Reading Turkey: Storms on the Page, From Suleiman the Magnificent to Erdoğan the "New Sultan" | QDaily's Books of the Year, No. 16

Turkey was once the Islamic world's beacon of secularization and modernization. Is it now heading for a defeat for modernity?

Another year has passed. China and the world, society and the state, the economy and our own lives have all been pulled along by big questions. Amid the shock, the voices of intellectuals have gone quiet or been drowned out by noise, which only deepens our confusion. Or perhaps a turning point is about to appear. In any age, clear thinking is scarce, and people of insight are what let us see the road ahead.

That is why our "2018 Books of the Year" tries to introduce, as widely and variously as we can, books we think are worth reading.

As in past years, every book that came within our view has been read by our editorial staff, who introduce it to readers in good faith.

We also called on contributing writers, who are always ahead of the trend and see deeper. Our thanks to all of them.

This is the twelfth piece in our nonfiction recommendation series, and it looks at the history of Turkey. The author, Su Qi, is deputy editor-in-chief of Caijing magazine, in charge of macroeconomics and academic coverage.

Apart from purely academic research, all reading has a bearing on the present, and reading about Turkey is no exception. These past few years have fallen within the centenary of World War I, and Chinese publishers duly brought in a wave of books about how the war "brought calamity" to the Middle East, breaking up the Ottoman Empire and giving birth to the modern Middle East — which has periodically pushed up interest here in reading about Turkey. Meanwhile the war in Syria grinds on, Turkish-Russian relations tighten from time to time, and Russia has "annexed" Crimea, all of which has warmed up subjects like the Kurdish question and the Crimean War. Beyond the chaos in the Middle East, the growing Islamic tenor of Turkish politics and President Erdoğan's steady concentration of power have drawn a great deal of attention to one question: is Turkey, once the Islamic world's beacon of secularization and modernization, now facing a defeat for modernity?

I

This year's main new book on World War I and Ottoman Turkey is Sean McMeekin's The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908–1923. It covers the same ground as Eugene Rogan's The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920, published two years earlier, and each has its own strengths. If Rogan made readers fully aware of how important the long-overlooked Middle Eastern theater of World War I was, McMeekin puts more weight on the shattering of the imperial myth.

By "imperial myth" he means the wishful idea that empires, compared with nation-states, let different ethnic and religious groups live together more harmoniously. In recent years, thinking about how rampant extreme nationalism and religious fundamentalism have produced geopolitical conflict and frequent terrorist attacks, people have gradually shed the so-called linear view of progress. They now feel a certain "regret" over the breakup of empires such as Ottoman Turkey and Austria-Hungary, and even a little nostalgia for the years when various ethnic and religious groups lived side by side in peace under them. On this view, the one-sided insistence on national self-determination opened a Pandora's box and let out the demons of ethnic, religious and geopolitical conflict. This revisionist history, by overcorrecting, can produce a misreading of its own.

Both Rogan and McMeekin point out that long before World War I, nationalist forces inside the Ottoman Empire were rising one after another and winning again and again, so that the empire's territory kept shrinking. This was clearest in the Balkans and in the Caucasus and Black Sea regions bordering Russia. Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, still nominally subject to the empire, were estranged in substance — either independent in fact or enjoying wide autonomy. So even without World War I, and even if Ottoman Turkey had not backed the wrong side by joining the Central Powers, the empire would still have broken up under the steady advance of the colonial empires that had grown strong on the basis of the nation-state. The process might have been slower, but the direction could not be reversed.

The modernizing reforms that Ottoman elites carried out on themselves before World War I also set the stage for this. Because both their intellectual resources and their institutional models came from Europe, the process of modernization itself contained the construction of a Turkish nationalism, which pulled against the older universalist model of empire. The Young Turks may not have wanted to abandon the Ottoman Empire openly, but the empire they had in mind was pan-Turkist rather than pan-Islamist. Arab nationalists, drawn at first by the empire's air of modernizing renewal and convinced they could raise their own political standing through parliamentary politics, quickly sensed the hostility of Turkish nationalists and drifted further away.

