Turkey at 100: Between Constancy and Change.

• Author: Mufti, Malik

Introduction

Heraclitus said all is flux. Parmenides said all is one. The tension between those two perspectives is fruitful, because each yields valuable insights. In the case of Turkish foreign policy since the establishment of the Republic 100 years ago, for example, a "Parmenidean" approach can point to one essential reality--Turkey neighbors Russia--and find that sufficient to explain virtually all the most important features of Turkish behavior, such as its acute sense of vulnerability; its relationship with the Western powers; and its desire to maintain a stable and controlled regional hinterland. If one wants to know more about the variations within this continuity, however, then one will need to adopt a more "Heraclitean" approach. This article explores the tension between the two approaches--the possibilities for change within the constraints that can frustrate it--by focusing on the case of Turkish foreign policy since the rise of the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AK Party) in 2002. It begins with a review of certain themes introduced by Thucydides and Ibn Khaldun--the interplay between rest and motion, structural factors and human agency, interstate and domestic dynamics--of particular relevance to the Turkish case. It then seeks to explain the evolution of AK Party foreign policy, in part through a comparison with the experience of Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s, before considering the current aporia it has reached.

Two Historical Guides

The tension between structural continuity and the various manifestations of change (demographic, economic, technological, political) has constituted the core of international relations theory since its earliest formulations. Before taking up the contemporary Turkish case, it is worth reviewing the treatment of this tension by two thinkers whose insights remain unsurpassed: Thucydides and Ibn Khaldun. In Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, the primary protagonists--Sparta and Athens--are made to represent, respectively, the principles of continuity or rest on the one hand, and of change or motion on the other. One way Thucydides explores the interplay of these two principles is through the crucial distinction he sets up between the internal, domestic sphere (where rest or peace is the paramount imperative) and the external "international" sphere (where human nature in the absence of any overarching restraining authority renders motion or war inescapable). Thucydides reminds us, however, that the domestic sphere must itself be created initially from disorder, so the state of war is always primary.

Both spheres, moreover, stand on a material or natural basis. Thus, in the remote past the Spartans subjugated neighboring peoples such as the Messenians and Laconians and set them to work cultivating their inland empire's resources. It is these particular material conditions--a large slave population and fertile soil--which shaped the Spartan regime. The availability of food and other necessities eliminated the need for further expansion, while the fear of slave rebellion kept the military at home. Within the Spartan ruling class, solidarity and discipline were maintained through pious adherence to an ethos that discouraged self-centered distinction in favor of the common good. In order to shield both the Spartan elite and its slave subjects from destabilizing foreign ideas and influences, travel and commerce were kept to an absolute minimum. Sparta's material endowment thus produced a conservative, austere, cautious, and xenophobic culture that in turn sustained a regime Thucydides himself praised for its extraordinary stability and longevity.

Athens started out from a very different natural endowment: a barrenness of soil that protected it from invasions but also made it a safe haven for refugees from wars in more desirable lands. Its population therefore grew without a commensurate rise in food production, making necessary both commerce and the founding of overseas colonies to siphon off its excess numbers, as well as of course the maritime military capability to protect such intercourse. Sea-based imperial expansion in turn generated innovations technical (more advanced ships and fortifications), sociological (a rise in the status and therefore political influence of commoners who provided the bulk of the oarsmen), and ultimately cultural: a more expansive worldview--more irreverent, more acquisitive, more daring, more open to new ideas and experiences.

Over time, the greater dynamism of Athens generated a growth in its economic, technological, and military capabilities vis-a-vis Sparta. Thucydides identifies this shift in the balance of power--rooted, it should be kept in mind, in material or natural causes--as the real cause of the Peloponnesian War; one he says made it inevitable. (1) In the course of his account, he also shows how the distinction between the domestic and international spheres cannot then be sustained and, most generally, how motion ultimately prevails over rest in all regards. Even so, Thucydides preserves a space for human agency within this structural framework by highlighting statecraft as a factor counteracting decay and defeat. It is possible for a rare leader such as Pericles to manage the natural expansion of a polity's power without provoking premature alarm among one's neighbors or embarking on premature initiatives of one's own.

There is no evidence of Ibn Khaldun ever having read or heard of Thucydides, who lived about 1,800 years earlier. All the more remarkable, then, that they agree on all essential points. Ibn Khaldun touched on two dimensions of change in his analysis of asabiyya--the spirited sense of solidarity that binds a political community together--both posing potentially lethal challenges to civic well-being, but both amenable to correction through virtuous statecraft. The better-known dimension is the psychological or sociological evolution from the stronger asabiyya characterizing people living under primitive conditions which engender courage and toughness, to the weaker asabiyya that characterizes them when they develop into more advanced but also more enervated and decadent civilizations. Ibn Khaldun provided a vivid illustration of this distinction when he celebrated the conversion of "this Turkish people and... its mighty and numerous tribes" who "embrace Islam with the determination of true believers, while retaining their nomadic virtues which are undefiled by vile nature, unmixed with the filth of lustful pleasures, unmarred by the habits of civilisation, with their youthful strength unshattered by excess of luxury." As a result, they "came to the rescue of the true faith, by reviving its last breath and restoring... the unity" of an Islamic empire that had lost its vigor and could no longer defend itself against its enemies. (2) It would be interesting to consider what effect Turkey's economic development during the past four decades has had on its asabiyya in this regard, but that is a topic for another discussion.

Here, I will focus on a related but perhaps less noted dimension: the evolution in terms of political identity from primordial to greater (or imperial) asabiyya. Going back to the earliest origins of political communities, Ibn Khaldun begins with the biological clan, founded by a patriarch and bound together by actual blood ties. Its solidarity sustained and its cooperation mandated by the quest for security, for access to the basic necessities of life, and later for distinction and preeminence as well, the clan must fight other clans because "each one will stretch his hand out for what he needs and take it from its owner, in accordance with the iniquity and aggressiveness of animal nature." (3) Ibn Khaldun emphasizes the natural basis of such aggression: war is "something natural among human beings." (4) Successful clans conquer and absorb neighboring clans, who become their wards and over time come to claim common descent. In this manner, clans expand into tribes, tribes into tribal confederations, tribal confederations into nations, nations into empires. It is a process Ibn Khaldun welcomes (just like Thucydides, but much more explicitly), because the cultivation of advanced civilization--the development of the arts and sciences which are the crowning accomplishments of human reason--require as large and complex a socio-political framework as possible. Along the way, however, blood lineage necessarily assumes a more and more "imaginary" or mythological character. (5) Eventually a new "greater solidarity" (asabiyya kubra) must be manufactured--for it can no longer be "natural"--both in order to provide an internal basis of political legitimacy that goes beyond mere coercion, and in order to unite the increasingly diverse polity against hostile outsiders. (6) Otherwise, survival itself is at stake. Ibn Khaldun thereby identifies a central and perennial political problem: how to formulate a new asabiyya capable of accommodating the inevitable diversity of an increasingly complex, dynamic, and outward-oriented polity?

Both thinkers thus proceed from two most basic structural or natural starting points: one environmental and one psychological. The environmental is exemplified by the fertility of the soil in Thucydides, and the harsh wilderness of the primordial nomadic barbarians in Ibn Khaldun. The psychological is the shared recognition by both thinkers that human action within all such environmental parameters is driven by an innate inclination toward acquisitiveness and aggression--hence the "realism" for which both are still renowned. Together, fixed human nature interacts with its fixed environment to generate change. Desire drives expansion, which produces new technologies and living conditions, which in turn transform social and cultural attitudes, which in turn shape the character and extent of further expansion. For Thucydides and Ibn Khaldun, the process must culminate...