How Turkey Moved East

In late January, the Turkish parliament ratified Sweden’s accession to NATO, bringing an end to nearly two years of stonewalling by the Turkish government. Ankara had held up Stockholm’s entry into the alliance ostensibly because Sweden has allowed members and fundraisers of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, an internationally designated terrorist group that has fought with the Turkish state for decades, to operate on its soil. But Turkish opposition to Swedish membership melted away once Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan secured what he really wanted: 40 F-16 fighter jets from the United States, equipment upgrades to Turkey’s existing fleet of aircraft, and a potential opportunity to meet U.S. President Joe Biden.

That Washington agreed to this $23 billion arms deal is no small matter. A de facto embargo on U.S. weapons sales to Turkey had been in place ever since Ankara purchased Russian missile defense systems in 2017. At the time, an angered Congress placed a hold on Turkey’s request to buy F-16 aircraft, and U.S. officials and lawmakers berated Turkey for purchasing weapons from a NATO adversary. U.S. President Joe Biden is also the only U.S. president not to have invited Erdogan to the White House in Erdogan’s two decades in power. And yet the United States is so eager to bolster the ranks of NATO and suppress any fractiousness within the alliance that it has caved to Turkish demands. All this has given Erdogan—who as recently as last spring was largely shunned by the White House—a rather emphatic diplomatic victory. U.S. officials have even hinted that Biden may soon invite his Turkish counterpart to the White House.

Some analysts have interpreted this deal as representing a major reset in U.S. relations with Turkey. Allowing Sweden into NATO may augur a period of warming ties between Turkey and the West and may signal Turkey’s closer alignment with the alliance’s core members on all issues.

That would misread Turkey’s true geopolitical orientation. Instead, the deal reflects the fundamentally transactional nature of foreign policy under Erdogan, a leader willing to look east, west, north, and south in pursuit of his ambitions. Indeed, a deeper and more important shift is underway within Turkey, one that, even amid the current reconciliation over NATO expansion, is pulling it away from the West.

The founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal, also known as Ataturk, forged the country as a European secular republic. Many Turkish leaders and elites followed Ataturk in trying to shape the state and its institutions along European lines. They would secure the country’s entry into NATO in 1952 and, in later decades, strive to join the European Union. But at least since the early years of this century, the Western-leaning Turkish elites of yesteryear began to lose control over a society that they had tried to direct ever since the country’s founding, in 1923. Erdogan embodies that shift even as he is not entirely responsible for it. Unlike Ataturk, who came from the Ottoman Empire’s European provinces, Erdogan hails from Anatolia; his political base consists of pious Anatolians, many of whom never fully adopted Ataturk’s radically secularist project. Accordingly, Erdogan’s Turkey has fewer emotional and political attachments to the West. The new Turkey that he has crafted is anchored not in Europe but in the Turkish hinterland. Its foreign policy represents the political and cultural sensitivities of Anatolians far removed from the secularist ethos of the elites who founded the country.

This is not to say that Turkey will abandon its seat at the table of the West. After all, Turkey’s quest to join the West, which goes as far back as the first attempts at Europeanization by Ottoman elites in the early eighteenth century, is as old as modern Europe itself. Rather, with its center of gravity now in Anatolia, Turkey can be expected to position itself as a hybrid power between the West and the rest of the world. A European-influenced outlook governed Turkish foreign policy for decades, but the new Turkey will freely engage other countries without regard to Western objectives or priorities. That is because Turkey now sees the world through an Anatolian lens.

THE RELOCATION OF TURKEY

Countries can uproot themselves. It is often said that Poland “moved” in the early twentieth century. After World War I, Poland included parts of what is now Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus. But after World War II, it relocated westward—to its current location—losing its eastern territories and gaining stretches of what was then Germany. It physically moved from east to west.

Turkey moved in the opposite direction. In the late nineteenth century, during Ottoman times, many of the major urban centers of the empire were in its European provinces in the Balkans, including Shkoder (in modern-day Albania), Pristina (in modern-day Kosovo), Plovdiv (in modern-day Bulgaria), Skopje (in modern-day North Macedonia), and Thessaloniki (in modern-day Greece). Thessaloniki, Ataturk’s birthplace, especially shone, as the empire’s second-largest city (after Istanbul) and as its cultural and commercial capital—the equivalent of New York City in the United States today.