So the Middle Eastern act of World War I was, on one side, an extension of Europe's struggle for supremacy, and on the other a contest among rival versions of nationalism inside Ottoman Turkey — the different players had simply found different backers. In that sense the fighting in the Middle East was not an interlude to the European war, and the men fighting it were not supporting players. This also partly explains why the Turks generally acquitted themselves well in wars to defend their own heartland, while campaigns on the empire's periphery, hemmed in by local nationalist resistance working hand in glove with outside powers, usually ended in one retreat after another.

As for what became of them after World War I, the Turkish nationalists — heirs to a long tradition of centralized statehood and to a degree of modernizing reform — still had the better of the Arab nationalists in many respects, even though the Arabs had stood on the winning side. Seen this way, the rise of modern Turkey on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire follows naturally. It is a very different story from the tribe-based state-building of Saudi Arabia, Iraq or Syria, and has more in common with Iran (Persia) and Egypt.

For the same reason, while the success and the solidity of modern nation-building in the Middle East can certainly be credited in large part to outside forces, in the end it depends on whether each political entity had any real experience of statehood before the Ottoman Empire collapsed — a point that also matters for watching today's upheavals in the Middle East.

Going back over this history, one finds that the framework Bernard Lewis laid out in The Emergence of Modern Turkey — the four wellsprings of modern Turkey: the local, the Islamic, the Turkish and the Western — still wears well. Seen through it, the birth of modern Turkey looks like this: Kemal, born in Edirne in Rumelia and formed by the military revolution of 1908, later went to Anatolia to turn around and save Turkey. He stands for the way Western-style modernizing forces from Turkey's European part uncovered and absorbed the traditional Anatolian resources of the Turkish heartland, and together forged a modern Turkey.

This modern nation-state, having shed the imperial shell and the imperial pomp, chose Ankara rather than Istanbul — which carried far more of the imperial past and of an international outlook — as its capital, and so opened Istanbul's long run as a "receding international metropolis." Midnight at the Pera Palace, published here in early 2018, tells that story well: taking the Pera Palace Hotel as its way in, it lays out the swirl of events in Istanbul after World War I. A city's face is always shaped by the actors on its stage, and by witnessing the joys and sorrows of wave after wave of "international actors" — Greeks, Jews, White Russians — Istanbul held on for a long stretch to the cosmopolitan bearing and multicultural air it had acquired over the centuries from Byzantium through the Ottomans. But with the departure of the Jewish community after World War II and of the Greek community in the 1950s, Istanbul became more and more a "purely" Turkish city. Half a century would pass before it was again called an international metropolis.

II

Both the collapse of an empire and the forging of a modern nation-state require a baptism of blood and fire, and Turkey is no exception — if anything it is the rule's sharpest case. The Armenian genocide, a scar on that history, remains a huge obstacle between Turkey and the European Union, and accounts of it take up a large part of both The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908–1923 and The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920. On this chapter, though, Michael Mann offers a more rigorous academic analysis in The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing.

In that book Mann sets out eight propositions, or preconditions, under which ethnic cleansing or mass murder can occur, and uses the framework to examine episodes of ethnic killing including the Armenian genocide. Roughly, the eight are: 1) Murderous ethnic cleansing is a modern phenomenon, because it is the dark side of democracy; 2) Ethnic hostility tends to appear when ethnicity overtakes class as the main form of social stratification; 3) The danger zone of murderous cleansing appears when organizations claiming to speak for two very old ethnic groups both claim state sovereignty over all or part of the same territory, and that claim seems to them to carry enough legitimacy, along with some apparently reliable chance of being carried out; 4) One of two situations brings a society to the brink of murderous cleansing: the weaker side, believing help will come from outside — usually from a neighboring country, perhaps the homeland of its own people — is emboldened to fight, while the stronger side believes it has such overwhelming military superiority and ideological legitimacy that it can force into being a cleansed state of its own at almost no material or moral risk; 5) The step over the brink into actually carrying out murderous cleansing happens on contested territory, where the state exercising sovereignty has already fallen into factionalism and radicalization within an unstable geopolitical setting of the kind that normally leads to war; 6) Murderous ethnic cleansing is rarely what the perpetrators originally intended; it takes shape only after plans for compromise or for outright repression have failed; 7) There are three main levels of perpetrator: the radical elites who command the party-state, the gangs of radicals who make up the often-violent paramilitary forces, and the core supporters who supply substantial — though not majority — popular backing; 8) Finally, ordinary people are brought into carrying out murderous ethnic cleansing by ordinary social institutions, and their motives are far more mundane.

