The True Turkish Believer.(World Affairs; Europe)(Recep Tayyip Erdogan)

Byline: Owen Matthews And Sami Kohen

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan just won't take no for an answer. In 2002 he and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power promising to get Turkey into the European Union. Under the banner of the EU's "Copenhagen criteria" for new members, the AKP made an impressive start: it abolished the death penalty, curbed the backroom political power of the military and eased restrictions on Kurdish language and culture. But instead of recognizing just how far Turkey had come, European leaders recoiled, rebuffing Erdogan and his country at virtually every turn. French President Nicolas Sarkozy says he opposes Turkish membership in the EU because it's "an Asian country," suggesting instead that maybe one day it could be part of a proposed Mediterranean Union. German Chancellor Angela Merkel warns that "Turkey's membership is going to constrain the EU." She offers "privileged partnership" instead of full membership.

Erdogan is undeterred. Instead of slowing down the pace of change, the AKP has announced its biggest and boldest reform package yet. Emboldened by a resounding victory in snap elections last summer, the party has embarked on a wholesale overhaul of the hard-wiring of the country's political system. Central to the new order is a redrawing of Turkey's 1981 Constitution designed to give more power to the people--including direct presidential elections--as well as introducing more freedom of speech and religion. In doing so, the AKP hopes to create a society that Europe simply cannot refuse--one that is moving ahead with a long-term strategy that looks calmly past the current crop of anti-Turkish European leaders. "Whatever they say, we will continue on our path," promises Foreign Minister Ali Babacan. "For us the important thing is that the negotiation process with Europe remains on track."

What is driving this? One top European diplomat who has worked closely with Erdogan during Turkey's negotiations with the EU says Turkey's prime minister "has a deep and personal commitment to bringing his country into Europe. He feels that that is his country's destiny." During his years in power Erdogan has developed a powerful narrative for Turkey as a "bridge between cultures," with both his country and himself playing key roles in "bringing religions and culture closer together to avoid a global clash of civilizations." It is a philosophy he expounded eloquently upon at a recent Madrid conference on the "Alliance of Civilizations," which he co-hosted with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis RodrA-guez Zapatero, and it is based on the assumption that Turkey cannot stand alone in glorious isolation.

There is also a more pragmatic rationale for looking to Europe. Turkey's growing harmonization with western business practices and regulations has brought a deluge of foreign investment--$20 billion last year--which has helped fuel GDP growth of close to 6 percent for the past five years and helped modernize Turkey's once creaky manufacturing and textile industries.

Still, if taken at face value, Erdogan's enthusiasm for Europe comes as a surprise: for most of their careers, Erdogan and his close ally Abdullah Gul, now president, shared with most Turkish Islamists a deep suspicion of Europe and Western values in general. Their political mentor, Necmettin Erbakan, frequently railed against the West for being ruled by "racist imperialism and Zionism." Erdogan himself, while mayor of Istanbul in the mid-1990s, sparked controversy when he compared democracy to a streetcar: "When you come to your stop, you get off."

But then reality intervened. In 1999 he was convicted of sedition after reciting an allegedly subversive Islamic poem at a political rally. He spent four months in jail, and by his own account, his spell in prison helped convince him that political Islam needed modernizing just as much as the Turkish state. The two, he came to understand, were locked in a vicious cycle. On one side, an ultraconservative military was using police-state methods to enforce a rigid secularism, which was at odds with the reality of Turkish society; on the other side were old-guard Islamists like Erbakan, whose blend of nationalism, religion and anti-Westernism was out of step with a modern, globalized world.