What is modern Türkiye’s relationship with its republican, secularist origins of Kemal Atatürk’s republic from 1923? How is the relationship between Türkiye, the United States, […]
What is modern Türkiye’s relationship with its republican, secularist origins of Kemal Atatürk’s republic from 1923? How is the relationship between Türkiye, the United States, and the West evolving? How is Türkiye positioning itself in the region in the aftermath of the Arab Spring? And is Europe’s stance toward Türkiye hypocritical?
Leszek Jazdzewski (Fundacja Liberte!) talks with Soli Özel, a Senior Fellow at Institut Montaigne and a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), who currently teaches at Koç University in Istanbul. He co-authored a book with Michael T. Rock titled “Elite Origins of Development and Democracy.” Currently, he is working on another book with Michael T. Rock, tentatively entitled “Elite Origins of Democracy and Development in the USA.” Tune in for their talk!
This podcast, as well as previous episodes, is available on SoundCloud, Apple Podcast, Stitcher and Spotify.
Watch the video of the conversation: youtu.be/DDawzZISEbw
This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with the Movimento Liberal Social and the Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.
Leszek Jażdżewski: Hello, welcome to Liberal Europe. This is Leszek Jażdżewski, and today we are going to discuss Turkey, the region and the post-American world with Soli Özel, who is a good friend from the Future of Europe Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), as well as a visiting lecturer at Koç University, a Senior Fellow at Institut Montaigne and one of the leading intellectuals, not just from Turkey. Soli, welcome to Liberal Europe.
Soli Özel: I’m very happy to be with you, Leszek.
Leszek Jażdżewski: I wanted to start with a big question about Turkey’s relationship with the republican, secularist origins of Kemal Atatürk’s republic from 1923. How would you describe this relationship today?
Soli Özel: The political party and its leadership that are in power today come from a political movement that was antithetical to the secular principles of the republic. They had a problem with the way the republic was founded, with its principles and its general trajectory. Particularly important in this context was, of course, the principle of secularism, which is an alaturka secularism, presumably separating state affairs and religion. But Turkish identity for citizens always included the religious dimension.
To this day, a non-Muslim is not understood to be a full-fledged citizen of the country. So when the AKP came to power nearly 24 years ago, in about two months it will be 24 years since they won the elections of 2002, they have been running the country continuously since then as a single party, with a coalition with the nationalists that is not official. They are part of the so-called People’s Alliance, anyway.
So the emphasis on which principles should guide the country has changed, as you’ve suggested. On the other hand, the very policies they have put in place have continued secularising society. Like in all such experiments, I understand that mosque attendance is down. The new generations have a very different relationship to religion than the rulers had actually expected.
At some point, when he was prime minister, today’s president, Mr Erdoğan, declared their goal to raise religious and vengeful generations. Maybe the vengefulness is there, but religiosity seems to be slipping. And for the audience, last night there was the final of the Women’s European Volleyball Championship. Turkey played against Italy, which is a very strong team, and the Turkish women’s team won three to two. They became European champions, and this is the second time in a row. The more conservative Islamist constituencies or intellectuals in the country keep attacking them because they are half-naked, this, that and the other.
But this is now the pride of the country. You could see among the spectators a lot of children, a lot of women, a lot of covered women, because they actually make the country proud. So I think whatever the ideological inclinations of the ruling elites today are, or the kinds of pressures they put on the country to further Islamise it, “sneaking Islamisation,” as an academic called it, the process of secularisation in society continues unabated.
Of course, it creates tensions because they hold power. And finally, one observation that I’ve had for a while now: the only political personality Mr Erdoğan was unable to beat, until the mayor of Istanbul who is now incarcerated, is Atatürk. He’s becoming more and more popular, and this time not because the state imposes his identity on the country, but because people own up to him. So there is genuinely now a popular popularity, if that makes any sense, of Atatürk in the country, including among more conservative circles of society.
Leszek Jażdżewski: Thank you, Soli. I started with this broad question because I think there is a lot of misunderstanding of Turkey from outside, of the relationship of the current party with its past, and also very little understanding of the sort of paranoia Erdoğan has vis-à-vis foreign influence, but also some internal influence, especially after the failed coup in 2016.
We’ll get to that. But I wanted to start with something you wrote, a very interesting piece for the Heinrich Böll Foundation, I think eight years ago, “The Transatlantic Drift and the Waning of Turkey’s ‘Strategic Westernness’.” How would you describe this strategic Westernness, which I think was very much a Cold War choice because of the threat from the USSR and a pro-American orientation?
After the Cold War ended, I think it lasted until the early 2000s, but since then we have seen the evolution of Turkey’s position, connected with the waning position of the US, but also the changing approach of the EU towards Turkey. So can you describe this waning strategic Westernness and what is replacing it?
