Turkey and the US: Competing Perceptions

Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül’s visit to the US is taking place at a crucial time. The items on the minister’s agenda are well known: Northern Iraq, PKK, the Kirkuk referendum and the Armenian genocide claims. Both sides have certain positions on the issues. Regardless of the outcomes of the minister’s visit, Washington will have to pay more attention to Turkey in 2007.

 Not simply because there are two major elections ahead of us, but because Turkey has been undergoing profound changes in recent years, which the Western capitals need to know more about.Turkish society is no longer content with what the bureaucratic state gives it in a condescending manner. It is extremely dynamic, open to change, but resistant to rootless modernization. It follows the developments in its region and the world more closely than ever. It has the courage to demand more freedoms, services and accountability from those in office. It no longer accepts such divisive categories as religious/secular, Sunni/Shiite or traditional/modern. The vast majority of the Turkish people want to live in peace with their culture and history while embracing new ideas. This is confirmed by the fact that the Turkish constituency sees the ruling Justice and Development Party as a party of service rather than ideology.

These changes have deep implications for Turkey’s foreign policy outlook. To put it bluntly, Turkey is no longer the “strategic partner” of the US or any other country, for that matter, as the term was defined during the Cold War. During that time, to be a strategic partner meant to belong to a block: either the liberal capitalist camp headed by the US or the communist block headed by the Soviet Union. You had to see the world through the lenses of these political, ideological and cultural divisions.

Today no country can afford to position itself within such blocks. Despite a number of serious issues, Turkey has good relations with the US — but it has also good political and economic relations with Russia. In another context, Turkey has gone beyond the simplistic categories of East vs. West where East represents backwardness, inequality and oppression and the West represents progress, freedom and economic prosperity. It is no coincidence that Turkey is constantly increasing its political, economic and social relations with Arab and Muslim countries. The last two years witnessed the expansion of this outlook to even Latin America and Africa.

The reckless US policies in the Middle East and Europe’s foolish resistance to Turkey’s full membership in the European Union have ended any idealization in Turkey of Western political culture. There is more disillusionment and frustration than trust, admiration or even interest in Western political ideas. I am one of those who believe that the kind of anti-US and anti-EU sentiment in Turkey is a result of the failed policies of Western countries and therefore will pass sooner or later. Yet the perception (and the increasing demand) that we are all equal is there to stay. Western political elites should better adjust themselves to this new reality

There are other facts that need to be acknowledged. For a long time, the history of Turkish democracy was described as a struggle between an enlightened and progressive state elite (the self-professed “Republican elite”) and an underdeveloped, ignorant and excessively traditional society. The state’s mission was not to be the voice of the nation but its master and patron from education and politics to city planning and architecture. Very few noticed or admitted that social resistance to the so-called modernization policies of the Turkish state was in fact a resistance to the state’s claim to the absolute ownership of the nation. Today no serious scholar of Turkish socıology can explain the dynamic nature of the Turkish society within such a framework.

To address some of these issues, the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the SETA