You’ve got mail, your excellency! (I)

The quote belongs to prominent political scientist George Modelski (The World's Foreign Ministers: A Political Elite, Journal of Conflict Resolution).

Yes, we are all optimistic, or cautiously optimistic, about the "Turkish Kissinger." Part of the optimism comes from the fact that no one can possibly do worse than Ali Babacan. But let’s try not to be unfair to Professor Ahmet Davutoğlu. The new minister of foreign affairs has got a couple of letters from the Turkish diaspora. I shall leave the floor to both letters today and next week, hoping that it might be useful to lend an ear to these partially converging views.

Here we go:

"Since I am a member of the Turkish diaspora, I cannot comment in detail about other ministries but please allow me to make a couple of points with respect to Professor Davutoğlu’s appointment as the new foreign minister.

"It is always a pleasure to have a foreign minister who himself resided out of the country. Davutoğlu brings a great wealth of knowledge with him, and that on its own should be a source of pride for usÉ Has it not always been a source of criticism that our leaders lack proficiency in foreign languages? Or their educational credentials are lacking? Well, here we have found a professor of international relations with exceptionally fine colors, someone who can command more than one foreign language and who has excellent the academic credentials as wellÉ

"Mr Davutoğlu is no longer behind the doors. He is now officially associated with the Justice and Development Party (AKP)É Like anyone else involved in policy-making he has made mistakes and he has been under the spotlight for years now. But there is more than that about him:

"First is the fact that the Turkish foreign ministry for years followed a very ’reactionary’ approach, that is Turkey reacted whenever there was a problem. We saw signs of change under charismatic leaders, such as (Turgut) Özal, but until the last couple of years, we could not call the foreign ministry ’visionary.’ Behind the vague slogan of ’peace at home, peace in the world,’ Turkey played a low-key position in many regions in the hands of career diplomats Ğ whose main concern is to be accredited to posts in 'western' countries, and frequently changing rather insignificant foreign ministers. Survival as a foreign minister under coalition governments in the 1990s was not easy.

"One path Turkey focused on was the ’West’, even though not many people were sure about how to go west, or be a part of the West. One sincere concern of many ’secularists’ Ğ and maybe some career diplomats Ğ was that if the Islamists took over we would lose our Western orientation.

This has been much debated and will be debated in the next decade as well, so acknowledging but not dwelling on the question, one has to ask in the last six years of post-Islamist rule, how has the Turkish foreign ministry changed? I argue that the question of whether Turkey’s orientation towards the West has been altered or not is the wrong way to address the issue. With the West, what is meant is the institutions of the Western civilization, such as NATO and the EU.

Therefore, we can summarize this as relations with the United States and Europe. Our relations with the U.S., with its possible ups and downs, have been at best not drastically mismanaged. The same cannot be said for the EU. For many years the Turkish diaspora held similar hopes for an eventual accession. However, for those of us who know the voting procedure and the institutional structure of the EU, full membership, as it stands today, is not possible. We all would like to keep the audacity to hope alive, plus many believe that with the goal of becoming an EU member, ’harmonization’ of several laws might indeed benefit Turkey in the long-run. I have no qualms in trying to improve laws and the general well-being of Turkey, even if it is behind the veil of misguided hope; however, it is a rather dangerous game to keep attached to ’false hopes’ in the long run.

I believe Professor Davutoğlu and his team see the bottom line that Turkey will most likely not become a full EU member; therefore, we need to re-establish our identity. High expectations lead to major disappointments which can then generate social disillusionment. "This brings us to the reorientation of the foreign ministry towards other regions. Some refer to this as ’rediscovering’ our roots, Muslim identity, or other historic attachments, i.e. neo-Ottomanism.

Professor Davutoğlu has continuously struggled to emphasize that it is not mutually-exclusive, that one can have friends in the West and the East without necessarily being the ’bridge’ countryÉ

"Turkish attempts to broker peace proved to be a more challenging task than ever imagined; it also demonstrated major crevasses in our identity. When it comes to peace-making while making headlines all over the world at Davos, we discovered the fact that we are not Norway at equidistance to the two sides involved. That said, one has to applaud Mr Davutoğlu for his success with ’zero-problem-policy’ with our neighbors, particularly Syria and IranÉ

"We share definitely more than the same prophet and cooperation with our neighbors long forgotten (except in times of support of terrorist activities) can benefit Turkey on multiple levels.

Changing images and generating cooperation with countries we were almost on the brink of war only a decade ago is not easy in this region and we need to understand that even if Turkey does not become the ultimate ’mediator’ between Israel and Syria, even if both countries were to prefer the U.S. rather than Turkey, still for improved relations with Syria and Iran, Davutoğlu deserves kudos from his harshest critics."