Turks Are Back With A Little Scar

Hours before the Turkey-Germany match in Basel, here is my wildest UEFA finals cup scenario: Turkey beats Germany and Russia beats Spain. Turks and Russians, the two nations the Europeans have historically feared the most, play the final.

Advice to my European friends: Don’t be shocked. This is a little dose of globalization coming home to roost. The success of the Turkish national soccer team in UEFA 2008 continues to create joy and excitement around the world. It is not only the Turks in Turkey and Europe who take pride in the team. The same joy is expressed by people from around the globe. After the game with Croatia was over (no one believed it was over!), messages began to pour in from Sarajevo, Cairo, Baku, Kuala Lumpur, Skopje and many other places. These nations, bound by a common history and cultural heritage, saw in the Turkish national team something of their own. This, too, is a little of a dose of globalization for the Muslim world.

But of course, it is not just the Turkish soccer team that has created this excitement. Rather, it is what Turkey has been doing in recent years with its democracy, rule of law, economy, stability, foreign policy and young and dynamic population. Turkey has become a center of attraction because it can speak to the dreams and imaginations of millions of people around the world. It can create excitement and thus attract the best minds, ideas, students, tourists, businessmen, projects, investments, journalists and others. The problem is that anti-reformists in Turkey are not happy with any of this because they feel an existential threat in the rapid development and opening up of Turkey, a Turkey in which, they feel, they will lose their privileges to decide the country’s future.

What Turkey needs now is full democracy, not a retreat in the face of an anti-freedom, anti-law and anti-reformist judiciary and militant secularism. Turkish democracy cannot recoil into a state of moribund docility which will certainly kill off all the creative energy and excitement that fuels the Turkish nation. As the UEFA matches have shown so far, the game is not over until it is over. So far, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan opted for a policy of “no action” in order to not raise tensions with the judiciary and the military. But not doing anything until the last moment could be too risky. Both the prime minister and his party — and with them the Turkish democracy — may lose.

Until the forces of democracy prevail, Turkey’s so-called soul-searching will not go anywhere. Some Westerners seem to miss the point. They think the battle in Turkey is between religion and secularism, between religious conservatives and progressive secularists, between history and the future, between yesterday and tomorrow. Anyone who knows something about Turkish society and history will shrug at these simplistic categorizations.

But they creep in. Consider the latest piece in The New York Times by Roger Cohen (“The Fight for Turkey,” June 23). Cohen believes there is soul-searching in Turkey and that it is taking place between “proud secularists and pious Muslims.” In the middle of this fight and while trying to modernize and become a member of the EU, Turkey is also faced with the problem of “ascendant political Islam.” Cohen approves of the Constitutional Court’s decision to ban women’s right to wear a headscarf at universities. He thinks this is a good way to secure Turkey’s secularist credentials. And he ends with calling for an “occasional dose of secular fascism” to keep the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) — and other forces of democracy – streamlined.

I am at a loss as to how Turkey will maintain its democratic credentials and move forward with an “occasional dose of secular fascism.” It is this “secular fascism” that has delayed Turkish democracy for decades, created all kinds of irrational internal threat perceptions, led to the stigmatization of Kurds, Alevis, religious conservatives, non-Muslim minorities, leftists and reformists, and created the sense o