Given the radicalization of the Young Turks, the state of war between Turkey and Russia and both sides' nationalist mobilization, and the long tradition of the Christian Armenian community's struggle for independence, these conditions look practically "made to measure" for the Armenian genocide. Indeed, it is now widely held that the ethnic killing that accompanied the birth of modern Turkey announced the arrival of an age of ethnic cleansing, while the Greek-Turkish population exchange foreshadowed the ethnic violence that would later come with the partition of India.

Besides the Armenian question, the Kurdish question has also been a major obstacle in Turkey's bid to join the European Union, and the conflict in Syria has thrown the issue into sharp relief. Michael Ignatieff, the noted scholar and Canadian politician, took up the subject in Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, the record of his travels through modern nationalist conflicts. Visiting areas under actual Kurdish control, Ignatieff recognized both the legitimacy and the depth of the Kurds' longing for a state of their own, and also raised a doubt: the greatest challenge to Kurdish independence may be that a people spread across Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran has no single national identity or shared plan for a state.

III

The Ottoman Empire did not begin to collapse with World War I. It was a long and painful process that started in the late 18th century, and throughout it Westerners saw Ottoman Turkey largely as a muddled, backward-looking old European empire that crushed national independence. That impression was not fixed, though; it shifted from time to time with the demands of geopolitics. During the Crimean War, for instance, plenty of Britons hated Russia enough to hold Turkey up as a moral model. In The Crimean War: A History, Orlando Figes points out that this romantic image of Turkey did not come out of nowhere: it began with Turkey's decision in 1849 to shelter the Hungarian and Polish freedom fighters who had risen against the Tsar.

Radicals among British evangelicals, moreover, were keen to back Turkey against Orthodox Christianity. They believed the Tanzimat reforms stood for Turkish liberalism and religious tolerance; that the Christians of the Balkans, though oppressed by the Turkish authorities, were still more the victims of the Russian-backed Greek Orthodox Church; and that being ruled by Turks beat living in the Tsar's shadow. Should the Russians conquer the Balkans, they warned, a dark age would set in and Protestants would have nowhere to go. The Earl of Shaftesbury, a hawk on Russia, even held that the silent religious rites of Muslims came closer to the inward prayer of Anglicans than to the noisy ritual of the Orthodox.

In those years, at public meetings in Britain, merely naming the Sultan was enough to draw applause. The honeymoon did not last. As the independence movements of the Balkan peoples surged again, Ottoman Turkey returned, in British eyes, to the role of an oppressor swimming against the tide of history.

To the Turkish scholar İbrahim Kalın, what the West perceives in the Islamic world, with the Ottoman Empire as its representative, largely reveals what the West perceives in itself. In Knowing the Self in the Mirror: An Introduction to the History of Islam-West Relations (《认识镜中的自我：伊斯兰与西方关系史入门》), Kalın points out that when the West sees itself as standing for progress and justice, the Islamic world must stand for the other side — just as the Islamic world's own sense of its justice and doctrinal purity carries a prejudice against the West's pursuit of material gain and self-interest.

Kalın also rejects the idea that modern Muslim intellectuals were especially passive in "discovering the West." As he sees it, faced with the West's emergence as a rising civilization, many Muslim intellectuals did not flinch at all from asking whether something had gone wrong in the essence of their own civilization. The different answers they gave produced distinct currents of thought: modernism, reformism, traditionalism. And their differing attitudes toward the West in turn became part of the wider argument over Islamic culture and civilization.

This argument stands against Bernard Lewis, whose angle carries a degree of Western-centrism. In The Muslim Discovery of Europe, Lewis largely keeps to the impact-response model that John King Fairbank used on China, and tends to argue that Muslims paid too little attention to the shock of the West and answered it too weakly.

