Ataturk's experiment

Clash of civilisations closes in on Ataturk's experiment

March 03, 2005
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12423002%255E25377,00.html

THE main drag of Ankara, Turkey's capital at the centre of the vast Anatolian plain, is called, naturally enough, Ataturk Boulevard. Kemal Ataturk was the founder of modern Turkey who determined, 80 years ago, that his country would modernise, Westernise and secularise. You can see the fruits of his historic vision in the boulevard that bears his name. It is a huge thoroughfare several kilometres long that neatly cuts Ankara, a city the size of Sydney, in two.

I spent a happy few hours strolling its length earlier this week and was struck by several extraordinary sights. In several hours walking among tens of thousands of people, I counted but six women in headscarves. Remember that Turkey is 98-99 per cent Muslim, and that qualifies as extraordinary. There were also a rather starling number of blondes - Turk friends assured me this is not a natural phenomenon.
Truly this world of ours offers almost infinite variety. There are parts of Indonesia and Malaysia where the headscarf is not particularly common, but I've never before seen a Muslim city in which it is virtually absent.
A few days later, in the poorer parts of the city, I saw more headscarves, though still on only a minority of women.
The men of Ataturk Boulevard were almost as striking as the women. Most were dressed in neat business suits, prosperous burghers hurrying between appointments. The rest were in more casual Western gear. But I didn't see a single hajji cap, which many Muslim men wear to indicate they've made the hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca. Yet tens of thousands of Turks make the hajj each year.
Overall, the visual style of Ankara is southern Europe, though somewhat less prosperous than Europe itself. In many ways it reminded me of South American cities I've seen such as Santiago, where the inspiration is also obviously European, even if the final result is not quite to replicate Europe but to adapt it to a different environment.
These elusive issues of identity are of acute and immediate policy consequence for Turkey and the world. For if moderate Islam exists anywhere, it surely exists in Turkey. Given Turkey's strategic location, having borders with Iraq, Iran, Syria and Greece, to name a few, the world has an immense stake in the success of Ataturk's experiment.
Recently the EU gave Turkey a date later this year to begin formal negotiations for membership of the EU. This represents one of those rare moments when an international organisation has a chance to pivot the course of history. Turkey has already undertaken a raft of reforms - ranging from freedom of the press and political rights to abolishing the death penalty - to meet the EU's criteria for membership. Full membership could take another 10 years. Turkish officialdom is so thoroughly and emphatically committed to the European idea that this virtually guarantees a continual program of liberalisation for Turkey.
For 50 years Turkey has been a member in good standing of NATO. To have a big (70 million), overwhelmingly Muslim society that is democratic, pro-Western and successful is perhaps the single most important outcome we could crave in the war on terror and the long-term battle for the soul of Islam.
Of course, Turkey is not paradise and there are countless complexities. But it is a pretty decent society and it conceives of itself as simultaneously Muslim, democratic, secular and European. Surely conceiving of oneself as simultaneously Muslim and secular is a contradiction. Not at all, answer the Turks. We are Muslim in religion but secular in government, a classic Western response all but unique in the Muslim world.
Nothing would consolidate Turkey's liberal direction more than entry to the EU. But the EU would benefit too, as Yasir Yakis, a Turkish member of parliament and former foreign minister, explained to me in his parliament house office. "Turkey, because of its size and the size of its army, can bring tangible benefits to the EU," he said. "Turkey's strategic location is of value to the EU."
Yakis, a ramrod straight fellow with a shock of blindingly white hair, is a man of great urbanity and precision. He points to a NATO survey of 15 hot spots that could cause security trouble for NATO, from Iraq to the Balkans to the Caucusus. In almost all of them Turkey has a presence and an influence.
Yakis doesn't claim Turkey is indispensable, but his more modest claim - that it is important and can be useful - is undeniable.
Turkey used to be regarded as a nation on the flank of NATO. But as NATO and the EU have expanded eastwards, and as the Caspian region has established a new energy economy, Turkey has come much closer to the centre. Yakis says that recent unfavourable coverage of the West in the Muslim press has been joined in the popular mind with the theory of Harvard professor Sam Huntington that a clash of civilisations between Islam and the West is inevitable.
"Turkey joining the EU would show that this is not true," he says. Is anything else much more important? It would even give the EU a chance to do some good, a truly rare and wonderful occurrence.