CO-ORDINATED BOMB attacks on Turkish synagogues last week suggest that a new front may have opened in the war on terror. The attackers' motives and identities remain murky. But the danger that continued terrorism could pose for Turkey, not to mention the Western alliance, is obvious.
In more ways than one, Turkey stands on the border between East and West. If one subscribes to the view of Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington -- that the world is engaged in a clash of civilisations -- Turkey can make a plausible claim to lie at its epicentre.
Like Russia, Turkey straddles Europe and Asia. Like Russia, this dual identity has given the country a unique culture and peculiar history. For like Russia, Turkey has spent its modern history in a struggle with itself over whether it should look east or west.
The Ottoman Empire, which once stretched from the Middle East into Europe and Africa, collapsed in the ashes of World War I. Essentially unified by Islam, the empire was hollowed out by a nationalist revolt in its Anatolian heartland. The generation known as the Young Turks sought to build a modern state not upon religion, which they maintained had kept their people backwards, but on a new identity, that of Turkish nationalism.
Accordingly, many measures were adopted to foster this new identity. Laws were passed to weaken the hold of Islam on daily life: traditional clothing was banned, religious foundations were broken up and people were required to adopt family names. The ruling elite solidified its hold on power by making the state the principal engine of economic growth. Indeed, Turkey's model of state-led growth would inspire similar experiments among newly-independent countries the world over.
The guardians of this secular nationalism would come to be the soldiers who had brought the nation into being. Throughout Turkey's history, the military has considered itself the guarantor of the legacy of Turkey's great nationalist leader, Kemal Ataturk, and in the past it has gone so far as to overthrow elected governments when it judged the nation to be in crisis.
Nationalists see Turkey's future in Europe. But there has always remained an Islamist tendency in Turkey, which has regarded the adoption of Western ways as a betrayal of the ancestors. Over the last few decades, as the interventionist Turkish state was rolled back under the same fiscal pressures that have weakened states all over the Third World, Islamists have taken the offensive.
Due to the country's rapid modernisation, Turkey's cities have swelled with migrants from rural and tradition-bound areas. Once, the state would have looked after employing, housing and educating them. It can no longer do so. In its stead, private Islamist networks, raising money among the growing middle class, have created social service agencies to look after the needs of this impoverished mass.
A political movement has built itself atop these networks, and in recent years has come into government. While it remains rhetorically committed to the traditions of Turkish nationalism, it harbours elements that would like to turn away from the West and re-integrate with the Muslim world.
The military watches warily. It does not seem anxious to intervene, but nor will it stand by idly if Turkey veers too far in the direction of Islamism. The modernisers are eager to press ahead with integration into the European Union, seeing this as the best way to move their country decisively into the Western orbit.
Therein lies the problem. Never far from the surface of European politics are ancient tensions between the Turks and West Europeans. These are compounded by the fact that many European leaders consider Turkey's generals insufficiently committed to liberal democracy, and its politicians insufficiently committed to secular nationalism.
Turkey's westernisers thus find themselves between a rock and hard place: if the generals send a signal that they will not tolerate a resurgent Islamism, European leaders will decry them for meddling. But if they stand back, the Islamists may go on the offensive, and European leaders will dismiss Turkey as unreliable.
The bombers thus complicate things by driving a wedge between the country and the West. But in its war on terror, the West can ill-afford to lose the support of Turkey. It may become a most dangerous front.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
John Rapley
