Is Turkey building a new Ottoman Empire?

As the neighbors stumble, everyone’s talking Turkey. But deep divisions within cloud Ankara’s regional ambitions.

By: Mitch Potter Washington Bureau,
Published on Sun Nov 13 2011

ISTANBUL—It’s a broken world out there and today, more than ever, Turkey is offering itself as the glue to make everything right again.

ottoman empire

Need a new boss in the buckling Middle East? Been-there, done-that, for 500 years. See Ottoman Empire.

Need a modernist model to whip the revolutions of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya toward just the right blend of democracy, Islam and prosperity? Hey, that’s us.

Need someone to deliver tough love to Syria, Iran and Israel, all at the same time? We can do that, too. We’ve got the second-largest army in NATO, after the U.S. We play nice. We can even talk to Pakistan. And when we talk, they listen. Need a bridge between east and west that brings both halves together in harmony? Apply here. Good terms available.

Such are the superficial slogans of the neo-Ottomans, whose sultan — three-term Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan — is flexing political muscle unmatched since the days of Kemal Ataturk, who founded modern Turkey from the ashes of empire nearly a century ago.

Erdogan’s Turkey has reasons to preen. It can look to withering neighbour and longtime rival Greece with something approximating pity, whispering, “But for the grace of Allah.”

Like Greece, Turkey jumped through a frenzy of market-reform hoops demanded by Europe during its decades-long accession dance, tripling its GDP in the process. But the coveted EU membership never came, and now resurgent Turkey is laughing all the way to the bank. Which happens to be bursting with Turkish lira, not ticking-bomb Euros, thank you very much.

Turkey got the milk, economists will say, without actually buying the cow, thanks to a customs union with Europe that drives as much as 80 per cent of Turkish exports.

Look at any washer or dryer on the continent, for example, and chances are it is Turkish-made — an industrial boom that has lifted many of its 70 million inhabitants from a low-tech textile and tea-growing past.

You can feel the rising confidence on the exotic streets of Istanbul, where explosive sprawl means something close to 17 million people now reside in a megacity straddling two continents.

But more than anything you can see it in Erdogan himself. This summer, the prime minister, head of the Islamic-inspired Justice and Development Party (AKP), ended years of intrigue by imposing full civilian control over Turkey’s fiercely secular military elite. Four times between 1960 and 1997, Turkish generals toppled their governments. It appears now the era of coups is over.

Indeed, Turks themselves are as riven as ever with objections to Erdogan’s regional wanderings. They may be doing well, economically, but among the conspiracy-minded electorate there are many who doubt the AKP’s commitment to democracy, let alone the separation of religion and government that was laid down as Ataturk’s cardinal tenet for Turkish governance.

For evidence, most critics look no further than the country’s jails, where hundreds of retired and active military officers, journalists and political dissidents have been gathering dust, many accused of conspiring against the government in alleged coup plots known as Ergenekon and Sledgehammer.

Click on Link:

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2011/11/13/is_turkey_building_a_new_ottoman_empire.html