CHAPTER 8
Overview
O
ver the past century, ethnic and national identities have played crucial roles
throughout the Middle East. Turkey, however, has struggled with its identi-
ties to an unusual degree. Is Turkey a Middle Eastern country, a European
country, or both? What should be the status of the minority of residents—notably the
Kurds and the Armenians—who are not ethnic Turks? Is Turkey an Islamic society,
or is it a secular society where more than 90 percent of the people are Muslims? Is
Turkey a genuine democracy in the modern, Western sense, or does the military’s
influence in national life mean that Turkey’s democracy has yet to mature? Since the
rise of Turkish nationalism in the late nineteenth century and the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire following World War I, Turkey has grappled with these and simi-
lar questions about its identity as a nation. It continues to look for answers today.
Starting with Mustafa Kemal, or Ataturk, the dynamic founder of modern Tur-
key, Turkish leaders, have pointed the country westward, in the direction of Europe.
Geographically, however, all but a sliver of Turkey is on the Asian continent. Many
elements of Turkey’s history, particularly its past as a great empire, also point prima-
rily eastward, toward the Middle East.
The role of religion in society remains a core issue for Turkey. In the 1920s and
1930s, Ataturk declared Turkey to be a secular society. In it, the state and religion
were not necessarily separated, but the state controlled religion, not the other way
around. In 2002, Turks elected the Justice and Development Party (AKP), an avowedly
Islamist political party, to lead the government. The AKP governed with moderate
policies for more than four years with widespread support, but it ran into opposition
from the military in 2007 when its leaders moved to take control of the presidency,
the position that Ataturk had used to impose his personal stamp on Turkey. The party
prevailed in 2007 by calling early elections and winning a renewed mandate to gov-
ern. How the party chooses to use that mandate could determine whether, and how
far, Turkey might stray from Ataturk’s secular legacy.
The political drama in 2007 concerning the presidency resurrected old disputes
about the state and religion at an especially sensitive time, with Turkey and Europe627