philosophical principles, especially in regard to the sanctity of the individual, combined with widely accepted notions of civil rights enshrined in an explicit commitment to the rule of law in constitutionally defined democratic states. The Russians profess to share these values but their political system does not reflect them. The Turks for the most part already practice them, and both assert categorically that they already are “European” culturally and socially. Each minimizes the residual impact of their once more distinctive oriental despotisms. The Turks point to the institutionalized separation of religion and state in their own modernized and increasingly democratic Turkey. The Russians stress that as far back as under Peter the Great Russia was deliberately Europeanizing itself, that the recent Communist era was essentially an aberration, and that their Russian Orthodox traditions are an integral part of European Christendom.
Nonetheless, it is true that both Russia and Turkey are inheritors, though in different ways, of culturally distinctive imperial pasts that continue to blend with their contemporary “Europeanism.” Both countries attained greatness apart from, and often against, Europe. And both subsequently experienced a deep fall. During the nineteenth century, Turkey was labeled “the sick man of Europe.” In the course of the twentieth century, Russia was seen as such twice, first before the Bolshevik Revolution and then after the fall of Soviet Communism. Both have repudiated their respective imperial pasts but they cannot entirely erase them from either their geopolitical ambitions or from their historical consciousness as they deliberately and insistently redefine themselves.
During the twentieth century, Turkey proved more successful in transforming itself than Communist Russia. Ataturk’s sweeping reforms, which were abruptly imposed on Turkey in 1924 (three years after its proclamation as a postimperial state), produced dramatic and remarkably successful changes. The country broke with its Arab- Islamic connection, it suddenly (literally overnight) adopted the Western alphabet in place of the Arabic script, it removed religious elements from its state institutions, and it even changed the people’s dress code. In subsequent decades, it has progressively institutionalized in a determined fashion an increasingly democratic process within a firmly defined secular state.
Unlike Russia, at no time did Turkey either plunge into a Manichean orgy of internal killing or degenerate into totalitarianism. The ambitious nationalist mystique of Ataturk was contagious among fervent younger Turks, but it was not imposed by sustained, brutalizing, and lethal terror. There was no Gulag; nor was there any claim that what the Turks were doing domestically was universally applicable and historically inevitable. The Turkish experiment, in effect, was less globally ambitious than the Soviet but more nationally successful.
It is noteworthy that Turkey managed in an impressive fashion to shed its imperial ambitions and to redirect its national energy toward internal social modernization. In firmly promoting it, Ataturk was guided by a historic vision in which means were in balance with ends, thus avoiding the Stalinist excesses of Leninist utopianism and universalism. His vision also facilitated Turkey’s remarkably realistic accommodation to its new postimperial status, especially in contrast to the still-lingering nostalgia among some portions of the Russian elite for its recently lost multinational empire.
In the course of the last two decades, Turkey has moved steadily forward in its consolidation of a genuinely functioning constitutional democracy, driven by its desire to join the EU—having been invited several decades ago to do so by the Europeans, but on the specific condition that Turkey would satisfy Europe’s democratic standards. More importantly, however, Turkey’s steady democratization has been a reflection of its growing acceptance of democracy as a way of life. Though its democracy is still vulnerable, especially in the area of press freedom, the fact that the Turkish military has had to acquiesce to electoral outcomes and constitutional changes it did not like is a testimonial to the vitality of Turkey’s ongoing democracy. In that respect, Turkey is also clearly ahead of Russia.
Continued secularization will be critical to Turkey’s democratic progress. Because Ataturk imposed secularization from above in 1924, many Europeans and even some Turks now fear that with the onset and subsequent acceleration in recent decades of Turkey’s democratization, greater political openness could lead to the resurgence of more extreme manifestations of religious primacy in social affairs and even to the primacy of religious identity over national identity. That, so far at least, has not happened and some indications suggest that a more robust Turkish democracy gradually reduces the appeal of religious fundamentalism. For example, according to a Turkish university survey, between 1999 and 2009, public support for the adoption of sharia laws declined from over 25% to about 10%. Closer ties with Europe would be likely to favor the further social acceptance of a secular and national Turkish state.
