Political scientist Samuel Huntington in his The Clash of Civilisations describes Turkey as the “prototypical torn country”. At some point, Turkey could give up “its humiliating role as a beggar pleading for membership in the West” and resume its “impressive historical role as the principal Islamic interlocutor”, he wrote
Rejecting Ataturk
To do so, Huntington said Turkey would have to reject Kemal Ataturk’s militant secular legacy “more thoroughly than Russia has rejected Lenin’s”. This would take a “leader of Ataturk’s calibre,” he wrote in his 1996 book. Two years earlier, a young man was elected the mayor of Istanbul. His name Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Enter Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Erdogan was then a member of the Welfare Party, which was thrown out in a 1997 coup & banned by the Kemalist state. An icendiary speech saw him spend four months in jail. He founded a new party in 2001
Coronation of a Sultan
After coming to power in 2003, Erdogan renounced the euroskeptic line of his forebears. The condition for entering the EU—reining in the military—came in handy. Only after the military and court were weakened by 2010 did he “veer right on religious issues”. In 2017, an increasingly dictatorial Erdogan won sweeping new powers in a referendum