TURKEY IN THE EYES OF THE ARABIAN GULF MONARCHIES: DISCUSSING THE IMAGE OF TURKEY THROUGH THREE GULF NEWS AGENCIES.

Abstract

BRIEF INTRODUCTION ABOUT THE TOPIC The year 1979 signed a breaking point in the balance between the Middle Eastern countries. Ending the so called “twin-pillar policies” implemented by the United States, the Islamic revolution in Iran divided the Muslim world along two paths: on one hand, the Sunni community governing around the Gulf area, above all Saudi Arabia; on the other hand, the rising Iranian Shia elite contrasted the previous Sunni hegemony. Due to this break Iran and Saudi Arabia, which were previously main partners of the US and major regional powers of the Middle East, became rival on the base of this renewed scenario. While Iran has been targeted as “undesirable state” from the majority of the international community since the early 1980s (to confirm it, I mention the Iran-Iraq war where both US, USSR and other Arab nations supported Saddam Hussein during the eight-year conflict), Saudi Arabia, followed by the Arab Gulf monarchies, strength his role in the region remaining a solid stronghold for the US policies. Meanwhile, Turkey was dealing with an unstable political framework, especially during the three decades post-WWII, characterized by several coup d’états (respectively in 1960 and 1980), a harmful relation between the army and the political class, preventing the consolidation of a proper democratic system, and between secularism and Islamic values. Nonetheless, throughout the 1980s under the Ozal government, Turkey went through a phase of structural reforms, which modernized the society and gave the ground for further economic changes in the upcoming decades. Going back to the Turkish socio-political context, it has been characterized by a radical confrontation between a nationalist and secular view of the State proposed by the military and Kemalist establishment, that played a central role at least up to the 1990s, and the rising pressure coming from the Islamist section of the society, which attempted several times to express its values and stances inside the political arena. Among all, since the foundation of the Turkish republic in 1923 the Sunnis have been the main object of both secularists and Islamists: they were central in the construction of the Turkish national identity in the eyes of the Kemalist and as far as they are Muslim every Islamic party referred its political discourse to them. As already mentioned, still in the 1980s, Turkey dealt with a phase of structural economic reforms which opened the way to the Turkish globalization. In accordance with Oktem (2011), the Ozal government implemented a series of free market policies revolutionizing not merely the production and consumption of all goods and services, but the popular culture, the lifestyle and the worldview as well. Despite the 1990s showed a new wave of instability and the third coup d’états in 1997, so called post-modern, the economic path started a decade earlier did not change, offering a fertile background to the upcoming reforms of the 2000s. Indeed, since the affirmation of the Justice and Development Party, AKP, in the political election happened on November 3rd, 2002, this new major Turkish party developed a mixed policy composed by neo-liberal aims and followed by a strong Islamic rhetoric, namely focused on the Sunni community. Economically, the Arab Gulf monarchies carried out similar structural reforms. Supported by huge amount of revenues coming from the oil trades, they developed profitable financial, banking and infrastructure sectors, bringing as a consequence the will to spread their economic system around the Middle East throughout the so called Dubai consensus. Due to the similarities between these Middle Eastern actors, it might guessed and investigated if and to what extent the US partnership with both Arab monarchies and Turkey is one of the key reason of the implementation of such a political economy.