The Influence of the Turkish-Ottoman Model: The Case of Turkey in the Last World Cup

SEMIH VANER

For the author of these lines, an enthusiastic fan (although inept player) of football and especially of the World Cup – to the point of diverting me from my work and research – the media, on this occasion mainly French, and the way it reflected the competition have also given me cause to comment, for its focus on the participation and the clearly unexpected performances of one of the teams, Turkey, my own native country. It seemed to me that their commentary was linked to the issue of their representation which, diffusely and sometimes even tangibly, continues to play some role in the relations between Europe and Turkey. Can we summarise this image under the term “Christian club”? The question is certainly much more complex than that, although nevertheless related to the problem of otherness.

Europe, insofar as it is possible to speak of a “Europe”, views Turkey as an exterior country. This attitude seems to have re-emerged since the end of the Cold War, after a period in which it had been somehow stifled, though not eliminated, under the either implicit or explicit political and military alliance that the European Union had established with Ankara. The exteriority of Turkey is related to the history of Europe, to its culture, its religion, in short to its identity, always assuming that this identity is not immutable and perennial, not to say illusory, like any other identity. Despite its European vocation, its right to request membership in accordance with the Treaty of Rome, the integration of Turkey has not been considered clear cut as in the case of Spain and Greece, to mention only the southern European countries. The problem cannot be reduced to the situations, however real, of its socio-economic level or its democratic deficiency. Of course, the question has more than one side to it, and refusal is also given by certain groups of Turkish society who see the EU as an entity that is alien to Turkish culture. Nevertheless, Turkey, as a single player, finds itself cap in hand, something which relatively marginalizes a possible rejection.

In fact, in the context of the beginning of the 21st century, the cultural-religious factor takes on particular importance in relations between the Muslim world and the West, whose adherence to Christian religion is often overlooked. The Iranian revolution and its resulting regime, the civil war in Algeria and the crises of Bosnia and Kosovo, are often given different interpretations when observed through the filter of religion. The probable coming to power of the Islamic party in Turkey after the general elections of 3 rd November 2002 and, more broadly, what the western media rightly or wrongly calls the “resurgence” or the “ascension of Islam”, have seemingly brought the cultural element to the forefront of Turkish-European relations. Moreover, it is clear that the cultural factor, especially if there is also a geographical justification, carries greater weight in certain specific cases, for instance in the questions related to membership of Morocco and Turkey in the European Union, than in those of Spain, Portugal and Greece and those pending of Malta and Poland.

It is also important to define the cultural factor, the portrayal of the European and Ottoman-Turkish images, and to strive to comprehend, as much as possible, what is not given vocal form. The cultural element appears, in this case, all the more imperative because the Ottoman Empire in the past and the Turkey of today are, by their geographical contiguity with Europe, placed in direct contact with Christian states, and have had, or have resumed, alliances or conflictive relations with them as well as commercial and intellectual exchanges. We must qualify our three propositions:

•  We cannot reduce the relations between Europe and Turkey to relations between Christianity and Islam. This has not always been true as, in the past, these relations were between Europe and the Ottoman Empire; this is still less true today with reference to the relations between the EU and Turkey, as international relations have now acquired a high degree of complexity;

•  However, perhaps it would be inappropriate, even if not excessive, to suggest that the religious factor occupies a privileged place in the construction of the images created by either entity of the other. Collective perceptions and mentalities do have an influence on the behaviour of both entities, at a diplomatic level. Apart from the obvious cases, where the religious or more precisely the cultural, can serve as an underlying influence of xenophobic exclusionary ideas (in other words, racism), it is not always easy to detect and localise the religious element in such behaviour. To do this, it is necessary to assess the interest and the politics of each community state individually. The manifestation or implementation of the cultural or religious element appears when relations contain or dissimulate a stake in internal politics, whether localised or not (as in the case of France), or in regional or international politics (as in the case of Greece);

•  The relations between Turkey and the EU and more specifically the question of membership cannot only be explained with reference to reciprocal perceptions. It is here that the limitations of the cultural approach are clearly defined. It is important, therefore, to identify and localise the more specifically political or socio-economic factors which favour Turkish membership of the EU, and the more numerous factors of the same category that seem to obstruct it.


Negative identity and political obstacles

Like all the somewhat peremptory propositions, ours need to be clarified and defined, albeit briefly. Seen from within Europe, the Ottoman Empire and Turkey have contributed only from their position as a negative identity and a political obstacle. Without exhausting the issue, it has been the subject of remarkable studies in both the East and West. However, it is certain that the negative images have influenced the European approach to Islam and the East and that they still do so. And in the case of the East, the Ottoman Empire occupied a predominant place for a long time. The European representation of the Sublime Porte has left a distorted and twisted trajectory, ruled by a periodisation with its own logic. Despot, despotic, despotism and above all “eastern despotism” have entered into western political vocabulary, especially at the beginning of the 18th century. Through political critique of a power that is little related to the political reality of the Ottoman, the Ottoman-Muslim society as a whole is directly accused of lacking in civility, wisdom and aptitude. The categories of Montesquieu are stretched to absurdity by Wittfogel, for whom almost all non-European regimes (in a wide sense of the word) emerge from “eastern despotism”.

