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FOREWORD
To say that Andrew Mango’s Turkey: The Challenge of a New Role provides a most welcome and timely addition to the nearly nonexistent monographic treatment of contemporary Turkey would be a gross understatement. His insightful analysis reflects both a close familiarity with and appreciation for the problems facing this key country.
Turkey is located in a neighborhood that by any standards must be termed marginal and in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact could well become a slum. Turkey’s neighbors have traditionally included Iran, Iraq, Syria, Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and the USSR; to this crowded list the USSR’s collapse has added the Russian Republic, Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.
Turkey is literally surrounded by instability. Russia, whose future is still to be determined, has recently begun exhibiting nationalist tendencies that do not bode well for Turkey. Georgia is still suffering the aftershocks of a particularly brutal civil war, and Armenia and Azerbaijan show little sign of resolving their five-year ethnic dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh. Iran, whose own future course is far from clear, spares no expense in exporting terrorism and its own brand of
Islamic fundamentalism to neighboring Turkey. Iraq’s future remains a question mark, and Syria (despite U.S. efforts to bring it back into the family of nations as part of the overall Arab-
Israeli settlement) remains a major supporter of terrorism, much of it directed against Turkey.
Greece, Turkey’s long-time regional “ally” remains hostile over bilateral issues and the still unresolved Cyprus crisis. Not unlike a petulant child, it does what it can to destabilize Tin-key-most recently allowing the terrorist Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) to open offices in Athens. To survive in this version of the “new world order,” Turkey needs a strong economy and a fair measure of internal stability.
Mango’s perceptive study amply illustrates the absence of these factors in contemporary Turkey. He argues persuasively that Turkey’s ability to play a more substantive role in its troubled part of the world is closely linked to its still undecided success in meeting its own growing internal problems, especially (1) a fragmented political system; (2) an economy stretched beyond its means by high inflation, mounting external and internal debt, and an outmoded tax system; and (3) the direct threat to its territorial integrity represented by the ever-mounting PKK insurgency in the southeast.
To this analysis must be added the growing tendency of an ever-increasing percentage of the electorate to reject the traditional political parties of the center-right and center-left in favor of extremist religious and ultra-nationalist alternatives on the radical right. This trend, observable in municipal and parliamentary election returns of the past five years, is startling: In the 1989 municipal elections, the extreme right took some 10.8 percent of the total vote (Welfare Party or RP 9.8 percent plus National Action Party or MHP 1.0 percent); two years later in the 1991 parliamentary elections, these two parties running together accounted for 16.9 percent of the nationwide total vote. On March 27, 1994, once again in municipal elections, the extreme right tallied 28.28 percent of the total (RP 18.99 percent plus MHP 8.03 percent plus BBP or Grand Unity Party 1.26 percent). Stated differently, within the relatively short span of five years, that percentage of the electorate rejecting the traditional status quo has practically tripled and today comprises close to three out of every ten voters. Given the fragmentation of the Turkish political parties, a similar growth in the next two years could conceivably see the radical right emerge as the winner of the next scheduled parliamentary elections in 1996.
One thing is certain, as Mango writes, “Turkey and the West need each other as never before.” His perceptive study can play a key role in drawing the attention of Western policymakers to this all-important truth. It behooves us all to focus less on what is wrong with Turkey today than on a far more important question: How can the West help ensure that the only Muslim democracy surmounts its current problems and reemerges as strengthened proof that Islam and democracy are not incompatible? Andrew Mango has set forth the problems. Now all of us must look for ways to resolve them.
Heath W. Lowry
Atatürk Professor of Ottoman
and Modem Turkish Studies
Princeton University
Summary
The republic of Turkey has matured into a middle-ranking regional power. Founded in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) as the central successor state of the Ottoman Empire, it is ruled by a freely elected parliament and pursues economic development within the global free market system. Its tradition of statecraft, inherited from the old empire, has helped it surmount internal political crises and develop a successful foreign policy that has ensured the support of like-minded foreign powers in defense of Turkish national independence and the general world order.
When Andrew Mango wrote his first Washington Paper on Turkey in 1975 (Turkey: A Delicately Poised Ally), internal tensions were threatening to erupt into full-scale civil war between Marxists and nationalists, and the country’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was being challenged by a vocal body of neutralists. Both dangers were averted, and Turkey successfully discharged its role as southeastern bastion of the Western alliance until the cold war’s end brought disintegration to the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union.
From the Truman Doctrine’s inception in March 1947 until the end of the cold war, Western—especially U.S.— aid to Turkey was firmly grounded in common interests. It …
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