Erdogan makes turkeys of the Arabs

Tony Badran
NOW Lebanon
08 June '10

As the dust begins settling after the Gaza flotilla affair, it has become increasingly clear that Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) resorted in a premeditated way to populist demagoguery during the episode in order to serve narrower political goals.

Populism in the Arab world is second nature and despite its disastrous track record, it never seems to go out of fashion. Non-Arab regional players like Iran have understood this and have cynically used populism to their advantage. And so, when Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, declared recently that Gaza “is a historical cause for us,” one could be forgiven for snickering.

Since its rise to power in 2002, the AKP has steadily and systematically sought to marginalize its domestic opponents and secure total control over all power centers in Turkey. Just before the flotilla fiasco, a poll was released showing that the AKP had lost ground to its rival, the Republican People’s Party (CHP). Erdogan exaggerated when he described Gaza as a “historical cause,” but he calculated that the confrontation there would be a perfect instrument to whip up Islamic and nationalist fervor to his party’s benefit.

Turkey is going through an identity crisis. Erdogan has all but demolished the legitimacy of the Kemalist state. And yet the state’s remaining secularist framework makes it very difficult to locate that legitimacy in Islam, the public and political uses of which are constrained by the constitution. Erdogan has had to walk a fine line in redefining Turkish frames of reference and political identity.

The AKP seeks to restore as much of a pan-Islamic framework as possible, and foreign policy offers ways of bypassing domestic constraints. It is perhaps in that light that Erdogan’s peculiar emphasis that Turkey is not a “nation of tribes” and not a “rootless adolescent country” should be read. What was outwardly a crisis with Israel may in fact be a domestic Turkish affair through and through.

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