The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (25 page)

During the Soviet years the struggle between Slavophiles and Westernizers was suspended as both Solzhenitsyns and Sakharovs challenged the communist synthesis. With the collapse of that synthesis, the debate over Russia’s true identity reemerged in full vigor. Should Russia adopt Western values, institutions, and practices, and attempt to become part of the West? Or did Russia embody a distinct Orthodox and Eurasian civilization, different from the West’s with a unique destiny to link Europe and Asia? Intellectual and political elites
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and the general public were seriously divided over these questions. On the one hand were the Westernizers, “cosmopolitans,” or “Atlanticists,” and on the other, the successors to the Slavophiles, variously referred to as “nationalists,” “Eurasianists,” or “
derzhavniki
” (strong state supporters).
[20]

The principal differences between these groups were over foreign policy and to a lesser degree economic reform and state structure. Opinions were distributed over a continuum from one extreme to another. Grouped toward one end of the spectrum were those who articulated “the new thinking” espoused by Gorbachev and epitomized in his goal of a “common European home” and many of Yeltsin’s top advisors, expressed in his desire that Russia become “a normal country” and be accepted as the eighth member of the G-7 club of major industrialized democracies. The more moderate nationalists such as Sergei Stankevich argued that Russia should reject the “Atlanticist” course and should give priority to the protection of Russians in other countries, emphasize its Turkic and Muslim connections, and promote “an appreciable redistribution of our resources, our options, our ties, and our interests in favor of Asia, or the eastern direction.”
[21]
People of this persuasion criticized Yeltsin for subordinating Russia’s interests to those of the West, for reducing Russian military strength, for failing to support traditional friends such as Serbia, and for pushing economic and political reform in ways injurious to the Russian people. Indicative of this trend was the new popularity of the ideas of Peter Savitsky, who in the 1920s argued that Russia was a unique Eurasian civilization.

The more extreme nationalists were divided between Russian nationalists, such as Solzhenitsyn, who advocated a Russia including all Russians plus closely linked Slavic Orthodox Byelorussians and Ukrainians but no one else, and the imperial nationalists, such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who wanted to recreate the Soviet empire and Russian military strength. People in the latter group at times were anti-Semitic as well as anti-Western and wanted to reorient Russian foreign policy to the East and South, either dominating the Muslim South (as Zhirinovsky urged) or cooperating with Muslim states and China against the West. The nationalists also backed more extensive support for the Serbs in their war with the Muslims. The differences between cosmopolitans and nationalists were reflected institutionally in the outlooks of the Foreign Ministry and the military. They were also reflected in the shifts in Yeltsin’s foreign and security policies first in one direction and then in the other.

The Russian public was as divided as the Russian elites. A 1992 poll of a sample of 2069 European Russians found that 40 percent of the respondents were “open to the West,” 36 percent “closed to the West,” and 24 percent “undecided.” In the December 1993 parliamentary elections reformist parties won 34.2 percent of the vote, antireform and nationalist parties 43.3 percent, and centrist parties 13.7 percent.
[22]
Similarly, in the June 1996 presidential election, the Russian public divided again with roughly 43 percent supporting the West’s candidate, Yeltsin, and other reform candidates and 52 percent
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voting for nationalist and communist candidates. On the central issue of its identity, Russia in the 1990s clearly remained a torn country, with the Western-Slavophile duality “an inalienable trait of the . . .
national character
.”
[23]

Through a carefully calculated series of reforms in the 1920s and 1930s Mustafa Kemal Ataturk attempted to move his people away from their Ottoman and Muslim past. The basic principles or “six arrows” of Kemalism were populism, republicanism, nationalism, secularism, statism, and reformism. Rejecting the idea of a multinational empire, Kemal aimed to produce a homogeneous nation state, expelling and killing Armenians and Greeks in the process. He then deposed the sultan and established a Western type republican system of political authority. He abolished the caliphate, the central source of religious authority, ended the traditional education and religious ministries, abolished the separate religious schools and colleges, established a unified secular system of public education, and did away with the religious courts that applied Islamic law, replacing them with a new legal system based on the Swiss civil code. He also replaced the traditional calendar with the Gregorian calendar and formally disestablished Islam as the state religion. Emulating Peter the Great, he prohibited use of the fez because it was a symbol of religious traditionalism, encouraged people to wear hats, and decreed that Turkish would be written in Roman rather than Arabic script. This latter reform was of fundamental importance. “It made it virtually impossible for the new generations educated in the Roman script to acquire access to the vast bulk of traditional literature; it encouraged the learning of European languages; and it greatly eased the problem of increasing literacy.”
[24]
Having redefined the national, political, religious, and cultural identity of the Turkish people, Kemal in the 1930s vigorously attempted to promote Turkish economic development. Westernization went hand-in-hand with and was to be the means of modernization.

