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Turkey provides a unique example of the interaction between religion and politics. Recip Tayyeb Erdoğan, with his strong-man appeal to Islamic piety, won the Turkish Presidential election run-off at the weekend by 4% of the vote taking 52.1%. Kemal Kiliçdarğoglu with his promise of modern social democracy, had won only 44.9% of the vote in the first round, so stood little chance of overtaking Erdoğan with 49.5%. Fateful figures.
Two highly charged contending mindsets define Turkey’s national identity. Kemal Atatürk, a revolutionary nationalist who, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following the First World War, founded the modern Turkish secular State in 1923. He was influenced by French laicité, an ideological commitment to keep religion out of the public domain, and achieve its complete separation from the State. For many, this is expressed as a passionate rejection of Islam in favour of Turkey’s 1928 secular constitution traditionally supported by the military. For others there is a no less passionate religious commitment but to a moderate, pious Islamic conservatism. The US Brookings Institution wrote glowingly in 2002 that the AKP, Erdoğan’s Justice & Development Party which had just swept to power, “heralds democracy”. It seemed like a “new model” for the Islamic world. A year later, Erdoğan became Prime Minister. His development of a modern transport system, political flair and skillful negotiation of the deep nationalist tensions, while maintaining his espousal of Islamic values in the AKP, have enabled him to increase his power ever since. Erdoğan’s religious appeal owed much to the phenomenal success of the Gulen Islamic revival movement that provided him with the cultural and religious credentials of Turkish Islamic piety and helped to attract pious voters. Inspired by Fetullah Gulen, a scholar and preacher, the movement prioritized modern education, understanding of science and a commitment to interfaith dialogue as well as traditional Islamic practice. During the 1980s, starting with popular dershane, crammer schools, the Gulenists – calling themselves Hizmet meaning service – gained ground in the medium-sized towns of Anatolia. Those with money, the ‘Anatolian tigers’, invested in media and business forming the Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists. Nationwide, Gulenist-led universities and schools became a ladder into the civil service, judiciary, police and army. With a flat structure and a reputation for being secretive, Hizmet was accused both of ‘infiltration’ of the state structures and of becoming too close to Erdoğan, collaborating in his dismissals of secular opponents of the AKP. At trials, beginning in 2008, Gülenist prosecutors brought charges, some falsified, against some 275 key secularists, high ranking military, government critics and opposition politicians. By 1999, Fethullah Gulen had withdrawn from the fray to a ranch in Pennsylvania after a new Turkish government which aimed to restore the constitution’s secular principles put him in danger of arrest for ‘anti-secular activity’. By 2012 Erdoğan was powerful enough to dispense with Hizmet’s blessing. Influential in the judiciary, the media, universities and schools and with supporters in some 160 countries, Hizmet was now a potential rival needing to be curbed. That October Erdoğan obliged Hizmet to hand over its cash-cow, the dershane schools, to the State. In February 2014 Hizmet members hit back by releasing tapes which provided concrete evidence of major corruption involving the President and his son. Erdoğan brazened it out and was elected President that August. The key to survival as an autocrat is ruthlessness, luck and courage. A military coup got underway on the night of 15 July 2016 while Erdoğan was on holiday in Marmaris, south-west Turkey. He narrowly escaped capture, broadcast to the nation via a mobile phone held to camera in a TV studio, flew back to Istanbul, called his supporters out onto the streets and regained control. Over 250 people were killed and 2,200 