Turkey — the bridge between East and West. That’s how the cliché goes, a saying that endures because it’s physically true: “Welcome to Europe” reads the sign on one side of a bridge over the Bosporus, the strait that divides Istanbul. “Welcome to Asia” is the sign on the other. But the passage also evokes transitions of other, less tangible sorts, one of which is playing out in the persistent civic unrest that’s knocked the country’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan so badly off stride. Turkey’s own transition, to a fully fledged democracy, is not yet complete. As street protests enter a fourth week in Turkey’s major cities, Erdogan finds himself tugged alternately by the imperfect democracy that brought him to power and the authoritarian legacy that lingers in Turkey’s body politic. “All the world was authoritarian until the middle of the 19th century or so,” notes Rami G. Khouri, head of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. “Democracy is a very young tradition in even countries like France.” It’s even younger in Turkey, which until 1924 wasn’t even a country. (MORE: Erdogan’s Crisis: How Protests Undermined Turkish Leader’s Legacy) Before that, it was just Asia Minor, seat of the Ottoman Empire that ruled much of the Muslim world for four centuries. That epic run of autocracy carried over into the early days of the modern republic that the Turkish military hero Mustafa Kemal Ataturk built on the remains of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, almost as an act of will. Ataturk, Turkey’s founding father, created a one-party state that Western nations would later call the model for a Muslim democracy, not least because Ataturk so admired the West. But the immense authority the new Turkey vested in devlet (the state) was more in line with traditions still thriving in the lands east and south of the Anatolian peninsula. Political scientists still debate why, but the Middle East and northern Africa would be the last section of the globe to turn toward democracy. And![]()
