ICC Note:

As Turkey prepares to draft a new constitution that recognizes the equal rights of all its citizens, including Christians, it must maintain the delicate balance of keeping Islamist-based political parties in check by a secular military.

By Mustafa Akyol 

In recent years, Turkey has undergone a process of civilianization in which the long-powerful military — which made a name for itself as the defender of secularism — has lost a great degree of its power. Liberal Turkish columnist Mustafa Akyol analyzes what this portends for the future not only of Turkey, but of the Middle East.

8/22/2011 Turkey (The Globalist) – When Turkey’s four top generals unexpectedly resigned in July 2011, in an implicit protest of the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, they demonstrated not just dissatisfaction — but also despair.

For their once-mighty institution, which used to enjoy a self-proclaimed “guardianship” over elected politicians —a somewhat secular version of “the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists” in neighboring Iran — was now not even able to save dozens of its senior members from legal prosecution.

“They resigned because they can’t launch a military coup anymore,” wrote Ismet Berkan, a liberal columnist. “Those days are clearly over.”

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Secondly, the reforms encouraged by the European Union disestablished the legal infrastructure of what Turks call the “military tutelage” over the political system. And finally, the latest opponent with which the generals clashed swords, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), proved to be more competent and resilient than any of its predecessors.

For any given country, this civilianization process would be hailed as the consolidation of democracy. When the country in question is the majority-Muslim Turkey, though, and the military in question has made a name for itself as the defender of secularism, many have second thoughts. Some even argue that the military should have preserved its upper hand in order to block the AKP’s suspected “Islamist agenda.”

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In Iran, Reza Shah (in power from 1925-41), who admired the Atatürk reforms in Turkey but vowed to do even more, took radical anti-religious measures such as banning the veil everywhere and executing the ayatollahs who raised protest. This secular tyranny soon created its religious mirror image by breeding a violent Islamist reaction that would culminate in the Iranian Revolution.

What made Turkey much luckier than Iran, and all the Arab nations, is that despite all the meddling of the military, its multi-party politics survived, and therefore the Islamic pious never resorted to any means other than casting their votes. Moreover, as the religious Turks opened up to the world and saw the nuances in the West, they realized that their search for religious freedom could be attained in a liberal model. “We are not against secularism,” said Tayyip Erdogan in 2005. “We [just] prefer the Anglo-Saxon interpretation of secularism to the French one.”

The gradual civilianization of the system has opened up a democratic space in Turkey in which these nuances about the principles of the regime — along with taboos such as the tragic fate of Ottoman Armenians — can be discussed.

The next big step will be to draft a liberal constitution, a goal which both the incumbent AKP and the main opposition People’s Republican Party promise to realize. The latter, which used to be in the shadow of the military, is becoming a more credible and promising party since it discovered, in the words of its secretary-general, that “the military was a paper tiger.”

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