Egypt Won’t Exit From This Turkish Model So Quickly
June 14, 2012 § 3 Comments
It’s tough to ignore the big news out of Egypt this morning, which is that the High Constitutional Court ruled that the Political Disenfranchisement Law – which prohibited high ranking Mubarak government officials from running for public office – is unconstitutional and nullified the election of 1/3 of the seats in parliament that were reserved for individual candidates (and that was dominated by Islamist candidates, including the new Muslim Brotherhood speaker of the parliament). The consensus among Egypt watchers is that this decision is a political one mandated by the SCAF, and the effect of it is that Parliament now has to be dissolved, there is no Constituent Assembly to write the constitution, and the new president (and I’d bet money that it will conveniently be former Mubarak PM Ahmed Shafiq) will be unchecked by any other political institution since they have just been eviscerated. This is for all intents and purposes a soft coup orchestrated by the military.
So why am I writing about this? The reason is that Egypt is increasingly looking like it is following the path that Turkey took in the second half of the 20th century, which was marked by military domination of politics and successive military coups that were carried out when the generals did not like the direction that the country’s politics were taking. While I have not written much about Egypt on this blog, I have been openly skeptical in many conversations with friends and on Twitter that the military was going to allow a genuine transition to occur, and today’s events certainly confirm my doubts for the time being. The most worrying part for Egypt is that it is following the praetorian Turkish model without enjoying two of the benefits that Turkey had that allowed it to break the cycle and become a legitimate electoral democracy.
First, Turkey’s first military coup came in 1960, which was fourteen years after Turkey transitioned to a two party system and ten years following the Turkey’s first democratic elections and transfer of power to the opposition. When the military intervened in 1960, 1971, and 1980, it eventually returned power to civilian governments in each instance after a few years, and one of the primary reasons was that Turkey had a history of contested elections and democratic government, which made it easy to fall back into democratic patterns. One of the, if not the absolute, best predictors of democracy is having previously been a democracy, and Turkey fell into this category. Egypt, however, does not, and now that the military has intervened in a real way to protect its own interests and the remnants of the old regime, there should not be an expectation that Egypt is going to easily overcome this. Make no mistake, a government led by Shafiq with no real parliament and martial law (which was reimposed yesterday) is a continuation of the Mubarak regime plain and simple, and that does not change just because Shafiq is going to have to win some votes before being formally installed as president. Egypt has no real democratic tradition upon which to fall back, and so while the intervention of the military in politics may look like what took place in Turkey, nobody should be optimistic about Egypt’s chances of eventually breaking out of this pattern like Turkey did.
Second, the establishment of firm civilian control of government in Turkey that has taken place under the AKP was in response to a number of outside structural pressures. I have previously mentioned the role of the EU accession process so there is no need to go into that in depth again, but it is a factor that Egypt is obviously missing since no outside body is demanding wholesale democratic reforms as a condition for conferring a host of benefits upon the country. The EU process was not the only variable pushing Turkey toward civilian government, however, since there was also the NATO factor. Turkey has been a member of NATO since 1952, and it was thus firmly ensconced in an important club of Western democracies and subject to regular pressure from and close contact with countries like the U.S. One of the theories about why Turkey suddenly decided to get rid of its single party system is that the aftermath of WWII left Turkey in a position where its interests lay in a closer relationship with the West, but achieving this meant embracing liberal democratic governance and ending one-party rule. Turkey’s quest for aid from the United States and its signature on the United Nations Declaration made democracy imperative to implement since Turkey needed to be in compliance with the obligations it had agreed to undertake.
Furthermore, the distancing from the Soviet Union and the increasing contacts with the U.S. lessened the appeal for many Turks of Soviet-style authoritarianism, which was far different from the Turkish political system but seemed like a newly emerging threat. While Turkey had a close relationship with the Soviet Union during the first two decades of the republic, the Soviets demanded a readjustment of the Soviet-Turkish border following WWII and Turkey’s only recourse for protection against Soviet encroachment was to turn to the U.S. and other Western states. In order to take full advantage of U.S. concern over communism as embodied by the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, it was plainly in Turkey’s best interests to democratize. These pressures continued throughout the second half of the 20th century as Turkey became invested in the American-led order that had been created in the postwar period.
