Austin Bay‘s recent essay for Strategika on the post-coup Turkish political situation and its NATO membership:
Ataturk bequeathed Turkey what his greatest biographer, Andrew Mango, called “the structure of a democracy, not of a dictatorship.” He authored an orientation, not an ideology, creating a political, social, and cultural process that he believed would eventually make Turkey capable of perpetual self‐modernization. Ataturk was a political giant and a superb military commander. Eighty years after his death he remains a cult historical and political figure.
President Erdogan is a canny politician and, to be fair, Turkey’s most significant political figure since Ataturk. The green-eyed monster feeds his inner fire; Recep knows he disappears in Kemal’s giant shadow. Not capable of displacing Ataturk the man, he has chosen to replace Ataturk’s state, first under the guise of extending democracy, now behind the façade of maintaining stability. Erdogan also intends to remain in office over twice as long as Ataturk. Turkey 2034 will be an Erdoganist political construct, not Kemalist.
That last paragraph sketches a novelistic interpretation of Erdoğan’s motives. It expands on the answer I gave at Hoover’s October 2017 Military History and Contemporary Conflict symposium after Barry Strauss asked me what I thought drove Erdoğan — the deep drive that might shed light on his long-term vision for Turkey and help us craft policy responses to his challenge.
Novelistic speculations have numerous weaknesses. However, over the decades Erdoğan has supplied plot points and psychologically-indicative dialog. We are able to assess action through time. Early in his career Erdoğan routinely employed Islamist poetry: “Democracy is merely a train that we ride until we reach our destination. Mosques are our military barracks. Minarets are our spears.” That poetry led to his arrest for sedition. After his release he renounced his piously seditious poetry, claiming his fundamentalist views had fundamentally altered. His sudden commitment to Turkish democracy energized his “moderate Islamist” Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) 2002 victory over a tired and corrupted Republican Peoples Party (CHP). In 2003 the AKP became Turkey’s governing party with Erdoğan serving as prime minister.
First he tested Kemal’s structure, then he began to dismantle it. Erdoğan purged the military of suspected political opponents. A cunning narrative camouflaged his operation. He claimed European Union accession rules demanded he strip the military of its political powers and make certain Kemalist military coups entered history’s dustbin. Sometime in 2008, as Erdoğan began pursuing the Ergenekon conspiracy of “secular fundamentalists” and other secret nationalist vigilante organizations, I finally realized whatever explanation du jour Erdoğan offered for his actions, the dismantling scheme always expanded his personal power and influence.
The bizarre July 2016 coup follows the same pattern. The Turkish people defeated the coup. Ironically, Erdoğan remains in office today because Turkish citizens (across Turkey’s complex political and ethnic spectrum) courageously defended their hard-won democracy — a democracy nine challenging decades in the making. In its aftermath, however, Erdogan used emergency powers to purge Gulenist Islamists and his political opponents. He dismantled elements of the democratic system that saved him and his government.