But the Ottomans had lost all of these European territories—with the exception of Istanbul, Edirne, on the Bulgarian border, and a strip of territory in between—by the end of the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. The modern Turkish state ended up relocating to Anatolia in the east, constituting itself across the vastness of the Asia Minor plateau, including in traditionally Kurdish areas and those recently depopulated of Armenians in eastern Anatolia. To anchor the new country in Anatolia, Ataturk picked as its new capital Ankara, which lay at the heart of the peninsular steppe and was his former headquarters during the Turkish war of independence. Initially designed as a garden city with villas, reminiscent of those eastern European cities lost in prior decades, Ankara symbolized the birth of a European country from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire—in the middle of Anatolia.

At the republic’s founding, Turkey’s elites—many of them born in Europe and catapulted into Anatolia during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire—held on to European-influenced ideas of statecraft and social life. At the helm of this group, Ataturk expelled Islam into the private sphere, banned religious brotherhoods, purged Islam from Turkish laws, and came close to outlawing religious education. Additionally, he changed the country’s alphabet from an Arabic-based script to a Roman one, expunging Arabic and Persian words from Turkish while retaining French and Italian borrowings. Turkey also dropped the Islamic Hegira calendar in favor of the Western Gregorian alternative and banned fezzes and turbans for men. In this way, modern Turkey’s founder hard-formatted the country to embed it firmly into the West.

Ataturk hard-formatted Turkey to embed it firmly into the West.

Ataturk and his followers, known as Kemalists, from cabinet interior ministers in charge of his feared and powerful single-party state down to idealist schoolteachers crisscrossing Anatolia to spread the new modern secular ethos, were often born and raised in the Balkans. These founding elites were occasionally distraught when visiting Anatolia’s vast and steppe-like plateau and meeting its conservative and pious inhabitants. One writer of this era, Sevket Sureyya Aydemir, a prominent Kemalist intellectual with roots in Ottoman Bulgaria, described Anatolia in his 1959 memoir as “nothing but an already dead piece of the earth’s crust.” At Republic Day balls organized across small Anatolian towns only years after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the loss of its European provinces, Kemalist bureaucrats would dance to European tunes played by jazz bands, to the bewilderment of the attending Anatolian peasants.

Ataturk’s European project, however, was by no means limited to the country’s elites. During the unraveling of the Ottoman Empire, which started in the nineteenth century, millions of Turks and non-Turkish Muslims—including Albanians, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Greeks, and Macedonians—moved into Anatolia. These groups, who had faced persecution in newly formed Balkan countries, were joined in Anatolia by an even bigger exodus of Turks and other Muslims from Europe during the Balkan Wars. Together with Muslims expelled by Russia from the former Ottoman territories north of the Black Sea (such as Circassia and Crimea), European Muslims thus accounted for nearly 40 percent of Turkey’s population by the time Ataturk founded the republic, in 1923. And they tended to support Ataturk’s project of strict secularization.

Modern Turkey became a multiparty democracy in the 1950s less than two decades after Ataturk’s death, in 1938, and his Kemalist followers on the left and right, many of them born in the Balkans or descendants of immigrants from Europe, perpetuated the idea of Turkey as a European entity. Turkey’s democratic evolution after World War II and inclusion in the West during the Cold War further strengthened the country’s claims to a European and Western identity. Ankara joined many pan-European organizations, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Council of Europe, as a founding member, and was admitted to NATO soon after the alliance’s creation.

With the passing of a century, however, the connection to Europe held by many Turks became increasingly tenuous. When Erdogan came to power, in 2003, native Anatolians constituted an overwhelming majority of Turkey’s population. Hailing from the peninsula’s steppe interior, mountainous east, and Black Sea littoral, this population tended to be devoutly Muslim and, for the most part, had never been fully at ease with the republic’s secularist founding project. As these conservative hinterland Turks began to enter the middle class and climb up the ladder of political power, the European identity that Ataturk grafted onto the nation became thinner with each passing decade, eventually falling away. Unlike the Kemalists, the new Anatolian elites do not think of themselves primarily as European, and their view has come to form the heart of Turkey’s geopolitical identity.

