The political upheavals of the Arab Spring and electoral victories of Islamist parties have brought a resurgence of talk about the ‘Turkish model’—a template that ‘effectively integrates Islam, democracy and vibrant economics’, according to a gushing New York Times article last year, which hailed Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as ‘perhaps the Middle East’s most influential figure’. White House officials stressed the positive example that Turkey could play, as a Muslim country that maintained diplomatic relations with Israel; in 2009 Obama hailed the Justice and Development Party (akp) government as a ‘model partner’ and pillar of the nato order on a much-trumpeted visit to Ankara. The International Crisis Group describes Turkey as ‘the envy of the Arab world’, delighting in ‘a robust democracy, a genuinely elected leader who seems to speak for the popular mood, products that are popular from Afghanistan to Morocco—including dozens of sitcoms dubbed into Arabic that are on tv sets everywhere—and an economy that is worth about half of the whole Arab world put together’. Tourists from elsewhere in the region flocked to witness ‘a Muslim society at peace with the world, economically advanced and where Islamic traditions coexist with Western patterns of consumption’.footnote1

The praise is echoed by Tariq Ramadan, who declared the Turkish Prime Minister’s September 2011 visit to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya ‘an immense popular success’—‘Arabs and Muslims looked on with amazement and admiration’ as Erdoğan spoke up for Palestinians’ right to exist. ‘He is on the right side of History’, Ramadan proclaimed. ‘Turkey can and must play an important role’, helping ‘to reconcile Muslims with confidence, autonomy, pluralism and success’.footnote2 Meanwhile, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has prided himself on bringing a new pax ottomana to the region, a ‘zero problems with neighbours’ approach that would expand Ankara’s influence across the Caucasus and the Black Sea, the Middle East and the Mediterranean, while helping to broker better relations between Israel and the Arab states. This vision disavows any neo-Ottoman imperial ambitions; rather, it is described by its proponents as a matter of ‘soft power’, underlining the smiling face they wish to set on it. As an emergent structure of feeling, the pax ottomana has been embraced by layers of the intelligentsia and by popular culture, extending far beyond akp ranks.footnote3 A nostalgia for all things ottomanesque has swept even secular Turkey, leading to record ratings for a soap opera about Sultan Süleyman and his harem’s intrigues; banalized and sexualized forms of imperial splendour have become part of the air one breathes.

After a decade of akp rule, an international consensus has portrayed Erdoğan’s Turkey as the ‘successful’ alternative to both secular Arab authoritarianism and the revolutionary Islamism of Iran. Opinion polls reveal a more cautious assent: some 60 per cent of Arabs are reported to see Turkey as a model. To what extent does a cool-headed examination of the akp’s foreign-policy and domestic record support these claims?

The akp entered office in November 2002 as an outsider party, capitalizing on the crisis of the political establishment after the meltdowns of the Turkish economy in 1999 and 2001. Its origins lay in a conservative social movement, built on the basis of street politics, religious schools and popular mobilizations; its ideology combined business ethics, religious piety and parliamentarianism with a standard pro-Muslim, therefore pro-Palestinian, line, opposing Anglo-American military intervention in the region. But the new akp leadership—Erdoğan, Abdullah Gül, Bülent Arınç—were also vociferously pro-eu and made frequent visits to the United States.footnote4 In the November 2002 elections, the akp swept 60 per cent of seats in the Meclis, the Turkish parliament, albeit with only 34 per cent of the vote. Its first foreign-policy test came in spring 2003 with the us invasion of Iraq—opposed by an overwhelming majority of the Turkish population. The results of the three Meclis votes on the war hardly need repeating. In February 2003, akp deputies supported a ruling to allow us bases in Turkey to be upgraded, preparatory to the invasion. The second vote, held in Erdoğan’s absence in March 2003, saw a rebellion by akp backbenchers, who joined with the Republican People’s Party opposition to vote down the government motion permitting us troops to launch the invasion from Turkish soil. By the time of the third vote a few weeks later, Erdoğan had whipped his party into line: a massive majority of akp deputies now voted in favour of the war—and for sending Turkish forces to support the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq (this in addition to the troops that had long patrolled the Iraqi Kurdish region under the Anglo-American no-fly zone).

