The Turks Today

by Andrew Mango

John Murray £20, 292 pages

For the past 40 years, Turkey has been waiting anxiously, sometimes patiently but more often with growing frustration, to hear whether it is considered eligible by the member states of the European Union to join their club.

They have promised to decide this December whether they are finally ready to start formal membership negotiations. It is not going to be an easy decision, and it is not a foregone conclusion. But for both Turkey and the EU, it will be a critical moment.

Back in 1964, when Turkey became an associate member of what was then the European Economic Community, Walter Hallstein, then president of the European Commission, declared the gesture meant that “Turkey is part of Europe”. Yet, ever since, politicians within the European club have been blowing hot and cold about whether they really meant it.

It is certainly no secret that many voters in the old EU are uneasy with the idea. They worry whether such a large, poor and overwhelmingly Muslim country can ever really integrate with the rest of the union. It is partly a question of size, but it is also a question of culture and religion, although many are too politically correct to admit it. Turkey is the least popular of all the remaining candidates for membership, particularly in Germany, where fears of large-scale Turkish immigration are rife, and in France, which is anxious to preserve its “European project” from endless dilution. But why should a country that can boast a vibrant democracy, a secular constitution and a vigorous market economy cause such doubts?

The truth is that Turkey is a mystery to most of the rest of Europe. It is a land that is neither European nor Middle Eastern, with a secular constitution but overwhelming observance of Islam, and a democracy that has periodically been overthrown by military rule when the democrats proved too corrupt, or too chaotic, to satisfy the soldiers. It is a bridge between very different worlds, and a country in a state of semi-permanent transition, first from ailing Ottoman empire to nation state, and now from a largely backward peasant economy to an overwhelmingly urbanised industrial one.

That is the enigma that Andrew Mango, a lifelong Turcophile who was born in Istanbul of Russian emigre parents, sets out to explain in his latest book. As a fluent Turkish speaker, and author of the definitive biography of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, he is well qualified to do so. Yet Turkey is an extraordinarily difficult country to write about and to explain. It cannot be done in black and white, but in many shades of grey.

The answers to many of the most urgent questions are still unclear. Will a resurgent Islam - one that has seen a party with Islamist roots emerge with an overwhelming parliamentary majority - happily coexist with a secular state? Will the powerful military establishment quietly acquiesce in an erosion of its traditional power as the ultimate arbiter of Ataturk’s constitution? And how can the country accommodate the national aspirations of its substantial Kurdish minority who are watching their cousins over the border in Iraq win ever-greater autonomy in the Iraqi meltdown?

What Mango provides is a swift, potted history of the Turkish political roller coaster since the death of Kemal Ataturk in 1938, as the country moved from a military autocracy to a democratic state, via a few counter-coups on the way. Tensions between economic liberalism, religious conservatism, prickly nationalism, corruption in power and the destabilising issue of Cyprus were recurring themes that upset one government after another in bewildering succession. Yet where he gets most interesting is in trying to analyse the state of Turkish democracy today: the strains between its institutions, including the military, and unease between a bloated public sector and the increasingly vigorous business community.

The victory of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party in November 2002 in effect swept the old political order away. Yet it was not a rebellion against corruption, according to Andrew Mango. Voters were far more concerned about jobs, inflation and the high cost of living. What they saw in Erdogan was a moderniser, in spite of his roots in conservative Islamism.

The new prime minister’s immediate move was to seek a firm date from the EU for the opening of accession negotiations. It was a move designed to appeal to multiple constituencies, and, at the same time, to keep the suspicious military establishment off his back. One of the preconditions for EU membership is a reduction in military power over the civilian government.

Liberal Turks see EU membership as a guarantee of human rights and freedoms enjoyed in western Europe. The business community wants access to European capital and markets. The army sees full membership of the EU as the culmination of Ataturk’s dreams. And even Kurdish nationalists are passionate pro-Europeans, because the EU will guarantee their minority rights.

Mango certainly seems to approve. Yet he mentions intriguingly the existence of a Red Apple Coalition of Turkish nationalists from both right and left who fear that Turkey would disintegrate if it accepted EU membership terms. But he moves on without further explanation.

This is a book full of detail on the intricacies of Turkish politics and institutions. But it is more like a political traveller’s guide than a profound analysis of the power structure. It is excellent on the infuriating practices of the Turkish bureaucracy, which inherits its habits from a combination of Ottoman and Kemalist memories, but is modelled, in many respects, on the French system.

Yet he dismisses in a sentence the worries of Turkish liberals about the existence of a “deep state”, which he describes as “an occult alliance of generals, senior civil servants, compliant politicians and businessmen using unorthodox methods to keep the country under control”. He makes no attempt to analyse why such a theory exists, nor say why he does not think it worth taking seriously.

Not that Mango is entirely uncritical. He clearly believes that the methods of the military and the security services in prosecuting their war against Kurdish separatists during the 1980s and 1990s were often counter-productive - not least in encouraging the creation of an Islamist movement to fight the Communist-inspired Kurdish Workers’ Party, a tragic miscalculation that has laid the seeds of Islamist terrorism in Turkey today.

Yet on issues that are too “sensitive”, Mango pulls his punches. He dismisses the persecution and massacre of Armenians during the collapse of the Ottoman empire as an inevitable consequence of a revolutionary period - although Turkey’s failure to come to terms with the tragedy is an issue that will certainly cause trouble for the EU accession negotiations.

There is a gap, too, on how the Turkish generals see the world today. Will they ever be tempted to intervene again in democratic politics, or have they recognised that the will of the ballot box must rule? Like the “deep state”, they seem to defy analysis.

What Mango does provide is a comprehensive guide to how the complex and confusing Turkish political clock has been put together. Where he does not quite succeed is in explaining how it ticks. That task will have to be done by someone else.