Turkey and the West

Fault Lines in a Troubled Alliance

Kemal Kirisci

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780815730019
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Turkey: A necessary ally in a troubled region
With the new administration in office, it is not clear whether the U.S. will continue to lead and sustain a global liberal order that was already confronted by daunting challenges. These range from a fragile European Union rocked by the United Kingdom's exit and rising populism to a cold war-like rivalry with Russia and instability in the Middle East. A long-standing member of NATO, Turkey stands as a front-line state in the midst of many of these challenges. Yet, Turkey is failing to play a more constructive role in supporting this order--beyond caring for nearly 3 million refugees, mostly coming from the fighting in Syria--and its current leadership is in frequent disagreement with its Western allies. This tension has been compounded by a failed Turkish foreign policy that aspired to establish its own alternative regional order in the Middle East. As a result, many in the West now question whether Turkey functions as a dependable ally for the United States and other NATO members.
Kemal Kirisci's new book argues that, despite these problems, the domestic and regional realities are now edging Turkey toward improving its relations with the West. A better understanding of these developments will be critical in devising a new and realistic U.S. strategy toward a transformed Turkey and its neighborhood.
Western policymakers must keep in mind three on-the-ground realities that might help improve the relationship with Turkey. First, Turkey remains deeply integrated within the transatlantic community, a fact that once imbued it with prestige in its neighborhood. It is this prestige that the recent trajectory of Turkish domestic politics and foreign policy has squandered; for it to be regained, Turkey needs to rebuild cooperation with the West. The second reality is that chaos in the neighborhood has resulted in the loss of lucrative markets for Turkish exports-which, in return, increases the value to Turkey of Western markets. Third, Turkish national security is threatened by developments in Syria and an increasingly assertive Russia, enhancing the strategic value of Turkey's "troubled alliance" with the West. The big question, however, is whether rising authoritarianism in Turkey and the government's anti-Western rhetoric will cease and Turkey's democracy restored before the current fault lines can be overcome and constructive re-engagement between the two sides can occur.
In light of these realities, this book discusses the challenges and opportunities for the new U.S. administration as well as the EU of re-engaging with a sometimes-troublesome, yet long-time ally.

CHAPTER ONE

Turkey and the West

A Troubled Alliance

AS THE SECOND DECADE of the twenty-first century moves beyond its midpoint, the transatlantic alliance faces growing instability on multiple fronts. The conflict in Syria has entered a new stage since the Russian-imposed cease-fire in December 2016 and the April 2017 U.S. missile attack on a Syrian air base to punish the regime for its chemical attacks on civilians. Though considerable gains were made against the self-styled Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria during 2016 and 2017, IS continues to threaten not only the future of the Middle East but security in Europe and the United States as well. Iran’s gradual reincorporation into the international community has failed to bring an element of order to the region. At the time of completion, the summer of 2017, Yemen and Libya are still in the grip of civil war, while Tunisia, the only success story among the Arab Spring countries, is not yet on solid ground. Russia’s actions in the post-Soviet space and its growing military assertiveness in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean region continue to cloud Moscow’s relations with the West. The European Union is trying to put itself back together after the global financial crisis of 2008–09 and is struggling with the consequences of the migration crisis that began in 2015, while nationalism is on the rise in a number of EU member countries. The issue of Brexit remains unresolved more than a year after the referendum and continues to constitute a challenge to the future shape of the EU.

This grim picture is accompanied by growing concerns about the ability of the transatlantic community to confront these challenges together and uphold the international liberal order. A major question clouding predictions is whether the U.S. president Donald Trump will continue to support the U.S.-led post–World War II global liberal order. Considerable uncertainty persists as to the direction of U.S. foreign policy in the immediate future. This contrasts starkly with the United States that emerged as the “liberal Leviathan” after World War II and fashioned “a world of multilateral rules, institutions, open markets, democratic community and regional partnerships.”¹

The bulk of the institutions that would form the basis of the international liberal order emerged between 1944 and 1951 in the form of the Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank—the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Turkey was quick to join all these organizations. Membership to NATO in 1952 was particularly critical and was seen by the then U.S. ambassador to Turkey, George C. McGhee, as a sign the country was becoming “an integral part of Europe and the West.”² Regional organizations such as the Council of Europe, founded in 1949, and the European Economic Communities (EEC), the precursor to the EU, all encouraged by the United States, also emerged during this period. Turkey became a founding member of the Council of Europe and applied for associational membership in the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1959. Turkey’s membership in these institutions bound Turkey to the West and was in line with the objective of the founders of the Turkish republic, to orient the new country toward Western civilization, and membership became a part of Turkey’s post–World War II traditional statecraft.³