This is another factor that does not exist for Egypt. There are no serious outside influences pressuring it to democratize, and it is not dependent on the U.S. and other Western democracies to the same extent that Turkey was. It is not joining the EU, it does not need protection from the Soviet Union, and its military aid from the U.S. is not ever going to be really endangered because of the way in which it is bound up with the peace treaty with Israel. In short, Egypt in 2012 looks very little like Turkey from 1950 onwards, and the pressures that existed on the Turkish military that ensured quick handovers to civilian governments following military coups do not apply on anything like the same scale to the SCAF. It is understandable that those who are disappointed with today’s events might look to Turkey as a ray of hope for what can eventually happen after the military intervenes in politics, but the comparison is an unsuitable one. Turkey had a democratic head start and a host of reasons to ultimately consign the military to the barracks for good, and Egypt unfortunately has neither of these things.
New York Jews Aren’t Going Anywhere
June 13, 2012 § 3 Comments
In many ways, New York is a quintessentially Jewish city. The enduring image of New York Jews was famously captured by Woody Allen in Annie Hall, and New York’s liberal, secular, hyper-educated Jewish population has for decades set the tone for American Jewry as a whole. According to a new survey, however, the stereotypical New York Jew is becoming an endangered species. New York City’s Jewish population is growing after years of decline, and the growth is being fueled by Orthodox Jews, and particularly Hasidic and black hat Jews who are conservative, do not have college degrees, and are relatively poor. Over at Commentary, Jonathan Tobin writes that this signals the end of American liberal Jewry since the New York Jewish community (the largest concentration of Jews anywhere in the world outside of Israel) and the American Jewish community itself are slowly dividing into two large blocs of Orthodox Jews and entirely assimilated and unaffiliated Jews, which means that the Jewish community will be more politically and religiously conservative.
On the religious aspect, I think Tobin is right, but I think he is overlooking two important points when it comes to where the American Jewish community is headed politically which makes his prediction of liberal Jewry’s demise premature. First, while the Hasidic and yeshivish communities – and to a lesser extent the modern Orthodox community – are unquestionably more politically and socially conservative than their non-Orthodox counterparts, they have a different set of concerns. As the New York Times notes, they take different positions than secular American Jews on abortion, gay rights, the peace process, and a host of other issues, but the question is whether they are going to be as active as the rest of the Jewish community in pushing these issues to the fore and putting their money where their mouth is.
My bet is that they will not. The ultra-Orthodox (for lack of a better term) care more about social services and government subsidies than they do about traditionally political issues because they are generally an impoverished group. The poorest place in the entire United States is Kiryas Joel, a village 50 miles outside of New York City populated almost exclusively by Satmar Jews. Kiryas Joel votes as one bloc, and so it is awash in federal and state grants and poverty assistance, and its residents care far more about making sure that this continues than they do about whether gay marriage is legal in New York or not. Kiryas Joel is a political microcosm for the ultra-Orthodox in general, and while they are undoubtedly as socially and politically conservative as you can get, they simply don’t have enough skin in the game to move the debate. The things they care about transcend and supersede their political conservatism, which is why local Democratic Brooklyn politicians such as Joe Hynes and Dov Hikind receive overwhelming support from the Orthodox community. They are a lot like the Israeli Haredi parties such as Shas or UTJ in this sense, since their number one issue is patronage and winning state benefits and everything else is secondary and thus perpetually fluid and malleable.
Second, Hasidic and black hat Orthodox Jews are uniformly insular. The divide between these two groups and modern Orthodox Jews primarily revolves around the issue of engagement with the outside world. Hasidim and black hatters purposely construct figurative walls around themselves so that they barely have to interact with the outside world or engage with people outside of their immediate religious community. They go to their own schools, marry within their cloistered world, and shelter themselves from the impurities of secularism by shunning tv, radio, the internet, and even basic news. They spend their lives inside a bubble of their own creation, and are not terribly interested about what is taking place outside the cocoon. If 95% of American Jews were Hassidic or black hat, the 5% who were not would still be the ones driving the perception of Jewry among the rest of the population because they would be the only ones engaging in politics, culture, and the general debate. In this vein, it doesn’t much matter how conservative the Orthodox are because they keep to themselves and aren’t really interested in impacting American politics in any way. When Tobin writes that the assumption of American Jews being secular liberals to the end of time has just been proven false, he is technically correct but missing the forest for the trees. The segment of American Jewry that engages with the world and is ubiquitous in the media and pop culture and donates money to political campaigns is still overwhelmingly secular and liberal, and that is what matters. American Jewry as a whole may become more religiously and politically conservative, but the silent majority is so silent as to render them essentially invisible.
