The Ottoman Empire and the Contemporary Middle East

Ehud R. Toledano is Professor of Ottoman and Middle Eastern History and the Director of the Graduate School of Historical Studies at Tel-Aviv University. He holds a Princeton PhD (1979), and has taught and held research positions at the University of Oxford, University of Pennsylvania, and UCLA. He has published extensively on the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire. On Monday 12 March 2012, Ehud R. Toledano addressed The Sydney Institute during a visit to Australia.

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE CONTEMPORARY MIDDLE EAST

EHUD R.TOLEDANO

Let’s start with some background on Turkey. Then we will look at Turkey’s developments and its approach to the Middle East, and how the Arab Spring has turned Turkish politics and foreign policy almost 180 degrees.

Comparing what was the Ottoman Empire – the Mediterranean, Egypt, Syria and so on – with Australia, in the Middle East there are 320 million people and in Australia just 22 million people and all in a similar space area. This gives you some idea of the difference in proportions I am talking about.

The Ottoman Empire existed for six centuries, but it’s relevance for the Middle East is only 400 years, from 1516 to 1918. The Ottoman Empire was the epitome of diversity and probably one of the most diverse regions in the world at that time, from almost every angle. It was multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-lingual, and multicultural. It managed to survive for so long despite that because it was an inclusive kind of empire.

Then, from 1908 – 1922, the Young Turks, a Turkish a sort of military junta, came to power and encouraged integration. This will be familiar to you because of Gallipoli which you’re reminded of every year on Anzac Day – the connection between today’s Turkey and Australia. The Young Turks were exclusive, as against the heritage of the inclusive Ottoman Empire.

Following the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Turkish Republic following World War I, Kemalism emerged as the leading ideology and practice, named after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who was the founding father of the Turkish Republic. Kemalism is still the national ideology of Turkey, as much as you can say that Zionism is the national movement of the Jewish people that established the state of Israel. Kemalism is the national movement of Turkey that established and governed the Turkish Republic from its inception until the present day. But, while it remains Turkey’s ruling ideology, it has been challenged by the current ruling party (AKP) and is gradually falling apart and being replaced. I’m talking about an impending demise.

The height of Kemalism was from 1923, the establishment of the Republic, until 1950. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was the first President and he died in 1938. Until 1950, the Turkish state was governed by a one-party political system. So, it was hardly democratic. It was also very aggressively secular and statist in its economic policy; but it was pro-Western and reform-minded.

What the Kemalist governments did was to suppress all the multi-elements of the Ottoman Empire, and it coerced nation-building. Police would tear women’s head covers and enforce prohibition of the call for prayers. The weekend became Saturday and Sunday, and Friday as the day of prayer was not allowed to be a special day.

This was highly exclusive. It left a great part of the Turkish population without a voice in the public sphere. Erosion and reassertion began to take effect from 1950 when a multi-party system was introduced and the opposition party of Andan Menderes was elected. Now, the Democratic Party held power and it lasted ten years. In 1960, this tolerance was arrested as the army installed itself in power as the guardian of secularism and Kemalism in Turkey. A military coup d’etat ended this decade of more pluralistic government. Other military coups followed in 1980 and 1997 with consequent political instability.

Thus Turkey’s political system today is a multi-party, but one that was problematic in terms of its stability. There were three prominent figures involved. Suleyman Demirel, Bulent Ecevit ,and Necmettin Erbakan, who was the leader of the Islamic party at the time. The first served as President and PM, the second as PM, rotating several times. Until 1996, there was never an Islamic controlled government, with Islamic parties receiving no more than 17- 21.5 per cent of the vote. In June 1996, Erbakan became prime minister of a coalition government that lasted in power one year only, before it was forced to resign following pressure from the army and secularist Kemalists.

The AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi or Justice and Development Party) government of Turkey over the last ten has transformed it into what is commonly known as New Turkey. This Turkish Spring, over a decade on, is still going strong. There has been mass urbanisation and a shift in the loyalty of the old Kemalist elites. There has been recognition that the system was corrupt and needed to be replaced. In the build up to the 2002 elections there was also a reassertion of religious identities.

From 2002-2007, the AKP  which won the elections with 34 per cent of the vote and a near two-thirds majority in Parliament, did not change very much, in terms of policy, but they learned a great deal. Over the following two terms (2007-2011, and 2011 to the present), there has been dramatic change with huge economic success, a rise of a new Islamic business elite, political stability and restrictions on the military.

There is now in Turkey a stable system and a flourishing economy. The army does not need to interfere. The government has made a strong case that the Army should be taken out of politics. The government is trying to open up and become much more inclusive. It’s an attempt at multi-culturalism, to include the Alevis, Kurds, and other minorities, such as the Orthodox Christians and Armenians.  The Alevis,  make up 25-30 per cent of the population. They are Turks who are not Sunni Muslims; many of them are Kurdish. . The government has tried, with its opening up policy, to negotiate better conditions of rights, culture acceptance and even political inclusion for these minorities. This is an inclusive policy.

