Monday update: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced in Ankara that President Obama’s first trip to an Islamic country will be in April 2009 – to Turkey. Turkey last year mediated between Syria and Israel in talks suspended because of the Gaza offensive – and the US is keen to see those talks revived. Also, it seems to be Obama policy to show that there is more to the Islamic World then Arab oil. Ankara’s good relations with Tehran may also become an asset.

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 The two day meeting, Friday March 6th – Saturday March 7th, is a serious effort to dig deeper into the background of Turkey’s attempt to become the only Muslim-majority member-country of the European Union. Even a Dutch politician, Joost Lagendijk from the Green Left, a Member of the European Parliament Committee on Foreign Affairs, Chairman of the Delegation to the European Union – Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee, is one of the speakers at the last Panel on Saturday afternoon. We had a chance to talk to him on Saturday – but on this later.

The First Panel, on Friday Morning, after the opening remarks by Professor Alfred Stepan, Wallace Sayre Professor of Government, Columbia University, was handed over for Chairing to Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi, and our introductory posting   refers to him, rather then to the excellent presentations of the panel.

The Star of the panel was the discussant Professor Richard Bulliet – Professor of History at Columbia University, a Turk.   He is the author of “The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization” and a co-editor of The Encyclopedia of the Middle East.

The Panel included:

Professor Karen Barkey, Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, who spoke on “Empire and Religious Diversity:The Ottoman Model in Contemporary Perspective.” She has edited and researched topics of “After Empire: Multi-ethnic Societies and Nation-Building, the Soviet Union, and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires.”

Professor Sukru Hanioglu, a Turk, Chair of Near Eastern Studies at princeton University, the author of “Brief History of the Ottoman Empire, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902-1908,” and “Young Turks in Opposition.”   He spoke naturally on “The Historical Roots of Kemalism.”

and Anthropolgy Professor Nur Yalman, a Turk, from Harvard University, who studied Caste, Kinship, and Marriage in Sri Lanka, but also co-authored “A Passage to Peace Global Solutions from East and West.” His topic is titled: “The Three ways of Politics’ Revisited: Whither the People of the ‘Sublime State?”

The above panel looked at the span in time:   “FROM THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE TO THE TURKISH REPUBLIC.”

It was history, sociology, anthropology – it looked into women issues, into the place of religion – the question of a State controlling religious belief rather then the trite question of Religion and State. In an empire there are at any moment a multitude of relations between the State and religions. Professor Bulliet was at pain getting back to it –   that in the Turkish case there is a generality of Islam – it is really a de-centering   of differences in the Islam – this is at variance with the Arab world with their Shiia and Sunni conflicts. Turkey was also not colonized – this makes it different from the Arab and Iranian world. In effect Turkey managed to turn WWI into   victory from defeat. The feeling in Turkey is that what is important in Turkey – is what happens in the country itself – they are much less dependent on what goes on outside their territory.

The moderator, Rashid Khalidi, was the weakest link on that panel – he just kept showing that he does not belong there, and as we will soon show, he probably does not belong at Columbia University all together. He kept arguing that the notion “The Arabs and the Turks are separate entities is totally bogus!” Why was he really there?

Professor Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, but unlike Professor Edward Said who was a man of very large-scope culture, and even when his politics were attacked from various quarters, he was never discredited as a source of intelligent thought, the man that Columbia University appointed to the chair named after Edward Said is a flat one issue man – the Palestinian anti-Zionist music is all what he knows to play – and sources in the Middle East, rather then sources in Middle America, are the rock on which he was established. The case in front of us – the serious symposium on Turkish issues, is just one case that highlighted the inappropriate Columbia University appointment.

From - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_Khal… – and to be fair let us also note the Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, comment: This page is currently protected from editing until disputes have been resolved.
This protection is not an endorsement of the current version.

