Erdogan is busy proving Huntington right

Source:Ahval News Date:26Mar2019

Editor in Chief of Ahval News, Mr Yavuz Baydar, has highlighted a topic about which I’ve been spending restless nights:  Has Hungington’s Clash of Civilizations already started?  Will there be a Cold War between Islam and the other faiths?  How would such  a future affect trade, tourism and FDI?  Baydar doesn’t answer these questions, but touches upon  another relevant point:  As a society perched between East and West  “the Turkish  example” could have moderated the pressures escalating towards a Clash of Civilizations.  Erdogan missed that chance.

Huntington said Turkey has become, since the first world war, a “classic torn country,” a nation with a single predominant Islamic culture that places it in a sphere of civilisation while its leaders, led by Ataturk, sought until the 1990s to shift it to another civilisation.

Thus, argued Huntington, as the clash of civilisations thrusted in slow motion a tectonic shift on a global scale post-Cold War, Turkey would be on the most sensitive of the cultural and political fault lines.

For some time, all that has taken place in Ankara supports Huntington’s predictions. It is as if Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has read the book, agreed with its thesis and done everything in his might to prove Huntington right. Erdogan does it in a grand scale to position Turkey as the battlefront against the West.