injured. Here was his opportunity finally to take control of the army and destroy his old allies, the Gulenists, some of whom had joined the coup. A disturbing feature of the coup’s aftermath, demonstrating the efficiency and depth of surveillance by the National Intelligence Agency was the immediate arrest of thousands of Gulenists alongside the coup’s secular military participants. A massive purge of civil service, police, armed forces, judiciary, media, universities and schools followed. Many were guilty of nothing more than a vague connection with Hizmet. ‘estoring democracy’, Erdoğan had seized the last pieces completing the puzzle of autocratic power. A sorry story of not much import? No. Now that we perceive geo-politics as a struggle been democracy and autocracy the Turkish experience is a neon sign flashing confirmation that democracy is losing the global struggle. Look at the post-Cold War record: Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya three tragic failures of intervention; Iran still in the hands of the mullahs; Russia triumphant in a devastated Syria and destroying Ukraine; Putin contemptuous of European democracies, the USA and international law; China with its terrifying surveillance society watching Ukraine as a dry-run for taking Taiwan; Narendra Modi’s discriminating against religious minorities; the army in Pakistan unwilling to accept Imran Khan’s attempt to reduce its power over the State. Sudan wrecked by two military factions. South Africa by government corruption. Just one hopeful sign in Brazil with its peaceful democratic transfer of power from Jair Bolsonaro. There are two main possible reactions to Erdoğan’s adding five more years to his twenty in power. Firstly, realpolitik requires continuing efforts to keep Turkey, a NATO member, out of the expanding band of brother autocratic regimes around the world, notably Russia. Another imperative is continuing huge payments to Erdoğan, following a 2016 migration deal which is keeping nearly four million refugees (3.6 million of them Syrians) out of the EU. Secondly, there is the utopian hope that one last push in the next elections in 2028 will remove Erdoğan, ending the imprisonment of opposition politicians, journalists and dissident voices, as well as removing government control of 98% of press, radio and television. But how realistic is this? Over half the electorate, not only in Erdoğan’s Anatolian heartland, feel he represents their values and hopes, and sustains their version of national identity. He represents strength amidst the fragility of their lives and their fear of repeating the chaos across Turkey’s southern and eastern borders. Must foreign policy choose between these two visions of Turkey’s future? Between realpolitik and utopian? In a recent slim volume, The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power by Robert D. Kaplan, a US journalist who has served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, implies we need to embrace both. The tragic mind, he argues, experiences failure not as fatalism or despair but as a goad to greater understanding and as a prompt for the heroism of ‘acting bravely in the face of no great result’. The tragedy of Kemal Kiliçdarğoglu and his defeated Republican People’s Party (CHP) is that however much he may understand the nationalism, culture and thinking of Turkey’s rural poor and of the working class in its medium sized towns – his talk of expelling the refugees - he does not speak to them and their condition convincingly. Erdoğan, more street-wise, plays on their heart-strings. No-one can doubt Kiliçdarğoglu’s heroism and bravery in facing a ruthless autocrat. There are lessons to be learned about navigating today’s multiple threats to democracy from the failure of Turkey’s Opposition. See TheArticle 30/05/2023
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Today about 27% of adults in the UK own a dog. We have over 10 million ‘best friends’ second per capita in Europe only to Germany. That’s an awful lot of hungry animals. UK spending on dry dog-food alone is estimated at over £0.5 billion a year.