The temptation among many westerners is still great today to place the Turkish political regime automatically within the vague category of “dictatorship” as if this destiny were pre-ordained even in the case of functional political pluralism, without questioning the specific, and not necessarily cultural, obstacles against which the anchor of democracy crashes, in contrast to what opinion would be, for instance, about the same situation in countries of Latin culture like Argentina or Rumania. It is true that the frequent interruptions of the democratic process in Turkey or, to rephrase, the democratic intervals that have punctuated the authoritarian situation over a long period of time, make such a task easier.

Certainly, even given the established acceptance of the pejorative image of the Other, it would be excessive and simplistic to see nothing but a direct and constant confrontation between Christianity and Islam in the relations between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. In the first place, because Europe, a melting pot of multiple political, cultural and social histories, restricts itself neither to a single religion, nor even, as Edgar Morin points out, “to a Judeo-Christian-Greco-Roman synthesis”; but instead is home to a dialogic : “an interaction that is not only complementary, but also concurrent and antagonistic, between these religions, each of which has its own logic" . Therefore, politics has not always followed the cultural and religious split: when the Ottomans twice besieged Vienna, in 1529 and 1683, the Europeans, although concerned, did not see the need to unite and make it a common cause. Francis I formed an alliance with Suleiman the Magnificent because of his rivalry with the Hapsburgs, by which he showed that the differences between the conflict zones of the "crescent" and the “cross” are not necessarily always insurmountable. Finally, interests are always taken care of and commerce always follows its course: at the moment of the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the western emissaries jostled with each other in Constantinople to guarantee the most substantial advantages possible for the traders and creditors of their respective countries. This negative and enduring image that exists in Europe of the East leads, of course, to the issue of different perceptions of perceiving modernity. Islam ?almost “immutable”, and "a hindrance to modernity”? is perceived as a religion which inevitably generates a “despotic” political regime.

It is therefore not at all surprising to read the following, written by a scholar specialising in foreign relations of the European Union: “Can Turkey assume the obligations of a member state? [...] The answer depends principally on the evolution of a society still anchored to its Islamic culture and with social structures still very different from those of Western Europe" . This negative perception is obviously not well received by Turkey, where it is not always fairly evaluated. This has inevitable repercussions at the level of international politics and, especially, European politics. To be more specific, we believe that this mistrust is one of the main reasons that lies behind Turkey's reluctance to take the issue of its differences with Greece concerning the Aegean Sea to the International Court of Justice; and for many Turks it is what explains the vote of the European or French Parliament on the “Armenian genocide”, the absence of reactions by Westerners in relation to the persecution of the Turkish community in Bulgaria before the fall of Jivkov, and the systematic designation of Azeris-“Turks”·as guilty or murderers in the conflict of the High Karabakh at present under Armenian occupation. Two of the technical questions that appear, as the first necessary step at an official level, in the EU-Turkey dossier, are the Turkish demographic growth and the free circulation of workers, These issues provoke certain bad feelings among the state members of the EU, and can be linked to a certain extent to the question of perception.

It was both tempting and difficult for viewers watching the match on their television sets to bear all this in mind, without falling into the Huntingtonian trap of making hasty generalisations. Of course, lack of understanding, ignorance and indifference are the basis of negative images. That was evident at the point of a Turkish goal when one commentator from French television declared: “I can imagine the joy which must reign now in Istanbul!” And another added: “And in Constantinople!”


Ottomans, still?

It is still possible to rein in the lack of knowledge, not to say ignorance, which is manifested by the confusion often caused by the media over the Ottoman Empire (dissolved definitively with the abolition of the Sultanate in 1922 and the proclamation of the Republic in 1923). For Le Figaro , the main Istanbul club “confirms the indisputable expansion of Ottoman football.” In fact, it would be necessary to recall that the Turkish team leant hard on its central Galatasaray players, both ex and current, and it was thanks to the successful performances of this club during several seasons in the European Cup (victory in the UEFA Cup or 2000 European Super Cup, against Real Madrid, and the quarter finals in the 2001 Champions League), that they were able to gain the necessary experience of playing in top level matches.

The erroneous reference to Ottomanity is repeated time and time again, and accompanied by negative comments such as: “In spite of all the obstacles they have overcome, the Ottoman team expressed no enthusiasm when faced with the expectations of the clamouring journalists and reporters, who were hoping for floods of revelations and photographs […] An amazing situation; the semi-finalists full of rancour with faces of defiance when they ought to be all smiles and satisfaction” also wrote the Paris daily. In another newspaper of the same day, the special correspondent to Osaka evaluated the teams' performance: “South Korea and Turkey […] exhort themselves in the semi-finals, unleash hysteria, and invite avalanches of press interrogation, in order to size up the quality of the 2002 competition and evaluate its semi-finalists.” “The Ottomans lost (1-2) against Brazil, drew with Costa Rica (1-1) then won (3-0) against China,” summarised the most reputed French newspaper before concluding: “Lacking recognition in the world and also in its own country, the Turkish team wants to reach the semi-finals of the World Cup at any price, for the internal appeasement of the team.”