish Republic is a populous, self-assertive nation-state of over 70 million. Ataturk hoped to impose a strictly secular concept of nationhood, but political Islam has reasserted itself. In any event the Kemalist dream of secularism had never penetrated beyond the military and a narrow stratum of the urban elite.

A century later the native Christian population was literally purged out of Anatolia, a policy executed not only by the latter day Ottoman Empire but Kemalist Turkey as well. There are no Greeks and Armenians that can serve their Turkish masters. I do not see displays of piety and rhetoric geared at winning over the Muslim world as enough of a revival. It is just an expression of a long repressed spirituality and self- reckoning. We would not base a Neo-Tsarism paradigm on the resurgence of Russian Orthodoxy and reinstallment of pre-revolutionary symbols of state, such as the bicephallic eagle, would we? This would be very superficial. As long as the Caliphate is not reinstated, there can be little talk of the Ottoman return. I would call the transforming Turkey Post-Kemalist, if anything. Finally it should be asked, if Islam has degenerative effects, what is there to worry about? The worry really should be that Turkey no longer plays by Western rules...

Turkey is not an 'indispensable ally,' as Paul Wolfowitz called her shortly before the war in Iraq, and as Obama repeated last April. It is no longer an ally at all. It may have been an ally in the darkest Cold War days, when it accommodated U.S. missiles aimed at Russia's heartland. Today it is just another Islamic country, a regional power of considerable importance to be sure, with interests and aspirations that no longer coincide with those of the United States

The article since changed its title to 'Neo-Ottoman Turkey: A Hostile Islamic Power'. Do not get disuaded by my little critique of the Neo-Ottoman divergence that I think could be spared in this otherwise informative article.

Hat tip goes out to Michael Averko.

Comments

[Richard]

Well, it is pretty clear that much of the reason why Turkey is getting on with this more assertive foreign policy is also that it has been continiously stonewalled or left out to dry by it's Western allies. EU-membership has been consistently denied to it, and the US has stirred up trouble with the Kurds next door in Iraq while expecting Turkey to unconditionally toe the line for America's war. Recognition of the Armenian genocide by Congress was a slap in the face, so was America's lukewarm rebuke of Israel during the convoi massacre lately. Turkey is not going to take it any more, and with rising wealth and a changeable identity, the temptation to take a more indepedent path in foreign policy is certainly there.