What is Erdoğan’s dream?
What is Erdoğan’s dream?
The Middle East is a somewhat defined place. The Middle East or West Asia is a collection of Arabic-speaking countries, Iran, Turkey, and Israel.
Approximately 25 political entities are located in the region known as the Middle East or West Asia. Part of the Middle East also includes the Arab countries of North Africa.
This region has continuously been a site for grand regional projects over the past 100 years, the latest being the Turkish project. The Turkish project of engineering the Middle East enters a new phase with the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government.
The meeting of Turkish and Qatari political and security officials in Damascus with leaders of groups that ruled over Bashar al-Assad’s government is more symbolically significant than in content.
This symbolic aspect peaks with the prayer held in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus by Ibrahim Kalin, the head of Turkey’s intelligence organization known as MIT, reminding of the Turkish dominance over Damascus after a century since the fall of the Ottomans.
The Turkish project of engineering the Middle East involves a combination of geopolitics, history, personal ambitions of leaders, changing regional conditions, and complex and layered emotions. The Turkish project of engineering the Middle East should be seen within the context and process of other projects that have tried to give a different and transformed face to the Middle East.
How can these grand projects for transforming and metamorphosing the Middle East be evaluated and analyzed? To answer, one must pay attention to the multitude of Middle East engineering projects, the nature of the projects, and ultimately, the consequences of the projects.
The multitude of change projects in the Middle East must be sought in the history of the past few centuries of this region. In this region, there were two native empires, namely the Ottomans and Iran, and several Western empires that, over about 500 years, were in a dual struggle related to the region.
On one hand, there was an internal struggle where these empires competed, disputed, and fought for dominance over this region, and on the other hand, their relationship with the native empires, which especially in the past two centuries, found themselves in an unbalanced and asymmetrical situation with the Western empires.
World War I ended several empires, at the forefront of which was the five-century-old Ottoman Empire. The collapse of the Ottomans was not a simple process, and the birth of new conditions was very painful, contentious, bloody, and active.
With the collapse of the Ottomans, major engineering for the Middle East began. Numerous negotiations and treaties that were concluded after World War I were all built on the ruins of the collapsed Ottoman Empire, and of course, all faced dissatisfaction, anger, and frustration from the Ottoman heir, Turkey, which was reduced from a vast empire spanning from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf to a relatively ordinary country.
The 1920s are very key in understanding this frustration.
In this decade and the next, the grand Middle East engineering project based on the design known as Sykes-Picot between the foreign ministers of France and England for dividing the region was tied to the Israeli project with the Balfour Declaration for engineering Palestine. Within each of these projects, there were minor plans that are significant. The 1921 Cairo Conference, which Britain launched for regional designs with the presence of British military and Middle East affairs researchers, led to the creation of some Arab countries.
The role of Gertrude Bell, the famous British orientalist, in establishing the monarchy in Jordan and Iraq reflects this regional engineering.
These regional engineering efforts continued, and interestingly, both from within the Arab world and outside of it, projects for changing and engineering the Middle East, especially after World War II, increased. The grand project of Arab nationalism from within and the projects of democratization and communism from outside are examples of these grand plans that have consumed the capacity of the Middle East and occupied it for decades. The post-World War II era is full of incidents and events in the struggle and interaction between international projects and internal change projects in the Middle East. Wars between states and internal wars were all based on the idea of engineering conditions.
However, what clarifies the multitude of plans more is the end of the Cold War and the structural transformation in the world of power, which fills the Middle East with painful events and at the same time, ideations and fantasies. At the forefront of these dreams for changing the Middle East is the United States, especially during the second Bush era. Israel also pursued the idea of changing the Middle East in coordination with America, with the final manifestation being the Abraham Accords in 2022. Beyond all plans, undoubtedly, geopolitical desires and ambitions have dominated the region.
Various actors think they can play a role in shaping a different Middle East, either from within or in its relations with the outside, completely eliminating competitors and monopolistically taking control of this geography. Narratives for realizing colorful and diverse fantasies are created.
But what these grand projects do not consider is that the Middle East and its people are themselves actors and are not merely pawns in the hands of strategic engineers. The Middle East’s reaction to all projects is a serious and worthy subject. Resistance against grand engineering projects is a stable, rooted, and established phenomenon in the region. At the same time, it must be said that each of the grand regional projects has left its specific effects on the region, and old wounds can be observed on the body of the Middle East, all of which stem from these fantasy-based projects. Western and Israeli projects have deeply affected the spirit and psyche of the Middle East.
The developments after October 7 display the destruction of these projects. The Turkish project to return to the Ottoman era, despite colorful narratives and coordinated preparations with extra-regional powers and, of course, opportunism from high-pressure moments in the region and exploitation of serious democratic shortcomings, cannot engineer a new Middle East. In short, perhaps reaching this conclusion is close to reality: human societies, including the Middle East, are not engineerable, and ultimately, people are the engineers of their own lives.
