Norman Stone: Turkey’s dream of an Arab Commonwealth backfires over Syria

Damascus, now in Syria, and Antioch, now in Turkey, are great biblical cities but modern-day relations between them have been very poor.

The tensions on the Syrian-Turkish border are not new: there was a stand-off until 2000. The Syrians felt that the Antioch (Antakya) region was rightfully theirs, the population being mostly Arab, and that they had been cheated of it by a Franco-Turkish colonial deal, complete with fake referendum, in 1938.

In any case, the two countries were on opposite sides in the Cold War, the Turks co-operating with Nato and Israel, the Syrians with Moscow.

The Syrians complained that Turkish dams on the Euphrates were cutting their water; they tried to use the Kurds against Turkey and gave a base to the PKK, a Maoist terror organisation that did much to keep south-eastern Turkey relatively backward. It shot teachers, wiped out whole families and even shot up chicken farms.

Then, in 1998, the Turks served an ultimatum to Syria: expel the PKK. That happened, and its leader sits in an island prison near Istanbul.

Then came the surprise, a Syrian-Turkish reconciliation, gathering pace when the present Ankara government came to power in 2002, with brotherly Muslim rhetoric, visa-free arrangements, free trade and head-of-state, husband-and-wife joint holidays.

Antakya in 2010 was full of Syrian taxi drivers, taking you to Aleppo, an hour or so away, and, back then, rather a wonderful place, with its Agatha Christie hotel, its huge citadel restored by the Aga Khan and its old Ottoman houses.

However, if you took that taxi journey you were moving down a stage in development. The Antakya region is not Turkey’s richest but it works in a European way: drivers are even known to stop at red lights.

The real reason for Syrian complaints about water shortages is that a Soviet irrigation system was installed, which got everything wrong and caused drought (one factor behind the present troubles).

When the river Orontes reaches Antakya from Syria, it is often just muddy slime. Turkey, associated with the West since 1945, has shot ahead: discounting oil, its economy is larger than that of the old Ottoman Empire.

Arabs look at Turkey with envy and resentment. The very name “Turkey” is really Italian in origin, because “Turk” in the Ottoman time meant “bumpkin”: “itrak bi-i idrak” was an Arabic pun, giggled at by the court eunuchs, meaning “Turks are jerks”. There was a Turkish language, of course, but its vocabulary was limited to elementary physical functions, especially fighting.

There was a thorough-going reform, or more accurately invention, of Turkish in the 1930s, when the state aimed to make peasants literate and scrapped the old Arabic script for a Latin one that suits Turkish sounds much better. The results are sometimes comic. Tahrir Square in Cairo, where the Arab Spring sprung, refers to Freedom. In Turkish it means “property survey”.

That Spring went to the head of the Turkish government. It had come to power in 2002 and was religious in inspiration. Its general line was that Islam could produce democracy and prosperity, as Christian Democrat parties had done in Italy or Germany. It had endless foreign well-wishers, including this writer, who were sick of the confusions and corruption of the old gang.

Its first years were good, housing and health on offer as never before. Quite sophisticated exports bounded ahead, and there is now a general business to the economy that comes as a relief if you have seen what “Europe” has done to countries such as Greece and Bulgaria.

The Turks had money to spend on cultural institutes and satellites, broadcasting the message that they were successful. Whereas other Islamic societies were not: backward, tyrannically run, corrupt. Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the former prime minister of Malaysia, had remarked of his country that “we produce nothing, we create nothing and we cannot even manage our own wealth”.

Turkey was different, and when the Arab Spring got under way the then Turkish Prime Minister, now President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, got on his travels. He was lionised when he spoke up for the Palestinians, got honorary degrees all over the Arab place, and Arab money poured into Turkey.

It still comes as a surprise to see black-clad women at Istanbul airport, where their menfolk are not very respectful of queuing rules. In the 1930s, people not dressed in Western style were turned away by the police in Turkish towns.

The religious government’s initial success came with a cultural revival of the once despised Ottoman Empire. There were successful television soaps, excellent museums devoted to Islamic arts and science. There was unquestionably a very good side of the empire, not least that it kept the peace and mostly avoided religious persecution.

The present Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, wrote a book to the effect that Ottoman soft power would make for a sort of Turkish Commonwealth, and he has been tireless in going around Muslim Africa (even Somalia) or Burma and the Pacific to promote that cause. Turkish Airlines flies all over the place, in this writer’s experience very efficiently.

This new self-assertion is reflected in matters great and small. Istanbul will have Europe’s largest airport, with a space-research institute attached; and in official buildings there are now hole-in-the-ground lavatories. From this, to lecturing the Syrians on their need for reform, of getting a government similar to Turkey’s, was a short step.

And so when President Assad would not accept the lessons, Turkey started supporting his enemies. He did warn at the outset that Syria was a powder keg and that its explosion would affect the entire Middle East, and right he has proved. The effects are now seen in Turkey, beset with nearly three million refugees and with car-bomb outrages even in the military quarter of the capital, Ankara. The troubles have now produced a Kurdish crypto-state, in Syria as well as in Iraq, and through the PKK it has Turkish links.

The ultimate irony in this over-ambitious Turkish foreign policy is that instead of creating an Ottoman Commonwealth it will end up with a Kurdistan. If only Mr Erdogan and Mr Davutoglu had played a longer game and respected the doctrine of Turkey’s founders: peace abroad, peace at home.

Norman Stone is a professor of international relations at Bilkent University in Ankara