What Is Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu's Ideology?

In the extraordinary congress of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) last week, Professor Ahmet Davutoğlu, the former foreign minister of Turkey, was elected to the party chairmanship. And Tayyip Erdoğan, recently elected to the presidency by popular vote, appointed him as prime minister to take his place. Davutoğlu was elected to party chairmanship with near unanimity, not in a race with other candidates for the post, but on the indication of Erdoğan following a so-called tendency survey he conducted among the ranks.

The nature of Erdoğan's tendency surveys was best described by Dengir Fırat, a founding member and the former vice chairman of the AKP: “Party organs, provincial heads and deputies are conferred with, just for the sake of formality. ... Those conferred with submit their choices in closed envelopes, and the results are never announced. In reality, Erdoğan decides on his own.” According to the AKP's first foreign minister, Yaşar Yakış -- another founding member and former vice chairman of the party -- the AKP functions like an African clan. The chief, considered a successful leader by the clan, makes all the decisions himself.
It is quite clear how Davutoğlu assumed the posts of the AKP's new party chief and Turkey's new prime minister. There is, however, much debate about whether he will be a puppet of Erdoğan and about his political ideology, which will direct his policies. Behlül Özkan, an academic and former student who attended his lectures, has studied Davutoğlu's writings between 1990 and 2000, including his opus magnum “Strategic Depth” book, concludes that Davutoğlu is not a neo-Ottomanist, but a pan-Islamist who mixes authoritarian expansionist thinking borrowed from the West with Islamism (see “Turkey's Imperial Fantasy,” The New York Times, Aug. 28, 2014).
Özkan's study can surely shed light on Davutoğlu's ideological leanings during his academic career as a professor of international relations. Özkan's conclusions are not, however, at all convincing as to the nature of the ideology that has characterized Davutoğlu's policies during his political career, first as chief foreign policy advisor to the prime minister between 2002 and 2009 and as foreign minister since then. Politicians, like intellectuals, surely espouse different ideas at different periods. In this age of rapid social change it is difficult to find those whose thinking remains unchanged over time.
I believe there have been differences in Davutoğlu's mindset not only during his academic career and after, but also in respect to the policies he pursued before and after the Arab Spring. Richard Falk, a distinguished American scholar of international relations, characterizes Davutoğlu's policies as mainly “pragmatic” with a “zero problems with peoples” policy replacing “zero problems with neighbors” in the wake of the Arab Spring (Al Jazeera Turk, Aug. 24, 2014). Graham E. Fuller, a distinguished American expert on Turkey and the Middle East, characterizes Davutoğlu's policies as “realistic” in their main orientation, while pointing to the fact that the Syrian crisis has proved to be the “graveyard” of his “zero problems with neighbors” paradigm (see “Turkey and the Arab Spring, Leadership in the Middle East,” Bozorg Press, 2014).

The foreign policies pursued by the Erdoğan-Davutoğlu team fit neither the neo-Ottoman, pan-Islamist, nor Sunni sectarian labels. It is difficult to find an ideological label for a kind of policy that led to the start of accession negotiations with the European Union, claimed to have a “model partnership” with the United States, was once rewarded by the Israel lobby in the US, once led to a close friendship between Erdoğan and the tyrant Bashar al-Assad, recommended a secular regime for Egypt, and feels best at home in Tehran.
The policies of the Erdoğan-Davutoğlu team both at home and abroad are marked more by pragmatism, populism and opportunism than any principle or ideology, and are directed towards attaining political power and preserving it. If one needs to assign these policies an ideological character, the label that fits best would be Islamic Kemalism or religious nationalism.

ŞAHİN ALPAY (Cihan/Today's Zaman)