Soli Özel: In that article, if I recall correctly, I make a distinction between Turkey’s political Westernisation and strategic Westernness. The argument in that essay was that although, in terms of a Westernising paradigm, the current rulers of Turkey are not much enamoured of that choice, whatever problems exist between Turkey and its allies in the Transatlantic Alliance, Turkey’s strategic Westernness actually remains. In fact, throughout the Cold War and in the post-Cold War period, whatever problems Turkey had with its allies, it never even thought of leaving NATO.
So I would argue that in spite of the problems Turkey might have, particularly with the Europeans nowadays, in terms of the supposed values of the European Union, I’m actually pretty full up with that. The hypocrisy of that terminology really grates upon many Turks of my kind. Strategically, Turkey is not about to leave NATO.
The defence minister, in an interview he gave a few months ago, said that NATO membership for Turkey was something Turkey would never give up, that it was the centre of its strategic identity. And some of the commentary on Turkey’s so-called drift is, in my judgement, either prejudicial or exaggerated. It is true, of course, that like many other countries in the alliance, Turkey does pursue its national interests in ways that may not always correspond to the collective interest.
But then again, neither is Spain necessarily always in accord with the rest of the alliance. A case in point is that the Spaniards refuse to raise their expenditures on defence to five percent, as everybody is required to do by the United States. So Turkey remains firmly installed in NATO.
Politically, it gives NATO a lot of headaches from time to time, but militarily it is a fairly well-functioning, very loyal and actually very contributive member. It provides almost 40 percent of all the intelligence on the Black Sea. It participates in many exercises, including in places where it didn’t necessarily have an interest or did not participate before, such as the Baltics.
So I really think that Turkey’s Western strategic identity remains, with the proviso that Turkey also has other interests because it is located in probably one of the most problematic regions in the world. It is surrounded by the Black Sea, where there is a war between Ukraine and Russia. It is a neighbour to Iran, Iraq and Syria. Syria has just finished its civil war. Iraq is still not a stable place, and Iran, the United States and Israel are at war, and have been at war for over seven months now.
So that’s how I would answer it. The orientation of society in terms of a Westernising modernity may have receded, but in terms of Turkey’s Western strategic identity, we’re still in there. One last point: just recently President Erdoğan said that Turkey may be interested in joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, but he had to add that this would not contradict Turkey’s NATO membership. Obviously, many people disagree with that.
Leszek Jażdżewski: Since the Arab Spring, and I think even before actually, Turkey played rather diplomatically and it went very well. Since then, Erdoğan supported the Arab Spring. It mostly failed. However, now there is a sort of stabilisation, especially with Syria.
What is Turkey’s position in the Middle East, especially now with the ongoing war in Iran and the ongoing conflict over Gaza, where Turkey is also very active, I would say more active than most Arab countries? How is Turkey positioned in the Middle East now, when traditional players like Russia and the US, well, the US is not withdrawing but seems to be quite weak vis-à-vis Iran, and Israel is gaining power? Russia still has some leverage over Syria, but not as much as it used to have. So how is Turkey positioning itself in this new Middle Eastern environment?
Soli Özel: You’ve asked a chunk full of questions. Let me dissect them. You’re right, or let me enlarge the context. In its first eight years in power, the AKP pursued a mostly pragmatic, economically oriented foreign policy. It sought, or it looked as if it sought, European Union membership.
This was a good way to demilitarise Turkish politics, but it also served their purposes because the military had been their nemesis, if you will, in political terms in earlier times. In foreign policy, the ideological dimension was subdued. The principle articulated at the time was “zero problems with neighbours.”
Rather than using force or threats, the idea was to open up as many markets in Turkey’s neighbourhood and in Africa as possible. At some point, by 2010-2012, there was more Turkish trade with the MENA region than there had ever been before. At that time, Turkey also wanted to become a more active and influential player in regional matters in all the regions around it.
It did try to adjudicate problems between Bosnia and Serbia, or Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia. It associated itself very closely with Azerbaijan and cut off relations, which it did not have anyway, with Armenia. There was also a détente with Syria, when relations got very much better and even the leaders of the two countries vacationed together.
Now, the Arab revolts, I call them Arab revolts, suddenly had the effect of changing Turkish foreign policy from a more pragmatic footing to a much more ideological footing, because the expectation was that the orders that existed in the Middle East, which were quasi-secular, were being shaken, so there would be democratic elections. And if there were elections, of course, the Muslim Brotherhood, the best-organised political movement in the region, would gain power.
