"You are a resister of the 25th hour," the leader of the European Parliament's Green faction told Baroness Catherine Ashton, the European Union's foreign policy chief, during a February debate on the upheavals in Egypt and Tunisia. Daniel Cohn-Bendit may as well have been talking about the reaction of the West as a whole. With the White House refusing to call for Hosni Mubarak's resignation until the last moment, and with the EU having failed, yet again, to articulate a clear stance, only a few western countries found themselves on the right side of history when Mubarak's rule finally came to a close.
That one of those countries was Turkey, a Nato member and an EU candidate, and that the person who articulated its position was none other than its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is more of a surprise than meets the eye.
Erdogan's Justice and Development (AKP) government has never placed a high premium on human rights and democratisation with regard to the Middle East. Stability - the one word that Turkish officials mentioned more than any other whenever they spoke of their country's policy towards the region - seemed to override all other concerns. It became, essentially, a byword for non-interference. Turkey buried its head in the sand during the violence that followed the flawed 2009 presidential election in Iran, calling the electoral dispute, as well as its fallout, an "internal matter". It turned a blind eye to human-rights abuses and autocratic rule in places like Syria and, for that matter, Egypt. Finally, it has looked the other way in Sudan, with Erdogan himself insisting that there has been no genocide in Darfur and that, in any case, a Muslim - in this case, Sudanese president Omar al Bashir - "could not perpetrate such a thing".
Turkish policymakers have tried to shield themselves from the criticism that such statements and policies have inevitably provoked in the West and, to a lesser extent, in Turkey itself, by citing the importance of discretion.
"We're certainly not going to promote human rights and democracy the way the American neocons have," Suat Kiniklioglu, the spokesman for the Turkish parliament's foreign affairs committee, told me a year ago. "If the aim is to produce results, we find it more effective to speak face to face. We prefer to talk to them behind closed doors rather than criticising them through media outlets."
Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey's tireless foreign minister, sounded a similar note when he told a Turkish journalist that "we tell our counterparts the importance of being respectful of human rights. But we don't do it in public; this is a requirement of sincerity." (What Davutoglu forgot to mention was that Turkey had made an exception for Israel, repeatedly - and very publicly - chastising its government for its treatment of the Palestinians.) Asked whether Turkish diplomats really raised human-rights issues with their interlocutors in countries such as Syria or Iran, Kiniklioglu said that they did - but that "it's not at the top of our agenda".
"The Turks are very big on process," says Joshua Walker, a post-doctoral fellow at the Crown Center at Brandeis University. "Where there's a government in power, regardless of whether or not it is legitimate, they are going to deal with it."
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In light of all this, there was little reason to expect Turkey to come out strongly in favour of the protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square. In fact, a full week had to pass before the Turkish government could make its position clear. When it came, however, prime minister Erdogan's message to Mubarak - basically, a request for the Egyptian president to start packing - was possibly the strongest to come out of the mouth of any western leader.
"I'm asking you to listen to the people's voice and their uttermost humane demands. Welcome the will of nation for change without any hesitation," Erdogan said on February 1, in what he called "a sincere warning" to Mubarak. The following day, on the heels of Mubarak's pledge to stand down, but only after the next elections, Erdogan was even more blunt. "The [Egyptian] people expect a very different decision from Mubarak," he said. "The current administration does not inspire trust ..."
The verdict is still out as to why Erdogan took such a decisive stance. He may have simply sensed which way the wind was blowing. Back in 2009, when it became clear that the post-electoral protests in Tehran could not take down Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Erdogan's government remained silent. This time around, when the revolution in Egypt appeared to have reached a critical mass, Turkey seized the moment and sounded Mubarak's death knoll, winning plaudits in the West, at home, and across the Arab world.
There was an element of risk involved, however, says Joshua Walker. "If the protests had been crushed," he says, "Turkey would have found itself in a very strange position."