Turkey remained neutral during the West’s civil war between 1939 and 1945. Following that war, however, it quickly moved to identify itself still further with the West. Explicitly following Western models, it shifted from one-party rule to a competitive party system. It lobbied for and eventually achieved NATO membership in 1952, thus confirming itself as a member of the Free World. It became the recipient of billions of dollars of Western economic and security assistance; its military forces were trained and equipped by the West and integrated into the NATO command structure; it hosted American military bases. Turkey came to be viewed by the West as its eastern bulwark of containment, preventing the expansion of the Soviet Union toward the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf. This linkage with and self-identification with the West caused the Turks to be denounced by the non-Western, non-aligned countries at the 1955 Bandung Conference and to be attacked as blasphemous by Islamic countries.
[25]

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After the Cold War the Turkish elite remained overwhelmingly supportive of Turkey being Western and European. Sustained NATO membership is for them indispensable because it provides an intimate organizational tie with the West and is necessary to balance Greece. Turkey’s involvement with the West, embodied in its NATO membership, was, however, a product of the Cold War. Its end removes the principal reason for that involvement and leads to a weakening and redefinition of that connection. Turkey is no longer useful to the West as a bulwark against the major threat from the north, but rather, as in the Gulf War, a possible partner in dealing with lesser threats from the south. In that war Turkey provided crucial help to the anti-Saddam Hussein coalition by shutting down the pipeline across its territory through which Iraqi oil reached the Mediterranean and by permitting American planes to operate against Iraq from bases in Turkey. These decisions by President Özal, however, stimulated substantial criticism in Turkey and prompted the resignation of the foreign minister, the defense minister, and the chief of the general staff, as well as large public demonstrations protesting Özal’s close cooperation with the United States. Subsequently both President Demirel and Prime Minister Ciller urged early ending of U.N. sanctions against Iraq, which also imposed considerable economic burden on Turkey.
[26]
Turkey’s willingness to work with the West in dealing with Islamic threats from the south is more uncertain than was its willingness to stand with the West against the Soviet threat. During the Gulf crisis, opposition by Germany, a traditional friend of Turkey’s, to viewing an Iraqi missile attack on Turkey as an attack on NATO also showed that Turkey could not count on Western support against southern threats. Cold War confrontations with the Soviet Union did not raise the question of Turkey’s civilization identity; post-Cold War relations with Arab countries do.

Beginning in the 1980s a primary, perhaps
the
primary, foreign policy goal of Turkey’s Western-oriented elite has been to secure membership in the European Union. Turkey formally applied for membership in April 1987. In December 1989 Turkey was told that its application could not be considered before 1993. In 1994 the Union approved the applications of Austria, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, and it was widely anticipated that in the coming years favorable action would be taken on those of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, and later possibly on Slovenia, Slovakia, and the Baltic republics. The Turks were particularly disappointed that again Germany, the most influential member of the European Community, did not actively support their membership and instead gave priority to promoting membership for the Central European states.
[27]
Pressured by the United States, the Union did negotiate a customs union with Turkey; full membership, however, remains a distant and dubious possibility.