The Turkish AKP is, if not organically linked, certainly has an affinity with Muslim Brotherhood movements throughout the region. When they came to power, let’s say in Tunisia and Egypt, they probably expected it in Libya as well. And if that was followed by a Muslim Brotherhood government in Syria, then Turkey as the big brother, with the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, would be the natural leader.
So for about nine years, Turkey meddled in Syria’s affairs. It felt a threat because of Kurdish military organisations affiliated with the PKK, which is a terrorist organisation recognised as such by the EU and the USA. It also wanted to present itself as a hegemonic, or would-be hegemonic, power in the Middle East in general. That project actually failed by 2020.
By 2020, Turkey had very bad relations with almost every Arab country except Qatar, which Turkey helped in 2017 when it was being pressured by the other GCC countries. The country was bankrupt, and the Syrian policy did not really pay off, in spite of the fact that Turkey had four military operations.
It actually broke the threat of a Kurdish entity being formed to the south of the border. But in 2020 this policy came to an end, and Turkey tried to mend fences with all the Arab countries with which it had bad relations. It managed to do so.
Now, the regime in Syria fell not as a direct result of Turkey’s policies. It helped Turkey that it maintained good, or at least protective, relations with the group that Ahmed al-Sharaa leads, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. But the reason the regime fell was because the Israelis militarily destroyed Hezbollah, which had actually kept the regime in place.
The Russians, who saved the regime in 2015, were otherwise busy with Ukraine. The Iranians were unable to help because they themselves were attacked. And the regime by itself could not really sustain itself in power to begin with.
So it is a direct or indirect result of the Israeli reaction to October 7, and what it did to Iran’s axis of resistance, if you will, that led to the demise of the Syrian regime, especially when Moscow said, “We really cannot save you.” And we now know that al-Sharaa also negotiated with Russia, basically telling them that their interests would not be totally attacked, whereas Iranians cannot even enter Syria officially. But now, of course, the new regime needs Turkey’s help and protection in order to consolidate itself in power.
Turkey is very much involved in Syrian affairs. And that brings me now to the last part of your question, the deterioration of Israeli-Turkish relations to an extent that nobody in this country, anyway, would have imagined. Some Israelis now see Turkey as having replaced Iran as a major threat to themselves, which I think is, to be polite, exaggerated.
But the rhetoric has escalated. Of course, the Israeli grievance is that Turkey is very close to Hamas. It hosts some of the Hamas leaders inside the country. On the other hand, the last hostages were released by Hamas because Turkey intervened. And just about two or three weeks ago, the Israelis bombed an empty airfield that the Turks had just repaired, arguing that Turkey was going to place troops there. It was 70 kilometres from the Turkish border.
The Israelis accuse Turkey of being an occupying force in the north, while they themselves are occupying the south of the country. They bomb as they please, and they are actually weakening or attacking the sovereignty of Damascus. It is obvious that they do not want a strong government in place in Damascus because they don’t trust al-Sharaa, who is a jihadist and who probably has blood on his hands, and most of his people are of that kind, which is very strange.
And I disagree with you, I suppose, that Israel is gaining strength. Israel did gain strength on many occasions. But I think this Iran war and the way Israel reacted to October 7, the brutality with which it attacked Gaza, the kinds of things that are happening in the West Bank, the erosion of political support for Israel, and most importantly public opinion in the United States, in my judgement, will make Israel a lot weaker tomorrow than it was on October 6, 2023, the day before Hamas brutally attacked Israeli villages and murdered over 1,200 people, some of them soldiers.
So the general context then is that Israel and Turkey appear today as two hegemonic competitors, in spite of the fact that overall their interests do not necessarily clash. But so long as the Israelis do not have any intention of solving the Palestinian problem, and the Turks are going to be champions of it, more Hamas than the Palestinians, but that’s another topic, the tension is going to be there.
My hunch is, of course, that as this endless war between the Iranians and the Americans continues, and it may yet escalate, everyone’s interest in the region will be the containment of Iran. Maybe that reality will help ameliorate relations between Israel and Turkey tomorrow. But today, it is much tenser than I have ever seen it, or than anyone who has ever had any dealings with Israel had expected it to turn out.
Leszek Jażdżewski: Thank you. I don’t think I disagree on the issue that Israel, long term, is going to be weakened by being isolated, even if militarily it is on a strong footing right now vis-à-vis most of its adversaries.
I wanted to turn attention to European affairs, because Turkey has historically also been a European power, in Ottoman times. It’s been pro-Western for most of its recent history. And I think at the beginning of the 21st century, it appeared that the future of European integration might actually be happening.
