Turkey Under Erdogan review – Who is to blame for Turkey turning away from the West?
A scholar unafraid of a good turn of phrase is a welcome thing, albeit rare. Dimitar Bechev is a scholar and has a good turn of phrase. His expertise guides us through what is a thicket of events, dates, underlying trends, and acronyms, but just when, at times, the going becomes difficult, a turn of phrase chops through the text and opens up his train of thought. Some of the detail seems unnecessary but is leavened by the occasional anecdote.
After a sweeping 12-page introduction, the first chapter of Turkey Under Erdogan is aptly named “The Past Isn’t Another Country”. As the author writes, “Times gone by shine a light on the present”. It explores how the mistakes, corruption, and possibly fatigue of the old elite in the 1980s and 90s paved the way for Erdogan’s AKP populists (with an Islamist tinge) to rise to power.
It started so well. It’s now going so badly.
In the first few years of this century, the AKP looked outwards. It was a stalwart of NATO and had candidate status for the European Union. It sought better relations with its Balkan neighbours and stability on its volatile borders to the east and south.
But the foreign policy tensions of the 1990s, with Greece, Syria, Iraq, and with the EU were always present under the surface and events brought them bubbling up. Bechev marks 2005 as a key year to explain how things began to turn.
After an EU meeting in Luxembourg, it appeared Turkey was on an open road to membership of the Union. But negotiations quickly foundered as several states found reasons to delay accession.
As the author notes, a “swaggering Erdoğan” had earlier pledged “to make European values Ankara’s values.” However, as it became increasingly clear Europe did not value Turkey, the shallow roots of the Turkish leader’s commitment to those values were apparent. A slow, and then steady, slide towards authoritarianism began.
The book then says that for many people the reason for this is simple — Erdogan. The logic of this is that he was never a democrat, always an authoritarian and that once “the EU gave Turkey the cold shoulder, Erdoğan cut the West loose. His detractors, crying foul at the sight of an Islamist lionized in Western capitals, had a point all along”.
Bechev argues this is too simplistic and that the structural institutional forces which shape Turkey underpin Erdogan’s subsequent behaviour including a tradition of populism.
In a way this is obvious, all leaders are to a degree products of their societies, but I think Bechev does not give enough credence to the personality of Erdogan and his genuine Islamist beliefs and authoritarian nature.
A different leader may have chosen to try and navigate the dangerously choppy waters of Turkish politics, including the rise of political Islam among the Anatolian masses, whilst still cleaving to the tenets of democracy and the rule of law.
What is unarguable is that, as the author puts it, “Like no other statesman since the republic’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Erdogan had grabbed vast powers in his hands”.
He goes on to detail how the courts, bureaucracy, media, business establishment, the army and the police all eventually were forced to answer to Erdogan and the AKP. He pulls no punches; “The Turkish state itself had morphed into a family fief.” He is also not frightened of detailing the human rights abuses committed by both sides in the brutal internal conflict with the Kurdish PKK.
Bechev is an expert and not just on Turkey. His works include books on Russia’s role in Southeast Europe and Putin’s Middle East and North African policy. He was also head of the European Council on Foreign Relations office in Sofia and so is well qualified to take the wider overview of Turkey’s place in the world.
As he puts it “Erdoğan’s Turkey imagines itself as the centre of its own universe spanning the Middle East, the Balkans and the Southern Caucasus, all the way to sub-Saharan Africa.”
He details how “Zero Problems With Neighbours” crumbled into arguing with almost everyone. There are now Turkish forces operating in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. There are tensions with Greece, Cyprus, and France, and Erdogan’s “friendship” with Putin has been shown to be the pretence it was all along. Bechev argues that Turkey will stay in NATO (despite buying Russian air defences systems) a belief surely strengthened by recent events. Reprints of this book will no doubt benefit from an update on the ramifications for Turkey of the current Ukraine conflict.
The book argues that “Turkey’s illiberal trajectory could be best understood by Turkey’s own illiberal features”. Despite this, the author concludes that the remnants of the country’s democracy will prevail and that they are strong enough for the ballot box to remain the arbiter of power. Next year’s elections will put that thesis to the test.