Siloviki and Turkish Generals Building a Pan-Turanism ?

May 31st, 2008 by zen

In a nutshell, both Putin’s siloviki regime and Turkey’s Kemalist establishment are feeling the need for ideological rejuvenation  these days, in the former case to fill a vacuum in the public mind left by the collapse of Soviet Communism and in the latter to fend off a creeping Islamism that is undermining Turkish adherence to hallowed, secular, Kemalist traditions. The Neo-Eurasianism of Dugin is a frankly authoritarian, anti-western and quasi-fascist witch’s brew and synthesizing it with the Pan-Turkism of Turkey’s own nationalist fringe can only be unhelpful to Western interests and the prospects for liberalism and democracy in the region.

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Posted in extremists, foreign policy, geopolitics, ideas, intellectuals, meme, myth, networks, politics, primary loyalties, russia, soft power, Uncategorized | 3 comments

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  1. CKR:

    June 1st, 2008 at 1:12 pm

    Thanks for finding this, Mark. I’ve expanded on it here.

  2. Lexington Green:

    June 1st, 2008 at 2:33 pm

    Ideas can lie in the earth, seemingly forgotten, until the opportune moment arrives.

    The Russians are dying off so fast these days, no wonder there is desperate search for a new ideology to fill the spirotual void. Millions of them seem to beloieve there isd nothing to live for.

    In Turkey it seems like a lesser-of-two-evils situation. How much traction is a Pan-Turkic ideology likely to have on the target populations in the ‘stans?

  3. zen:

    June 2nd, 2008 at 4:22 pm

    Hi Lex,

    .

    Not sure. The newly post-Soviet stans were suspicious of Pan-Turkism and had been cut off culturally from Turkey for much of the Cold War during which time Russification, Sovietization and secularization were encouraged with varying degrees of success and resistance.