A Propaedeutic,
Part 2:
The Turkish Option
by
Robert J. Loewenberg, President IASPS
The peace process policy has failed, meaning it cannot achieve its aim.
This aim is stability or the aim of every policy or choice of peace or war
in international relations.
Israel’s options, its choices after Camp David (see A
Propaedeutic Part 1 11/3/00), whether to accept or reject the
peace process have proved to be a single option for war. Israel accepted the
peace process at Camp David but this was demonstrated to be the same as
rejecting it. In effect the peace process has defined what is meant by
instability.
Serious consideration ought to be given by Israel to a regional system
that might in time mature into a confederal arrangement, say a Turkish-based
EU or NAFTA. So far as the peace process focused on Israel it compromised
its capacity to deter and project power,
that is to choose peace or war. This now means two things:
1.
Israel’s prior options of deterrence including
alliance with Turkey are diminished;
2.
Turkey’s eastern flank is now exposed.
The peace process sought regional stability from Turkey to the south and
east including the Levant, southwest Asia (Iran and Iraq), the Persian Gulf
and north Africa. Unless the Turks assume their natural role as “regional
great power” to provide stability in the Middle East, as they alone once
did, the consequences will be bad and far reaching.
- The
chaos now about to emerge because of the failure of the peace process
threatening Turkey’s eastern flank is an invitation to the Russians.
They are moving slowly southwest from the Caspian littoral. This region
includes Turkic peoples whose resources are part of what threatens
Turkey including the 85% of FSU hydrocarbons consumed by Turkey. A
neutralized Turkish regional policy in effect undermines Western
interests and rewards Russo/Iranian strategic planning.
- Russia,
in spite of its present weaknesses, remains a strategic threat to
Western interests. The Slavic control of secular Muslim regimes in the
Caspian littoral includes the Russian strategic tie-up with
fundamentalist Iran and oil-rich, Baathist Iraq, all part of a possible
Russian led OPEC. As EU nations embracing Arab fundamentalist regimes
and discounting the Turks move Gulf-ward, medium term dangers include
the isolation of Turkey as well as a weakening of the West as Europe is
still more cut off from the US.
Turkey sees its own national or Kemalist raison d’etre or anti-Muslim
fundamentalism as a “godsend to Western Europe.” Europe (and the US) do
not see it this way, thus the peace process. In fact the roles of Turkey and
Western Europe are reversed from what they were before 1914. Turkey, having
then “led the other side” against an anti-Ottoman pursuit of nationalism
and the balance of power in the West, confronts today a kind of secular
Ottomanism in the EU that is more tolerant of Arab fundamentalism that it is
of a “rearguard action against fundamentalism” in Turkey.
But with all its faults and problems Turkey strives toward the Western
ideal: a republican nation. If it is the case that only a nation-state on
the spot and not a group of crumbling ones at a distance, the EU (and
perhaps the US, too) can bring stability to the Middle East, then Turkey’s
pursuit of the EU is the wrong policy; for Turkey but also for the West.
The failure of the peace process is an opportunity for Turkey and its
proven constitutional mechanism of Kemalism. Turkey's assumption of great
power status in the Middle East combined with the possibility of EU denial
of entry to Turkey may yet prove to be the West's godsend to Turkey. Turkish
geopolitical orientation towards the south and east by way of a confederal
system of like-minded states offers the hope for stability and republicanism
to Asia Minor and the Levant.
The only power that can stabilize the anticipated chaos of the Middle
East is Turkey which is also the only power that has done so before, indeed
when it “led the other side” against the West. That was when the West
was based upon nation states and the balance of power whereas now it pursues
opposite aims although this time Turkey is on the side of the West that was.
The peace process has failed in the main because the West, the US and
the EU, wished to achieve stability by moving against the hard, and since
1914, the much despised means of achieving stability. The means of stability is what it always is; strong and
determined nation-states in an “imperfect” balance of power. The
opposite course of comprehensive peace is “perfect” because it is not
human and is therefore unable to supply the tension that comes from
imperfection, from the human element which creates the balance. The hope of
the peace process was that weakened states and diluted or non-states would
be “balanced,” on one side by idealistic multiculturalism and on the
other, more effectual side by outside money and moral relativism. It was
stability on the cheap.
In seeking to join the EU the Turkish regime seeks the second of these
things but cannot demonstrate the “multiculturalism” to gain entry to
the EU. Turkey’s opportunity, unlooked for and heavy enough with ironies,
is to earn as a great power all that it has ever wished to get from the West
by abandoning its supplication for entry into the EU. Skipped over by the
Congress of Vienna and now by otherwise minded EU, Turkey has it in its
power to hand back to the West, to Europeans
and others, what the West is now itself abandoning, for example in the peace
process.
A confederal
arrangement with the Middle East’s anti-fundamentalist peoples is the
surest means for Turkey to deal with its own problems of revanchist and
domestic groups seeking independence. It is the way to hold back the tide of
chaos in the Middle East. Most of all, it is the best way for Turkey to
“enter” the West at long last, namely by leading it, beginning with the
EU, out of its anti-nationalist weakness for punishing emerging republics
seeking freedom, first of all from Muslim fundamentalists and also from
anti-nationalist Europeans. It is their policies of comprehensive peace that
have undermined the Middle East, and, if supported by Turkey’s own pursuit
of joining the EU, invite Muslim fundamentalism into the heart of Europe
itself, most likely from the “funnel” that leads from Turkey into
Europe.