Are We Reaching A Tipping Point on Turkey’s Image?
June 12, 2012 § Leave a comment
Turkey’s rise is attributable to a bunch of factors, but one of the primary ones is the image of Turkey as a democracy. When the AKP took over, they did a good job of making Turkey more democratic in a number of important ways as part of the EU accession process, and the world noticed. For a decade, Turkey has been heralded as a model of Muslim democracy and been held up as a successful example of how a state can transition from a military-dominated polity to one where the elected civilian government is the ultimate accountable body. Turkey has played up its democratic status at every opportunity, and is has been taken as a given that Turkey is a democracy, one that has its own issues to overcome but certainly not a state that is in danger of authoritarian backsliding.
Two columns this weekend make me wonder if we are coming to a tipping point where outside observers are no longer going to give Turkey’s democratic status the benefit of the doubt. In the New York Times, Tom Friedman (who probably represents conventional elite opinion better than anyone aside from Fareed Zakaria) had a rambling column that managed to work its way to Turkey by the end, and what he had to say about Prime Minister Erdoğan and the AKP was not kind. He concluded his column with this:
The A.K.P.’s impressively effective prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has not only been effective at building bridges but also in eliminating any independent judiciary in Turkey and in intimidating the Turkish press so that there are no more checks and balances here. With the economic decline of the European Union, the aborting of Turkey’s efforts to become an E.U. member and the need for America to have Turkey as an ally in managing Iraq, Iran and Syria, there are also no external checks on the A.K.P.’s rising authoritarianism. (Erdogan announced out of the blue last week that he intended to pass a law severely restricting abortions.)
So many conversations I had with Turks here ended with me being told: “Just don’t quote me. He can be very vindictive.” It’s like China.
This isn’t good. If Erdogan’s “Sultanization” of Turkey continues unchecked, it will soil his truly significant record and surely end up damaging Turkish democracy. It will also be bad for the region because whoever wins the election in Egypt, when looking for a model to follow, will see the E.U. in shambles, the Obama team giving Erdogan a free pass and Turkey thriving under a system that says: Give your people growth and you can gradually curb democratic institutions and impose more religion as you like.
In the Guardian, Mehdi Hasan unloaded on the Erdoğan government, describing Istanbul as gripped by a “climate of fear” and noting government pressure on the media and prosecution of ordinary citizens for criticizing state education policy and insulting Islam. He recounted how the authorities detained some of his colleagues and read through his tv program’s scripts to find anything that might be objectionable, and conveyed the opinion of some that Erdoğan is “Putinesque.” Hasan summed up with the following:
Those of us who have long argued that elected Islamist parties should not be denied the opportunity to govern invested great hope in Erdogan and the AKP. But what I discovered in Istanbul is that there is still a long way to go. The truth is that Turkey cannot be the model, the template, for post-revolutionary, Muslim-majority countries like Tunisia and Egypt until it first gets its own house in order. To inspire freedom abroad, the Turkish government must first guarantee freedom at home.
It comes as no surprise to veteran Turkey watchers that the government’s authoritarian tendencies are increasingly bubbling to the surface. Plenty of folks have been sounding the alarm for awhile, but Turkey’s image has remained as a democracy that is successfully struggling to shed a legacy of military coups and acrimonious ideologically charged politics. That people like Friedman and Hasan are starting to sit up and take notice of some of the more egregious problems signals to me that Turkey is entering a dangerous place. Once Turkey and Erdoğan start to get lumped together with Russia and Putin – a comparison that I would note is completely inappropriate at this point – it will present a whole set of challenges for Turkey’s foreign policy and severely set back relations with the U.S. and Europe. I get the sense that Turkish economic growth has led Erdoğan and Davutoğlu to think that Turkey is indispensable, and that the rest of the world needs Turkey more than Turkey needs the rest of the world. This is pretty clearly an overreach, and Ankara should be more mindful of the fact that Turkey’s democratic status is massively important to its new preeminent position. Taking this lightly or underestimating how vital it is that Turkey continue to be perceived as solidly democratic is a bad misstep, and the AKP government needs a serious course correction before it’s too late. David Ignatius can write as many glowing paeans to the Obama-Erdoğan relationship as he likes, but the fact remains that the U.S. holds all non-democracies (aside from the oil producing ones) at arm’s length, and Turkey will be no different should it continue to crack down on basic freedom of expression and harass political opponents. Reputational costs are important, and if the narrative takes hold that Erdoğan is consolidating power and turning Turkey into a one-party state, he will find that his power inside of Turkey is unchallenged but that his power on the world stage is diminished.