Whatever the case, Erdogan must have seen little reason to stand by Mubarak. Unlike the regime in Iran, which retains a degree of popular support, the Egyptian system was bankrupt, says Walker. That, he says, goes a long way to explain Turkey's non-response to the 2009 unrest in Tehran and its reaction to the events in Cairo. For Erdogan, throwing Mubarak under the bus - voicing the sentiment of the Arab (and Turkish) street and getting out in front of the rest of the crowd - was politically expedient. More than that, it was probably enjoyable. "It was clear that these two leaders did not get along," says Walker. "For Erdogan, Mubarak, using the bogeyman of Islamism, being the lackey of the West, was emblematic of everything that is wrong with Kemalism in Turkey."
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Since Kemal Ataturk's secular revolution of the 1920s until the early 1990s, the Middle East and the Arab world seldom registered on Turkey's radar. To a large extent, this was a factor of identity politics. With the Ottoman Empire dead, its legacy discredited by Ataturk's credo of a modern nation-state, Turkey's unique reference point was Europe. Identifying with the West meant turning your back on the East. As far as the Turkish state was concerned, the Middle East was a dangerous backwater, a rotten limb that had been severed and discarded.
The end of the Cold War forced Turkey to rethink its role in the region. The influence of the army and the Kemalist establishment, which had traditionally cautioned against involvement in the Middle East, began to wane. Where previous governments saw nothing but risk, a new generation of politicians - from the popular Turgut Özal in the late 1980s to Erdogan himself - began to sense opportunity. Under Erdogan's AKP, which swept to victory in 2002 and has won every election since, Turkey has effectively shed its image of a western outpost in the Middle East, winning its neighbours' trust and - as of late - adulation.
Turkey's re-emergence in the region has been so strong as to prompt some commentators to refer to the AKP's foreign policy as "neo-Ottoman".
The foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu, a former academic, prefers slightly more neutered catchphrases like "strategic depth" and "interdependence". Whatever the jargon, it all speaks to the fact that, as Walker puts it, "the Turks are more actively involved [in the Middle East] today than at any point in their modern history". On Davutoglu's watch, Turkey has signed a slew of deals lifting visa requirements with Syria, Yemen, Jordan, Lebanon and Libya. It has engaged in a series of ambitious mediation efforts between India and Pakistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Syria and Israel, and the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Most recently, it has spearheaded the creation of a free-trade zone with Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, prompting talk of an emerging "Middle East Union".
Though itself not an Arab country, Turkey has ended up jostling with Egypt for leadership of the Arab world. Turkey's policy of championing the Palestinian cause, particularly on the heels of Israel's January 2009 attack on Gaza and last summer's flotilla incident, has earned it plenty of praise across the region. It has also caused friction with Cairo, which has traditionally considered itself the Palestinians' main channel to the outside world, particularly as far as Gaza is concerned.
Following his famous outburst against Israeli President Shimon Peres in Davos at the beginning of 2009, a number of Arab commentators, contrasting Turkey's position on Gaza with their own leaders' quiescence, dubbed Erdogan the "new Nasser". (None of this is likely to have gone down well with Mubarak and his circle.)
Turkey's popularity ratings in the Muslim Middle East have reached unprecedented highs. According to a recent study conducted by Tesev, a leading Turkish think tank, 85 per cent of people surveyed across Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Iran had a "favourable" or "very favourable" view of Turkey. Seventy-eight per cent agreed that Turkey should play a bigger role in the region.
Mubarak's departure clears the way for just that. With Egypt forced to concentrate on its domestic situation, the mantle of regional leadership is now Turkey's for the taking. As the only indigenous democracy in the region, Turkey is in a very good situation, says Walker, "not only as a model and an inspiration that everyone looks to, but also in terms of being the most stable economic actor that everybody wants to do business with". It is up to Turkey, as a major player, to prevent chaos, to figure out ways to moderate the Iranian influence in the region, and to try to figure out ways to work with the Israelis.
