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At first sight, this situation seemed proof that Islam and the West were not necessarily mutually antagonistic. Not only had a party of devout Muslims come to power through a democratic process and reaffirmed Turkey’s pro-Western strategic alignment (e.g., through continued membership in NATO) but it had committed itself to moving even closer to the West through integration into the European Union. U.S. observers, among others, hoped Turkey could provide a model for other Muslim nations. Yet a closer analysis of the JDP’s rise to, and record in, power not only raises questions about the depth of its commitment to eventual E.U. membership, it also reveals Turkey’s unique historical experience, which arguably mitigates against the possibility of successfully transferring the Turkish model to any other country. For over 600 years, the Ottoman Empire was seen—and saw itself—as the Islamic antithesis of the Christian West. During the nineteenth century, its slow decline in the face of increasingly assertive European powers triggered a period of acute soul-searching. Although there were conservatives who argued that the remedy for the empire’s gradual disintegration was a return to Islam, the majority of the political class looked to Europe, not for the causes of Ottoman weakness but for its solution. In 1919, after defeat in World War I had brought the Ottoman Empire to the point of collapse, an army officer, Mustafa Kemal (later known as “Ataturk” or ”Father Turk”), led a successful revolt against both the ailing and discredited Sultanate and an invading Greek army, which was attempting to annex a large swathe of Anatolia. When Ataturk founded the Turkish Republic in 1923, it was to Europe that he looked for inspiration for the nation-state, in which identity was defined by political allegiance rather than religion. Despite Turkish Islam’s relatively moderate nature, characterized more by Sufi mysticism than rigid Qur’anic textualism, Ataturk believed that Islamic conservatism had been the main reason for the Ottoman Empire’s failure to keep pace with Europe. He sought to break the power of organized religion, abolishing the caliphate, outlawing all Islamic organizations, arresting—and sometimes executing—their leaders, bringing all religious affairs under the control of an office tied to the prime ministry and, in 1928, embedding the principle of secularism in the Turkish constitution. As a result, unlike most other Muslim countries, where Islam became a unifying force in the nationalist struggle against European imperialism and colonialism, Ataturk’s nationalism used European concepts against Turkey’s own Islamic past. Like many of the European regimes of the 1920s and 1930s, Ataturk’s new Turkey was an authoritarian single-party state. His teachings, which later coalesced into the ideology now known as Kemalism, were based on the principle of secularism and designed to fill the ideological gap left by the removal of Islam as the state religion. After Ataturk’s death in 1938, it was the Turkish military that assumed the role of the protector of his legacy. Despite Kemalism’s authoritarian tendencies, its insistence on Europe as a model meant that, in 1950, as parliamentary democracy spread through western Europe in the wake of World War II, it was also introduced into Turkey. However, economic and social underdevelopment had meant that Kemalism had only fully penetrated the urban elite. The lives of most people living in rural areas, the majority of the population, were still regulated by the moderate “folk Islam” of their forebears. The introduction of multiparty democracy inevitably brought Islam back into the political arena, culminating—from 1969 onwards—in the establishment of explicitly religious parties, most of which advocated a virulently anti-Western political agenda, including withdrawal from NATO, open hostility to Europe and the United States, and the inclusion of Islamic precepts in Turkey’s legal codes. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, a succession of corrupt and incompetent governments fueled a rapid increase in electoral support for religious parties. In July 1996, the Islamist Welfare Party (WP) came to power, only to be toppled in June 1997 as the result of pressure from the Turkish military. A young generation of former WP members eventually founded their own party, the JDP, in 2001. The WP’s experience of being forced from power by the military had a powerful impact on JDP leaders. They rapidly concluded that, far from threatening their values, Turkish membership in the European Union would not only result in an easing of the Kemalist suppression of Islamic piety in the public sphere but also, through the European Union’s subordination of the military to civilian control, would make it impossible for them to be forced from power by the Turkish military. Such calculations have inevitably led to accusations by the JDP’s opponents that the party’s political reform program is insincere, merely an attempt to create an environment in which it can introduce an Islamist agenda. Such accusations are not entirely without justification. Privately, many members of the JDP admit that, in the long term, they want to see a greater Islamic coloring to public life in Turkey and a gradual erosion of the importance of both secularism and Kemalism. Yet there is also little doubt that their long-term agenda is relatively moderate. Even relative hard-liners admit that, despite their reservations about integration with the West, they recognize the practical need to be able to cohabit with Europe and the United States. Perhaps more significantly, Kemalism has not only served as an ideological bulwark against the penetration of religion into the public sphere but has imposed experience of a parliamentary system upon the Turkish people. Unlike other Muslim countries—which tend to be ruled by authoritarian regimes and whose constitutions mostly include Islam as a defining characteristic of the state—Turkey’s recent history includes the theoretical separation of religion and state and a functioning, if imperfect, democratic system. The result of Ataturk’s goal of emulating the West is that the Turkish model is nontransferable. However, it is also true that, even if his secularism is ultimately diluted or destroyed and religion again colors the political arena, democracy is likely too deeply entrenched institutionally and in the collective psyche of the Turkish people to be easily uprooted. © 2005 IFES
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