Turkey

Mom the Turks!
by Antonio Cardella

Abandoned the mask of the moderate Muslim, turkish Prime Minister Erdogan echoes Arab pride, mediated by the Islamic jiadism. And Turkey asserts its role as an emerging power.

In the popular Sicilian short story is told of the legendary Saracens, starting from the coast of North Africa, with agility and speed boats, task, particularly in harvest time, destructive raids in the coastal countries of Sicily, sometimes even pushing inland.
Arose as to defend the towers and the small and defenseless cities, the subject of raids, structure their villages so that the houses and the deans of defense should arise on the sides of narrow streets, so as to channel the flow of the invaders and make them more exposed to the blows of the defenders.
The lives of these clusters had its normal course until the watch towers was not the weird strangled cry and repeated "Mother the Turks." Then it was all a run to put away the merchandise and prepared for defense.
Timing of a distant past. The Ottoman Empire has long disappeared and sultanates are only subject to convoluted reinterpretations often exotic, far away from historical reality. Well, today we live in a season in which the geopolitics of Arab pride, mediated by Muslim jiadism raises his voice and claims its role as an emerging power in the international arena. Its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, AKP party leader and winner of the referendum of 12 September 2010, he quit the mask of the moderate Muslim, to discover his true face of neo-Ottoman extremist opponent of an increasingly anchored in the West American-Israeli neo-colonialist policies.
Vanishes, so the design of a Turkey integrated into the European Union, integration, moreover, opposed by a large sector of public opinion on the Old Continent and the majority of those governments of the Community.

The turning point in Turkish foreign policy impressed by Erdogan is not a minor event. Apart from the hegemonic ambitions and the momentous challenges, the mere geographical position gives Turkey a significant role, both in the areas of pain and friction in the Middle East and east of the Adriatic, and in the vast areas of Asia where they now play the balance of the entire planet.
This explains why the American and Israeli foreign policies look with serious concern the evolution of events.
Of course, the design of a Europe that would include Turkey was not easy to achieve. The European Community had to deal with their own internal difficulties: 27 countries, located in different zones of influence (from the north-east, a tangle of conflicts arising from the collapse of the Soviet Union, the plight of the countries of former Yugoslavia never resolved, the issue of greek Cypriot community, to name a few), and difficult to integrate economies, so that you can not set a common standard, without losing heavily in favor of some other, as happens in the original core of the Community.
The drift of Islamic Erdogan has dispelled the misunderstanding of a European vocation of Ankara. The Old Continent, today more than ever, it is not for Turkey as a strategic objective to be pursued. His eyes, his perspective is facing the Middle and Far East, due to objective cultural and religious affinities, not only, but also because that way they may take your expectations for development. Meanwhile, the vital energy plan, Turkey is the focus of grandiose projects undertaken, including the giant Nabucco gas pipeline from Iran, that through Anatolia reaches Bulgaria, and already nearly completed pipeline from Kirkuk in Iraq in just Turkey branches: on the one hand and the other reaches the Black Sea, through Georgia, Azerbaijan.

Then, on the geopolitical side, Turkey is an essential interlocutor in the Middle East chessboard: the eternal conflict between Israel and Palestine, in the inexhaustible involving the dispute between Iraq and the Western powers and Iran, a dispute that hopefully not should result in yet another war waged that would destabilize the entire area with consequences that are difficult to calculate.
But the expectation of a messianic neoottomanismo does not stop.
Under the current foreign minister, who inspired the policy of Erdogan, Abmet Davutoglu, the mission of the twenty-first century Turkey is to fill the power vacuum following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the weakening of the dominance of American power.
In his book Strategic depth published in 2001, when it was a simple Davutoglu international relations professor at Marmara University in Istanbul, Davutoglu writes:

“Turkey's role as a bridge between East and West is more than ever widening. Indeed, Turkey is a country both European and Asian, the Balkans as Caucasian, the Middle East as the Mediterranean. This requires its versatility to increase the range of options ... There are two possible fates await that historically the people who are invested in the role of a bridge. Those who have that role based on a strong identity and self-confidence have created a civilization capable of opening new horizons for humanity ... unlike companies that have considered the role of a bridge from a purely pragmatic and superficial according to a mentality that ignores the respect and confidence in oneself, in the course of history have been subjected to frequent crises of identity with the resulting internal conflicts.”

It is clear that, first, the almost prophetic vision of Davutoglu gives Turkey the messianic role of a pan-Islamism that was the Caliphate of Andalusia in the eleventh century, and second, of a strong recovery by the people Islamic, which favors a new civilization characterized by peace in the name of Allah.
In the reality of Turkish foreign policy today, the anti-European component plays a decisive role in the discrimination that operates within the same Erdogan Islamic sided with the Russians against the Chechens, with Hamas against the Palestinian Authority, with the Sudanese government in massacre in Darfur, with the government in Tehran against instances of freedom of the Iranian people.
And Europe, which has only considered Turkey as a bulwark against the East Atlantic hostile, and only for this reason called for his entry into the EU, now licking the wounds of an unnecessary, additional internal conflict between the pros and cons access that Tehran does not require, indeed rejects.
Another sign of a strategic myopia that marks its decline.