Mick Hartley

Here's more on Turkey's new power games under Prime Minister Erdogan (via):

As the dust begins settling after the Gaza flotilla affair, it has become increasingly clear that Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) resorted in a premeditated way to populist demagoguery during the episode in order to serve narrower political goals….

Since its rise to power in 2002, the AKP has steadily and systematically sought to marginalize its domestic opponents and secure total control over all power centers in Turkey. Just before the flotilla fiasco, a poll was released showing that the AKP had lost ground to its rival, the Republican People’s Party (CHP). Erdogan exaggerated when he described Gaza as a “historical cause,” but he calculated that the confrontation there would be a perfect instrument to whip up Islamic and nationalist fervor to his party’s benefit.

Turkey is going through an identity crisis. Erdogan has all but demolished the legitimacy of the Kemalist state. And yet the state’s remaining secularist framework makes it very difficult to locate that legitimacy in Islam, the public and political uses of which are constrained by the constitution. Erdogan has had to walk a fine line in redefining Turkish frames of reference and political identity.

The AKP seeks to restore as much of a pan-Islamic framework as possible, and foreign policy offers ways of bypassing domestic constraints…

Just as Iran’s Islamic Revolution was expansionist by definition, the AKP’s “neo-Ottomanism” also posits a Turkish-dominated realm. As the potential for Iranian-Turkish competition grows and the Levant once again assumes its historical function as a contested space between more powerful nations vying for regional influence, the Arab states are becoming ever more secondary, their populations easily manipulated by regional populist leaders like Erdogan.