Erdogan Makes Turkeys of The Arabs

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.

If Turkey is in an identity crisis, the predicament of the Arabs is no less flagrant and fundamental. What the flotilla episode reaffirmed was the ease with which the Arabs can be used as instruments for the projection of power by the region’s non-Arab powers and traditional centers of regional influence, such as Turkey and Iran.

There was something deliciously ironic in seeing two pillars of Arab nationalism sinking off the shores of Gaza. At the heart of the romantic Arab nationalist narrative was the notion that the Arabs – united by an Arab identity – were burning with a desire to emancipate themselves from the Turkish yoke. Palestine later became the center of this Arab tale. The struggle against the Turks was featured in history books, and for years Arab popular culture highlighted Turkish brutality in television series and the like. Now, effortlessly, the Turks have become champions of the Arabs and of their mythical “central cause.”

This not only has highlighted the shallowness of the Arab nationalist narrative, it also, at least conceptually, has appeared to restore what for centuries was the natural order of politics in the region, which Arab nationalism was supposed to alter but did not. Take Syria for example. The Syrians are giddy at the prospect of being drafted back into a resurgent Turkish realm. Little wonder. Syria’s historical role is to function as a buffer state for powers to the north, east and south.

The appeal of sectarianism also puts the lie to Arab nationalism’s supposed secularism. As Turkey seeks to paint itself as Hamas’ patron, some Arab states have reasoned that this represents a Sunni counterweight to Iran’s patronage of the Islamist group.

But while such transnationalism finds assets in the fractured Levant, it creates problems for established states, namely Egypt, bordering Gaza, where the recent political developments played out. As much as Israel, Egypt finds itself a target of this Turkish resurgence – not to mention Iran’s. It was only fitting that we were reminded the other day by Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah of the need for the ideas and values (such as “the culture of resistance”) of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution to be spread throughout the Arab and Islamic states. This also happened to follow Nasrallah’s hint of an operational capacity in the Red Sea.

Just as Iran’s Islamic Revolution was expansionist by definition, the AKP’s “neo-Ottomanism” also posits a Turkish-dominated realm. As the potential for Iranian-Turkish competition grows and the Levant once again assumes its historical function as a contested space between more powerful nations vying for regional influence, the Arab states are becoming ever more secondary, their populations easily manipulated by regional populist leaders like Erdogan.

Tony Badran is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.