newly elected prime minister, Turgut Ozal, a devout Muslim with Sufi tendencies from central Anatolia, enacted a series of reforms that liberalized the statist economy. A slew of large firms were privatized and import controls loosened. This led to the creation of a nouveau riche middle class of devout Muslims with real political power. Nevertheless, Ozal’s genius in the later years of the Cold War was to stay politically anchored to the West, even as he softened the arch-secularist tendency of Kemalism to give religious Muslims a larger stake in the system. Turkey became at once more Islamist and more pro-American. Ozal’s Islamism allowed him to reach out to the Kurds, who were united with the Turks in religion but divided by ethnicity. The Turkish generals, supremely uncomfortable with Ozal’s religiosity, stayed in control of national security policy, which Ozal did not challenge, because he and the generals were in broad agreement about Turkey as a NATO bulwark on Spykman’s Rimland of Eurasia facing off against the Soviet Union.
Ozal died suddenly in 1993 at age sixty-five, after ten years as prime minister and president. This had profound repercussions for the future of Turkey, another instance about how the lives and deaths of individual men and women affect the destiny of geopolitics as much as geography, which retains its primacy mainly because it is permanent. Because Ozal in his own person held together apparent contradictions—pro-Islamism and pro-Americanism—his death shattereda tenuous national consensus, though this took some years to unfold. For a decade after Ozal’s death, Turkey had uninspiring secularist leaders, even as economic power and Islamic devoutness continued to burgeon in the Anatolian heartland. By late 2002, the whiskey-sipping secular elite was discredited, and an election delivered an absolute parliamentary majority to the Islamist Justice and Development Party led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the former mayor of Istanbul. Istanbul, while the home of the secular elite, was also the home of millions of poor devout Turks who had migrated in from the Anatolian countryside in search of jobs to pry their way into the lower middle class; it was these millions to whom Erdogan had given a voice.
When Erdogan assumed control, he gave power to a wave of Islamism, strengthened by Ozal, that had been creeping back into Turkish life under the radar screen of official Kemalism. In 1945, there were 20,000 mosques in Turkey; in 1985, 72,000, and that number has since risen steadily, out of proportion to the population. According to some studies, almost two-thirds of urban working-class Turks prayed daily, as well as most rural Turks, percentages that have only gone up in recent years. 4 A revived Islam has competed extremely well with the secular ideologies of the right (fascism) and the left (Marxism) “as a savior of the disillusioned urban youth,” for whom Kemalism was not a “socio-ethical system” to guide daily life, writes the London-based author and journalist Dilip Hiro. Once a normal nationalism tied to Islam took root, Kemalism gradually lost its “raison d’être.” 5
Yet when the Turkish Parliament voted in March 2003 against allowing U.S. troops to stage in Turkey for an invasion of Iraq, it was not really the Islamist Justice Party that undermined the American position, but the secularists, who, by this point, had joined Europeans in their anti-Americanism as a reaction to the unsubtle post-9/11 rhetoric and deportment of the George W. Bush administration. The disastrous outcome of the Iraq invasion, which led to sectarian warfare inside Iraq, even as no weapons of mass destruction were found, roughly coincided with the realization that Turkey would not be admittedto the EU. The upshot of these dramatic events—coming at a time when Turkey had a new, popular, and deeply entrenched Islamist government—was to shift the political and cultural pendulum dramatically in the
Ozal died suddenly in 1993 at age sixty-five, after ten years as prime minister and president. This had profound repercussions for the future of Turkey, another instance about how the lives and deaths of individual men and women affect the destiny of geopolitics as much as geography, which retains its primacy mainly because it is permanent. Because Ozal in his own person held together apparent contradictions—pro-Islamism and pro-Americanism—his death shattereda tenuous national consensus, though this took some years to unfold. For a decade after Ozal’s death, Turkey had uninspiring secularist leaders, even as economic power and Islamic devoutness continued to burgeon in the Anatolian heartland. By late 2002, the whiskey-sipping secular elite was discredited, and an election delivered an absolute parliamentary majority to the Islamist Justice and Development Party led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the former mayor of Istanbul. Istanbul, while the home of the secular elite, was also the home of millions of poor devout Turks who had migrated in from the Anatolian countryside in search of jobs to pry their way into the lower middle class; it was these millions to whom Erdogan had given a voice.
When Erdogan assumed control, he gave power to a wave of Islamism, strengthened by Ozal, that had been creeping back into Turkish life under the radar screen of official Kemalism. In 1945, there were 20,000 mosques in Turkey; in 1985, 72,000, and that number has since risen steadily, out of proportion to the population. According to some studies, almost two-thirds of urban working-class Turks prayed daily, as well as most rural Turks, percentages that have only gone up in recent years. 4 A revived Islam has competed extremely well with the secular ideologies of the right (fascism) and the left (Marxism) “as a savior of the disillusioned urban youth,” for whom Kemalism was not a “socio-ethical system” to guide daily life, writes the London-based author and journalist Dilip Hiro. Once a normal nationalism tied to Islam took root, Kemalism gradually lost its “raison d’être.” 5
Yet when the Turkish Parliament voted in March 2003 against allowing U.S. troops to stage in Turkey for an invasion of Iraq, it was not really the Islamist Justice Party that undermined the American position, but the secularists, who, by this point, had joined Europeans in their anti-Americanism as a reaction to the unsubtle post-9/11 rhetoric and deportment of the George W. Bush administration. The disastrous outcome of the Iraq invasion, which led to sectarian warfare inside Iraq, even as no weapons of mass destruction were found, roughly coincided with the realization that Turkey would not be admittedto the EU. The upshot of these dramatic events—coming at a time when Turkey had a new, popular, and deeply entrenched Islamist government—was to shift the political and cultural pendulum dramatically in the
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