Khalidi was born in New York. Khalidi is the son of Ismail Khalidi and the nephew of Husayin al-Khalidi.[2] He is the father of Ismail Khalidi (writer). He grew up in New York City where his father, a Saudi citizen[2] of Palestinian origins who was born in Jerusalem,[3] worked for the United Nations.[2][4] Khalidi’s mother, a Lebanese-American Christian born in the United States, was an interior decorator. Khalidi attended the United Nations International School.[3]
In 1970, Khalidi received a B.A. from Yale University,[5] where he was a member of Wolf’s Head Society.[6] He then received a D. Phil. from Oxford University in 1974.[1] Between 1976 and 1983, Khalidi “was teaching full time as an Assistant Professor in the Political Studies and Public Administration Dept. at the American University of Beirut, published two books and several articles, and also was a research fellow at the independent Institute for Palestine Studies.”[7] He has also taught at the Lebanese University.[5]
Khalidi became politically active in Beirut, where he resided through the 1982 Lebanon War. “I was deeply involved in politics in Beirut” in the 1970s, he said in an interview.[8] Khalidi was cited in the media during this period, sometimes as an official with the Palestinian News Service, Wafa, or directly with the Palestinian Liberation Organization.[9] However, Khalidi has denied that he was a PLO spokesman,[10] stating that he “…often spoke to journalists in Beirut, who usually cited me without attribution as a well-informed Palestinian source. If some misidentified me at the time, I am not aware of it.”[7] Subsequent sources disagree on the nature or existence of Khalidi’s official relationship with the organization.[11]
Returning to America, Khalidi spent two years teaching at Columbia University before joining the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1987 where he spent eight years as a professor and director of both the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago.[12] During the Gulf War, while teaching at Chicago, Khalidi “emerged “as one of the most influential commentators from within Middle Eastern Studies.”[13] In 2003 he joined the faculty of Columbia University. He has also taught at Georgetown University.[citation needed]
Khalidi is married to Mona Khalidi, who is the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs and the Assistant Director of Graduate Studies of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.[14] He is a member of the National Advisory Committee of the U.S. Interreligious Committee for Peace in the Middle East, which describes itself as “a national organization of Jews, Christians and Muslims dedicated to dialogue, education and advocacy for peace based on the deepest teachings of the three religious traditions.”[15]
He is member of the Board of Sponsors of The Palestine–Israel Journal, a publication founded by Ziad AbuZayyad and Victor Cygielman, prominent Palestinian and Israeli journalists.[16]
He is founding trustee of The Center for Palestine Research and Studies.[17]
Academic work

Khalidi’s research covers primarily the history of the modern Middle East. He focuses on the countries of the southern and eastern Mediterranean, with an eye to the emergence of various national identities and the role played by external powers in their development. He also researches the impact of the press on forming new senses of community, the role of education in the construction of political identity, and in the way narratives have developed over the past centuries in the region.[1] Michael C. Hudson, director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown, describes Khalidi as “preeminent in his field.”[18] He served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in 1994. Khalidi is currently editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.[19]
Much of Khalidi’s scholarly work in the 1990s focused on the historical construction of nationalism in the Arab world. Drawing on the work of theorist Benedict Anderson who described nations as “imagined communities”, he does not posit primordial national identities, but clearly argues that these nations have legitimacy and rights. In Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997), he places the emergence of Palestinian national identity in the context of Ottoman and British colonialism as well as the early Zionist effort in the Levant. This book won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Prize as best book of 1997.[20] His dating of Palestinian national emergence to the early 20th century and his tracing of its contours provide a rejoinder to Israeli nationalist claims that Palestinians either do not exist, or had no collective claims prior to the 1948 creation of Israel.[citation needed] Nevertheless, Khalidi is also careful to focus on the late development, failings and internal divisions within the various elements of the Palestinian nationalist movement as well.[citation needed]
In Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (2004), Khalidi takes readers on a historical tour of Western intervention in the Middle East, and argues that these interventions continue to have a colonialist nature that is both morally unacceptable and likely to backfire.[citation needed]
Palestinian Identity
Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997), is probably Khalidi’s most influential book, and certainly the most widely cited. In Palestinian Identity, Khalidi demonstrates that a Palestinian national consciousness had it origins near the beginning of the twentieth century. This is not, however, the kind of simplistic reading that dates a nation’s origin to a point in time. Rather, Khalidi describes the Arab population of British Mandatory Palestine as having “overlapping identities,” with some or many expressing loyalties to villages, regions, a projected nation of Palestine, an alternative of inclusion in a Greater Syria, an Arab national project, as well as to Islam.[21] Nevertheless, his book was the first to demonstrate substantive Palestinian nationalism in the early Mandatory period. As Khalidi writes, “Local patriotism could not yet be described as nation-state nationalism.”[22]
Khalidi also demonstrates the active oppositon of the Arab press to Zionism in the 1880s.[23]

Further, I must add here that one of the most interesting comments I heard while sitting at lunch next to a Quebec-Canadian that lives now in Tokyo. She brought to my attention that Japan is very similar to Turkey because it had a transition from its military past leadership to a democratic system, but as Islam, in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic ethics’ tradition id imbued with ethical concepts, nothing of the kind exists in Japan where religion was not based on ethics – but the military was handling the situation by simple repression with power. She actually would welcome Japan learning from the Turkish experience in order to achieve a modicum of humanization in the Japanese system. i found this quite interesting and continued the thought by comparing Chinese Confucian thought to the Buddhist Japanese system. In effect, Confucius with clearly about getting the folks to bow to power – so, is here a difference that explains the real East from a West that in the old days started somewhere in India?

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The second panel on Friday dealt with: “Religion. Religious Parties, and Democracy.” It included Professor Stepan, Professor Statys Kalyvas of Yale University, and Myrjam Kunkler of Princeton U., as Discussant. The latter is author of “The Role of Religious Institutions in Democratic Transition Processe.”

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The Sunday morning session was about “The AKP Government and the Military,” and was again chaired by Professor Stepan. On his panel where Professor Umit Cizre of Bilkent University in Turkey – editor of “TheSecular and Islamic Politics in Turkey: The Making of Justice and Development Party,” and Ahmet Kuru – a postdoctoral Columbia University fellow who is the author of “Secularism and State Policies towards Religion – The US, France, and Turkey.”