Why was Turkey passed over and why does it always seem to be at the end of the queue? In public, European officials referred to Turkey’s low level of economic development and its less than Scandinavian respect for human
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rights. In private, both Europeans and Turks agreed that the real reasons were the intense opposition of the Greeks and, more importantly, the fact that Turkey is a Muslim country. European countries did not want to face the possibility of opening their borders to immigration from a country of 60 million Muslims and much unemployment. Even more significantly, they felt that culturally the Turks did not belong in Europe. Turkey’s human rights record, as President Özal said in 1992, is a “made-up reason why Turkey should not join the EC. The real reason is that we are Muslim, and they are Christian,” but he added, “they don’t say that.” European officials, in turn, agreed that the Union is “a Christian club” and that “Turkey is too poor, too populous, too Muslim, too harsh, too culturally different, too everything.” The “private nightmare” of Europeans, one observer commented, is the historical memory of “Saracen raiders in Western Europe and the Turks at the gates of Vienna.” These attitudes, in turn, generated the “common perception among Turks” that “the West sees no place for a Muslim Turkey within Europe.”
[28]

Having rejected Mecca, and being rejected by Brussels, Turkey seized the opportunity opened by the dissolution of the Soviet Union to turn toward Tashkent. President Özal and other Turkish leaders held out the vision of a community of Turkic peoples and made great efforts to develop links with the “external Turks” in Turkey’s “near abroad” stretching “from the Adriatic to the borders of China.” Particular attention was directed to Azerbaijan and the four Turkic-speaking Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. In 1991 and 1992 Turkey launched a wide range of activities designed to bolster its ties with and its influence in these new republics. These included $1.5 billion in long-term low-interest loans, $79 million in direct relief aid, satellite television (replacing a Russian language channel), telephone communications, airline service, thousands of scholarships for students to study in Turkey, and training in Turkey for Central Asian and Azeri bankers, businesspersons, diplomats, and hundreds of military officers. Teachers were sent to the new republics to teach Turkish, and about 2000 joint ventures were started. Cultural commonality smoothed these economic relationships. As one Turkish businessman commented, “The most important thing for success in Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan is finding the right partner. For Turkish people, it is not so difficult. We have the same culture, more or less the same language, and we eat from the same kitchen.”
[29]

Turkey’s reorientation toward the Caucasus and Central Asia was fueled not only by the dream of being the leader of a Turkic community of nations but also by the desire to counter Iran and Saudi Arabia from expanding their influence and promoting Islamic fundamentalism in this region. The Turks saw themselves as offering the “Turkish model” or the “idea of Turkey”—a secular, democratic Muslim state with a market economy—as an alternative. In addition, Turkey hoped to contain the resurgence of Russian influence. By providing an alternative to Russia and Islam, Turkey also would bolster its claim for support from and eventual membership in the European Union.

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Turkey’s initial surge of activity with the Turkic republics became more restrained in 1993 due to the limits on its resources, the succession of Suleyman Demirel to the presidency following Özal’s death, and the reassertion of Russia’s influence in what it considered its “near abroad.” When the Turkic former Soviet republics first became independent, their leaders rushed to Ankara to court Turkey. Subsequently, as Russia applied pressure and inducements, they swung back and generally stressed the need for “balanced” relationships between their cultural cousin and their former imperial master. The Turks, however, continued to attempt to use their cultural affiliations to expand their economic and political linkages and, in their most important coup, secured agreement of the relevant governments and oil companies to the construction of a pipeline to bring Central Asian and Azerbaijani oil through Turkey to the Mediterranean.
[30]

While Turkey worked to develop its links with the Turkic former Soviet republics, its own Kemalist secular identity was under challenge at home. First, for Turkey, as for so many other countries
[counties]
, the end of the Cold War, together with the dislocations generated by social and economic development, raised major issues of “national identity and ethnic identification,”
[31]
and religion was there to provide an answer. The secular heritage of Ataturk and of the Turkish elite for two-thirds of a century came increasingly under fire. The experience of Turks abroad tended to stimulate Islamist sentiments at home. Turks coming back from West Germany “reacted to hostility there by falling back on what was familiar. And that was Islam.” Mainstream opinion and practice became increasingly Islamist. In 1993 it was reported “that Islamic-style beards and veiled women have proliferated in Turkey, that mosques are drawing even larger crowds, and that some bookstores are overflowing with books and journals, cassettes, compact disks and videos glorifying Islamic history, precepts and way of life and exalting the Ottoman Empire’s role in preserving the values of the Prophet Muhammad.” Reportedly, “no fewer than 290 publishing houses and printing presses, 300 publications including four dailies, some hundred unlicensed radio stations and about 30 likewise unlicensed television channels were all propagating Islamic ideology.”
[32]