Initially this liberal order remained constrained to Australia, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States. This picture changed dramatically when first the Berlin Wall came down and then, after decades fraught with tension, an exhausted Soviet Union in the late 1980s began a quiet collapse from the inside. Eastern bloc countries, released from the sphere of Soviet influence, turned to the West for a new chapter in military security and political affiliation. NATO and the EU expanded into Central and Eastern Europe, instilling in the region an unprecedented sense of security and creating a basis for growing economic prosperity as well as liberal democratic governance.

There was hope in some quarters that these developments heralded a “unipolar moment” as the rest of the world, not just the global north, seemed to be moving toward an international liberal order spearheaded by the United States.⁴ John Ikenberry, a prominent scholar of international affairs, argued that this post–World War II U.S.-led order was turning into “a sprawling global system.”⁵ Emerging economies such as Brazil, India, and South Africa advanced toward greater democracy and a market economy, and China was expected to follow suit, along with Russia.⁶ Indeed, the number of democracies around the world increased substantially in the two decades following the end of the Cold War.⁷ In addition to the BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—a large number of countries nurtured their economies, narrowing the welfare gap between the developed and the developing world.⁸ The exception to this trend was the Middle East, where the Arab countries seemed stuck in authoritarian political systems and autarkic economies, as was strikingly exposed in the United Nations Development Program’s Arab Humanitarian Development Report 2002.⁹ Yet many anticipated that the George W. Bush administration’s Greater Middle East Initiative would eventually break through the exceptionalism of the Middle East and bring the region into the fold of the international liberal order.¹⁰ This did not happen, and the state of world affairs today is starkly different from what was envisioned at the end of the Cold War.

Turkey joining Western institutions might have not occurred had it not been for the fear of Soviet expansionism and territorial demands made by Joseph Stalin on Turkey during the closing months of World War II, as well as the growing domestic calls for democratic reforms. Modern Turkey had emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the World War I when Atatürk and his colleagues fought back occupying European powers to win the independence of the country in 1923. Atatürk’s reforms had led to a steady growth of Westernization that was guided by a vision of secularization. However, ruined by wars and population displacements, the country had adopted a Soviet-like planned economy and a one-party political system. During the course of World War II, İsmet İnönü, Atatürk’s successor, followed a policy of neutrality and resisted Allied calls to join the war against Germany until February 1945. This experience would leave an important legacy in Turkey’s relations with the West.

During the course of the Cold War, Turkey’s democracy evolved hesitantly and was interrupted by military coups on a number of occasions. Domestically, its membership in the transatlantic community and especially NATO was periodically questioned. It would not be until the 1980s that Turkey would start transforming its economy from a primarily state-led import substituting to a liberal market economy. A slow and highly contested process of democratization would then follow this from the late 1980s on. Eventually these two developments would open the way in 2005 for membership talks with the EU, and it increasingly seemed that Turkey was becoming solidly anchored in the international liberal order. By the time the EU and the United States had entered into one of their worst economic recessions in 2008, Turkey was being touted as a model for countries aspiring to join the international liberal order. Its rising soft power, constructive foreign policy, and economic engagement of its neighborhood (the Balkans, countries bordering the Black Sea, the South Caucasus, and the Middle East) were seen as assets for bringing this neighborhood into the international liberal order. Yet this did not last long. The international liberal order began to encounter challenges from within, as both the United States and the EU experienced economic difficulties and challenges from outside powers, especially China and Russia, which sought an alternative order. Furthermore, Turkish democracy began to recede, its economic dynamism started to fade, and its leadership, increasingly driven by an Islamist agenda, became embroiled in the conflicts of the Arab Middle East.

