CIAO DATE: 11/2014
A publication of:
SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
During the first years of its tenure in office, as the AK
Party focused on consolidating its position domestically, Turkey's reengagement with the Arab world after decades of alienation took a largely unproblematic form. Inevitably, however, as Turkish activism deepened, conflicts of interest emerged both with other aspirants to regional influence such as Iran and Israel, and then - especially after the outbreak of the 2011 uprisings - with many Arab regimes as well. The future character of Turkey's engagement with its Arab neighbors will depend on its ability to combine an adherence to a conception of community based on Islam rather than ethnic nationalism, with a commitment to democratization
both at home and regionally.
The current map of the Middle East, and the political attitudes congruent with it, for the most part came into place with the Ottoman Empire's collapse in World War I and the rise on its ruins of new nation-states modeled on - and in many cases, by - the triumphant Western powers. Unity thus gave way to division. As that map comes under growing pressure today, the story of Turkish-Arab relations comes into view as a story of alienation and mutual rediscovery with profound implications for the future of the entire region.
For several decades after the fracturing of the Ottoman Empire, authoritarian regimes sought to inculcate in the hearts and minds of their populations the secular nationalist identity they believed provided the key to modernization and development. Individual circumstances varied, and there were noteworthy differences between Kemalism, Ba'thism, Nasserism and the other variants of this secular nationalist ideology, but they all shared the imperative of erasing the old common multicultural identity which had once bound them together, in order to make way for new nationalist identities that suppress external affiliations and internal heterogeneities with equal determination. An important part of this process of erasure was the dissemination, in government propaganda and national historiography, of a series of alienating tropes - on the Turkish side, of Arab ingratitude and treachery, the "dagger" struck into the back of the Ottoman Empire by the Arab Revolt during World War I, the Arab "swamp" in which countless young Turkish soldiers perished in those years; on the Arab side, of Turkish conquest and tyranny, the "yoke" that had kept the region enslaved for centuries, the oppression that had claimed the lives of so many Arab nationalists. Geopolitical and economic factors also helped this process of alienation along. The economic autarchy of the interwar years and the era of import-substituting policies that lasted until the 1980s minimized the rationale for economic interaction, while Soviet threats after 1945 pushed Turkey into a NATO security alliance that further reduced its interest in the Middle East.
By the time the AK Party won its first national elections in December 2002, however, several key variables had changed. The Soviet Union's collapse diminished Turkey's reliance on the West. Various aspects of the contemporary "globalization" wave - the transition to export-promoting economic growth, increased international mobility, almost instantaneous access to information worldwide - led among other things to renewed economic and cultural ties to neighboring countries, especially in the Middle East. As barriers came down and the power of the inward-looking nationalist paradigm weakened, there was a resurgence in competing identities at both the subnational (for example, Kurdish) and transnational (Islamic) levels - a phenomenon that intensified the Turkish polity's sensitivity to its external environment, and so further increased its need to engage with that environment.