A Golden Age At All Costs
April 2, 2012 § 1 Comment
Hugh Pope has a long and excellent roundup in the Cairo Review of Erdoğan’s first decade at Turkey’s helm, and it is a useful summary of the important trends that have taken place, particular in the foreign policy realm. Something that jumped out at me is Pope’s analysis of the U.S.-Turkey relationship, to which he does not devote an entire section but which pops up in a few places. He describes Erdoğan’s rushing to placate the U.S. following his embarrassment at the parliamentary vote denying help with the Iraq War, and that Turkish granting of overflight rights and supply routes and the subsequent deal for U.S. intelligence on the PKK helped usher in what Ankara has described at a golden age in relations with Washington. Pope also points to the return of a Cold War dynamic in which the U.S. looks the other way in ignoring Turkish authoritarian behavior at home in return for a reliable ally that secures American interests.
Certainly, Turkish government officials like to play up the relationship with Washington and what they see as a vital partnership, and they like to point out similarities in the two countries’ political development. I heard Davutoğlu speak at Georgetown in 2010 in a talk titled “Turkish Foreign Policy and Turkish-U.S. Partnership in the 21st Century” in which he embraced Obama’s term of a”model partnership” and then talked about Turkey’s four “political restorations” (the Tanzimat reforms, establishment of the republic, multiparty democracy, and what is going on now with AKP constitutional reforms) and cleverly made a comparison to the U.S. by asserting that it too went through four political restorations. Especially as Turkey has drifted farther away from Europe, first as European countries openly snubbed its EU membership bid and then as Turkey determined that it did not need Europe as much as it had originally thought, it has moved even closer to the U.S. Even though this should not be a point that ever bears repeating, casual observers tend to forget that Turkey is a member of NATO and that it is a valuable strategic ally in numerous ways.
The upshot of this is that in thinking about Erdoğan’s comments over the past week regarding Iran’s nuclear program, and how no state has the right to threaten Iran over what he deems to be an entirely peaceful pursuit of nuclear power, and how the NATO X-Band radar is not directed at thwarting or containing Iran, ultimately it’s not going to make a lick of difference. The growing chasm between Turkey and Europe along with its loss of Syria as its primary Arab ally mean that the relationship with the U.S. is even more inviolate than ever. Erdoğan did everything he could to repair ties with Washington following the Iraq War, and despite the perception of a Turkish turn to the east, Erdoğan and Davutoğlu are too savvy to go back to the dark days of spring 2003 when it comes to the U.S., even if it eventually means tossing Iran overboard and not looking back. The announcement on Friday that Turkey would be cutting back its imports of Iranian oil is the most recent datapoint in this regard, and no doubt if the U.S. decides to go even further and eventually take military action, Turkey will quietly follow along. I still stand by my musings from last week about Erdoğan’s perplexing move of jetting straight to Tehran from Seoul, and it makes sense in this context since Turkey has perhaps the most to lose from a U.S.-Iranian confrontation and will do anything it can to prevent it from happening. Turkey benefits from its relationship with Iran and does not want to lose it, but now that it has lost Syria and Europe, it simply cannot lose the U.S. as well.
The implications for U.S. pressure on Turkey to maintain its liberalizing reforms and not roll back any progress that was made between 2002 and 2009 are that no such pressure will be forthcoming any time soon. The U.S.-Turkey relationship has moved firmly into the realm of realpolitik, and anyone expecting Washington to speak out on press intimidation or harassing of political opponents will be waiting a long time. The U.S. needs Turkey more than ever in the wake of the Arab Spring and Turkey equally needs the U.S., and so the golden age/model partnership is going to be maintained no matter the hardships on either side. If it means Ankara sacrificing its relationship with Iran or the U.S. appearing to cynically give an ally a free pass, so be it.
Predicting the Outcome of the Arab Spring
March 30, 2012 § 3 Comments
I am once again going to step away from Israel and Turkey because I cannot let Walter Laqueur’s piece in World Affairs on misplaced optimism about the Arab Spring go uncommented upon. Laqueur’s argument is that most observers assumed that democracy was going to sweep the Middle East, which is now apparently not going to happen, and so we must ask why the chances against that happening were ignored. He cites the writing of Roger Cohen and Nick Kristof as leading the optimistic charge, and says that Westerners mistook Arab dissatisfaction with the status quo as a desire for democracy and universal human rights, and that “it should have been clear that the odds against the emergence of a democratic order in the foreseeable future in the Arab world were impossibly heavy.”