But then came very strong rejections, especially from France, of membership by Turkey, and also the internal transition or transformation inside the country. It seems now that Turkey sees itself as a sort of, you know, Europe likes to talk about strategic autonomy in the European Union. Turkey is also thinking about strategic autonomy for itself, being a pillar in the multipolar world that is emerging from this American hegemony.
How do you think the future of the relationship between the EU and Turkey will evolve? Turkey seems to be quite important militarily for Europe, especially now with the conflict with Russia. Turkey and Russia have been strategic rivals for long parts of their history. How do you see this future relationship evolving, and how should it evolve in the best possible scenario in Europe?
Soli Özel: Leszek, it’s like all of your questions so far, this is such a broad question.
Leszek Jażdżewski: I’m sorry.
Soli Özel: No, don’t be sorry. I like them. It’s just that, in order not to confuse your audience, I’ll try to go in a very simple way.
Number one: what is the West today? Is AfD Germany the Germany we had yesterday? Will Le Pen’s France be the France that we’ve known for 80 years? Will Farage’s Britain be the Britain of the previous 80 years? If your government changes tomorrow, what kind of government will it be?
First of all, we do have a crisis of the West, both as a strategic concept, look at American behaviour vis-à-vis European allies, the dismissiveness, that they want to annex Canada, they want to annex Greenland. So the conception of the West that was created after 1945 is being shaken. Then the content of the West is being shaken: MAGA in the United States, all the radical right-wing parties in different countries of Europe that are taking advantage of the discontent that much of the population in those countries feels these days.
So there is that identity crisis, which is also a security crisis because of the current American administration. In that sense, to talk about whether Turkey is really Western doesn’t make as much sense as it might have 20 or 15 years ago. That’s number one.
Number two: until recently, until about three weeks ago, Erdoğan always said that Turkey’s strategic goal was to become a member of the European Union. As you know, La Rochefoucauld said, “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” But about three weeks ago, in an interview he gave to Al Jazeera television, he said that it was no longer our number one priority, that we still wanted it, but it was no longer our number one priority.
It’s not just the Turkish side that is responsible for the way relations are. I think the Europeans have been utterly hypocritical in the way they have dealt with Turkey. It was far more important for von der Leyen and the Commission to have the migration agreement with Turkey, which is an appalling agreement, quite frankly, and nowadays, of course, there is reliance on the Turkish military for European security. But then they do not say a word about the shrinking of democratic space, the trampling upon human rights, the incarceration of elected officials on trumped-up charges and all of that. Europe is totally silent. It’s as if these things are happening in a different world.
With that kind of hypocrisy, they’re even losing the Turkish public, which in spite of everything is still overwhelmingly in favour of European membership, because its aspirations are not Middle Eastern, they are not Central Asian. Their aspirations are European, of a pre-AfD and, if you will, pre-Le Pen Europe.
So this political crisis is not going to go away anytime soon. There are probably about four to five million Turks living in different countries of the European Union. If the right wing asserts itself in many more countries than it does today, what will happen to those people? Will that generate tension? That is a problem.
And the Europeans also appear not to be interested in integrating Turkey organically into their new so-called security architecture, and instead just keeping it as a collaborator. That, I think, is a bad idea. And for Turkey as well, to think that it can get away with just being a collaborator and not being integrated is also wrong.
Yes, Turkey does have a strong military. It is also true that Turkey now has a budding defence industry, particularly in drones and so on, but it still has technological incapacities. It is improving on those, but that will take a while. So I think a more organic relationship is necessary.
And once you build a more trusting relationship, because trust is totally absent between the two sides, if you can build a trusting relationship in security, then the political one may follow.
But then I can ask you a question. Answer me yes, no or maybe: will there be a European Union as we know it in ten years’ time?
Leszek Jażdżewski: As we know it, perhaps not, but some sort of European Union I expect to still exist.
Soli Özel: Okay. And by the way, we have very good relations with Poland, to the best of my knowledge. I mean Poland and, at least, Orbán’s Hungary, the Baltic States, those are countries that appreciate Turkey’s geopolitical position. I think they appreciate more than Western Europeans what Turkey has done in Ukraine and Russia.
The fact that it does not join the sanctions regime is usually called upon to criticise the country, but it was a sanctions regime that nobody consulted Turkey about to begin with, number one. Number two, in principle, Turkey never joined any sanctions regimes that were not actually based on a UN decision.
So anyway, I find a lot of ill will, both in our country and in Western countries, when commenting on the problems. It’s very easy to leave out inconvenient facts when you’re making an argument. And in the world we’re living in, in the kind of perilous environment we’re living in, I think one ought to be, I’m talking about intellectuals now, far more honest about their assessments than partial and militant.
Leszek Jażdżewski: Thank you, Soli