"The way the US, the EU and other countries are now dealing with Turkey, there's almost a sense that they have no choice but to talk to the Turks in the Middle East," Walker explains. If the Turks are sidelined - as in Paris, when the French government conspicuously excluded them from a meeting that preceded air strikes against Libya - they can spoil the entire process. "Whereas, if they are on board, they can assume a greater share of the burden."
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For those who assumed that Erdogan's support for the Egyptian revolutionaries heralded the arrival of a Turkey that could make a more assertive case for democracy in the Middle East - more assertive, at least, than the West's case in Egypt - Ankara's response to the tragedy unfolding in Libya has been a rude wake-up call.
While Erdogan was one of the first world leaders to publicly call on Mubarak to step down, his government has been extremely slow to join the chorus of international condemnation that followed Muammar Qaddafi's decision to open fire on protesters. In late February, Erdogan opposed so much as sanctions against the Libyan government, intimating that world powers were acting "out of oil concerns". Until recently, he has shied away from openly calling for Qaddafi to step down or face the consequences. It was only once US and European planes began hitting Libyan targets - following UN resolution 1973 - that Erdogan began to criticise Qaddafi for letting things get out of hand.
For a long time, Turkey remained opposed to any outside intervention, putting itself at odds not only with its western allies, but also with the Arab League, which, unlike Turkey, supported a no-fly zone over Libya from the outset. Calling the idea "counterproductive" and "dangerous", Erdogan's government initially frustrated plans for the Nato alliance to take over the ongoing military operation. Turkey has since performed a volte-face, criticising the French for taking the lead in the air strikes against Qaddafi's forces and backing a decision by Nato to take over the operation. Moreover, it has dispatched five warships and a submarine to Libya, albeit with the proviso that these would be used solely for defence and humanitarian purposes.
Granted, Turkey seemed to have a lot on the line. At the time of the initial outbreak of violence, Libya was home to more than 30,000 Turkish nationals. (Thanks to a massive evacuation operation, the largest in Turkey's history, the vast majority of them have since left Libya.) Commercial interests have also been at play. Turkey has more than $15 billion (Dh55bn) worth of projects in Libya, most of them in the construction sector. Trade between the two countries reached $2.4 billion last year. Given all this, says Hugh Pope, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, it is not that surprising that Turkey was initially "somewhat on the Qaddafi side of the fence".
On some levels, Erdogan's decision to keep lines open with Qaddafi has paid dividends. As Pope points out, through its embassy in Tripoli and its consulate general in Benghazi, Turkey has remained in the unique position of being able to interact with both the government and the rebels. It was the Turkish embassy in Tripoli that helped secure the release of four New York Times journalists captured by loyalist forces at a checkpoint near Ajdabiya. Turkey has also taken advantage of its stance to propose a road map calling for an immediate ceasefire, safe zones to secure the flow of humanitarian aid and a process for a transition to democratic change. (Falling short of citing Qaddafi's departure as a precondition for talks, the road map has so far failed to win the endorsement of the Libyan opposition, which has been critical of Turkey's policy from the outset.)
None of this dispels the sense of disillusionment among those who hoped that the events in the Middle East would usher in a more principled Turkish foreign policy. Turkey's response to the events in Egypt could have been a major turning point, says Walker. "My concern is that Libya is going to put a stop to that ... When the going got tough the Turks basically backed down and said, we'll be pragmatic about this." And by claiming a moral high ground - "We are not one of those who look at the Caucasus, Asia and Africa with interest considerations," Erdogan said while accusing world powers of making calculations based on oil - Turkey is driving a wedge between itself and its western partners. "Turkey is consistently saying, I'm different, I have a special position, on the issue of Libya, for instance, accusing western countries of only being interested in oil at the same time as [it is] interested in commercial contracts with the current regime," Pope says. "There's nothing wrong with that, but saying I'm going to be different because I'm holier than thou and then not really being holier than thou sets up a gap between rhetoric and reality."