THE MARCH OF THE ANATOLIANS

I was born in Anatolia and grew up in Turkey during the late twentieth century, where I received a staunchly Kemalist education. Even with that upbringing, it perplexed me during my teenage years to observe the ways in which Turkey clung to European identity. In school, we spent days studying European countries, including some far away, while the curriculum merely glanced over Turkey’s immediate Middle Eastern neighbors. Many Turks understood the Middle East similar to the way many Argentinians saw Latin America. Just as Argentinians would say that they are not really Latin American but Europeans who happened to live in Latin America, Kemalism encouraged its citizens, including me, to think that Turks were, in fact, Europeans who happened to live close to the Middle East. On local Turkish TV networks, international weather forecasts would beam a map of Europe centered not on Turkey but often on Switzerland, with Turkey tucked in the map’s lower corner, as if Turks should imagine their country as an appendage to a larger European whole.

Yet Europe was more hesitant about its relation to Turkey. Between 1995 and 2013, during the rapid expansion that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the European Union absorbed 16 new countries. At first, it looked like Turkey might join this group: its own accession process had begun before the end of the Cold War, in 1987, and received a shot in the arm with Erdogan’s coming to power, in 2003. Erdogan was hailed by many European observers as a new style of moderate Islamist who was deeply committed to democratic institutions and willing to take on the country’s entrenched military and turn Turkey into a full-fledged democracy. In 2005, the EU started formal talks with Turkey regarding membership.

But Turkey remained on the outside. Soon after talks began, Brussels notified Ankara that no offer for membership would be forthcoming. Ostensibly, that decision had to do with the abiding dispute between Turkey and Cyprus regarding North Cyprus, but in reality, France and Germany were reluctant to welcome a country of Turkey’s size and heft into the union. The EU had never before started accession talks with a country that did not culminate in an offer of membership. The unique signaling this time around was clear: Turkey had no home in Europe.

Coupled with Turkey’s disappointing EU membership talks, Erdogan’s transformative rule helped firmly anchor Turkey in Anatolia. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) encapsulates—par excellence—the rise of the Anatolians in the country. The AKP is a machine fueled by voters, businesses, elites, and an ethos rooted in Anatolia’s interior and the Black Sea coast—where Erdogan’s parents are from—and in the east, which includes many Kurds. Erdogan’s cabinets have been stacked with politicians from these areas. The politicians with ties to the Balkans who dominated cabinets before Erdogan’s rise have all but disappeared. The same can be said of the ranks of the bureaucracy, as well as high courts and key media outlets, many of which have been taken over by Anatolians sympathetic to the president.

Along these lines, Turkey’s powerful, pro-European business lobby, TUSIAD, has seen its influence diminish in recent years. Dominated by businesses in Istanbul and Izmir that were formed by people who had come from the former European provinces of the Ottoman Empire, TUSIAD often drove the political agenda in the country; it called for EU accession in the 1980s and funded a bold study in the 1990s, at the height of the PKK insurgency, that proposed a political solution to Kurdish separatism. Since Erdogan came to power, however, a different business elite has held sway and shaped the political agenda; Anatolian-run businesses and billionaires who often hail from the Black Sea coast back the president and encourage Turkey to shed its commitment to Kemalist secularism, maintain economic ties with Russia, and increase its political footprint in the global South.

This Anatolian takeover is simply a product of Turkey’s demographic shift over the past decades and the diminishing hold of the old secular elites over Turkish society. Erdogan is not the cause of this change so much as he is a major symptom of it. Turkey’s new Anatolian elites have taken charge, and they do not see the country’s identity in the terms laid down by Ataturk and his Kemalist successors. These elites, often informed by more conservative strains of Islam, also see Islam as inherent to Turkey’s national identity. In fact, these new elites celebrate Islam as vigorously as Ataturk tried to suppress it. The AKP movement has long sought to challenge and then eliminate Turkey’s Kemalist-era attachment to Europe and the West, and with that, the country’s commitment to European-style secularism that mimicked (and perhaps exceeded in its severity) France’s system of laicity. Since coming to power, Erdogan has lifted Turkey’s Kemalist-era ban on the hijab while also allowing Islam to flood into the country’s educational curriculum and political life.