In fact, quite a few historians in recent years have taken a "revisionist" angle and pointed to how open Islamic civilization historically was, and how much it gave back to Europe; a fundamentalist, backward-looking worldview is not the exclusive property of the Islamic world. This runs interestingly parallel to the stress some scholars put on how many features of the early modern world can be found in late imperial China.

But a truth carried one step too far easily falls into a new error. This emphasis on Islam's past glories cannot get around the fact that in the modern era Islamic civilization and the Ottoman Empire steadily lost their vitality and answered the shock of modernity feebly — a process the second half of Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire documents with a mass of material.

The Ottoman Turks were once adept at learning the enemy's skills in order to beat him. The imperial army was a stew of every kind of ethnic group, full of skilled craftsmen, which brings to mind the Mongol armies that once swept across Eurasia. But because it could not generate resources from within, the Ottoman Empire's expansion by plunder eventually hit a wall. People were startled to find that the Ottoman Empire was no better at a war of attrition than Venice — and Venice was only a trading city-state with no hinterland behind it.

Every war comes down in the end to a contest over the ability to gather, mobilize and deploy resources. Ottoman Turkey's model — take resources by war, then hand them out in exchange for loyalty, and use war to feed war — needed an unbroken run of victories to keep going, and finally could not be kept going at all. That the whole strength of the Ottoman state could not bring Venice to heel is enough to show that the traditional land empire had already reached the limit of what it could do and had begun its slow decline. The Ottoman Empire had no sustainable way to supply resources, and its heavy reliance on personal rule meant that the sources of energy and the forms of organization behind its strongest years could hardly be reproduced. Once it stumbled, all people could do was wish in vain for the rebirth of some brilliant and far-sighted monarch.

The same problem plagued the Spanish Empire under the Habsburgs. The infusion of resources from the New World may have patched things up for a while, but the contest with the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean still bled the Habsburgs slowly. By the time they finally made peace with the Ottoman Turks and turned to concentrate on their overseas empire, they took a hard blow from the English: the destruction of the Armada gave them a full taste of what Lepanto had been for the Ottoman Turks.

The spices and silver now reaching Europe along newly opened ocean routes from the far-off islands of Southeast Asia announced that, in political and economic terms, the Mediterranean had become a dead sea. It no longer led the currents of the age; it merely absorbed their swings. In the words of Roger Crowley, author of the "Mediterranean Trilogy," Venice and Turkey were sealed forever into a tideless Mediterranean, still fighting over the coast of Greece long after world supremacy had moved elsewhere.

The nightmare that kept Venetians awake was made real in the end not by the Ottomans but by their fellow Christians, the Portuguese. If the Ottoman Turks showed Venice some mercy by not closing their hand around its throat at the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, the Portuguese did exactly that, easily, at the Strait of Malacca. The biggest victims, of course, were still the Ottoman Turks themselves. The inflation caused by New World silver was far beyond anything they could understand or control. At such moments modernization often becomes the scapegoat, and a backward-looking view of history follows — the idea, for instance, that today's troubles come from having turned away from God's teachings. That led on one side to a rejection of modernization and on the other to religious intolerance, and together they built the modernization trap. The Ottoman persecution of infidels, and the wars against the Shiite Safavid empire in Persia, were both products of this failure to answer modernization. And that finds an eerie echo in the reign of the Spanish Inquisition and Spain's religious wars in the Low Countries.

By the time the rising land power of Russia and the rising sea powers of Britain and France had gradually tightened the ring around the Ottoman Empire, the Turks no longer had the strength for a large counterattack. Yet their long resistance and occasional local blows still showed the true colors of an empire that had once ruled, and they still draw a sigh of regret.

The players who once bestrode the Mediterranean stage faded on the larger stage of the world. The frontline countries and regions where Eastern and Western civilizations faced each other have all, to one degree or another, become marginal ground. Central and southern Europe are still the EU's economic laggards, and on the other side of that old front line, the regions reassembled out of the empire's collapse are still torn by war and unrest. What laws really govern the clash of civilizations and the rise and fall of their tides, and what forces really decide who wins a war, remain questions without a settled answer.

IV

Besides a shared history as "sick men," Chinese readers are drawn to Turkey by its troubled trial of democracy. Among the mountains of work on modern Turkey's political development and economic growth, the analytical framework the American scholar David Waldner proposed in State Building and Late Development — the "precocious Keynesian state" — stands out.

