Rally to Turkey
"Most of this bustle is about hugging Turkey's Islamists so tight that their arms are pinned to their sides"
Rosemary Righter, Wall Street Journal, November 12, 2002, LONDON- A crescent moon has risen over Ankara, for 80 years the Islamic world's mightiest bastion of secularism, and the world is hastening to admire it. The State Department, aware of the crucial role that Turkey will play in any action against Iraq, has hailed the "vibrancy" of Turkish democracy, and urged the European Union to roll out the welcome mat to the victorious Development and Justice (AK) party of professed ex-Islamists. Berlin has been more than polite; so has London, which shares America's esteem for Turkey's stalwart membership in NATO. And Brussels has done its embarrassed best to hint that Friday's outburst by former French President Giscard d'Estaing, who said that it would be the "end of the EU "if Turkey came in, was a blast from the past that could be quietly ignored.

Western Engagement
Most of this bustle is about hugging Turkey's Islamists so tight that their arms are pinned to their sides. As a tactic, that may be wise. Active Western engagement with this untested regime may persuade the Turkish military -- whose new chief of staff, Gen. Hilmi Ozkok, has not questioned the result but has pointedly stressed the army's readiness to "repel all types of threat, particularly radical Islam -- that it does not need to do the pinning itself. And in any case, most Western governments share the Turkish voters' disgust with the incompetent, corrupt and eternally bickering secular political establishment which has just had its comeuppance. But the applause is nervous.

This was without question a vote for "none of the above," but is it something with far greater strategic implications, the beginning of the end of the secular legacy of Atatürk? It is what Turkey voted for that matters, not what it voted against. Elected with an outright majority that is itself a rarity in Turkish politics, in comes an openly religious party, the fifth incarnation of an Islamist party that first emerged in 1970 and was repeatedly banned, only to reappear in new guises, for mixing religion with politics.

Why? Bread-and-oil almost certainly trumped religion in most voters' minds. What electorate would not have revolted against mismanagement of the economy so gross that Turkey's debts have rocketed to over $200 billion, while at least a million people lost their jobs, and thousands suffered the collapse of their businesses in Turkey's worst slump since 1945? Yet victory for the Republican People's Party founded by Atatürk, which includes the highly effective dissident economy minister Kemal Dervis, would have been the surest way out of trouble. Instead, the Turks have risked everything on the AK -- without even knowing who the prime minister will be, since Mr. Erdogan is legally barred from office because of a criminal conviction for "using religion to incite hatred."

This was democracy in action, but are the winners democrats? (Mr. Erdogan says he is "fed up with such questions," but they will keep coming.) If the AK are "Islamist moderates," the label Western commentators have tended to pin on the party, the answer is no. Islamists cannot by definition be moderate, or modern, as the West understands it because Islam does not accept the concept of human as opposed to divine governance. But if they are, as their leaders say, "Muslim Democrats in the same way that in Germany you have Christian Democrats," Turkey could be a model in George W. Bush's quest for "modern and moderate governments, especially in the Muslim world."

Western governments need urgent answers and they will not get them before two critical decisions are taken. The first is whether finally, at next month's Copenhagen summit, to give in to Turkey's demands for a firm date to start negotiations on its entry into the EU. The second is Iraq; Turkey's cooperation will be needed and although Mr. Erdogan has said Turkey will support a U.S. attack on Iraq (if it has U.N. approval, a condition the new Security Council resolution may have met), the AK rank and file is vehemently opposed, as are most voters.

There are two sides to the Erdogan coin. As mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s, he ran an effective, socially liberal and above all clean administration. But his roots are Islamist. He claims to offer pragmatic government (translate: do not cross the Turkish military); cooperation with the International Monetary Fund's rescue strategy for the economy, and a determined drive to take Turkey into the EU. He also promises respect for cultural pluralism (translate: women will be allowed to wear headscarves at university and in government offices), and separation of religion and state -- by which the AK means, to the alarm of secularists, ending the state's tight control of the content of sermons in the mosques. He insists that AK is not "religious-orientated" and his deputy Abdullah Gul, the likely interim prime minister, swears that it is a new kind of party whose members are "good Muslims" as individuals, but accept that an Islamic political system in Turkey "is not realistic."

Yet this is some way short of disavowing Islamist ambitions. What, Mr. Erdogan's critics inside and outside the military ask, if this were Islamic deception, the concept that permits a believer to lie for the sake of his religion? Mr. Erdogan once said that AK viewed democracy not as an end, but "only as a means; whatever is the system you want to establish, it is a means to elect that system." When Algeria's Islamists said something similar a decade ago, they meant "one man, one vote, once" -- democracy would pave the way to theocracy.

Mr. Erdogan may well be a democrat today. The conviction that keeps him (until the law is changed) out of office was for reciting a poem by Ziya Gokalp, a father of Turkish nationalism, which is on the secondary school syllabus. An entirely harmless exercise of free speech, and many Turks consider his conviction a stitch-up by the establishment. But the words -- "the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, the believers our soldiers" -- are hard to square with his avowed ambition to make Turkey a modern, prosperously Westernized member of the EU.

If Turkey were to drop its opposition to freestanding EU military operations at the forthcoming NATO summit, only to find the gates to Europe still barred at Copenhagen some weeks later, there would be fury in Ankara which could well make it markedly less cooperative in the Iraq campaign. The EU has always been myopic about Turkey, never seriously intending to be more than courteous about its ambitions to be part of Europe, never expecting that question to affect the trans-Atlantic relationship and never really sharing America's conviction of Turkey's pivotal importance in a turbulent region. The question has now come to a head at a time when the answer will become entwined with the larger trans-Atlantic dispute over dealing with Saddam's Iraq. There could hardly have been a more awkward moment for Turks to turn to a party rooted in Islam -- whatever Mr. Erdogan does with his resounding electoral victory.

Muslim Identity
The EU can no longer gloss over Turkey's Muslim identity. But paradoxically, that is why it should stop playing games with Turkey on entry into the EU and start serious negotiations. Talks should be seen as an integral part of the campaign against Islamist terrorism. The strategy requires a pro-Western, modernizing Turkey, a stabilizer at the gates of Iran, Iraq and the Arab world. If the AK dons Islamist garb, all bets are off; but nothing could be more dangerous than a slamming of Europe's doors against a duly elected, democratic, government of Muslim Democrats. And nothing, when it comes to EU membership, is more likely.

Ms. Righter is associate editor of the Times of London. (URL for this article: /online.wsj.com)