Conceiving the New Turkey After Ergenekon

The approaches and policies toward Turkey of international and regional players cannot alone be expected to fundamentally alter the political Zeitgeist and operational principles of its political system. In fact the opposite is true: underlying Turkey’s foreign policy formulations and recalibrations is a domestic power struggle to redefine the real parameters of Turkish politics. The primary focus of this struggle in the last two years has centred on the still ongoing historic court case known as Ergenekon that is altering the status quo framework and understanding of Turkish politics.[i] Engaged in this struggle are, on the one hand, the secular establishment, led by the military[ii] and, on the other, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), a pragmatic conservative offspring of the banned Islamist party.[iii]

‘‘Ergenekon crisis’’ and redefining the civil-military interface

Since the 1999 EU Helsinki Summit’s decision to extend candidate status to Turkey, EU accession has become the main driving force for democratic reforms in civil-military relations in Turkey. As part of the accession process, the European Commission has been assessing Turkey’s progress based on fulfilment of the political criteria set out in the Copenhagen European Council meeting of 1993.[iv] The Accession Partnership Document and the European Commission’s annual reports on Turkey have suggested the need for structural changes[v] in the organisation of civil-military relations to enhance democratic civilian control and bring the relationship in line with EU standards.

Perhaps the most important features that distinguish the EU’s policies toward Ankara from those of the US are their sharp insights, their realistic and proactive character, and their power of enforcement. Officials in Brussels accepted the risk of drawing upon themselves the antagonism of the military and other traditional actors when they acknowledged from day one that “the so-called internal security problems may in fact be the result of the extant civil-military imbalance. If so, then the Turkish armed forces’ (TAF) justification of its greater domestic involvement and independence from democratic checks and balances is both self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating.”[vi] EU documents and representatives have not refrained from explicitly criticising the state’s security ambitions and their deleterious effects on the country’s democratic governance. Adoption of this critical perspective and policy has led to acceptance of the fact that unless primacy is given to reviewing and altering the civilian-military equilibrium, a general democratic reform strategy cannot produce effective results.

More significantly, the most recent Commission Progress Report, published on 5 November 2009, pinpoints the ambiguous nature of the AKP’s policies toward the military:

Political control over the military was applied in practice in the context of military operations aimed at terrorist targets in Northern Iraq. Such operations were authorized by the parliament and decided upon by the government. Overall, however, no progress has been made in ensuring full civilian supervisory functions over the military and parliamentary oversight of defence expenditure. Senior members of the armed forces have made statements on issues going beyond their remit. No progress has been made on strengthening parliamentary oversight of the military budget and expenditure...[vii]

The revelation of charges against state bureaucrats, military personnel, rightwing intellectuals and professionals for planning to provoke the military to intervene and bring down Turkey’s Islam-sensitive government gave the government an unprecedented opportunity to repair and reset, more intentionally and intensely than ever, the lopsided balance between civil and military authorities in Turkey infavour of constitutionally elected organs.[viii] It is clear that the strong response to the Ergenekon case in people from all walks of life is not just a reaction against the  political autonomy and impunity of the Turkish military. The Ergenekon episode is about who genuinely makes fundamental rules in Turkish politics and with what force, coalitions, legitimacy and agenda. Hence, the episode, more directly and intensely than ever before, raises the need to institute genuine forces and processes of democratic politics in Turkey.

The power and privileges of the Turkish armed forces stem from two sources. First, the TAF bears the torch of the state ideology (called Kemalism or Ataturkism, after the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk), the most unfailing tenet of which is secularism, which forms the basis for the priorities and values of Turkish public life. The TAF’s strong and persistent role in Turkish politics throughout most of the twentieth century, albeit with different modalities and emphases, is an imperative of this ideology. Turkey’s ‘‘design-flaw’’,[ix] – the idea that the armed forces must guard secularism first, and democracy (and the commitment to Europe) second – shows that the military bureaucracy’s view of politics is steeped in esoteric pre-democratic notions, including a visible distaste for popular politics as a societal activity and an ambivalent attitude toward the electoral power of the populace.

Second, the TAF’s unchallenged control in defining and deciding what constitutes security or threats to the nation, built up over the last half century, serves to promote its own legitimacy and to perpetuate its own veto power in politics. From the Cold War years through the last decade of the twentieth century, the army transformed itself from a reformist institution into one that views the world around it with disapproval, frustration, concern and despair, and regards the political system as being in constant ‘‘reaction’’ to the good and solid foundational principles of a modern, secular, developed Turkey. The EU’s emphasis on the democratic accountability of the military and security sector, sensitivity to expressions of identity, and concern for human rights are considered part of a grand plan toweaken Turkey. As a result, the TAF’s overall attitude toward westernisation has moved from early advocacy to accusations against the EU’s ‘‘fantasy’’ of democracy and accountability in the Turkish system.