In the event, the deployment of the Turkish military as part of the occupation force in Iraq was blocked by the Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, and perhaps also by the Bush Administration, as punishment for the Meclis’s short-lived rebellion. Most striking, however, and a measure of the hegemony that the akp enjoyed, was the level of popular support for Erdoğan’s pro-Bush position, which was read as a strategic masterstroke: a short-term concession that would ensure American support for Turkey and the reward of major prizes in the longer run. The third vote was also hailed by Turkey’s Atlanticist liberals as a welcome step towards fuller participation in the ‘international community’s’ military interventions, not least in former Ottoman lands. This support has stood the Erdoğan government in good stead as it has lent its backing to successive Western military interventions in Muslim countries. Thus in 2006, when the Turkish population almost unanimously condemned Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and bombardment of southern Beirut, Erdoğan and Gül, then Foreign Minister, insisted on Turkish participation in the un force sent to contain Hezbollah, which the idf had signally failed to do, on the grounds of ‘coming to the aid’ of suffering Lebanese.

Similarly, Vice Prime Minister Bülent Arınç has explained that the Turkish military is in Afghanistan to help nato ‘protect peace’. When twelve Turkish soldiers were killed there recently in a helicopter crash, the government’s liberal supporters—the ex-Maoist Şahin Alpay prominent among them—rushed to point out the inseparability of Turkish and ‘global’ interests, in response to a pointed inquiry by the new, pro-left leader of the rpp, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, as to whether Turkish troops were in Afghanistan ‘to defend our nation’s interests’. Islamic conservatives, meanwhile, argue that the Turkish contingent of isaf is there to protect Afghans from the excesses of Western imperialism—an excuse frequently used when defending Turkey’s participation in us-led occupations.footnote5 They also emphasize the need to protect the Turkish model of Islam against an alleged al-Qaeda version. Turkey’s participation in isaf, along with that of Jordan and the uae, is plainly of symbolic rather than military value to the us: the presence of predominantly Muslim countries’ troops supposedly proves that this is not a Christian crusade against Islam. In fact, it helps to lock Turkey into its accustomed role as ‘bridge’ between Western imperialism and the Muslim world—a bridge for nato forces to tramp over. A minority of more radical Islamic forces, along with the much-depleted left, still resist Turkey’s Western-guided involvement in the region and call for independent diplomatic and military action. But a far larger number of Islamic intellectuals and activists support the government in its attempt to claim Islamic leadership while remaining an extension of the West.

Once the akp’s central foreign-policy goal of eu entry had been stalled—following Cypriot voters’ rejection of Kofi Annan’s plan for circumnavigating the stark fact of Turkey’s 40-year military occupation of the island—Ankara’s Ostpolitik took on new salience. In 2007, when French and German leaders made election-stump speeches about ‘Christian Europe’, Erdoğan, Gül and Davutoğlu could gesture to Turkey’s new role in the East. During the Cold War, Ankara’s foreign-policy efforts had been almost exclusively West-oriented (if long-standing relations with Israel can be included under this term). The breakup of the Ottoman Empire had left a legacy of mutual distrust across the region once ruled from Istanbul. Turks accused Arabs of ‘stabbing them in the back’ by cooperating with Western powers in the aftermath of World War One; Kemalist modernization (and Turkification) aimed at a decisive break with Islamic and Arab culture, including the romanization of the alphabet and the de-Arabizing ‘purification’ of the language. Similarly, historical Turkic domination was a negative leitmotif for Arab states, whether secular republics or conservative monarchies; Arab textbooks referred to Turks, not just Ottomans, as imperialists. Just as Kemalists attributed Turkish ‘backwardness’ to the decadent influence of Arab culture, so Arab nationalists blamed Ottoman colonialism and exploitation for the low levels of their countries’ economic development. It is true that some Arab Islamists detected virtuous aspects in the Ottoman past, while some Turkish Islamists were also nostalgic for the times when Turks, Arabs and others coexisted under the banner of Islam. But if there was widespread sympathy for the sufferings of the Palestinians, there was little practical pro-Arab solidarity among Turkish Islamists, while the country’s most influential religious organization, the Gülen community—run by the cleric Fethullah Gülen from self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania—espouses an explicitly Turkish-nationalist cultural agenda.footnote6