Turkey's Democratic Dilemma
Letter from Istanbul
Article Summary and Author Biography
After years of cozying up to Middle East dictators, Turkey now urges its neighbors to liberalize -- or risk regime change. But these calls for change will ring hollow unless Turkey gets its own democracy in order.
PIOTR ZALEWSKI is the Turkey correspondent for Polityka, a Polish news magazine.
Snapshot
The United States is counting on Turkey to help oust the Syrian regime and bring about a pluralistic government. But Ankara, whose Sunni leadership sees Syria’s conflict in sectarian terms, is not on board.
Journalists and activists rally for press freedom in Ankara, March 19, 2011 (Umit Bektas / Courtesy Reuters)
During a town hall meeting organized as part of Barack Obama’s 2009 visit to Istanbul, a Turkish student expressed his disappointment with the president’s inability to implement substantial changes to U.S. foreign policy. “Moving the ship of state is a slow process,” Obama explained. Not so in Turkey. Since the spring of 2011, Ankara has performed a remarkable volte-face. A country that engaged and appeased Middle East dictators for the better half of the past decade now urges them to undertake democratic reforms -- or risk regime change. There is just one problem: If Turkey is serious about exporting democracy, it will have to do a much better job of nourishing its own.
Turkey’s renewed focus on the Middle East began in the 1990s but hit full swing with the election of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002. Trade with the region boomed, visa restrictions with neighboring countries disappeared, and feel-good bilateral visits abounded. (By his own account, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, billed as the architect of Turkey’s renewed engagement with the Middle East, visited Damascus more than 60 times in the past eight years. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, meanwhile, vacationed in Turkey with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his family.) Things were going so well that a 2010 free-trade agreement among Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey immediately bred talk of a Turkish-led Middle East union...
