Turkey And The Middle East: Carpe Diem: Can Europe Have A Muslim Country?
30 March 2011By Eric Walberg
Recent initiatives by its government attest to
Turkey's determination to bring a new realism to world
politics, and events in the Arab world provide an
opportunity to reshape regional relations, notes Eric
Walberg in Istanbul
As Turkey gears up to parliamentary elections in June,
recent pronouncements by Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu confirmed the importance that the Turkish
leadership places in defining a more dynamic role for
Turkey in the Middle East as a bridge between East and
West.
The Leaders of Change summit 13-14 March in Istanbul
brought together a hundred political leaders,
academics and journalists primarily from the US,
Europe and the Middle East. The summit was opened by
the Turkish prime minister, who referred to Turkey as
a "democratic social state based on social justice",
and described Istanbul as the right place for
East-West meetings, with its long history of ties to
the Middle East, the Balkans, North Africa, and as a
crossroads of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. His
address complemented the words of his foreign minister
addressed to the summit: "Islam and democracy are side
by side" now, and Turkish entry into the European
Union will show that "Europe can have a Muslim
country."
Erdogan chastised the West for its reluctance to
support the recent indigenous uprisings in the Middle
East, and at the same time warned against the mistake
of invading Libya as it invaded Iraq, saying that this
would destroy any hope for democracy. A strong leader
himself, he argued that if a leader falls behind,
becomes merely a "ruler trying to resist change" and
uses his position to enrich himself, he will be
reviled and will fall. The state "lives" only in as
much as the people live; there is no chicken-and-egg
problem here. If there is to be regime change in
Libya, it must come from the people, not the West.
The Turkish prime minister's vision is to dismantle
borders, so that people can pass from Europe to the
Middle East and vice versa, pointing to Turkey's
abolition of visa requirements to dozens of countries,
including Egypt and Russia -- unlike the insular EU.
This is a long term vision of Erdogan, who
co-sponsored the United Nations Alliance of
Civilizations along with Spanish President José
Zapatero in 2005.
The "end of history" proposed by Francis Fukuyama
after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the "clash
of civilisations" proposed by Samuel Huntington were
dismissed by the prime minister as Euro-centric and
discredited by recent events in the Middle East. He
also dismissed the Euro-centrism of the war on terror.
"Terrorism is international" including "Madrid, Moscow
and Istanbul" You can't say "My terrorist is bad,
yours is good," a principle that "certain countries"
operate on. The flow of ideas cannot be one-way. "We
must share ideas to overcome problems."
The prime minister is already looking towards Turkey's
centenary celebrations in 2023, and vowed at the
Leaders of Change summit that Turkey would be among
the top 10 economies by then. Deputy Prime Minister
Hayati Yazici further spoke about the strong Turkish
economy at the summit, claiming that Turkey's strong
economy has raised living standards to the point that
"no Turkish citizen is among the world's 1.5 billion
people who must survive on less than a dollar a day or
the 1 billion who lack adequate drinking water."
Foreign Minister Davutoglu arrived at the summit
straight from the sixth Al-Jazeera Forum "The Arab
world in transition: Has the future arrived? " in
Doha, Qatar 12-14 March, where he spoke at length
about the Turkish vision for the Middle East.
Davutoglu noted there that "The wave of revolutions in
the Arab world was spontaneous. But it also had to
happen to restore the natural flow of history".
He condemned the colonial divide-and-conquer policies
of the 1930s-50s, carving up the Middle East and
cutting the organic relations of Arab countries, and
the subsequent Cold War, which distorted and weakened
the region and turned nations like Turkey and Syria,
which had lived together for centuries, into enemies.
We are not witnesses of the end of history, but, on
the contrary, the return of the Middle East to "the
normal course of history" after a century of
distortion, when ancient civilisations were torn apart
by the invaders.
