Since the early 2000s, Turkey has undergone a ‘quiet revolution’.103 The process began with the electoral victory, back in 2002, of the
103 O Bengio, ‘Turkey’s Quiet Revolution and its Impact on Israel’. Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, IV:1, 2010.
pro-religious but pragmatic Justice and Development Party (AKP) on an EU accession-oriented platform. The AKP proceeded to pursue extensive democratizing reforms. This created a permissive environment for internal debates over outstanding issues like the Kurdish question. It also allowed for the pursuit of novel – if fruitless – approaches to long frozen conflicts like Cyprus. But, by the mid-2000s, Turkish progress towards Europe had sparked resistance both across the EU and within Turkey itself. As doors to the West slammed shut, the AKP – bouyed by a thriving economy – cast towards the East and the South for a new role and purpose.
AKP-led Turkey did so by reaching out to diverse actors in the region, including many former rivals, on the basis of the foreign policy principle ‘zero problems with neighbours’. A sort of categorical imperative for foreign policy, the formula was meant to enable Turkey to decouple conflicts that had long been linked – reaching out to Armenia, for example, without insisting from the outset on a concurrent solution to the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabagh. Such efforts were sustained through proactive diplomacy, multilateralism, cultural exchange, and, trade and economic cooperation. This amounted to a pioneering template for converting rivalry into interdependence. Though not explicitly formulated as such, the ‘zero-problems’ approach was also predicated on the logic of subsidiarity – of reaching out to all parties in the region including those deemed pariah by the West such as the Iranian and Syrian regimes and the militant Palestinian organization Hamas.
The AKP argued that under the rubric of ‘zero problems’, outreach to Islamists did not mean abandoning the strategic alliance with Israel forged by the Turkish military the previous decade. Some observers doubted this and charged the Islamic-rooted AKP with a hidden agenda; the party, after all, was heir to a movement for which antipathy to Israel had long been a basic tenet. Others suggested Ankara was naïve and being manipulated by old hands in Middle Eastern intrigue like Iran. But Turkey’s leadership insisted that its multi-pronged and decoupled approach would enable it to broker dialogue between all parties in the region including key players inaccessible to Western mediators. In effect, this was an attempt to bridge impartiality and engagement by being inclusive towards actors across the region while trying to reframe interactions through the mutual benefits of enhanced economic and political ties.
The approach proved unworkable and was scuttled in late 2008 when, on the eve of a Turkish-brokered Syria-Israel agreement, Israel launched the Gaza war. This offended the AKP leadership, and the ensuing years have been punctuated by crisis after crisis such that relations between the two governments are now thoroughly soured.
Meanwhile, figures from the Turkish leadership discovered the political capital and street credibility that Israel-bashing delivers in the Arab world. Colourful commentary to this effect alienated friends of Israel, not least in Washington. The upshot, as Ivan Krastev has put it, is that today there is ‘zero chance for zero problems’. Thus Turkey, like other aspiring meditators in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, succumbed to the tension between the need for impartiality on the one hand, and engagement on the other, becoming embroiled in the very conflict it sought to mediate.
While diplomatic proactivism in the Middle East can be a complicated affair, Turkey could still help stabilize the region. The key is to recognize that Turkey’s biggest challenge at home mirrors that of the region more broadly, namely, the need to learn how to live together despite apparently incommensurable identities and interests. The AKP, with its strong mandate for constitutional reform (59 per cent), has an unprecedented capacity and opportunity to consolidate Turkish democracy. To do so, it must enshrine an inclusive political framework through constitutional reform. This would permit Turkey to achieve that critical and elusive balance between equidistance towards and empowerment of antagonistic groups within its own polity, radiating an example for the broader region.
To this end, negotiations between the AKP and other factions including Kurdish leaders are currently underway in parliament.
The debate is riddled with tensions, but there is consensus among moderates across camps that a return to the bad old days of interminable low-scale conflict in the predominantly Kurdish southeast and persistent insecurity in the rest of the country is intolerable. The outpouring of solidarity across Turkey for victims of a recent earthquake in Van, a predominantly Kurdish city, speaks too of the will of ordinary people to muddle through together. Yet spoilers have already mobilized to undermine the process and, in recent months alone, hundreds have died in separatist violence.
This, in turn, heightens Turkish nationalist intransigence. To be sure,
Turkey must fight PKK terrorism with all the means it can, but doing so without a commitment to democratic resolution of the Kurdish problem is a recipe for disaster domestically, as well as for Turkey’s relationships in a Middle East where Iran, Iraq, and Syria all have cards to play should the Kurdish conflict go transnational. In short, the most effective tool at the AKP’s disposal is to neutralise support for the PKK by co-opting ordinary Kurds through an inclusive constitutional settlement. The same is true for other oppositional groups in Turkey’s heterogeneous polity.
If AKP-led Turkey can institutionalize protection of Turks and Kurds, Sunnis and Alevis, conservatives and advocates of open lifestyles, under the same constitutional rubric, a democratic, prosperous and peaceful Turkey can ‘mediate by example’. In so doing, it would demonstrate that equidistance and empowerment are both possible in the Middle East. The timing could not be better, as the region embarks upon the fraught path of re-negotiating its domestic and international relations in the wake of the revolutions and elections, wars and withdrawals of 2011. In this context, Turkey’s democratic consolidation would resonate in Egypt and Tunisia where democratically elected but inexperienced political Islamist governments must come up with a formula to accommodate large non-Muslim and non-practicing minorities or risk inter-communal conflict. It may also resonate with actors in ethnic, multi-confessional Syria on the cusp of civil war. It would dampen the lure of Saudi petrol dollars with their Wahabi strings, and mitigate the influence of an Iran which has sought to export its revolution and sectarian cleavages. A Turkey that has consolidated its democracy would also complement the work of resource-rich Qatar in fostering critical debate. Last but not least, it might offer a glimmer of inspiration for those in Israel and Palestine who call for mutual recognition and co-habitation.