GLOBAL LEADERSHIP AND THREATS TO THE WORLD ORDER

The revolving heart of this picture is the question of global leadership, especially the extent and nature of U.S. involvement. Some have advocated that the world continue to be led by the United States as the power that remains “in a class of its own.”¹¹ Others disagree, adducing in support of their position notions of “the decline of the West” and “the rise of the rest”—China in particular.¹² The greater role of the G-20, whose members account for 80 percent of world trade and two-thirds of the world population, relative to that of the G-7 in steering the global economy through the first stages of the economic crisis of 2008–09 reinforced this broader view of a more dispersed global leadership.¹³ Furthermore, the Chinese economic model of state capitalism and the Russian (Putin’s) political suasion of sovereign democracy have exhibited staying power as alternatives to their Western counterparts. Thus some have espoused the idea that the twenty-first century will not be America’s, China’s, or Asia’s; it will be no one’s.¹⁴

The question of a continuing leadership role for the United States in the international liberal order has come to be discussed most ardently in relation to developments in the Middle East. Compared to the depth and scope of U.S. involvement in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s and in the Middle East during the 2000s, the country remained relatively inactive during the Obama presidency. The mass protests that erupted in Iran following the presidential elections of June 2009 offered an opportunity for the United States to support the prospects of a democratic opening in the country. Yet Obama remained reticent, fearing that any sort of outside intervention would be regarded as imperialist meddling and would weaken the hand of the reformists in government.¹⁵ It was the Arab Spring uprisings, which erupted in Tunisia in December 2010 and spread to other Middle Eastern countries, that suggested an impending democratic breakthrough. Those hopes also proved short-lived: the situation in Libya, Syria, and Yemen quickly worsened, and the West could not be effective in preempting the violence between domestic actors, who were often supported by rival Arab regimes.¹⁶ In Egypt, the government of Mohamed Morsi succumbed to the “temptations of power,” drifted into majoritarian rule, and was later violently overthrown by the military in July 2013.¹⁷ Some placed the blame at least partially on Washington’s inertness, arguing that the United States had reduced itself to a “dispensable nation.”¹⁸ Interestingly, the only success story, though a fragile one, was Tunisia, where the democratization process was led by local actors (political parties, trade unions, and civil society groups) rather than by Western outsiders. The influential politician and moderate Islamist Rachid Ghannouchi’s unique leadership in devising a power-sharing arrangement in governance—a sure sign of his commitment to reconciling Islam with democracy—also proved critical to Tunisia’s success.¹⁹

The question of finding the right measure of U.S. involvement in the Middle East has been complicated by the civil war in Syria. The protests against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which began in March 2011 in the context of the Arab Spring, gradually dissolved into civil war, pulling a growing number of external actors into the fray. The wavering U.S. commitment to hew to its “red lines” in Syria, coupled with the decision to reduce troop levels in Iraq, did not improve the security situation in the region.²⁰ The rise of IS in 2014 aggravated the chaos in both Iraq and Syria, triggering what the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has described as a protracted displacement crisis.²¹ This soon evolved into a security concern for Europe: the IS fighters, in possession of Western passports, became a growing threat, as some masterminded or carried out bomb attacks. In the meantime, Europe became the final destination for some of the millions of Syrian refugees fleeing the chaos in the region. These developments in turn fueled the rise of xenophobic right-wing groups across Europe and were drawn on to justify calls for stricter border controls. Fearful that extremists might have planted themselves among these flocks of refugees, some EU member states jettisoned the burden-sharing schemes of the European Commission. These developments have raised concerns about the viability of keeping together the very fabric of the EU.²²

U.S. domestic politics have also been upended by the rise of right-wing populism and anti-immigrant feelings. This exclusionary sentiment has already translated into travel restrictions placed on the nationals of a group of Muslim-majority countries, including drastic limits on the admission of Syrian refugees, by the new administration. The international agreement applicable to refugees, put in place by the United States in the aftermath of World War II, is based on the principle that the protection of refugees is an international responsibility and one that should be shared globally. That these developments occurred despite the disposition on the part ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. Turkey and the West: A Troubled Alliance
• 2. Turkey and the Transatlantic Alliance in the Cold War Era, 1947–91: From Blissful Honeymoon to Fragile Alliance
• 3. The Post–Cold War Years, 1991–2017
• 4. The Rise of the AKP and Turkey’s Exposure to Liberal Democracy
• 5. Skepticism and Identity: Gains and Losses from Turkey’s Integration into the Transatlantic Community
• 6. The Politics of Regression
• 7. Turkey’s Foreign Policy: The Rise and Fall of Soft Power
• 8. Turkey’s Future in the Transatlantic Alliance: Three Scenarios
• Appendix: The Davutoğlu Doctrine
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index