Turkey's Dreams of Accession

David L. Phillips

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2004

Summary:  The hope of joining the EU has driven major reforms in Turkey, including economic liberalization, human rights protection, and greater civilian oversight of the military. But these reforms have fueled suspicions among Islamists and hard-line army officers. EU membership would help Turkey become a successful Muslim democracy, strengthen it as an ally in the fight against terrorism, and foster liberalization in the Islamic world.

David L. Phillips is a Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In the past decade, Turkey's military leadership has grown increasingly concerned about Islamic fundamentalism, which it believes is an impediment to modernity. Every few years, the NSC drafts a National Security Policy Doctrine charting challenges to the country; its 1992 report identified "political Islam as a threat to the country's security." In 1999, a group of army officers was dismissed for demonstrating an unacceptable level of piety. Every year, the High Military Council purges the military ranks of officers involved in "reactionary" activities, which include religious extremism. And recently, the influential military academy in Ankara called for a "war of liberation" against Islamic fundamentalism.

The military's oversight of politics has played out most visibly in its opposition to radical parties such as REFAH, which came to power in 1996. At first weak and tentative, REFAH soon began to challenge the secular establishment. When, at a 1997 rally hosted by the REFAH mayor of Sincan, the Iranian ambassador criticized Turkey's secularism, the army diverted a column of tanks and arrested the mayor. A few weeks later, calling for the "highest possible awareness to protect the secular state," the NSC presented 18 anti-Islamist measures to Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan. Restrictions were imposed on Islamic media and Islamic dress; Koranic schools were closed; compulsory secular education was extended from 5 to 8 years; funds were blocked for Turks studying abroad who were suspected of "Islamic agitation"; and an investigation was launched into overseas contributions to REFAH.

Meanwhile, the TGS worked behind the scenes to galvanize media, business leaders, and academics troubled by the Sincan incident and by Erbakan's ties with Iran and Libya. Members of the governing coalition were pressured to step down. Eventually, in 1997, the constitutional court banned REFAH for promoting a "subversive agenda ... against the principles of our secular republic," and Erbakan resigned.

SECULAR FACADE

Governance subsequently floundered under incompetent and corrupt leadership. Nine different coalition governments ruled Turkey in the 1990s alone. According to several polls, by the end of the decade, only 15 percent of Turks "trusted" politicians, and 43 percent called politicians "liars." Amid the torpor, however, one offshoot of the dismantled REFAH was gaining ground. After the party was banned in 1997, it fractured into a group of traditionalists, including followers of Erbakan, and the more progressive Justice and Development Party (known as the AKP) led by Erdogan. By distancing itself from radical Islam, condemning corruption, and embracing moderate, democratic positions, the AKP successfully appealed to disaffected voters.

In November 2003, the AKP won an overwhelming victory in parliamentary elections, returning Turkey to single-party rule for the first time in 15 years. Support for the incumbent leftist party tumbled to 1.2 percent of the vote. In what the Turkish newspaper Sabah called the "great purge," Turkey's political dinosaurs resigned.

Despite the AKP's continued popularity, some are skeptical of Erdogan's real intentions. Pointing to his more radical beginnings and recent AKP positions on women's rights and education, critics charge that the prime minister's commitment to secularism and liberalization is only superficial.

Raised in prayer schools, Erdogan is a devout Muslim. As a teenager, he quit his soccer team when his coach told him to shave his beard. He married a conservative woman who wears the traditional head scarf to signal her piety. Erdogan started in politics as a protégé of Erbakan, who appointed him chairman of REFAH's Istanbul branch and endorsed his run for mayor. When he won the election in 1994, Erdogan declared himself Istanbul's "imam," opening his first city council session by chanting from the Koran. As mayor, he condemned contraception, ordered the renovation of mosques, and banned alcohol in public places. His fervor soon got him into trouble. After reading a poem with Islamist overtones at a 1998 rally ("The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets/The minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers"), Erdogan was convicted of using religion to foment disorder. He spent four months in prison.

Erdogan's sentence apparently had a transformative effect. He now appears to embrace without qualification Atatürk's vision of Turkey as a secular democracy. He maintains that religion is a private matter divorced from state affairs and that, although Islam governs his personal conduct, Turkey's staunchly secular constitution is his political reference. His handling of the head scarf issue exemplifies his transformation. To rally support among traditional Turks during the campaign, Erdogan argued against the ban on wearing head scarves in government offices and schools. But since assuming office, he has not moved to lift the restrictions. Symbolically associating himself with President Ahmet Necdet Sezer and the military leadership (who once refused to participate in a "national sovereignty" reception attended by a member of parliament and his covered wife), Erdogan visited the Atatürk mausoleum on Turkey's 80th anniversary in 2003 accompanied by women without head scarves.