Masaryk University Faculty of Social Studies
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF SOCIAL STUDIES Department of International Relations and European Studies Can the new expansionism of Turkey overcome its troubled past with nation question? Master’s Thesis Serap Güneş Supervisor: Prof. PhDr. Vít Hloušek, Ph.D. UČO: 443716 Study Field: European Politics Year of Enrollment: 2015 Brno, 2017 Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis I submit for assessment is entirely my own work and has not been taken from the work of others save to the extent that such work has been cited and acknowledged within the text of my work. Date: Signature 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof. PhDr. Vít Hloušek, Ph.D., for his patient guidance, encouragement and advice during my study. I have been especially lucky to have a supervisor who cared so much about my work, and who responded to my questions and queries so promptly. I am also very grateful to all staff members of the European Politics Program who made this study possible with their contributions to my academic knowledge and skills. 3 Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 5 Research question ............................................................................................................ 7 Methodology .................................................................................................................... 9 Primary resources .................................................................................................................... 9 Primary concepts and theories ................................................................................................ 12 Imperial legacy ............................................................................................................... 14 Early military revolution and medieval constitutionalism ........................................................ 15 The millet system ................................................................................................................... 19 The role of Islam and ulema .................................................................................................... 21 Reform efforts in the 19th century ........................................................................................... 22 Eastern Question as the international context ......................................................................... 25 The CUP period ............................................................................................................... 34 “Ottoman” identity and emergence of the Young Turk opposition ........................................... 34 The Weltanschauung of the CUP ............................................................................................. 37 The curious case of Young Turk “Revolution” .......................................................................... 38 Towards the CUP dictatorship: 1912 “Big Stick” election and defeat in Balkans ........................ 41 From the fraternity atmosphere of 1908 to the shameful act of 1915 ....................................... 43 The AKP period ............................................................................................................... 55 The re-emergence of the notion of a Muslim geopolitical unity ............................................... 55 EU enlargement and Turkey’s EU accession process ................................................................ 59 Foreign policy shift.......................................................................................................... 62 Refugee crisis/deal and end of EU conditionality ..................................................................... 68 NATO’s loosening grip and end of Turkey’s embeddedness...................................................... 69 Turkish state tradition .................................................................................................... 73 Bothersome parallels.............................................................................................................. 76 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 79 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 83 Appendices ..................................................................................................................... 90 4 Introduction A map of Turkey, with new and improved borders, circulates the Turkish media. In fact, it’s an old map, showing the territories claimed by the last Ottoman parliament, Meclis-i Mebusan (the Chamber of Deputies) in January 1920 as the national borders: Misak-ı Milli or the National Oath.1 The map went viral after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan criticized the Treaty of Lausanne (24 July 1923) and claimed that the country had interests beyond its current borders (Danforth, 2016). This was the climax of an increasingly assertive foreign policy line pursued by the consecutive Justice and Development Party (AKP, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) governments. Traditional Turkish foreign policy has been a modest one, fully aware of the hard-sealed national borders. After all, Kurdish question could cause losing the lands already in hand if an adventurous foreign policy was to be pursued. Then, could this new assertiveness in foreign policy be regarded as an AKP exceptionalism? Or is AKP only reacting to a new call from the deep old “survival of state” instinct? This study argues for the second explanation on the grounds that the peculiar modernization of Turkey which can be equated to the transformation from a multi-ethnic empire to a nation-state and dates back to the 19th century reform efforts in the Ottoman Empire, reproduces an irresolvable dilemma for the Turkish political elites in their each and every reform effort. It’s clear that the country is in desperate need of reforming itself but every reform attempt seems to be predestined to failure, adding even more burdens to the political system. The dilemma is the imbalance between the extent of the reforms and the insufficiency of the agency role. The required reforms are extensive, necessitating substantial 1 National Oath sets the minimum conditions of the Turkish side in the peace negotiations after the end of World War 1. Although the borders claimed by this declaration were fluid (even today subject to dispute among historians) and the geopolitical concerns are another matter, it can be said that its main idea was that the Ottoman territories lost without a battle (for example, British-occupied Mosul, etc.) would belong to the Turkish side. There are many National Oath maps circulating around because the borders actually were not set precisely and definitely. The borders have changed even between the first adoption of the National Oath document and its official declaration (not even a month of time). 5 changes to the institutional structure, but it is the same institutional structure which effectively suppresses the reformist dynamics and transforms the actors that could lead them, into watchdog of the state. AKP is an exception indeed, since it chose to push further when faced with this institutional trap, changing the political system. However, the trajectory of the push was not towards democratization. On the contrary, it chose to cut loose from the delimiting external status quo to pursue the interests of the inner one. So, however substantial the regime change might seem, it is in fact nothing more than a re-alignment of the political system in order to preserve the hardcore interests of the Turkish state. This study argues that the current shift in Turkish foreign and domestic policy have considerable parallels with the late Ottoman period (particularly the Hamidian Regime and the Committee of Union and Progress or CUP era, 1876-1918) and are highly dependent on the state reflexes acquired in this period and that the analysis of this historic period leads to a clearer understanding of the neo-Ottomanist new expansionism of Turkey. 6 Research question Many international commentators, including prominent political scientists, evaluated the rise of AKP in Turkish politics as a positive development. Especially the period of reforms under AKP rule in relation with the EU accession negotiations and Kurdish peace process had led to these considerations. AKP’s Turkey was pointed to as a democracy model for the Islamic world. However, after fifteen years in power, AKP’s Turkey is at odds with the West to an unprecedented extent. The AKP appears to have failed all expectations and the country is now on the verge of authoritarianism2 after the disputed referendum of 16 April 2017 “to change Turkey’s system of government from parliamentary to presidential-on- steroids” (Cizre, 2017). The fact that yet another government is stuck within the democracy deficient institutional structure of the country urges to look into the preeminent institutional nexus to which even the governments with the highest democratic aspirations surrender. Consequently, the main research interest of this study is the path-dependence of Turkish state which seemingly exhausts all the democratizing dynamics and turns each and every government into merely the protector of the status quo, and the slow-motion authoritarianization of Turkish politics under the AKP rule via the analysis