Turkey's transformers (I)

In recent years, Turkey has earned kudos from the international community for its economic dynamism, its energetic and confident diplomacy and its attempts to confront some of its deepest foreign policy problems, such northern Iraq and Cyprus. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that Turkey is one of seven rising powers with which the United States will actively collaborate to resolve global problems. But Turkey has not yet become the global, or even regional, player that its government declares it to be. These days the always daunting domestic issues are bedeviling Turkey's progress.

Increasingly polarized views about the leadership of the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, have undermined the government's ability to spearhead profound political change. Even some of the AKP's traditional supporters have begun to question whether the party will follow through on its goals, including getting Turkey to join the European Union.

There are two camps. The first, and largest, group, which includes center-right politicians, liberals, and the religious, fully support the AKP. The group sees the party as fighting the dead hand of the past to free Turkish politics from military subjugation and the judiciary. To most AKP supporters, the party is genuinely committed to instituting a much greater measure of democracy and tackling Turkey's most difficult issue: recognizing the democratic rights of its large Kurdish population.

The other camp is primarily composed of staunch secularists, the military and civilian bureaucratic elites, and various types of nationalists. And they, remembering the AKP's roots in Islamist movements, claim that the party is increasingly contemptuous of its political opposition, interested in destroying the opposition press and determined to weaken the Turkish military despite the country's unstable neighborhood. These skeptics argue that the party cares mostly about winning the next election and the AKP's commitment to the EU's membership requirements is largely a pretext for passing measures that eviscerate the military. To them, as well as to many observers, the AKP is making the country more religious, partly in order to consolidate its position in the Muslim world, even at the expense of its traditional alliance with the West. The AKP, they charge, has consistently overlooked the appalling behavior of Muslim governments toward their own people, even as they have ferociously pointed out other countries' mistreatment of Muslims.

Party time

The AKP's success in achieving rapid economic growth since its first electoral victory, in 2002, won the party vast political support and propelled it to a spectacular reelection victory in July 2007. It was the first time since 1954 that an incumbent in Turkey had increased its share of the vote, and the AKP did so by an astonishing 14 percentage points. The global economic crisis, however, stopped growth in its tracks.

Real change is on the chopping block. Turkey has always been a conservative country, and the vast majority of Turks have traditionally voted for center-right parties. The rise of the AKP represents a struggle between the military and civilian bureaucratic elites — which have controlled the state and the economy since independence — and the new, largely provincial and pious middle class.

As its wealth grew, it began to challenge the economic elites traditionally favored by the state and its military backers. And in 2002, the new middle class helped elect the AKP, a party whose piety and relative indifference to the legacy of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish republic, challenged the ideological underpinnings of the Turkish state: secularism, nationalism, and centralization. Since then, the AKP has allowed for more public manifestations of Islam and expressed its attachment to hot-button issues, for example, by supporting the right of women to wear headscarves in universities, which is currently prohibited.

More headscarves can be seen today than ten or 20 years ago, and their visibility disturbs the secularist elites. To them, it indicates that the AKP government is indeed using its influence, locally and nationally, to facilitate religious practices. The AKP's attempt to lift the headscarf ban landed the party leadership in front of the Constitutional Court in 2008, when the state prosecutor attempted to have the party banned for challenging the country's secular constitution.

The AKP narrowly won that fight, but secularists are convinced the party is unlikely to mend its ways, and rumors occasionally circulate about another court case being brought to try to finish off the party. Since coming to power, the AKP has managed to reduce the political influence of the generals. It has pushed through legal changes that limit the military's power over politics. Erdoğan brushed aside the military's effort to prevent Abdullah Gül, a leading AKP member, from assuming the presidency in 2007.

To be sure, much of this development is also the officers' doing. They have intervened four times since 1960 to depose civilian governments but have resisted change themselves. On civil-military relations and the questions of religion and Kurdish identity, the military has refused to countenance any vision other than its own. It has been wedded to a very strict definition of secularism, for example, and until very recently, it completely rejected even the Kurds' most basic demands for cultural rights.

A recent investigation into an extensive secret effort by some officers and civilian leaders to destroy the AKP has been a revelation to many Turks. Although the handling of this so-called Ergenekon inquiry has been criticized, it has already landed many officers, academics, and others in jail. Whatever facts are eventually unearthed, the investigation has already tarnished the military's reputation.

The AKP will live or die by its policies towards the Kurds. So far, it has managed, courageously and skillfully, to modify Turkey's long-standing policy toward the Iraqi Kurds. For years, the Turkish government had treated the quasi-independent Kurdistan Regional Government as a danger to Iraq's unity and an instigator of Kurdish separatism in Turkey. But the AKP has now engaged the Kurdistan Regional Government in an attempt to win the confidence and cooperation of the Iraqi Kurds on a slew of issues, ranging from security to economic exchanges.

On the harder question of how to treat the estimated 12-14 million Kurds who live in Turkey, however, the AKP government has promised much and done little. This issue is now the biggest drag on Turkey's political life, undermining the political and administrative reforms, constraining the country's foreign policy choices and requiring huge military expenditures to combat the decades-old insurgency led by the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK.

After years of promising that it would bring a fresh approach to the Kurdish question, the AKP government sparked a charged debate this summer by calling for a "democratic opening" (sometimes referred to as a "Kurdish opening") and launching a series of conversations with Kurdish and Turkish political and civil-society groups. The perspectives of both Turkey's Kurds and influential elements in the AKP appear to be changing, but nothing can be taken for granted.

The country is too divided. Many Turkish Kurds still take their cue from Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK, whom the Turkish military, most Turks, and most Western governments consider a terrorist. Although Erdoğan has promised to unveil a new comprehensive policy, as of this writing, no specifics had yet been revealed. Erdoğan will probably propose incremental changes allowing the Kurds to express their cultural identity more freely, such as easing the restrictions on the use of the Kurdish language.

But this is unlikely to satisfy many Kurds; real reform will require a long, drawn-out process. The most difficult short-term issue is whether to consider granting amnesty to PKK fighters, particularly the group's leaders. How the government handles this question may determine the scope of change possible on the broader Kurdish question. It remains to be seen whether Erdoğan has the stamina and the political fortitude to carry out measures to end the PKK's 25-year insurrection that will enable most of the PKK fighters to return home and release the many prisoners associated with the organization without necessarily legitimizing its stance.

Nevertheless, Erdoğan has opened the door to truly radical change, and this will continue to generate fractious debate and uncertain consequences for Turkey's political stability.

* Morton Abramovitz, a Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation, was U.S. Ambassador to Turkey in 1989-91. Henri J. Barkey is a nonresident Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University. This piece was published on the November/December 2009 edition of the Foreign Affairs and was abridged by the Daily News staff.