LONGTIME ALLIES OF THE UNITED States, the Turks have been sympathetic to American values for decades. Nevertheless, a new BBC World Service poll of 21 countries shows Turkey to be the least friendly to America, especially the current administration. Eighty-two percent of Turks said they found President Bush’s reelection “negative for peace and security in the world.” While this sentiment doubtless reflects a global reaction to the war in Iraq, there are also distinctive local factors that explain the current wave of Turkish anti-American feeling.
One of these is the Kurdish question. The Turkish Republic was founded in 1923, under the influence of secularist European nationalism. Rather than building a national identity around the shared Islamic heritage of its various peoples, modern Turkey sought to achieve national cohesion by converting its non-Turkish ethnic groups–notably the Kurds–into Turks. This effort at social engineering has only partly succeeded.
Most Kurds retain their ethnic identity–and their suspicion of the Turkish state. In the 1980s and ’90s, the Marxist-Leninist Kurdish radicals of the PKK exploited this distrust. The PKK carried out a bloody terrorist war against Turkish rule and assimilated Kurds–a war that killed more than 30,000 citizens of Turkey. Today the PKK is weakened—thanks partly to American support of Turkey–but the fate of the Kurds remains uncertain.
The Kurds, of course, live in Iraq as well as in Turkey, divided in two by the border between these neighbors. For hard-core Turkish nationalists of both left and right, the best Iraq is an authoritarian one, ruled by a strongman in Baghdad who suppresses the Kurds in the north of his country, keeping Turkey’s southern border quiet. This explains these nationalists’ enduring sympathy for Saddam Hussein. For them, a free and democratic Iraq sounds alarm bells, for if the Kurds flourish in Iraq, they may inspire their brethren on the other side of the border to attempt to secede from Turkey and join them.
That perceived threat might not be entirely fanciful, but the best solution would seem to be to make Turkey’s Kurds so free and prosperous that they wouldn’t want secession. Indeed, the current parliament, led by the AKP government, has granted many cultural freedoms to the Kurds in the last two years. Nevertheless, many hard-core nationalists wish to return to the “no Kurds allowed” policy of the good old days. For them, the Kurds are not countrymen to be won, but bitter enemies to be fought.
Anti-Americanism comes naturally to this mindset. The more the Iraqi Kurds can be portrayed as agents of “American imperialism,” the more suspicion of the Turkish Kurds will seem justified. As the prominent Turkish columnist Cengiz Candar has noted, some Turkish nationalists are pressing an anti-Kurdish agenda under the guise of anti-American propaganda. (A U.S. crackdown on PKK camps in northern Iraq would help neutralize that propaganda and answer Ankara’s justified concern about the resurgence of this terrorist threat.)
The prominence of the nationalist establishment in Turkey’s media is another factor in the current anti-Americanism.
Actually, two camps dominate the Turkish mainstream media. The first and smaller one consists of hard-core nationalists–the “Kemalists,” who claim to follow in the footsteps of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. What they really do, however, is carve a frozen ideology out of Atatürk’s pragmatic legacy. The second, larger camp is the more relaxed, cosmopolitan, somewhat liberal, highly Westernized intelligentsia known as the “White Turks.”
While Kemalists are categorically anti-Western, White Turks champion Turkey’s bid to join the E.U. Most have been big fans of the United States, but they, too, have some quarrels with the Bush administration. Some of these are related to the Iraq war. The White Turks are attuned to the liberal media in the United States, and their heroes are figures like Michael Moore and, for the rare sophisticate, Maureen Dowd.
Moreover, most senior White Turks are former left-wing activists of the ’68 generation. They chanted antiwar slogans during Vietnam, and their present-day protests against “American imperialism” carry a whiff of nostalgia.
The other problem that most White Turks and all Kemalists have with President Bush is more philosophical: They consider him far too religious. They have always believed that modernization means secularization, and they don’t like the fact that the most modern nation on Earth is also among the most religious, with a president who starts the day by reading Scripture. It is no accident that the fiercest salvos in the Turkish press against President Bush and the values voters who helped reelect him come from columnists who are also, in the Turkish context, fiercely anti-Islamic. One such figure, the columnist Ozdemir Ince, recently wrote that the Americans who voted for Bush must be “ignorant” because “they believe in things like . . . man is created, or that heaven exists.” For good measure, Ince frequently attacks “American secularism” for being too soft on religion and rails against Turkish conservatives who sympathize with it.
In fact, Americans may be surprised to learn of an interesting conspiracy theory to which both Kemalists and White Turks subscribe: namely, that the United States intends to abolish the secular regime in Turkey and replace it with a moderate Islamic one. The best “evidence” for this, they say, is that top U.S. officials have mentioned Turkey as an exemplary “moderate Muslim country.” While this characterization obviously refers to Turkish society, not the state, it is unacceptable for the ultrasecularist camp. They simply can’t stand to hear the words “Islam” and “Turkey” in the same sentence.
A third important factor in Turkish anti-Americanism is the role played by radical Islam.
Traditionally, Islamic conservatives in Turkey have been sympathetic to the United States, which helped save Turkey from godless communism and has strong religious and moral values. Since the early ’80s, however, an alien strain of radical Islam has poured into Turkey from the Middle East, a strain that is constitutionally anti-American, and virulently anti-Semitic. The boundaries between traditional conservatism and the new Islamism are not always clear-cut. Thus, the AKP government is conservative, but Islamist conspiracy theories about the imagined “American crusade” against Islam influence the thinking of some AKP supporters.
None of this is to deny that there are facts feeding anti-American sentiment. Of these, the shameful mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the civilian deaths in operations against the Baathist/Zarqawist insurgency in Iraq are the most conspicuous.
The overwhelming success of the elections in Iraq, however, has been an inspiration for many, including some Turks heretofore suspicious of America. Once a stable democracy is established in Iraq, the conspiracy theories that prey on Turkish minds should start to fade away. Then anti-Americanism in Turkey should retreat to its usual strongholds–the Marxist left, the orthodox Kemalists, the ultrasecular portion of the White Turks, and the radical Islamists–for they despise America for what it really is: a nation that is modern, free, and open-minded, yet religious and moral, and that stands for liberty in the world.
Most Turks, in fact, cherish the same values. That’s why their bitterness towards Americans is almost surely temporary. These two nations are natural friends and allies, pushed into temporary distrust by some unfortunate events and poisonous ideologies.
Mustafa Akyol is a columnist and writer in Istanbul. He is the author of The Opium of the White Turks (forthcoming), a critique of the ultrasecular Turkish elite.
