Take Turkey's influence seriously

By Jeremy Brigham

Turkey, a newly emerging power, has deep roots as a powerhouse, first as the Byzantine, then the Ottoman, Empire for which Constantinople, then Istanbul, was the core.

The height of the Ottoman power came in the late 1600s, when it ruled over the Balkans, the Black Sea, the Arab world, including Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo and Algiers, while Western Europeans were establishing domination in much of the rest of the world.

From 1700 on, the Empire shrank. Russia took territory around the Black Sea and supported Balkan nationalist movements. From 1800 on, France and Britain sought to gain control of the Near East, largely in order to hem in the Russian push to the south.

With the construction of the Suez Canal, control of the eastern Mediterranean became even more critical. Britain gained control of Ottoman Egypt in the late 1800. The Empire came to be called “the sick man of Europe.”

Seeking to strengthen itself against all these comers, the Ottoman Empire allied itself with the newly rising power of Germany, who undertook the construction of the Orient Express to link Berlin with Baghdad. This threat to British hegemony in the Middle East contributed to World War I.

Out of that war, Turkey wrested itself into existence out of the shell of the old Ottoman Empire. It was not pretty. Italy, Greece, France and Russia all had designs on the territory. Mustafa Kemal, who had led the Ottoman Army that forced the British at the 1915-16 battle of Gallipoli to a draw, rallied the Turks to drive the foreign armies off Asia Minor, the peninsula between the Black and Mediterranean Seas. Kemal, later Ataturk (father of the Turks), overturned the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, which had partitioned Turkey, and succeeded in prevailing with the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.

Turkey has been independent for 87 years. Its military, sometimes ruthlessly, has stoutly defended its distinctly secular character. For many years, Turkey turned inward.

But with its 1987 application to join the European Union, the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union, its refusal in 2003 to allow American air bases to supply the Iraq war and the fading of both Egyptian and Iraqi leadership in the Mideast, it again is finding itself in a position of growing influence.

Istanbul, the largest city in Europe with about 13 million, is the fifth largest city proper in the world. Its deep roots as a center for a thousand years for Christianity and then for nearly 500 years as the seat of the caliph for all of Islam, provides it with a long memory of leadership.

Its position on the border of Europe and Asia overlooking the Bosporus linking the Black Sea with the Mediterranean is at a crucial pair of crossroads, both land and sea, that is even more significant in the 21st century than in the fourth or 15th.

Turkey is poised to be a major power in Europe as well as in Western Asia. It is not a simple country to understand, but it is one to be taken seriously in the 21st century.

Jeremy Brigham, adjunct instructor, has taught a course on the Middle East at Kirkwood Community College since 2003.