In that book Waldner compares Turkey and South Korea along two lines: how intense elite conflict was in each, and at what point in international economic development each mobilized ordinary people and drew them into political competition. The different effects of that on the long-run political and economic paths of a developmental state make for thought-provoking reading.

When people talk about Keynesianism, they usually stress state spending as against private investment, and the building of the welfare state, and overlook something internal to Keynesianism: the political and economic absorption of the organized labor movement. Keynes's policies did express the idea of cross-class alliances and transfer payments — it is just that those policies and practices came after substantial industrial development and after a legal-rational administrative structure was in place.

In mature Keynesian states, that is, in developed market economies, the key institutions of political economy were built before Keynesianism was adopted, so it was possible to limit what labor-absorbing policies did to fiscal structure, administrative procedure and state autonomy. Because those states had already firmly entered the industrial stage before adopting Keynesianism, and had developed many industries competitive on world markets, the money to pay for welfare improvements was easier to find — which also limited Keynesianism's effect on the political economy as a whole. Populist-flavored policies, moreover, reached only a small part of the population, so it remained possible to design institutions and write policies that favored long-term development.

A "precocious" Keynesian state, by contrast, is one where state transformation, cross-class alliance-building and the launch of industrial development all happen at once, and the convergence of these three produces results unlike those of a Keynesian state. Compared with ordinary Keynesianism, precocious Keynesianism is the product of elite conflict, takes in the great majority of the population, and forms the main part of a wholesale transformation of state structure in a society still at the beginning of industrial development.

Comparing the Middle Eastern and East Asian paths, Waldner finds that in South Korea state building came before the absorption of ordinary people. Korean elites therefore did not depend on popular support during the period of institutional change, and were able to shape new institutions that better served economic development. In Turkey, the transformation of the state (toward greater democracy), the absorption of the lower classes into a cross-class alliance, and the launch of industrialization all happened at the same time — a textbook precocious Keynesian state. Fierce political conflict in Turkey in the early 1950s split the elite, so that one faction of the competing elite negotiated with the popular classes before the transition to more democratic rule had consolidated; absorption and state transformation ran together. As a result, Turkish state-building produced a precocious Keynesian state, in which ordinary people were mobilized on a wide scale and promised all sorts of "welfare" beyond what the economy could deliver.

Precocious Keynesianism made economic policy political and short-term, and left economic development lagging. In Turkey, industrialization long meant, in the main, expanding the production of labor-intensive, low-value-added goods. By the 1980s Turkey depended on the international economic system in two ways — on its capital inflows, and on its product and process technology — and never built an internationally competitive industrial system that could sustain its own growth. Where postwar Keynesian practice in developed countries steadied politics and grew economies, precocious Keynesianism obstructed development and polarized politics.

South Korean state-building, by contrast, produced a developmental state. Korean elites did eventually take in popular support, but only after rapid growth and industrial transformation. In short, the timing of popular absorption relative to state transformation and large-scale industrial development is what best explains the results of sustained efforts at economic development.

V

How Turkish politics has developed in recent years has left people worried that the country's standing as a secular state, and the legacy of Kemalism, may be overturned — a worry bound up with the rise of Erdoğan and his Islamist, power-concentrating bent.

Analysts of Erdoğan's rise usually start from how successfully he mobilized new political constituencies. The Canadian writer Doug Saunders reads it instead through urbanization, as the political effect of the "arrival city." An arrival city is what we commonly call the urban-rural fringe; the name comes from the foothold it offers to people who have come to the city to make a living. In Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World, Saunders argues that the Welfare Party, forerunner of Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party, was better able to fit itself to the arrival cities thrown up by mass urbanization, and so laid a solid foundation for its own growth.

Saunders points out that the mayors and legislators of the Welfare Party, and of the Justice and Development Party that regrouped after the Welfare Party was banned, did the full work of service and charity in communities that mainstream politics had plainly never known were there — and that the people in those communities were themselves mostly migrants from the more traditional, more religious east of the country, which modernization had left behind. The two sides hit it off at once, and these places became strongholds of a mass Islamism.

