The (un)making of the Pax Turca in the Middle East: understanding the social-historical roots of foreign policy

Abstract

Turkey’s foreign policy activism has received mixed reviews. Some feel threatened by the alleged increasing Islamization of the country’s foreign policy, sometimes called ‘neo-Ottomanism’, which is seen as a significant revision of Turkey’s traditional transatlanticism. Others see Turkey as a stable democratic role model in a troubled region. This debate on Turkish foreign policy (TFP) remains dominated by a sense of confusion about what appear to be stark contradictions that are difficult to make sense of. Intervening in this debate, this article will develop an alternative perspective to existing accounts of Turkey’s new foreign policy. Offering a historical sociological approach to foreign policy analysis, it locates recent transformations in Turkey’s broader strategies of social reproduction. It subsequently argues that, contrary to claims about Turkey’s ‘axis shift‘, its changing foreign policies have in fact never been pro-Western or pro-American. All foreign policy ‘shifts’ and ‘inconsistencies’, we argue, are explicable in terms of historically changing strategies of social reproduction of the Ottoman and Turkish states responding to changing domestic and international conditions.

Notes

¹ Exchange of legal requests and notices between Adana’s Public Prosecutor’s Instructions Office and the General Staff Military Prosecutor’s Office: <https://anoninsiders.net/mit-documents-2867/>, accessed 24 January 2015.

² Various media reports and allegations about the Turkish Armed Forces’ (TSK) collusions with IS surfaced in the context of the September/October 2014 siege of Kobanî.

³ ‘Turkey to allow Kurdish peshmerga across its territory to fight in Kobani’, The Guardian, 20 October 2014.

⁴ Since 2011 the AKP has developed a discourse on ‘New Turkey’, indicating a shift in power away from the old ‘Kemalist’ elites towards a system with greater popular and peripheral representation—a model for socio-political renewal in the Middle East. Similarly, a ‘New Middle East’, borrowing both liberal and neoconservative foreign policy principles from the US and from nineteenth-century German imperial notions of geopolitics (Özkan 2014) is envisaged. For Turkey’s new vision of the Middle East see also Şenyüz and Balıkçı (2015).

⁵ Though Yalvaç’s critical realist call for historicizing Turkey’s foreign policy strategy is conceptually and theoretically convincing, he does not actually take on the task at hand.

⁶ To break the rigidity of the concept of ‘rules for reproduction’, Teschke and Lacher (2007, 571) offer a more open notion of ‘ways of reproduction’ which denotes the availability of the myriad ways in which social agents may respond to so-called ‘structural imperatives’.

⁷ This also indicates that agents of foreign policy are multiple and cannot be enumerated in a preconceived model or taxonomy. They may range from a trade union to a finance minister.

⁸ Though it was also anti-communist, it only became anti-Soviet in the light of Stalin’s designs on the Turkish Straits.

⁹ These and other similarities in their anti-Western state-forming history laid the foundations for a friendship between the early Turkish Republic and the Bolshevik regime, which was later undermined by Stalin’s designs on Kars and the Straits.

¹⁰ The urban intelligentsia was mostly non-Muslim, of Greek, Jewish and Armenian origin; see for example Braude and Lewis (1980, Part 4).

¹¹ For a historical account of attempts to define Turkishness during the early years of the Republic, see Çağaptay (2006).

¹² According to Zürcher (2004), prior to the formation of the Republic over 90 per cent of the industrial establishments with more than ten workers were owned by non-Muslims.

¹³ Official Turkish title: Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı (Presidency of Religious Affairs); the office also runs a sister organization in Germany which is concerned with the religious affairs of the large Turkish immigrant community there, the Turkish–Islamic Union for Religious Affairs: Diyanet Işleri Türk–Islam Birliği (DİTİB)

¹⁴ ‘Democratic confederalism’ is a concept developed by the US anarchist thinker Murray Bookchin. He proposes the decentralization of power and the dissolution of hierarchies associated with the modern nation-state, patriarchal social structures and extractive industries through direct democracy, confederated municipal assemblies as the central decision-making bodies, and ecological self-sustainability (Bookchin 1982).

¹⁵ Partly due to this dependency on foreign capital to pursue industrialization policies, Turkish historiography was influenced by the dependency school, which located the new state in the ‘semi-periphery’ of the capitalist world economy. Even though we do not concur with these arguments, the emphasis on international factors explaining socio-economic transformation in Turkey makes for a useful starting point; see, for example, Islamoglu and Keyder (1977) and Islamoglu (2004).

¹⁶ Another example being Egypt’s dependence on US military aid, owing to the Camp David accords, that is, a source of funding generated through a shift in geopolitical relations.

¹⁷ This constitution is currently still in force, though the government has recently launched a process to replace it with the overall aim of centralizing rule further and implementing a presidential system. This attempt came to a standstill when the Parliamentary Commission stopped working on it due to substantive disagreements between the parties represented in parliament.

¹⁸ It should be noted here that this adds not only yet another variety of capitalism, but also another variety of Islam. This is not necessarily to argue that amalgamating Islam and capitalism is a particularly novel or innovative project, but only that capitalism and Islam both have to be de-essentialized and understood as historically, socially and geographically specific concepts; see al-Ahmeh (1993) and Rodinson (1966)

¹⁹ The sense of exclusion of the founders of MÜSİAD turned out to be the motivation for establishing the organization and reached its apogee when some later members of MÜSİAD were blocked from participating in an international business meeting organised by the Association of Foreign Economic Relations (Buğra 1998, 529).

²⁰ Conveniently, the Turkish word for ‘Independent’, that is ‘Müstakil’, had been considered to refer to the Islamic credentials of the association as well, the acronym ‘M’ expressing both its Muslim and independent characteristics.

²¹ This concept denotes the idea of a property-owning, austere and hard-working class of religious entrepreneurs along the lines of Max Weber’s thoughts on the origins of capitalism in Protestant religious doctrine and identity (see Weber 1920 ).

²² Ahmet Davutoğlu set out his thesis of stratejik derinlik or ‘strategic depth’ for the first time in 2001 (Davutoğlu 2001). For the continuities between Kemalists and post-Kemalist Islamists see Birch (2008).

²³ ‘Moody’s upgrades Turkey’, Wall Street Journal, 20 June 2012, <http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304898704577478030788960276>, accessed 12 May 2014.

²⁴ ‘“Zero problems” policy supplanted by “precious loneliness” approach’, Today’s Zaman, 25 August 2013, <http://www.todayszaman.com/news-324415-zero-problems-policy-supplanted-by-precious-loneliness-pproach.htm>, accessed 15 May 2014.

²⁵ Kennedy and Dickenson (2013) specifically cite two developments, that is, the deterioriating relations with Israel starting with the Mavi Marmara incident and Turkey’s cooperation with Brazil in offering a draft agreement for the resolution of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

²⁶ At the time of writing, the results of this process were still unknown.

²⁷ Despite the recent deal to base US fighter jets at the Incirlik base, the exact details of which are not clear at the time of writing, considerable differences in opinion over the future of Syria remain between the two long-standing allies (Bertrand 2015).