Agreed, I am 100% on board with this last observation. The problem is, by focusing on the reporting of a couple of New York Times columnists, Laqueur makes the same mistake that they committed in that he misses the big picture, which is that plenty of people made it very clear that the odds of democracy emerging were depressingly slim. Just because high profile journalists ignored the vast array of expert opinion that was out there at the time does not mean that we can somehow alter reality and act as if Kristof and Cohen represent the consensus opinion of the world. If you are looking for contemporary warnings from the leading ranks of Middle East analysts that democracy in Egypt was not imminent, you can try this or this or this. Just because Kristof and Cohen chose to ignore the vast weight of history and the crushing burden of institutional legacies in favor of the heady optimism of Tahrir Square protestors does not mean that there needs to be soul searching on the part of anyone save columnists who parachute into the midst of a revolution and deign to explain what is going on to the world without taking a step back to consider the various structural constraints that are constantly shaping the political sphere. Democracy does not happen overnight; it emerges following a long and difficult path in which literally thousands of little things have to go right, and even then it is a long shot unless the underlying conditions for democracy to flourish are present. I do not mean to take anything away from the thousands of Egyptians who demonstrated in Tahrir and elsewhere, standing up to Mubarak’s goons and then to the army in order to nurture a dream of a better political and social order. Their presence was and is remarkable, but it is not enough to make democracy appear out of thin air, not when there are so many countervailing forces pushing back.
Folks who study and write about the Middle East professionally are not surprised at what is taking place today. I am certainly no expert, just a small voice on the periphery, but even I saw what was coming. One of the main premises of my dissertation (which is merrily underway and nearing completion), which I came up with for the first time in the fall of 2007, is that Tunisia has long been the only Arab state in which conditions are favorable in almost every respect for democracy and that there is a particular ideological legacy that has been holding it back. On the day that Ben Ali fell, I argued in Foreign Policy that Tunisia is unique and that it was unlikely that any other Arab dictators would be joining Ben Ali soon. That prediction was obviously (and happily) wrong, but only because my language was far too imprecise. What I should have written, and what I have argued long and loudly ever since, is that other Arab regimes were unlikely to be replaced, and indeed anyone who has followed events in Egypt knows that Mubarak may be gone but the authoritarian regime has remained right where it always was. In February 2011, I wrote the following in a short essay that I could not convince anyone to publish: “In Egypt, the military’s interests are too bound up with those of the regime to let it be overtaken, and as seen by events in Tahrir Square, where the army allowed violence to flare up but has now acted to simply keep both sides apart, the army is neither on the side of the demonstrators nor a force for democracy. In Syria, civil society is far weaker than in Egypt, making mass demonstrations difficult to sustain, and the army has a history of firing on civilians, unlike the Egyptian military. In short, Arab regimes and militaries are remarkably resilient and protective of their interests, and the chances of an outbreak of successful revolutions or democratic transitions are slim at best.” In hindsight, some parts of this are more correct than others – demonstrations have been going on in Syria for over a year, and Egypt and Libya carried out revolutions with varying degrees of success – but underlying analysis was right on point, which was not to expect democracy outside of Tunisia any time soon. I am not reprinting my thoughts from the first months of 2011 to make myself seem particularly prescient, but to highlight the fact that anything but the most shallow analysis easily led to a more pessimistic conclusion than the optimism Laqueur describes as widespread. Laqueur wants observers to reassess how their wishful thinking impacts their analysis, but the truth is that it is not Middle East analysts who got history wrong, only the wishful thinkers who moonlight as analysts.
Davutoğlu’s Thoughts on the World
March 20, 2012 § 2 Comments
Ahmet Davutoğlu has a wide-ranging interview in the Cairo Review on a host of topics ranging from Turkey’s strategic interests to its issues with Cyprus and Armenia, and there’s way too much in there to cover comprehensively, but I want to hone in on a few of the more interesting points.