It is also important to recognize that Turkey is already broadly connected in important ways to the West in general and to Europe specifically. It has been a stalwart member of NATO since its inception, more willing to help the Alliance in actual combat than some other European allies, and it has the second-largest standing armed force in NATO. It also maintained comprehensive and sensitive security links with the United States throughout the Cold War. For years it has been engaged in the tedious but necessary process of making its domestic law and constitutional practices compatible with EU standards. Thus de facto, though not yet as a legal fact, Turkey is in some significant ways already an informal extension of Europe and thus also of the West.
On the international arena, the increasingly modern and basically secular Turkey of today is beginning to attain a regional preeminence geographically derived from its imperial Ottoman past. Turkey’s new foreign policy, shaped by its geopolitically minded Foreign Minister (Ahmet Davutoglu, the author of the concept of “Strategic Depth”), is premised on the notion that Turkey is a regional leader in the areas once part of the Ottoman Empire, including the Levant, North Africa, and Mesopotamia. This approach is not driven by religious considerations but has a historical-geopolitical motivation. Based on the reasonable premise that good relations with neighbors are preferable to hostile ones, Davutoglu’s plan posits that Turkey should exploit its current socioeconomic dynamism— in 2010 it ranked as the world’s seventeenth-largest economy—to rebuild relationships that existed historically but faded during the twentieth century because of Kemalist concentration on internal secularization and inculcation of a specifically Turkish nationalism.
Moreover, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s dissolution and beyond the boundaries of the former Ottoman Empire, the newly independent Central Asia, largely Turkic in its cultural heritage, now beckons. Turkey’s more active commercial and cultural outreach is a potential reinforcement for the modernization, secularization, and eventual democratization of this energy-rich but geopolitically inchoate region. It is also relevant to note that since Russia seeks to monopolize direct foreign access to Central Asian energy exports, Turkey’s increasing regional role can facilitate—in joint collaboration with Azerbaijan and Georgia—Europe’s unimpeded access across the Caspian Sea to Central Asia’s oil and gas.
Turkey’s increasingly promising transformation into a modern and secular state—in spite of some persisting retardation in some social aspects including press freedom, education, and human development (see comparative Turkey-Russia tables on p. 142–143)—invests its citizens with a patriotic self-confidence that could turn into enduring anti-Western animus if Turkey were to feel itself permanently rejected by Europe. Forces within Europe— predominately in France and Germany—continue to deny Turkish aspirations because of an ambiguous belief that Turkey is an alien culture that represents an intrusion rather than a partnership. Thus, eighty-five years after the initiation of their unprecedented effort at social modernization and cultural transformation based on the European example, the Turks are now becoming resentful of their continuing exclusion. And that contributes to the risk that if the democratic experiment in Turkey were to fail, Turkey could turn back toward a more assertive Islamic political identity or succumb to some form of nondemocratic military regimentation. In either case, Turkey, instead of shielding Europe from the problems and passions of the Middle East, would amplify those challenges through the Balkans into Europe.
That eventuality could become especially threatening in the event of a continued failure by America and Europe to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace of genuine accommodation, and/or if America plunges into a direct conflict with Iran. The former—resulting very likely in intensified extremism in the Middle East—would indirectly but still quite adversely influence Turkish attitudes toward the West; the latter would threaten Turkish security, especially if the conflict were to ignite a wider Kurdish insurgency and again destabilize Iraq. The Turks would resent the fact that their national interests were not only being ignored but also jeopardized by the West.
A prolonged separation from Europe morphing into hostility could generate a political retrogression and a fundamentalist revival that could then halt Turkey’s march to modernity. In a worst-case scenario, reminiscent of the consequences for Iran of the Shah’s overthrow in 1978, such separation could even undermine Ataturk’s remarkable legacy. That would be historically and geopolitically unfortunate for three fundamental reasons. First, Turkey’s internal democratization and spreading modernization is evidence that neither democratization nor modernization are incompatible with Islamic religious traditions. Such a demonstration is of great importance to the
