July 21, 2016
Turkey’s Geopolitical Imperatives
Ankara appears in disarray, but the attempted coup is unlikely to prevent it from taking the necessary steps to emerge as a major power.
Summary
The coup attempt has generated a great deal of debate over Turkey’s future. Much of the discussion on this issue is focused on the personality of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the struggle between his supporters and their opponents. Truly understanding the current status of Turkey and where it is likely headed in the future, however, requires moving away from individuals and groups and examining objective geopolitical forces that shape a country’s behavior. This is why we try to make sense of Turkey by examining the imperatives and the constraints it faces.
Introduction
In our 2040 forecast, we identified Turkey as a major emerging power. We believe it will project power southwards into the Middle East, westwards into Europe and northwards into the the Black Sea region. However, Turkey is currently mired in problems at home and struggling on the international front. This was the case even before the July 15 coup attempt.
Therefore, the question is: what can be expected from Turkey in the coming years and decades? To answer this question, we will examine Turkey’s imperatives in this Deep Dive. We also need to look at the constraints that the Turks will be operating under. By understanding its imperatives and constraints, we are able to forecast the country’s future evolution – irrespective of which personality or faction is at the helm.
We define imperatives as the actions that a state must take to survive and flourish. They stem from the confluence of its geography, demographics and available resources. The most basic imperative is to control and govern a core territory. Once that is realized, a state then will turn to its second imperative pertaining to the relationships it must maintain with neighboring actors and those further afield.
Imperatives often take a long time to achieve and any country will require a significant amount of time to get to its second and third imperatives. Domestic upheaval, wars, economic downturns and even natural disasters sometimes force nations to retreat from pursuing advanced imperatives to focus on the more basic ones. In the case of Turkey, we have identified five imperatives.
1. Unify the Turkish Homeland Under a Single Authority
This is the most basic imperative that any Turkish regime must achieve. All nations have internal divisions that give rise to different sub-national groups. But each country has a core area that must be controlled, as well as one or more peripheral regions that have to be brought under a single political order.
The Marmara region, which includes Istanbul, represents Turkey’s core, while the Anatolian peninsula is the country’s periphery. Since the founding of the modern republic, these two areas have been inhabited by Turks with opposing outlooks. The former, being a wealthy and cosmopolitan region, has been dominated by Western-oriented Turks. In contrast, the interior has been the mainstay of traditional and conservative segments of the population.
For many decades, the Kemalists – followers of the ultra-secular ideology of Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk – in the civil and military sectors sought to expand their grip beyond the core and into the periphery. However, they have met resistance from religious and social conservatives who refuse to adopt a strict form of secularism. This struggle resulted in multiple coups (in 1960, 1971, 1980, 1998 and the most recent failed attempt on July 15) along with the rise of a number of religiously oriented parties – predecessors of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the government is attempting the reverse, as a new conservative elite is trying to unify the two areas under a milder American-style secularism that allows religion greater space in civil society.
While the Kemalists were largely entrenched in the state machinery (particularly the security sector), they were not always able to control the elected organs of the republic. However, their opponents have been able to penetrate the civil-military establishment in the last seven to eight years. The Kemalists have weakened but the “Muslim democrats” of the AKP and its supporters have also been limited in their growth. The former camp has been divided over whether democratic continuity should take precedence over strict enforcement of secularism. The highly acrimonious rivalry between the AKP and the Hizmet movement of Fethullah Gülen represents the split within the latter.
The end result is a divided social landscape leading to a situation where state institutions are not under a single authority. These and other divisions among Turkish nationalists have prevented the country from tackling the issue of Kurdish separatism. Given the demographics, it is not possible for the Turks to eliminate the threat of Kurdish separatism. Even significantly weakening it will require greater harmony among the Turks…
No comments:
Post a Comment