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Foreign Policy after the Failed Coup: The Rise of Turkish Gaullism
by Omer Taspinar
September 2, 2016
Western
media has an understandable tendency to see Turkish President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan as an incurable Islamist who is determined to overhaul
the secularist legacy of Ataturk. Many Western policymakers, analysts,
and scholars equate the notion of a Turkish divergence from the West --
or the fear of "losing Turkey" -- with the idea of an Islamic revival.
This is an understandable fallacy. After all, a political party with
Islamic roots has won five consecutive elections in a country where the
population is 99 percent Muslim.
Moreover,
until recently this secularist-Islamist dichotomy played an important
role in the societal polarization of the country. Yet, since 2013, the
power struggle between the AKP and followers of Fetullah Gulen,
culminating with the failed coup this summer, has changed the picture.
Secularism had nothing to do with this Islamic fratricide. Similarly,
secularism versus Islam has no relevance for the bloody confrontation
between Kurdish and Turkish nationalism, the most existential of
problems facing the future of the nation-state in Turkey. It is time to
admit that what we are witnessing in Erdogan’s “New” Turkey is the rise
not of political Islam but of a much more powerful and potentially more
lethal force: nationalism.
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