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Last July, the Turkish army’s top four generals resigned in what critics say was a misbegotten attempt to trigger a national crisis.
The generals, led by chief-of-staff Isik Kosaner, seemed to be hoping that their dramatic departure would topple the country’s moderate Islamist government and restore the primacy of the military in Turkish affairs.
“They thought they could put pressure on the government, that the people would be afraid and beg them to come back,” said Yusuf Acar, an Istanbul editor with the Zaman media group.
It was a reckless gamble with the country’s stability, but fortunately for the Middle East’s largest and most successful democracy, the generals lost their bet.
Instead of the expected crisis, the Turkish nation quietly bid farewell to 88 years of Kemalism—the founding ideal that put Turkey on the path of modernization and secularism—and the notion that the generals always know best.
While vivid scenes of the Arab Spring were becoming YouTube staples across the cybersphere, the crisis that didn’t happen in Turkey may turn out to be the most significant of all for the region. For Egypt in particular, the parallels are striking and the lessons instructive, especially after the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory in the first round of Egypt’s parliamentary elections.
Both countries have long histories of domination by the military. Since the founding of the modern Turkish state in 1923, the army has staged four coups, and up until 1989 all but one of Turkey’s presidents have come from military backgrounds. In Egypt, the military has been in continuous control since 1952, when Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser led a coup against the monarchy.
In both countries, the military is generously subsidized by the U.S.
When the crowds in Cairo’s Tahrir Square demanded the ouster of Hosni Mubarak (a former Air Force general), it was the senior military command that told him it was time to go—and then quietly seized power for itself. The so-called Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, headed by Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, promised to step aside once a new civilian leadership had established itself, but it now seems intent on staying put.
For Turkey, loosening the generals’ grip has been a long and fraught process.
“The generals see themselves as the sacred guardians of the state—they founded it, and they believe it belongs to them,” said Acar. And for a long time most Turks would not disagree.
Things began to change in the 1990s. The first to seriously challenge the Kemalist orthodoxy was the late Necemettin Erbakan, the founder of an avowedly Islamist party who became prime minister in 1995. Within a year, he was ousted by the military for deviating too far from Turkey’s secular, pro-Western path.
Several of Erbakan’s protégés, including a young former mayor of Istanbul named Recep Tayyip Erdogan, split from his Welfare Party and founded one of their own. Eventually called the Justice and Development party, or AK, it too was Islamist, but also democratic, open to the West and—as it would turn out—surprisingly good at running the economy.
When the AK party won the closely contested 2002 election, Erdogan became prime minister and inherited an economy that had seemed constantly on the brink of disaster. A decade later, Turkey’s economy has trebled in size and now ranks 17th in the world. And in the face of a lingering global recession, the Turkish GDP last year grew by 8.9 percent.
Meanwhile, the only signs of creeping Islamization so feared by the generals were hefty new taxes on alcohol and cigarettes and a low-key crackdown on the country’s still legal red-light districts.
But the generals remained unhappy. By early 2003, senior military officers and others who belonged to what Turks refer to as the “deep state”—a term used to describe members of the military and other establishment figures who believed they could act outside the law to protect the status quo—were busy plotting a coup. Their plan was to create a crisis by bombing mosques, assassinating the Armenian patriarch and shooting down a Turkish plane and blaming it on Greece, according to Markar Esayan, a journalist for the Taraf newspaper, which exposed the plot, code-named “Sledgehammer,” in 2009.
Since then dozens of senior military officers and hundreds of others—journalists, businessmen and academics linked to the deep state—have been arrested in a mushrooming prosecution.
The case has fascinated and divided Turkey. And while the prosecution of some suspects seems to carry more than a whiff of political vindictiveness on the part of the AK, there is a growing consensus that it was long past time to end the military’s overweening role in politics.
In last June’s election, Erdogan’s party easily won a third term with nearly 50 percent of the vote, almost doubling the total of Republican People’s Party (CHP), its closest rival.
“The AK is a modern conservative party,” concedes Faik Tunay, a rising star in the CHP. “As they say in marketing, Erdogan is the right person in the right place at the right time.”
And since July’s non-crisis, the military also seems to have come to terms with its new role.
“Their resistance to civil governance is diminishing,” said Mesut Ulker, a retired colonel. “The transition is being done in an organic way—a negotiation instead of a struggle.”
Erdogan’s success has not gone unnoticed in the Middle East. On a September state visit to Egypt, the Turkish prime minister received a rock star welcome. Part of this is explained by his sharp criticism of Israel’s blockade of Gaza and its expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank, but mainly it is because Egyptians and other Arabs appreciate that Turkey under Erdogan is both democratic and comfortable in its Islamic identity.
“Erdogan,” according to Burak Erdiner, a senior official in Turkey’s Ministry for EU Affairs, “is the only leader who can go to and pray in the mosque on Friday—and on Saturday lecture the Muslim Brotherhood on secularism.” Which is precisely what Erdogan did during the Cairo visit, telling a television interviewer that he hoped the new regime in Egypt would be secular.
With the Muslim Brotherhood’s decisive showing in last week’s election, Egypt is at a critical juncture. Whether the Brotherhood heeds Erdogan’s advice—and its generals learn from Turkey’s example—will go a long way toward determining the success or failure of the Arab Spring.
Tom Hundley's travel to Turkey was funded, in part, by the Rumi Forum.
This story has been corrected to accurately reflect the year the AK first came to power. It was 2002, not 2001.