The dog market boomed during COVID. You see more couples with three dogs when you would have thought two’s company. The top price paid to date, in 2021, for a Border Collie with exceptional shepherding skills is £28,000 – and prices have risen with inflation. But what price the unalloyed love and affection of a pet dog? Crufts showcases dogs at their healthy glossy best. This year’s Best of Show was a perfectly groomed Lagotto Romagnolo, not a football coach from North Italy but a former ‘duck hunter’ now employed to find truffles, a fine example of canine labour flexibility. On a more mundane note, I was pleased to discover that the dog-show judges score dachshunds for ‘good ground clearance’. It is surely time to create a class of Professional Pets judged on their ‘petting performance’, an opportunity for great family dogs. My own contenders would be two Hackney residents, Solly a curly haired, gentle and cuddly Wheaten Terrier- Poodle Cross and Charlie, a Cavalier King Charles-American Cocker Spaniel cross whose love is measured by the number of excited circles performed to greet visitors and reproachful looks when he’s washed. But Solly and Charlie’s social skills pale when set against the abilities of working dogs, from guide dogs, an integral part of their blind owners’ lives, to trained sniffer dogs. Police German shepherds and Belgian Malinois find mobile phone by detecting the TPPO, triphenylphosphine oxide, which stops the microchip in the sim card overheating. When after much running around tail-wagging and sniffing, a police dog sits down next to your suitcase, it is time to get worried. More difficult to pinpoint are explosive residues, there can be false positives. And then there’s trained dogs’ ability to smell out diseases. These dogs are public servants working in the canine public sector. It seems extraordinary that animals so acutely attuned to human feelings, or so defined by human relationships, are descended from wolves. But you don’t have to be an evolutionary biologist to appreciate that this is where, with considerable help from selective breeding, our plethora of dog breeds began, from chihuahuas to greyhounds and Great Danes. Our current canine economy, how dogs fit into ways of making a living today, not least dogged devotion for sale, is a good starting point for understanding evolutionary dynamics. How did wolves and our ancestral hunter-gatherers get together? Who made the first moves? Shared hunting is thought to have developed between 32,000 and 18,000 years ago. The first undisputed domesticated dog found with human remains was buried some 14,000 years ago. By the beginning of the Neolithic – the agricultural revolution – 12, 000 years ago, dogs were moving from a purely economic relationship with people to becoming companions. One theory is that smarter, more enterprising, - more Thatcherite - wolves took the initiative, moved into hunter-gatherer settlements and became domesticated. Right now, there are foxes in London progressing from nervously raiding bins to entering kitchens in search of something to eat, and even one in Hackney who apparently without fear follows people walking home. An alternative plausible domestication theory is that the hunter-gatherers initiated the relationship. Like wolves, hunting was central to their lives. Both wolves and men travelled in search of prey. Though sharing the hunt, taking advantage of wolves’ sense of smell to find prey and rewarding kills with cast off portions of the meat, could only have worked if the prey was no larger than reindeer. Wolves were a highly successful species but could not cope with the main prize for human hunters, the mammoth. The canine economy is much more complex today. Fox hunting hounds baying under government restrictions retain the old skills whilst still generating a few jobs - not to mention class hatred. Greyhound racing for the working class has almost disappeared. But dog-walkers by the thousands have entered the service sector alongside child-care for busy professional households. There are grooming salons with dog accessories, dog educators and dog psychiatrists. A beloved pet should be both beautiful, fit, well behaved and well balanced. With so much reported loneliness the demand for a dog’s devotion is unlikely to diminish. But the price of this unalloyed love can be high. Veterinary care is expensive. Anecdotal evidence suggests, contrary to good practice in human medicine, that too often pet diagnosis begins with costly testing such as MRI and CT scans only then moving on to simpler therapeutic trials with inexpensive medication. The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons does have a code of ethical conduct, professional misconduct includes taking “advantage of your age and inexperience”. But, unschooled in diagnosis, who is capable of resisting the authority of the veterinarian and denying their beloved dog the suggested treatment? And how many people realise after hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds spent on preventing the unpreventable, and far too late, that the kindest way forward would have been to ‘let their pet go’. Wolves by contrast are still unloved. Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t help their bad press. But there is something chillingly grand about them. They have not been subjected to ever more bizarre selective breeding. We don’t run after them with poo-bags. They don’t roll over to have their tummy tickled. They don’t sneak up to sleep on your bed or cover the sofa with hairs - at least not yet. “The Eurasian Wolf”, Rewilding Britain tells us, is “a vital top predator that can have a major influence on the landscape through influencing the behaviour of herbivores”. Quite so. The canine economy has proved productive, innovative and adaptive. Dogs both as workers and pets have established themselves amidst economic and home life. Their emotional ties to families look likely to defeat the future capacity of AI. And on the whole, canine evolution hasn’t turned out all that badly - apart, that is, from those dogs facing the hazards of poor ground clearance. |
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