“I was just thinking — what better way to spend a Friday night than hearing Oya talk about Turkish politics?!”
That’s how the laughing Elizabethtown College professor, Dr. Oya Dursun-Ozkanca, began her lecture at the Bowers Writers House on March 12.
“Hey, here at Elizabethtown we pull out all the stops, man,” said director of the Writers House Jesse Waters. “We’re just 24-hour party people.”
Ozkanca, Professor of International Studies and also Director of International Studies Minor, stopped by over Zoom to discuss her second book published back in the tail end of 2019, “Turkey-West Relations: The Politics of Intra-alliance Opposition.”
Ozkanca is uniquely well equipped to throw her hat into the discussion on Turkey’s relationship with the West. She has studied the subject for years and served as a visiting fellow of research on Southeastern Europe at the London School of Economics in 2013. You can hear it in her name. The “c” in Ozkanca is pronounced like a “j” because she is Turkish. That’s why she normally just goes by “Dr. Oya” around campus. She is also an immigrant to West-as-you-can-get America.
However, things have changed since Ozkanca left Turkey.
She has changed.
Last year, she realized, “I’ve now spent more of my lifetime outside of Turkey than I have within Turkey.” One time, Ozkanca tried to do an interview for the Turkish language broadcast of Voice of America and was surprised when they told her that her Turkish was not up to snuff — she learned all her international relations jargon at Istanbul’s English-language Bosphorus University.
Turkey has changed, too.
President Tayyip Erdoğan has risen to the level of a sort-of quasi-autocrat and is taking the country on a path away from secularism (separation of, in this case, mosque and state). Dr. Oya Ozkanca considers secularism a positive “Western value” and says, “It makes me intensely sad to see the current state of affairs.”
Ozkanca also notes that the structure of the Turkish government gives their president a great deal of power to set foreign policy agenda. Erdoğan’s rise, then, partly explains growing tensions between Turkey and the other members of the NATO alliance. In her book, Ozkanca groups Turkey’s acts of boundary pushing toward the rest of NATO into different categories with different levels of offensiveness. At the mild end, there is cheap talk. At the extreme, there is Turkey blackmailing Europe with flooding the continent with Syrian refugees until it gets the concessions it wants.
Ozkanca points to Turkey installing a Russian-made defense system designed to hunt down the new American F-35 fighter jet as a deadly serious escalation.
All this posturing makes Ozkanca concerned in the short term. However, she does not suspect Turkey would ever leave NATO despite hearing murmurs of that possibility from inside her homeland. That is because Turkey knows deep down that leaving would not be in its best interests.
“I think Turkey would be shooting itself in the foot if it were to withdraw from NATO,” Ozkanca said. “No one in their right mind would leave NATO because it brings in such a diplomatic, economic, political leverage in its dealings with the outside world.”
The professor believes that Turkey would be foolish not to appreciate the certainty that comes with being in a formal international institution. “Turkey has to realize that with its Western allies it has a formal alliance and with China and Russia it doesn’t. They can’t trust them,” Ozkanca said.
So, if Turkey has no real intention to leave, why doesn’t the rest of NATO say to them, ‘Put up or shut up?’
Ozkanca explains, “They are saying that, probably, behind closed doors but it just doesn’t get reflected to the public.”
There is also the problem that NATO’s charter contains no formal mechanism for expelling a member. That narrows the organization’s leverage for keeping other states in line.
During this impasse, Ozkanca sends out a plea for Turkey to help mend the relationship.
“I grew up in Turkey. When we were growing up, we referred to ourselves as Europeans and we really associated ourselves with European culture and values, so I want to have good relations between Turkey and the West.”
Jesse Waters enjoyed Ozkanca’s lecture and points to the fact she held it at the Bowers Writers House as a wonderful example of how Etown’s liberal arts culture creates camaraderie between different disciplines and exposes students to new ideas.
Waters says, “Dr. Oya is one of the leading political scientists in her field in the world and she is coming to me, a poet who directs the Writers House.” He predicts that at many other colleges, the political science department would have held the lecture and that “If someone asked them ‘Did you think about involving other departments,’ they would think, ‘Well, why?’”