So, there has been an ongoing pattern from Ottoman inclusion to Kemalism with its exclusion and back to an age of inclusion, where the government is trying to bring whole parts of society together, to let them feel part of a nation being built by all groups. As for removing the army from politics, Turkey now has dozens of high ranking military officers in jail on charges of conspiracy to overthrow the government.

Many of these changes must be formalised and enshrined in a new Constitution. Constitutional reform, stage one, happened in the referendum of 2010. The Army is out of politics, probably for a very long time, and trials of its military leaders are underway. Constitutional reform, stage two, is now in the making. Discussions are being held over an agreed text for a referendum in 2013, which will be much more inclusive. This is a negotiating process between all parties and all groups within Turkish society.

New Turkey’s foreign policy is happening under its architect Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and  is based on two pillars. One is ”Strategic Depth,” which has been dubbed (somewhat wrongly) “neo-Ottomanism,” and the other is the  “Zero Problems with Neighbours” policy. Significantly, foreign policy is seen as a tool for economic growth and expansion.

So, what is ”Strategic Depth”? Simply, this is the geo-strategic positioning of Turkey within its former spheres of influence in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central Asia, serving as bridges of “soft power” exertion. Turkey has a deep Ottoman history in these regions that facilitated its leadership role within the Islamic world. It does not mean, in any way, trying to revive the Ottoman Empire. It’s just about using the Ottoman heritage to extend Turkish influence in the region. At the same time this still means retaining ties with the US and the EU, especially through NATO, where Turkey is a long-time member. As well, Turkey continues to seek EU membership despite continuous humiliation and rejection of it by the EU.

The Ottoman Empire provided a system of government and law that enabled management of an empire that was “multi-all”, as I have explained. It needed that kind of flexibility to deal with diversity. Another feature was the central position of the military in stake-holding and as a constituent element of the governing elite. The empire was open to European influence and was reform-minded. It developed a political culture of moderation and accommodation. Albert Hourani, one of the leading scholars on the Middle East in the twentieth century, studied Ottoman political culture and described Ottoman, Middle Eastern, Arab and Turkish elites as “patient, cautious, carefully balancing one force against another in order to neutralise them all. Giving your enemy time and scope to ruin himself. Seeing how far you can go, but always leaving the way of escape if you’ve gone too far.”

The policy of “Zero Problems with Neighbours” is the other pillar of Turkish foreign policy. See how many neighbours Turkey has: Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Cyprus. It would be quite an achievement to have zero problems with so many neighbours. And it was going well before the Arab Spring destroyed it. The Arab Spring started in Tunisia at the beginning of 2011. And then Egypt erupted, followed by Yemen, Libya, Bahrain in the Gulf and Syria, which is ongoing.

In Morocco there has been change without a revolution with the King recognising that he needs to introduce reforms and have free elections. This is similar to the situation in Jordan where the King has introduced reforms along similar lines. In the Gulf, especially in the Emirates and Kuwait, there have been similar attempts. So, monarchies are trying to reform while the republics are collapsing one after the other. Iraq, which experienced a difficult transition (under American occupation) to a democratic rule, is not a fully completed process. Iran had a very brief Spring that was brutally suppressed in 2009. In Algeria, nothing happened. In the Sudan, the situation is still very fragile.

There has been regime change in the Republics of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. We’ve seen regime reform in the monarchies of Morocco, Jordan and some of the Gulf states. Things are still in turmoil in Syria, Iraq to an extent, and there has been no change in Algeria, Sudan and Saudi Arabia. Free elections have also propelled Islamic parties to power.

So why the differences? It’s not very clear. Partly it’s the type of regime undergoing change – republic versus monarchy; or the composition of society – ethno-religiously homogenous or heterogenous. An economic situation can be important – poor or rich – the level of urbanisation, youth unemployment. It may be influenced by religion in the public sphere – the tolerance of display versus suppression. So we look at Turkey and the Arab Spring and see that the Zero Problems policy yielded zero friends. Or, as the President of Armenia said in a speech in Luxembourg last year, ”Zero Problems” has produced zero results. In short, Turkey ended up having to change its policies and do an about face in at least four situations – those of Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Egypt.

The New Turkey has a pragmatic government which is not Islamist, not ideological, not rigid. Contrary to the image it has in the West, for completely unjustifiable reasons, Turkey’s government is very pragmatic and business oriented. It is a government which would always place economic considerations over religion, even in foreign relations. Turkey has no cadre of experts, think-tanks, people who know the languages and the cultures of the Middle East, so it has limited regional understanding. It has never cultivated such an understanding because Kemalism had its back to the Middle East and the Arabs, and its face towards Europe and the United States. Eastern familiarity was not important.

But Turkey is now presenting itself to the USA as the big partner who knows everything about the region in which it is located. This is far from the truth now, but might be evolving with time if the right steps are taken to create the required expertise. The current AKP government has also shown a large discrepancy between what it says and what it does. This is a good thing, because very often its statements are not very pleasant to Western ears, including Israeli ears.

So is democracy in a Muslim majority country possible? We can say right now that it is, and we are hoping that will continue, but we have no assurances. And, not least important, is Turkey a model for the new Arab regimes? The Turkish PM is often asked this. His reply is that Turkey is not a model, but an inspiration.