SO DIFFICULT TO BE

Nilüfer Kuyas

James Pettifer, a Balkan scholar, was educated at Oxford and has done extensive journalism, writing on Balkan affairs for The Independent, as well as The Economist, The Times and The Wall Street Journal. He was one of the first English language writers to live in Albania and has co-authored a book, with Miranda Vickers, entitled Albania: From Anarchy to a Balkan Identity? He is currently Visiting Professor at the Institute of Balkan Studies, University of Thessaloniki. His other books include The Greeks (Penguin, 1996) and Blue Guide to Albania (1996).

His latest offering is a rich and rambling look at contemporary Turkey, based on his travel observations; it is a half journalistic, half scholarly book with a heavy Balkan bias in its analysis of Turkey’s historical heritage. "A heritage at the heart of the future of Europe" according to Pettifer, mainly due to the war in ex - Yugoslavia.

A discussion of the contradictions which prevent Turkey from making the best of its European heritage and the problems that have weakened its long standing effort at Western style modernization take up much of the book. Unfortunately, Pettifer’s treatment of these issues suffers from a lack of systematic approach. The book constantly veers from serious analysis to friendly travel guide affability.

In so far as Pettifer comes to grips with the formidable tensions of Turkish modernization and the recent and quite radical Islamic challenge to it, I found his approach rather perceptive and original. His astute analysis of "Atatürk’s secular and modernizing heritage" rightly leads him to conclude, for example, that "the complex and incomplete political achievement" of Atatürk remains to a large extent culturally incomplete as well. "It is no wonder that Islam is reviving when the mosque is the only social centre... providing the only possibility of intellectual exchange or cultural dignity". Economically "The dynamism of Istanbul is based on ruthless exploitation of labour and the ethics and employment practices of the ant heap". He starkly concludes that "the technocratic future seems to offer many Turks little compared to the Islamic and Ottoman past. The singular power of Refah (the Islamist party) is embodied in its understanding of this reality".

He has also rightly identified an emerging rift between the political aspiration to the European ideal and the public’s realization that "the struggle and sacrifice of the post - war period have not resulted in Turkish leaders being able to articulate the national interest very successfully within the traditional Western framework".

Frequently in the book, Pettifer’s knowledge of the Balkans leads him to draw interesting and sometimes illuminating parallels, such as his comparison of the islamist Refah (Welfare) Party of Erbakan to Papandreou’s PASOK ("Both new parties arose at a time when the public was disillusioned with the old parties"); or indeed his comparison of the Kurdish imbroglio with Greece’s slavic paranoia.

Pettifer is also right on the mark when he observes that the legacy of nationalism, with its "racial assumptions" is "a profound handicap to modern Turkey."

He is quite perceptive in discussing much of Turkey’s contemporary tensions through the symbolic but very real divide between the capital Ankara, with its monolithic official mentality, and Istanbul, with its cosmopolitan and pluralistic reach.

In his discussion of the Ankara-Istanbul divide, Pettifer has correctly identified a cultural and political fault-line that runs across the most important issues that occupy Turkey at the moment, be it the mostly military struggle with Kurdish separatism in the Southeast, or the related abuses of human rights and the difficult legacy of the 1980 coup. Always, the security obsessed, inward looking and heavily statist tradition of Ankara clashes with the more liberalizing, outward looking vision of Istanbul regarding the future of the country.

Nowhere is this divide more clear, or better discussed by Pettifer, than in the analysis of Turkey’s economy. Despite some radical moves and much rhetoric in the direction of economic liberalization during the Özal years, Pettifer rightly argues that Turkey’s pattern of state capitalism still obstructs the development of a real business culture. "The weak link remains the limited development of finance capital" according to Pettifer; big business still relies too much on protection from the old planned economy for its success and whenever the going is too tough it is "quick to seek the protective canopy of the Turkish state". Radical economic thinking, with its emphasis on widespread privatization, still encounters stiff resistance from Ankara.

Although The Turkish Labyrinth is full of interesting arguments and observations on Turkey’s problems, whether it be the Cyprus question or the role of the military in political life, none of this adds up to a coherent whole; the book is not more than the sum of its parts, though some of those parts are indeed very informative and frequently illuminating.

Pettifer’s book was lambasted by Professor Norman Stone in a review in the Spectator (16 August) entitled Spot The Errors; Stone argued that Pettifer "attempts an anti - Turkish essay" and deemed the book only fit to be thrown in the Sea of Marmara, mainly due to a number of factual mistakes on place names or historical and geographical detail. Elsewhere in the British press, it has had brief but mainly positive comment. In Turkey his rather objective, even sympathetic view of the Islamist Welfare Party is bound to produce some negative reaction.

At the beginning of the book Pettifer whimsically draws a portrait of a loyal Turkish bureaucrat who laments that "It is very difficult to be Turkish" given the ever present threats the country is surrounded with; he ends the book on an elegiac mood, stating that "The great theme of Turkey is betrayal of hope and promises." In between, he argues that Turkey’s political problem "can only be solved in a European context, if it is capable of solution" but his own analysis provides no real hope in that direction. Nevertheless, his book should serve many a foreigner, European or otherwise, to shed considerable prejudice or ignorance of Turkey and provide a useful introduction to its many complexities.

Dr. Nilüfer Kuyas
Co-editor of the "Intellectual Perspective"
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