Whatever else one thinks of him, Davutoğlu is an impressive character and his reputation as a thinker is well earned. He speaks on topics with a depth and understanding that is rare for foreign ministers of any stripe. That said, the first thing that jumps out at me is a combination of stubbornness and what I assume is willful naivete. He makes it clear that he believes “zero problems with neighbors” is alive and well despite the numerous assumptions that should have been shattered by the Arab Spring. It is all fine and well to trumpet the desire to have harmonious relationships with everyone and help other states solves their problems, but it is not anything that can be seriously sustained if Turkey is to guard its own interests. This is international relations 101, and Davutoğlu surely knows that its dumping of Assad has guaranteed newly strained relations with Iran, to take one prominent neighbor. Zero problems with neighbors is a nice slogan and might have even worked when the Middle East appeared to be relatively static, but for an ambitious global power like Turkey that is aiming to expand its reach throughout and Middle East and beyond, it is nothing more than hubris to believe that it can revolutionize the way in which states interact. Turkey and Davutoğlu need to publicly and privately come to grips with this fact sooner rather than later.
This might be reading between the lines too much, but it is interesting that in listing Turkey’s interests, Davutoğlu orders them as economic, democratic, and the alliance with Europe and the Atlantic community. I think his prioritization of economic interests is perfectly normal but gives lie to the idea that Turkey is able to dance on the head of a pin when it comes to respecting everyone and forming a set of cooperative and non-confrontational relationships. Some of Turkey’s relations in the region will be characterized as such but others will not, and the foreign minister’s rundown demonstrates that Turkey is actually not so different from everybody else.
Davutoğlu also talks about Turkey consolidating its democracy as its greatest success on the domestic front. Political scientists all know that democratic consolidation is a famously slippery term that can mean all sorts of things from preventing democratic backslide, to moving from electoral to liberal democracy, to improving democratic quality in even highly advanced democracies, but at its heart it implies reaching some sort of democratic threshold that puts a country’s democratic status and liberal qualities beyond reproach. I think that few people outside of Turkey, and certainly no democracy experts, would describe Turkish democracy as consolidated. Turkish democracy has made strides in some places and been abysmal in others, and in fact Turkey appears to be closer to Thomas Carothers’ grey zone than it does to achieving liberal democratic status. Certainly no serious argument can be made that Turkey is a consolidated democracy when it has over one hundred journalists in jail, editors and reporters talk of a climate of fear surrounding criticism of the government, and students who throw eggs at politicians risk being imprisoned for five years. Turkish democracy has improved in many ways, but the consolidation talk is extremely premature.
Davutoğlu also does an interesting about-face that will be apparent only to those who read his doctoral dissertation (which was turned into the book Alternative Paradigms) when he talks about his categorical refutation of the Huntingtonian clash of civilizations thesis. The foreign minister used to sing a different tune, and in fact before Huntington even wrote his seminal 1993 article Davutoğlu argued that the divisions between the Western and Islamic world stem from an irreconcilable chasm between the philosophical and political traditions of the two civilizations, and that both sides can justifiably view the other as being ideologically intransigent. In the Cairo Review interview, he adds the interesting modifier “with the advantage of hindsight,” but I’d be interested to hear a first-hand account of when and why he changed his mind.
Finally, the subject of the Arab Spring makes for some fascinating reading. Davutoğlu claims that Turkey expected the Arab Spring, which is interesting in light of Turkey’s heavy reliance on ties with Syria under Assad and its seemingly being taken by surprise on Tunisia and Libya, and so there seems to be some serious revisionist history taking place. On the question of whether Turkey is an appropriate model for Arab countries, the foreign minister gives a surprising yet cogently insightful answer, which is that Turkey does not want to hold itself forth or be seen as a role model given every state’s unique history and sociopolitical legacy. He says that Turkey is happy to share its democratic experience with other countries, but that anyone looking solely at the evolution of civilian-military relations is missing the big picture and that it took Turkey decades to arrive at where it is now. Anyone who has ever studied democratization and knows just how difficult and rocky the path to democracy is will greatly appreciate that answer, and it is unusual to see Davutoğlu go out of his way not to promote Turkey as a model in that manner (I cannot imagine a similar level of restraint from Erdoğan).
For more thoughts, there is a good roundup of the interview by Steven Cook, Marc Lynch, and others.
