In Turkey, Atlanticism Does Not Mean Liberalism
After blocking Sweden’s bid to join NATO for nearly two years, the Turkish parliament ratified Stockholm’s accession on Jan. 23, reaffirming Ankara’s commitment to the Western alliance. A parliamentary majority that included the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), its ally the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), and the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) ultimately rallied in support of Sweden’s NATO accession. Hungary, the last remaining NATO member left to ratify Sweden’s accession, is expected to follow suit in the coming weeks.
Turkey’s support for Sweden’s accession long looked unlikely. By standing in the way, Turkey had a broader goal: to exploit the opportunity to undermine Western support for Kurdish aspirations in the Middle East. Sweden has been a sanctuary for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey labels a terrorist organization; it has offered political and financial support to PKK-linked Kurdish groups in northern Syria, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), and its military wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG). To get Turkey’s backing to join NATO, Sweden agreed to cut these ties.
Still, a year ago, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lambasted Sweden, saying that the country should not expect goodwill from Turkey if it fails to “show respect for the religious beliefs of Muslims and Turkish people.” Last September, Erdogan said Sweden had failed to keep its promises to Turkey to receive the green light, citing demonstrations in Stockholm in support of the PKK. Erdogan’s political ally Devlet Bahceli, who leads the far-right MHP, last year described Sweden as a “country that threatens our national existence,” adding that if Sweden remained unwilling to extradite Kurdish activists convicted of terrorism in Turkey, the MHP wouldn’t ratify its NATO accession.
Sweden refused this last demand, yet Erdogan and Bahceli still folded. This is welcome news for the United States and NATO, and it shows that nationalism and religious resentment ultimately take a back seat to Atlanticism in Turkey. However, Turkey’s stance on the so-called Kurdish issue will continue to sap NATO’s strength and credibility. The continued repression of the Kurds in Turkey is not in line with the democratic values that NATO purports to defend, and Turkey’s antagonism toward the Syrian Kurds puts it at odds with the United States. Turkey has now shown that it can bend, and in NATO’s strategic interests, it must do more than acquiesce to Sweden—it must acquiesce to a democratic resolution of the Kurdish question.
ERDOGAN’S AND BAHCELI’S STATEMENTS about Sweden did reflect resentment among both the Turkish public and the governing elite. However, the target was never really Sweden but instead the United States, which many Turks now consider a hostile power because of its support for the Kurdish militants in Syria. Turkey sees the establishment of a de facto Kurdish state in Syria as the principal threat to its national security and resents that the United States arms and finances the PKK-linked Kurdish militants there. Turkey may have entertained the illusion that Washington would stop supporting the YPG in return for Turkey ratifying Sweden’s NATO membership.
Still, when it came to Sweden’s NATO accession, Turkey’s strategic imperative to stay anchored to the West carried the day. NATO membership remains as crucial for Ankara’s ruling elite today as it did when the country joined the alliance in 1952. Neither occasional clashes with Western powers nor Turkey’s business relations with Russia signal any latent desire to alter Turkey’s Western orientation. Geopolitical turmoil from Ukraine to the Red Sea makes it even more paramount for Turkey to maintain its ties to the West. Furthermore, Turkey depends on the United States to refurbish its air force and now expects that the U.S. Congress will lift its embargo on the $20 billion sale of F-16 aircraft and modernization kits to Turkey.
Turkey identifies as Western only in a military-strategic sense that does not imply belonging to the West in political-ideological terms—and it never has. Turkey shows how leaders who stand in opposition to the liberal and democratic values that NATO supposedly upholds can still embrace Atlanticism. Turkey was a democracy when it joined the bloc, but its democratic rule was regularly suspended by military coups without its membership being called into question. On the contrary, the coups aligned with NATO interests, as the military was loyal to the Western alliance and suppressed left-wing calls for a nonaligned Turkey.
In fact, NATO resources were mobilized in the service of anti-democratic forces in Turkey in the past, notably under Bahceli’s predecessor as MHP leader, Alparslan Turkes. A military officer, Turkes received counterinsurgency education in the United States in the 1950s. He played a leading role in Turkey’s 1960 military coup and was later connected to the political killings of leftist activists in Turkey in the 1970s. The latter campaign, led by right-wing militias, was motivated by the fear of a communist takeover. The Turkish military, the police, and the intelligence community benefited from covert NATO support and advice in their anti-communist campaign. No NATO allies questioned the role that Turkish security forces played.
Both NATO adherence and authoritarianism remain salient in Turkey. The Turkish parliamentary majority that ratified Sweden’s NATO accession was the same group of parties that made it possible to imprison lawmakers in 2016 by stripping parliamentarians of their immunity. That November, the co-chairs of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, and eight other HDP parliamentarians were arrested. They remain behind bars, in violation of fundamental democratic principles.
During the Cold War, anti-communism bound together liberal democracies and right-wing dictatorships, offering Atlanticism some ideological leeway. But NATO can no longer overlook violations of democratic principles among its members as lightly as it did back then, when the overriding goal of resisting communism conferred political legitimacy on authoritarian governments in Turkey, Greece, and Portugal. Today, as global forces pit Western democratic capitalism against Russian and Chinese authoritarian capitalism, the West’s claim to moral superiority relies exclusively on its pretention to represent democracy.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg rejoiced that completing Sweden’s accession to NATO “makes us all stronger and safer.” But democracy advocates in Turkey and beyond have reason to question an Atlanticism that is embraced by authoritarian and nationalist forces in Ankara—and in turn empowers them. The fact that a strategic imperative compels Turkey’s authoritarian leaders to back Sweden undermines the Western narrative that equates Atlanticism and the defense of liberal values.