Turkey, Europe and the Middle East

Far Away, So Close

Levent Soysal
Kadir Has U, Turkey

Turkey is located at a close proximity to Europe and the Middle East, at the near East of one and the near West of the other. Turkey’s distances—or proximities—to these locations are customarily taken as absolute and obvious. Yet, measured and discussed in units of civilization-types (East and West), as well as in tropes of culture (Europeanness and Turkishness), they are, as Johannes Fabian’s and Hayden White’s work would show us, tangible inasmuch as they are typological or figurative.

The distances are constituted both by the past—the past time of the Ottomans, Islam and traditions, and by the present—the present tense of Turkish immigrants, Turkey’s membership in the European Union, and the war in the Middle East. In this theater of pasts and presents, traditions and modernities, and cultures and civilizations, distances collapse and proximities disappear. In other words, the distances and proximities are simultaneous and most often indistinguishable.

To the West Unification, to the East Detachment
In the last decade or so, while Turkey is attempting to keep its distance with the Middle East and place itself in Europe, Europe is increasingly underscoring the distances between itself and Turkey.

Seen from Europe, this distance—or rather proximity—is extremely contentious and borders on the dangerous. On the one hand, Turkey’s candidacy to the EU brings Europe to the borders of war. Over Turkey, Europe meets the Middle East. On the other hand, Turkey’s current political demons—Cyprus, Kurdish and Armenian questions, to list a few—become European matters, more than they already are.

There is also in Europe the question of how to deal with Islam, prompted by the post-Sept 11 anxieties and the presence of large populations of Turkish immigrants in most core European countries. At large, the issue is framed as one of Turkey’s compatibility to Europe, to its economy, culture and value system—in particular, to European norms of human rights.

Seen from Turkey, membership in the EU implies a rightful conclusion to the nearly century-long experiment in modernization and nation-building, actualized in accord with the universal (European) principles of laicism, democracy and equal rights for women. However, the prospects of a place in the EU in the near foreseeable future do not look as promising today as they did a few years back and membership seems more and more like a waning dream.

The sense of having accomplished a successful modernization also allows Turkey to distance itself from the Middle East, its presumed Islamic and “pre-modern” traditions and lifestyles, undemocratic governments and conflict-ridden terrain. Turkey’s proximity to the region, on the other hand, is pregnant with conflict and opportunity.

The possibility of war crossing over Turkey’s borders with Iraq, or spreading to the wider region, is always in the air and feels imminent, given US hostility to Syria and Iran, as well as alleged implicit US support for a Kurdish state in northern Iraq. The civil war in Iraq brings Turkey closer to Iran and Syria, resulting not in permanent alliances but momentary economic or political engagements. In addition, Turkey offers itself as an intermediary in resolving various conflicts—more often than not without any effect or recognition.

Seen from the Middle East, that really is, for someone writing in Turkey, somewhat speculative. Turkish media, academic and policy connections with the Middle East are negligible if not non-existent—though this is visibly changing recently.

Politics of Uncertainty
From afar, Turkey appears to be a country with strong policy orientations and political itineraries overly determined by national goals, established with the 1923 Turkish Declaration of Republic. Alternatively, we encounter a country ridden with strife, neatly divided along the lines of secular and Islamic, Kemalist and liberal, Europeanist and nationalist, or numerous permutations of these, roots of which again date back to the foundation of the Republic.

Either way, the picture presented is taken to be delimited by Turkey’s particular history of nation-building and the specifics of its experiment in modernity and rests upon a strong, undue assumption of continuity—Turkish sonderweg, so to speak. Such accounts of exceptionalism not only present immeasurable analytic difficulties in a connected world then and now, but also render invisible the towering presence of uncertainty in Turkey’s current political landscape.

It is not wrong to depict the current state of Turkey as a country floating seamlessly in rough seas, responding to international, as well as domestic, crises as they occur, without necessarily following set policy goals and national agendas. (An exception to this may be the realm of the economy, where IMF led policies set the course and do not leave much room for maneuvering.)

Added to this, currently Turkey has numerous and rather autonomous power centers, such as the government, the president, joint chiefs of staff, the speaker of the parliament, ministry of foreign affairs, the council of higher education, business associations, and so on. To a degree, they are all influential in decision-making, pursue openly conflicting agendas, and do not shy away from contradicting one another even in supposedly strategic cases that concern national security.

Also we should not forget the fact that the composition of the Turkish Parliament drastically changes with each election since the 1980s. It is not uncommon for a governing party to loose all of its seats in the parliament in the next election. All this simply amplifies the ad hoc nature of responses to crises and creates a suitable climate for politics of uncertainty.

Politics in Uncertain Times
Take the war in Iraq. It is not clear, for instance, whether Turkey wants to stay out of the conflict or get involved along with the US-British alliance. Just moments before the beginning of the war, the Turkish Parliament rejected a proposition brought to vote by the government, which by the way had the majority, not allowing the US army to operate from Turkish soil.

Around the same time, a high-ranking general called for staying out of futile war efforts, drawing attention to the painful experiences of the Ottoman army in Yemen during the First World War. This then ignited a debate on the borders of “fatherland,” some arguing for a fatherland bounded by the current nation-state borders, some—surprisingly with liberal tendencies—making expansionist arguments based on Ottoman legacy.

The presence of Kurdish insurgents in northern Iraq is always a cause for concern and military action. The current volatile situation in the city of Kirkurk, where a sizable Turkmen minority is in open dispute with the regional Kurdish government over land and census, legitimizes calls for intervention—from hawks and doves alike.

On the European front, the coefficient of certainty is not high, either. Turkey’s EU membership process resembles a roller coaster ride, with surges and ebbs in public opinion, media hype and political rhetoric. Turkey’s accession negotiations with the EU started in October 2005 with high expectations but stalled by early 2007.

The public imagination in Europe is already saturated with a heightened debate on the Europeanness of Turks and Turkey. On the other hand, the European Court of Human Rights’ decisions in favor of Turkey’s banning of headscarves and keeping of its electoral barrage at ten percent (that is seen as hindering democratic participation in government) affirms the public conviction in Turkey about “European hypocrisy.” All parties involved are discontent with the progress of Turkey’s application for EU membership but no one can afford to end the negotiations.

However uncertain the current state of Turkish politics is, what is certain is Turkey’s unmistakable entanglement in the future of both the Middle East and Europe. That future seems far away and, yet, is so close. On the road to that future, Turkey has to face her domestic demons and reassess her connections and orientations. The task for anthropologists is to seriously interrogate convenient assertions of Turkish exceptionalism and place Turkey in an analytic map that connects Europe to the Middle East.

Levent Soysal completed his PhD in anthropology at Harvard University in 1999. Soysal’s topics of research and teaching include globalization and the metropolis; transnationalism, youth and migration; spectacle and performance; and theories of culture, representation and media.