Mustafa Akyol writes: As any Turkey watcher would easily confirm, hostility to the West has increasingly marked the rhetoric of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his ruling Justice and Development (AKP) and pro-government media in the past two years. Especially since the Gezi Park protests in June 2013, the narrative of Erdogan and his entourage has revolved around Western “conspiracies” and a “national will” that is bravely fighting them.

Yet for those familiar with the AKP’s 14-year history, this may have come as a surprising turn. When the AKP was created in 2001, hostility to the West was not something with which it identified itself. On the contrary, party founders claimed to have disowned the Islamist, anti-Western “National View” tradition from which they came. Likewise, in the first years after the AKP came to power in 2002, Westernization (i.e., integration with the European Union) was the party’s prime objective. Back then, Europe was the source not of treacherous conspiracies that had to be thwarted, but of democratic criteria that had to be embraced.

Not surprisingly, the fiercest opposition to the AKP during that period from 2002 to 2010 was mounted by the anti-Western breed of Turkish secularists, known as neonationalists. This quarter — whose slogan is “Neither the US nor the EU, but a fully independent Turkey” — accused Erdogan’s government of “selling Turkey out to imperialism.” In 2007, one of Turkey’s best-selling books was nonsense titled “Moses’ Children,” which declared Erdogan to be a “crypto-Jew” colluding with the Elders of Zion. In the same era, the argument that Turkey should move closer to Russia instead of the EU was promoted by neonationalist generals, who would be implicated in the alleged Ergenekon coup plot to overthrow the AKP. [Continue reading…]

AFP reports: They have been mocked for looking like extras from a low-budget historical drama and criticised for having only the most tenuous connection with reality.

But the 16 costumed warriors included by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the honour guard for visiting dignitaries and representing various Turkic empires going back over two millennia serve a serious purpose.

Commentators say Erdogan wants to impress on his own public, and outsiders, that Turkey is a great power with a heritage that goes well beyond the modern republic founded in 1923 to the Ottoman and earlier great empires.

“The president has been mobilising these elements of the past,” said Ilter Turan, professor of political science at Istanbul Bilgi University, pointing to a plan by Erdogan to make Ottoman Turkish language lessons compulsory in schools.

“This symbolism appears part of this package,” he told AFP.

The figures represent the 16 purported states of Turkic history from the Xiongnu confederation in today’s Mongolia in the 2nd century BC to the Ottoman empire, taking in the Mughal empire, Timurid empire and a host of lesser-known states along the way.

The problem is that such an idea of simple historical continuity, linking states from the early days of nomadic Turkic peoples in southern Siberia to their migration into Anatolia and Europe, has never been widely accepted. [Continue reading…]