The Justice and Development Party carries a touch of Hamas about it, while at the same time being a decidedly modern party that favors opening to the outside world and privatization — which also makes it somewhat like India's Bharatiya Janata Party, which combines a heightened religious identity with a stress on economic growth. This BJP-plus-Hamas hybrid may be the secret of the Justice and Development Party's broad base among voters.

On why Kemalism has gradually found itself outmatched in its contest with Islamism, the noted British historian Perry Anderson offers what can fairly be called a precise dissection in his book on the prospects of the European Union. In the Turkey chapter of The New Old World, Anderson argues that the problem is not simply the rise of Islamism. It is that from the very start Kemalism's relationship with Islam was far more ambiguous than people once thought — not the clean, sharply drawn separation it has been taken for.

Anderson holds that, climbing to the summit of power, Kemal — like the Young Turk leaders Talaat and Enver before him — no longer rejected Islam but tried to make use of the Islamic wellspring. In 1920 he declared, "In our sacred struggle to defend the fatherland, the help and protection of Allah are with us." Kemal proclaimed the struggle for independence a holy war and led it as an "Islamic warrior," a Gazi — the term for the "warriors who fought for the faith" in the Ottomans' first age of expansion. The title stayed with him into the mid-1930s. Preaching at a mosque in 1923, he told the faithful outright: "Allah is one, and great is His glory!" When the constitution of the Turkish Republic was drafted the following year, Islam was made the state religion.

To Anderson, Kemal's zeal in those years for putting Islam to work was of a piece with Napoleon crowning himself with the Pope's blessing. But — and here is the irony — the two men were moving in opposite directions. Napoleon climbed to the summit of power as a revolutionary and used religion to steady that power; Kemal used religion to make his revolution, and once his power was steady turned on religion instead. After 1926 he rarely mentioned Allah.

The new regime's use of Islam proved to be a matter of convenience, dropped as soon as religion was no longer needed. Yet at a deeper level a sturdier structure bound the regime tightly to the very faith it outwardly held down. Even at its most fervent on the surface, Turkish secularism was never truly secular. Kemalism did not even separate religion from the state; it subordinated religion to the state. A "special directorate" was set up that took over ownership of every Islamic mosque, appointed the imams and ran the pious foundations — which in practice turned the institutions of faith into one more branch of the bureaucracy.

In Turkey, Anderson writes, religion was never separated from the "state" but became instead the unspoken definition of the state. That is exactly why Kemalism was not only worshipped by the upper classes but also left a deep mark on ordinary people: even where secularism was not accepted in the villages, nationalism took root among the poor. In doing so, Kemalism absorbed a Turkish cultural tradition long in the making, one born in Central Asia and older than the conversion to Islam, and in the process it sanctified the country and gave Kemalism's modernizing state an extraordinary halo of authority. What makes Kemalism ambiguous is that it had to build ideological rules in two domains at once: a secular code with an appeal to the elite, and a mystified religious code aimed at the masses. What the two had in common was that the integrity of the state was the supreme political principle.

Times have changed. Kemalism's suppression of Islam rested on the contrast between believers' "backward and superstitious" private lives and the "enlightened and progressive" public ideals or expectations of the state. So long as the political system kept ordinary people from having any say in the government of the country, the post-Ottoman elite could afford to look down on a popular culture steeped in folk religion. But as Turkish society grew more democratic, people's feelings and beliefs were bound to find more and more room for expression on the electoral stage. Outside the state education system, the number of religious schools has multiplied several times over since the 1950s, and the way believers live is no longer treated as something "shameful." As the gulf between the secular culture the Kemalist elite promoted and Islamism has grown less stark, the drift of religious activity into politics has also gained support.

Where Turkey goes will stay unsettled for a long time. Whether Kemalism can move with the times and renew itself, and push back against an Islamism that has for now managed to modernize; or whether the two will merge into some new form, producing a cosmopolitan crowd in Muslim headscarves that still longs to join the European Union — this is a question that will need continued watching. And people's reading about Turkey, too, will stay open-ended for a long time to come.

Cover image: Francis I (left) and Suleiman the Magnificent (right), from Wikipedia. Long banner image: Erdoğan, from Wikipedia.