Obama's Turkish Partners.(International Edition; POINT OF VIEW)(Barack Obama)

Byline: Mustafa Akyol; Akyol is a columnist for Istanbul-based Hurriyet Daily News & Economic Review.

A democratic Turkey that has respect in Muslim capitals is exactly what the West needs.

For years Ankara's foreign policy was fixated on a few narrow topics--how to handle the Greeks, the Kurds and Armenians--and Turkish policymakers seemed unable to solve even these chronic problems, let alone the problems of others. But these days Turkey has tackled such regional concerns with a new gusto--making the first real headway on the Cyprus issue in decades, for instance--while playing a far larger role in global affairs. In May Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government mediated indirect peace talks between Syrian and Israeli officials in Istanbul. The talks are now ongoing, and further meetings have reportedly been scheduled. Erdogan also recently stepped forward to offer help to U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to deal with Iran, which Turkey's prime minister and many others expect to be Obama's biggest foreign-policy challenge. On November 11 Erdogan told The New York Times his government was willing to be the mediator between the new U.S. administration and Tehran. "We are the only capital that is trusted by both sides," he reiterated later in Washington. "We are the ideal negotiator."

This surge of interest in becoming something of a global peacemaker is in part the result of the ongoing process of Turkish democratization. The nation's old elite consisted of the more isolationist Kemalists, the dedicated followers of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who established a republic without democracy in 1923 to westernize and secularize the nation. For many decades to come, society remained divided between the dominant Kemalist center and the more traditional periphery it kept under its thumb. But things fundamentally changed after the election victories of Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002 and 2007. The "other Turkey" was now out of the periphery and into power, and while it proved to be more religious than the old elite, it also proved to be more pro-Western, and more committed to the European Union accession bid than its growingly xenophobic secular rivals.

This was not simply a convenient tactic, as some have argued. Turkey's conservative Muslims had been undergoing a silent reformation since the 1980s, as evidenced by the country's growing "Islamic bourgeoisie," which sees its future in global markets, not Sharia courts. Ideas about the compatibility of Islam and liberal democracy flourished, as recently evidenced by headscarved women rallying in the streets for civil liberties for all.

Meanwhile, Ahmet Davutoglu, an erudite scholar who became Erdogan's chief adviser, outlined a new foreign-policy vision. Turkey had unwisely denied its cultural links ...