It is, of course, difficult for any country to forsake domestic interests to pursue a foreign policy along moral lines. In a neighbourhood like Turkey's, Pope acknowledges, it is nigh impossible. "Turkey is not a country like Norway or a country that lives in isolation and can afford to have very high universal moral standards."
Even so, taking a position that makes it look so different from its traditional western allies, as it is doing in Libya, is neither in Turkey's interest nor in the interest of its budding relationship with the Arab world. "I think the region wants Turkey to be in western councils, it wants it to be a regional voice, sometimes a Muslim voice sometimes an eastern voice, a developing country voice, whatever you like to call it, but inside the fence of the western alliances," says Pope. "A Turkey that would lose its links to the EU, to the US, to Nato or not be trusted by these countries, which it is getting close to, would not be what the region would hope for."
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While Turkish foreign policy might benefit from "a normative dimension", two serious problems stand in the way, wrote Ibrahim Kalin in 2008, two years before he became Erdogan's chief foreign policy adviser. One is the Kurdish issue, which "cripples Turkey's ambitions to speak with confidence about democracy, transparency and human rights in the Middle East". The other is the legacy of the Bush administration, which has badly tainted the idea of democracy promotion in the Middle East.
"Democracy and human rights and other principles like rule of law, transparency and accountability are part of Turkey's foreign policy in the sense that we uphold those principles but we do not impose them upon other countries," Kal¿n contends today. "Each country has specific circumstances, its own conditions and each country will have to develop its own way of implementing these principles," he says. "If you try to accelerate that process through some intervention from outside, it will backfire."
Turkey supports the transition in places like Tunisia and Egypt, says Kal¿n, but "we will not impose anything from the outside." Turkey might not be in a position to offer massive foreign aid but, he says, it can offer its democratic know-how. "If the governments of these countries want us to share our experience, if they need any assistance, say, for example, to write a new constitution, to change the political parties law, to hold free and fair elections," says Kal¿n, Turkey can help. "People in Egypt and Tunisia and other places already know what democracy is, they know what transparency is," he says. "It's a matter of letting them define these things within their specific context and hopefully implement them as soon as possible."
One of the most remarkable developments in Turkey's recent history - and its foreign policy - has been its transformation from a closed, autarkic economy into what Kemal Kirisci, a professor at Istanbul's Bogaziçi University, calls a "trading state". In 1975, Kirisci reports, Turkey's trade with the outside world stood at $6.1bn, or nine per cent of GDP. In 2010 it reached $300bn, or 46 per cent of GDP. Nowhere is Turkey's appetite for market openings greater than in the Middle East. Its trade with the region, as a share of total trade, has more than doubled between 2002 and 2010.
Trade, Kirisci argues, has become the main motor behind Turkey's foreign policy. In the absence of a more principled Turkish stance against the region's autocrats, Turkish trade, combined with visa-free travel and the growing popularity of Turkish culture, might also have the potential to advance the cause of democracy in the Middle East - through the back door.
"That kind of economic engagement, and engagement of people, people-to-people communication, that really helps open up new horizons," says Kalin. When people from neighbouring countries come to Turkey, he says, "they see a success story here, economically, infrastructure-wise. They see the universities, they see the roads, they see the fast trains, and they see people living in peace with tradition and modernity at the same time ... and they want to see the same thing in their own countries."
As Pope sees it, "Turkey's policy with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan does have a lot of potential to create interdependence, promote stability, and thereby promote democracy and human rights." Yet Turkish policymakers are right to see that democracy lies only at the end of the road, says Pope. Stability and prosperity might have to come first. "You can't jump from authoritarian rule in these traumatised societies to democracy in a day."
In the long-term, Turkey might have a major contribution to make to the growth of democracy in the Middle East. What Turkish policymakers are realising, however, along with the rest of the world, is that the region's patience for long-term solutions has just run out.