Under Erdogan, ties with Russia have improved. The two countries are historic competitors, and they have been on different sides in wars in Syria, Libya, the South Caucasus, and Ukraine—Ankara has been providing Kyiv with crucial political and military support. Despite this competition, Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin have had a close bond ever since 2016, when a coup attempt in Turkey failed. At the time, Turkey’s Western allies, including the United States, then led by President Barack Obama, missed a major opportunity by not embracing Turkey and its democracy after the traumatic putsch attempt. Putin, astutely, hosted Erdogan barely two weeks after the failed coup, forming the rapport that lasts to this day. That, in return, has allowed Ankara and Moscow to craft power-sharing arrangements in Syria and Libya, where they back different parties to the conflict. The two countries have also seen booming trade and tourism ties and the shared notion emerging among Turks and Russians that they are both “in-between peoples,” impossible to pigeonhole into a singular identity globally.

HERE TO STAY

A hundred years after being constituted by Ataturk, Turkey is settling in its place, much like a house settling in its foundations: in Anatolia, at the crossroads between the Middle East, Europe, and Eurasia. This Turkey still sees itself as part of Europe, but not to the detriment of its other associations. Ankara now freely engages with Iran, Russia, the United States, wealthy Gulf monarchies, Europe, and other regional and global actors without feeling that it has to choose a favorite partner. Where twentieth-century Turkish leaders had an emotional attachment to Europe, Erdogan does not; his Turkey is more self-guided and convinced of its own virtues.

This new Turkey will, of course, remain a member of NATO, which brings Ankara cachet as well as protection from Moscow (at some point, Turkey’s elites fear, the relationship between the two countries may once again become more hostile), and leverage with other NATO powers. But it will simultaneously forge ties and partnerships with countries in the Middle East and Eurasia. Ukrainian forces often use Turkish-made Bayraktar drones, for instance, even as Turkey’s overall trade with Russia has only increased since the outset of the Kremlin’s February 2022 attack on Ukraine. In the Middle East, Erdogan has recently reset Ankara’s ties with Riyadh. Relations between Saudi Arabia and Turkey dipped after Saudi operatives assassinated the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018, as Turkish officials helped link Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the killing. But in March 2023, Turkish courts transferred the prosecution of the crown prince to Saudi courts, and in return, the Saudi Fund for Development deposited nearly $5 billion in Turkey’s central bank to help the country’s embattled economy—conveniently just ahead of the May presidential election in Turkey, which Erdogan won.

Erdogan’s transformative rule helped firmly anchor Turkey in Anatolia.

The new Turkey has many identities, none of them exclusive or easy to classify: if it is a Middle Eastern country, then it is also the only Middle Eastern state that is also a Black Sea power. And if it is a European country, then it is the only European state that borders Iran. And if it is a Eurasian power, it is the only one that belongs to NATO.

The best way for the United States to approach Turkey is to acknowledge the reality of these multiple alignments. Erdogan is fond of being seen as the center of things, with the world turning around Turkey—he has tried to serve as an arbiter in the war in Ukraine, played an active role in the South Caucasus, and projected Turkey’s power in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, South Caucasus, and the Western Balkans. He relishes being the dealmaker or the middleman in regional conflicts, which boosts his already monumental standing at home. The United States must deal with Turkey as it does other middle powers, such as India and Indonesia, accepting that these countries see no contradiction in maintaining strong ties with both Washington and its adversaries.

After all, for all his years of bluster, Erdogan may now have little interest in antagonizing the West. After winning the 2023 presidential election, Erdogan no longer faces any significant domestic challenges, and is entering the legacy-building phase of his career. Having reshaped Turkey’s geopolitical path, he now wants to leave behind a positive legacy. This presents Biden, or Biden’s successor, an opportunity to embrace the new Turkey and leverage Ankara’s influence in the era of great power competition. Ankara could be eager to work with Washington on a bevy of issues, including the reconstruction of Ukraine and Gaza and countering Russian and Chinese influence in Africa and the Balkans, even as it retains ties with Russia and Gulf monarchies. Turkey has jettisoned any desire to join the West, and the United States must recognize that its multialignment is here to stay.