The Scary European Model

Soner Cagaptay/David Pollock
Washington Institute
02 August '10

There has been speculation about where Turkey is heading ever since the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002. The early years suggested to most observers that Turkey was heading West, as the AKP lobbied hard for membership in the European Union, and pushed the liberal-democratic and free-market reforms that membership requires. Lately, the consensus view has shifted 180 degrees.

As Europe makes clear its resistance to welcoming a Muslim-majority member, Turkey seems to be positioning itself as a regional power broker among its Islamist neighbors, most dramatically by casting a no vote against U.N. sanctions on Iran.

Our view is a bit different: Turkey is heading toward a European model, but it is neither modern nor liberal. It is the East European model of the 1940s, when communist parties took power in democratic elections, only to subvert democracy and veil their nations behind the Iron Curtain. After the Czechoslovak Communist Party won the 1946 elections, it quickly undermined one of Eastern Europe's most progressive democracies.

By 1948 the communists had quieted all opposition by various means, including the infamous defenstration of a top moderate politician in Prague. Within two years Czechoslovakia had joined the communist bloc. The rise of an illiberal party that would radically change its country's foreign policy would foreshadow AKP's conduct decades later. This is not to equate communism with Islamism; rather, both movements, rooted in an illiberal ideology, see democracy as a means to an end and espouse a Manichaean, us vs. them mentality.

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