Turkey as a Model for the Mediterranean? A Historical Perspective on European Discourses

This paper critically engages with the discourse on “Turkey as a model country” for the Muslim world which became popular in Europe and the West after 9/11 and the Iraq War and later during the Arab uprisings. It argues that this discourse was not an ad hoc formulation developed in response to the imminent geopolitical challenges faced by Europe and the West, but that it is embedded in deeper legacies of colonialism and neo-orientalism produced in Europe’s own history with the Mediterranean. It demonstrates this conceptual interlinkage by focusing on how the abolition of the Caliphate by the Turkish Republic in 1924, a key secularising reform of the young Republic, was received in France and Britain, by conducting a discourse analysis of the coverage of the event in the French and British press. The analysis shows the resilience of colonial and neo-orientalist assumptions on the relationship between Islam and democracy over time, and warns against their effects on the (re)inscription of a cultural hierarchy between Europe and the Islamic world as well as on the trajectory of democracy beyond Europe.