The foreign minister holds a PhD degree in Political
Science and International Relations and was chairman
of the Department of International Relations at
Beykent University in Istanbul before entering the
political arena. He is the author of five books,
including Alternative Paradigms: The Impact of Islamic
and Western Weltanschauungs on Political Theory and
The Civilizational Transformation and The Muslim
World, which have been published in English.
The end of the Cold War, the "earthquake of 1989",
should have brought the Turkish and Arab peoples back
to their "natural" relations, but the West prevented
this, he told the Leaders of Change summit. The West
believed that "Arab societies didn't deserve
democracy, and needed authoritarian regimes to
preserve the status quo and prevent Islamist
radicalism."
Davutoglu rejects this scenario and points to the
uprisings in the Arab world as proof that, "An
ordinary Turk, an ordinary Arab, an ordinary Tunisian
can change history," stating that the peoples who
lived under the pre-colonial Ottoman rule "have a
common destiny". "We need to reconstruct and restore
the political systems in our region, just as we would
rebuild our houses after a tsunami." The implication
is that the tsunamis that destroyed the region are
colonialism and Israel, and that the latter must
become part of the region's common destiny.
His vision is based on recognition of "respect and
dignity" for the people of the region, an end to the
insults and humiliation. "That is what the young
people in Tahrir Square demanded. After listening to
them, I became much more optimistic for the future.
That generation is the future of Egypt. They know what
they want. This is a new momentum in our region, and
it should be respected."
Change is happening whether the leaders want it or
not, and requires that leaders lead the change or they
will become followers. "Nobody should argue that only
a particular regime or person can guarantee a
country's stability. The only guarantee of stability
is the people. We must become subjects of change, like
the people in Tahrir Square."
No dictators can guarantee security – "security and
freedom are not alternatives; we need both." The only
way forward is through "transparency, accountability,
human rights and the rule of law." Davutoglu, clearly
reflecting on Turkey's experience, warned that there
must be a "clear separation between the military and
civilian roles of the political institutions" and
commended Egyptian head of state Field Marshall
Tantawi's decision to transfer power to a civilian
government as soon as possible.
He stressed that "the territorial integrity of our
countries and the region must be protected. The legal
status and territorial integrity of states including
Libya and Yemen should be protected. During
colonialism and cold war we had enough divisions,
enough separations."
"Turkey understands the region better than others
precisely because it is part of the region," but the
people of each country must lead the way. "There
should be regional ownership. This is our region."
However, like his prime minister, he stressed that
Turkey was not necessarily a model for any country,
that "change depends on both individual cultures and
universal values". He seconded Yazici's claim that
"Totalitarian regimes not based on social legitimacy
have no place since the fall of the Berlin Wall."
Davutolgu criticised the term "Middle East" as an
Orientalist term, connoting conflicts and
underdevelopment. "But our region has been the centre
of civilisation for millennia in which multicultural
environments flourish," and there are "sufficient
economic resources today to make our region a global
centre of gravity".
The foreign minister urged his listeners to seize the
day, to use the new openness in the region to reject
violence and dismantle "barriers between countries,
societies and sects". To increase economic
interdependency, political dialogue and cultural
interaction. Just as visa walls are coming down
between Turkey and its neighbours, so Turkey has
opened 18 new embassies in Africa in the past decade,
even as European countries shut theirs down. Davutoglu
endorsed Erdogan's call to eliminate visas,
envisioning a day "when people can pass from a free
Palestine through Istanbul to London. That's our
vision. Not building walls around Turkey, but opening
up to share with our neighbours. In Cairo, we are the
Middle East, in Europe we are Europeans. We must shape
history with all the nations around us."
He added that this applies to the West too, that
following the international financial crisis of the
past three years, "we need to develop an economic
order based on justice, and a social order based on
respect and dignity." Middle East developments today
hold out the promise of showing the way towards a
"global, political, economic and cultural new order".
Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/
You can reach him at http://ericwalberg.com
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