Take your pick
One view of Turkey (we have noted Ataturk here, among other places) from David Warren:
It is important to grasp why Turkey was the only Muslim nation to develop and maintain something like Western institutions over several generations. The point is that this was not achieved by “democracy,” but by Ataturk. A limited, guided democracy, grew out of his authoritarian vision. The Turkish military always stood by, prepared to intervene in political life to vindicate a secular constitution, in which it was assigned the responsibility of doing so.
Turkey has been an unconscious model, for Western occupiers trying to guide political developments in Iraq and Afghanistan. She cannot be a conscious model, because the U.S. and allies have never been prepared to do what Ataturk did to create a civil order, nor what the U.S. and allies themselves did when they imposed democracy upon Germany and Japan after the Second World War.
President Bush’s hopeful idea from the beginning, was that democracy would spread through the Arab and Muslim world, in the same way it had spread through central and eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He seems sincerely to believe, to this day, that freedom and democracy are things all human beings want, and will have, if only they aren’t prevented from obtaining it. Hence, the rather naïve efforts to endow Iraq and Afghanistan with paper constitutions, and in Iraq especially, the failure of the country’s politicians to agree to anything…
In free and fair elections on Sunday, the Turkish people again voted a mild but expressly “Islamist” party to power (the Justice and Development Party, whose Turkish initials are A.K.P.) — this time by a landslide, despite all the alarmed reservations about it expressed by Turkey’s own diminishing Westernized, urbane, secular middle class.
As I’ve written several times before (most recently June 20th), there is every demographic and political indication that Turkey’s “secular” experiment is ending. It went sufficiently against the grain of an Islamic society to begin with. Over time, the prestige of Islam revived, and by presenting themselves as only moderate Islamists, whose main intention is to clean up corruption, and deliver welfare services more efficiently to the country’s poor, the A.K.P. has cleverly insinuated itself into the hearts and minds of the people who still have most of the children.
Let that be a lesson to us. The Islamic world is not going to become more Western and “modern” over time. For Turkey was the farthest “West” any Islamic society could be taken, and then only by force. We must confront that reality plainly, and stop dreaming that “democracy” will make the Muslims just like us.
Another view entirely, from Steven Cook, a fellow at the CFR and author of previous works on Turkey, Algeria and Egypt:
Since coming to power in 2002, Justice and Development has…presided over political and economic reforms that strengthened human rights, overhauled the penal code, improved parliamentary oversight, reined in Turkey’s powerful military establishment, and made the Turkish economy the most dynamic in its region. The party will return to parliament with 27 women (more than double any other party) and scores of young, liberal legislators…
Justice and Development’s vanquished rivals — the Republican People’s Party and the Nationalist Movement Party — are far from paragons of democracy. Both parties have supported the Turkish military’s recent intervention in politics intended to weaken the Justice and Development government and prevent one of its members from becoming Turkey’s next president…
The recently published Pew Global Attitudes Survey shows that only 9 percent of Turks approve of the United States…The Islamists have trafficked in anti-American rhetoric…Turkey’s transition to democracy in recent years has had little directly to do with the Bush administration’s “forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East,” yet Washington should nevertheless welcome the Justice and Development win.
Since the party came to power in 2002, the Arab world has taken a keen interest in the way both Europe and the United States deal with Turkey’s Islamist government, seeing Turkey as a test case for the West. It is no secret that much of the Arab world has branded Washington’s democracy promotion policy as little more than hypocrisy over the Bush administration’s unwillingness to recognize Hamas’ electoral victory in the January 2006 Palestinian elections…
Justice and Development — unlike its secularist competitors — is a better partner for the United States. Turkey’s Islamists want to repair relations with Washington, will keep Ankara firmly in the West, and stand for a modern, pluralist, democratic Turkey.
One question for both gentlemen: does it matter whether your worldview on these issues is correct a century from now, if it is terribly wrong for the next ten or twenty years?