Ulpana and Closing the Pandora’s Box
June 6, 2012 § 3 Comments
Apparently I take a few days off, and Israel descends into anarchy. I am not going to do a thorough rundown of the Ulpana vote and the events leading up to it; Amir Mizroch, Brent Sasley, and Allison Good all have some good thoughts on the subject that you should check out. Instead, I’d like to focus on one limited point, which is the fact that the settler movement has apparently lost all ability to think rationally or logically.
Let’s remember one simple and basic fact: Five homes are being transferred to another neighborhood rather than be demolished, and 300 new homes are being constructed in the settlement to which those five belong. In addition, the government is announcing a tender for 551 new homes in other settlements. With this in mind, here is a selection of some of my favorite rightwing quotes from the past few days. UTJ MK Yisrael Eichler, despite what is taking place right across Israel’s northern border in Syria, dubs Israel “the worst dictatorship ever.” National Union MK Yaakov Katz says that the government displays evil-heartedness in dealing with the settlers. National Union MK Aryeh Eldad said that Likud only pretends to support settlements but actually destroys them at their roots. Finally Likud MK Danny Danon proclaimed the 69-22 vote in the Knesset a travesty of democracy since voters chose Likud and said that the “extreme left” tries to win through the courts rather than by convincing the public come election time (never mind, of course, that Kadima got more votes than Likud at the last election, or that the Ulpana homes are being moved following a Knesset vote confirming the High Court’s order). Up is down. Day is night. Likud hates settlements, and settlers are treated like second class citizens.
As if the rhetorical nonsense was not enough, settlers have marched on Jerusalem, started hunger strikes, flooded MKs with phone calls and texts, and generally acted as if this is the most egregious affront to their existence since the forced evacuations of the Sinai and Gaza. That literally not one building is being demolished and that 850 more are being built is of completely no consequence to them. One would think that Ulpana was the Temple Mount and had some sort of special sacred significance, rather than being a completely random tract of land in a small and otherwise non-descript settlement. This puts an even greater sheen of ludicrousness on Eldad’s mind-blowing statement about how anti-settlement Likud is; the settler movement has become so accustomed to getting every single thing they want from various Likud governments that they have somehow come to believe that the Ulpana decision is an existential crisis. They have won so big, they don’t even realize what a regular win looks like anymore. This is the force that Likud, and Netanyahu in particular, has unleashed, and now the government has to deal with it.
Finally, take note of who voted to legalize Ulpana or did not show up to the vote following Netanyahu’s “vote with me or be fired from your ministerial post” ultimatum. All the usual Likud suspects such as Danon, Zeev Elkin, Yariv Levin, and Miri Regev voted against Netanyahu in favor of retroactively legalizing Ulpana, and Silvan Shalom did not show up to the vote. Danon has already threatened the ministers who voted with Netanyahu and said that they are mistaken to believe that Likud voters will have short memories, and settler leaders have been calling Netanyahu a liar and vowing political retaliation. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: a Likud split is coming, and it’s going to happen sooner rather than later. The hardline settlement supporters simply cannot remain together in a party with the leadership that they have denounced so forcefully and in such harsh terms. When Netanyahu wakes up to the fact that he cannot keep this ungainly ship together, Likud is going to fracture.
Some Home News
June 4, 2012 § 5 Comments
I am sitting in a room in the maternity ward at the hospital, gazing at the most perfect and adorable little boy, whom my wife delivered earlier this morning. As a result, unless Israel and Turkey somehow come to open warfare, the posting is likely to be sporadic this week. I should be back up and running at normal speed by next Tuesday or so. And no, his name is not Mustafa Kemal Ben-Gurion.
