Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Westernization. Turkey's democratic system, though imperfect and influenced for too long
by an overbearing military, incorporated orthodox Islamic elements for decades. Unlike
quite a few Arab states and Iran, Turkey's industrial base and middle class were not created
out of thin air by oil revenues. Again, we have geography to thank for the advanced level
of human development in Turkey compared to most places in the Middle East. Turkey's
position as a land bridge not only connects it to Europe, but made for a wave of invasions
by Central Asian nomads that invigorated Anatolian civilization, of which Rumi's poetry
is an example. It was the Ottoman Empire that played a large role in bringing European
politics—at least the Balkan variety of it—into intimate contact with that of the Middle
East. The national independence struggles of the nineteenth century in Serbia, Bulgaria,
Romania, and Greece encouraged the rise of Arab nationalist societies in Damascus and
Beirut. Similarly, modern terrorism was born at the beginning of the twentieth century in
Macedonia and Bulgaria, before filtering into Greater Syria.
In the early twenty-first century, Turkey boasted a vibrant and politically dominant
Islamic movement, an immense military capability compared to almost any country in the
Middle East save Israel, an economy that had grown 8 percent annually for many years,
and still managed over 5 percent growth during the worldwide recession, and a dam sys-
tem that made Turkey a water power to the same extent that Iran and Saudi Arabia were oil
powers. These factors, seen and unseen, allow Turkey to compete with Iran for the locus
of Islamic leadership and legitimacy. For years Turkey had been almost as lonely as Israel
in the Middle East. Its Ottoman era overlordship complicated its relationship with Arabs,
even as its relations with neighboring Syria were overtly hostile, and those with Baathist
Iraq and fundamentalist Iran tense. In 1998, Turkey was actually on the brink of war with
Syria over Damascus's support for the radical anti-Turkish Kurdistan Workers' Party. Dur-
ing this time Turkey maintained a virtual military alliance with Israel, confirming its status
as a Middle East pariah. But all of this began to change with Erdogan's and the Justice
Party's assumption of power, which came at the same time as the West's downward plunge
in Turkish public opinion, owing to Turkey's virtual rejection by the European Union and
an increasingly truculent right-wing America and right-wing Israel.
Turkey did not withdraw from NATO, nor break diplomatic relations with Israel. Rather,
under Erdogan's foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey adopted a policy of “no prob-
lems” with its immediate neighbors, which in particular meant historical rapprochements
with Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Because of Turkey's economy, so much more technologically
advanced than its neighbors—and growing faster, too—Turkey's robust influence in the
Balkans to the west and the Caucasus to the east was already an established fact. Bulgaria,
Georgia, and Azerbaijan were all flush with Turkish appliances and other consumer goods.
But it was the Turkish championing of the Palestinians, and the intense popularity of the
Turkish people which that engendered in Gaza, that made Turkey an integral organizational
fact in the Arab world to a degree it had not enjoyed since Ottoman times. Neo-Ottoman-