Civil-military relations took a new turn after the 3 November 2002 general elections brought the AKP to power. In the minds of the military, the idea that Islam, formerly just an identity marker and securitisation target, had now become a holder of power by popular will simply reaffirmed the high command’s belief that the security threat had grown in size and that the TAF had been right all along in its suspicion of governments with parliamentary majorities. That is why it regards the ruling party’s project of inserting itself into the EU fold as a ruse, intended to disguise its Islamic agenda.

Since the AKP’s double election victories in 2007 and in response to the reforms proposed by the EU which would delimit its political role, the TAF has sought to safeguard its traditional prerogatives by adopting new strategies. Ergenekon represents the culmination of a series of unconstitutional activities over the past four years aimed at destabilising the government through coups.[x] One aspect of the alleged coup plans is the military high command’s proactive drive for societal support to undermine the government which has been akin to the actions of a political party.[xi] In April 2007, the military bureaucracy attempted to block the presidency of the ruling party’s candidate, Abdullah Gul, through morally and (in the eyes of many constitutional lawyers) constitutionally questionable means; Gul was in fact one of the founders and major figures of the party, but his wife wears a headscarf. The most extreme strategy, however, for dealing with the AKP was the attempt to close the party down: less than a year after its landslide victory in the 22 July 2007 general elections, the prosecutor general launched closure proceedings in the Constitutional Court in March 2008. On 30 July 2008, the Court fell just one vote short of doing so on charges of a nti-secularism, demonstrating that, like that of its  predecessors, the fate of an Islamic-oriented governing party with a strong electoral backing could still lie in the hands of eleven judges. Such closures have become a prominent sign of the ‘‘exceptionality’’ of Turkish democracy: the establishment’s ability to take extraordinary measures to restore an exceptional secular regime bearing no relation to popular elections.

The excessive character, scale and scope of Ergenekon have encouraged the government to restrain its traditional impulse of simply following along with the powerful military. The crisis has enabled the government party to highlight its ambiguous ideology and dual identity: one conservative-nationalist, the other liberal-reformist. By the middle of its first term, the AKP leadership had found it more sensible to guard itself against the military’s interventionist potential by reverting to the traditional civilian strategy of compromise with the military rather than engaging in democratic control of the armed forces and further reforms to align with the EU. Ergenekon, however, has given urgency to taking control of civil-military relations and turning the TAF into a ‘‘peacetime’’ establishment. The ruling party has been enabled to re-emphasize its reformist-liberal dimension and bring new energy and purpose into another phase of reform in 2009. As a result, for example, the government, in a long overdue act of defiance, passed a law clearing the way for the first time in the republic’s history for the prosecution and trial of officers who commit crimes in civilian spheres – thereby virtually ending the judicial autonomy of the military. This represents a critical setback for the military institution, in terms of its political role and social prestige, and carries the potential to alter radically the contours of its existence. As a result, the military is also impelled to define a new role for itself to preserve its unity and dignity. However, such a change is neither easy nor inevitable.

…

While the US withdrawal from Iraq has created positive momentum on the Kurdish issue and regional cooperation with Turkey’s neighbours, Turkey’s new self-confidence and regional prominence has transformed a static Cold War bulwark into a potential catalyst for regional stability. However, the Ergenekon affair, the series of alleged coup plots that preceded it, and the TAF’s attempts to act like a political party in reaching out to and aligning with both organised and unorganised sectors of society have all been so unprecedented as to lead significant segments of Turkish society to begin questioning the compatibility of these actions with the hallmarks of twenty-first century democracy that they keep hearing, watching and reading about, thanks to globalisation.

Taking democratisation further in an accession-weary and war-weary country will not only help stabilise domestic politics but will enhance Turkey’s regional role and international status. These realities serve as a major step toward realising the maxim that Turkey does not ‘‘automatically’’ foster stability in one of the most unstable regions of the world simply because of where it is located, but because of what it stands for.

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Umit Cizre, and Joshua Walker, (2010) 'Conceiving the New Turkey After Ergenekon', The International Spectator, 45: 1, 89 — 98.