AKP – Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – Justice and Development Party – is the Islamic Party of Tayyip Edogan, the former Mayor of Istanbul, Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey since 14 March 2003, his party came to power came to power in November 2002 and he is often credited as the head of a liberal party. However, the party’s liberalism seems selective. For instance, while the AKP’s constitutional amendments on the turban will further increase the rights of the Muslim majority in Turkey, explicit measures for the protection of non-Muslim minorities are still deficient, according to the European Commission. The AKP’s liberal credentials can also be questioned in the economic sphere. And this is now the background of the EU – Turkey difficulties.

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The Saturday afternoon Session was titled: “Politics of the EU, Constitution, and Democratization.” This session we will review a little more in depth as it is the real reason for the seminar and for the release of the eventual report as a book.

The Session was chaired by Professor Karen Barkey, and the Discussant was Professor Stepan; on the Panel were:

Mr. Joost Langedijk who addresses directly – “Turkey’s Membership to the EU: Perceptions and Processes;”

Professor Andrew Arato, the Dorothy Hirshon Professor of Political Theory at the New School for Social Research, and author of “Constitution Making under Occupation: The Politics of Imposed Revolution in Iraq, and Civil Society Constitution, and Legitimacy.” His title was “Legality and Legitimacy in the Making of a New Turkish Constitution;”

and Professor Ergun Ozubudun,   of the Bilkent University, Turkey, author of “Contemporary Turkish Politics: Challenges to Democratic Consolidation and co-editor of Ataturk: Founder of a Modern State.” His presentation had the title – “Turkish Democracy in constitutional Crisis.”

Joos Langedijk told me that he will leave the European Parliament, where he belongs to the Green Party, and move to Turkey in order to help the Turks prepare for a better chance to be accepted into the EU. With this information I was even more eager to hear what he had to say.

In his presentation he started from 2002 when an anti EU party, the AKP, took over, but then when in December 2004 the EU decided to start accession negotiations   with Turkey in October 2005, that party, surprisingly, actually turned out presenting a favorable and eager face to the proceedings, but it slowed down the speed of reforms. The background also includes that in France and the Netherlands, people did not understand what the EU treaty will do, voted against, and left Turkey with the feeling that they are not wanted. On the other hand, in 2004 Cyprus was let into the Union – and this was a mistake – an anti Turkey move that further turned Turkey away. A strange alliance developed between the European left and the Turkish Right – this alliance favored Turkey’s accession and Joos Langedijk’s Green Party is part of this alliance.

Joos described the Islamicist party as the “new kids on the bloc – from Anatolya – challenging the Istanbul and Ankara establishment. They looked at secularism as a new religion in Turkey – were religious Islamic – thought they were conservative liberal – but were unable to explain their view of liberalism. In 2008 there was support in the EU Parliament but the APT did not push for change on issues of limit to freedom of speech.Had they stayed secular it would have helped. In Morocco and Egypt there is much interest in what happens with Turkey Joos Langedijk concluded.

Ergun Ozbudun pointed out that the State is monolithic – pluralism is not reflected in the Islamic State. The development of a truly pluralistic State is not a constitutional question but is something rooted deeply in the society. The Ottoman Empire was a purely pluralistic society, with the Republic having lost first in the Armenian question, and then in other events. In the Empire Turks were 10-15% – now they decided to be the majority. Society continued to be pluralistic nevertheless, but the State was monolithic. Andrew Arato said previously that the Turkish People had the right to give themselves any Constitution they please and he did not seem to attribute importance to what the constitution says. The Joke went that it was TMSS – Turkish, Muslim, Sunni, Secular – whatever that meant. They were Muslim but wanted to behave like Ivy League – read drink alcohol etc. Today Turkey is behind East and Central Europe in the consolidation of Democracy – and this is an impediment for accession. Sure, the original Constitution has already 15 amendments, but it is probably hard to save. It was the military that introduced religious education to the schools – now one sees clearly the mistake this was.

Further the problem with the Kurdish identity. The problems here put Turkey back for years. Professor Nur Yalman said that it would make sense to have a Federal State and Professor Ergun Ozbudun adds that if you go to South-East Turkey, to a village – by law you are not supposed to speak Kurdish – but they do not understand you because nobody speaks anything else. Here the comment about India and Sri Lanka – two States that became independent 1948-49. While Ghandi insisted already in Bombay, in 1922 that when there will be a State it will have three languages – two National languages – Hindi and English and a third local language as appropriate to the differing States – this in a country where at the time of that meeting, in Bombay only 2% of the people spoke English or Hindi. When Independence came, Nehru kept the 1922 decision and there was internal peace on the language front. When Sri Lanka became independent, the Nationalists demanded there should be only one official language – the language of the majority – so they still fight today.

Joos Langedijk remarked about Turkey, that you do not make yourself liked by the EU by making yourself important in the region – what the EU wants to see is democracy and human rights. I asked if anyone thought that A Turkey with oil and gas pipelines could be an asset to the EU so it gets in easier? The answer was still that democracy and human rights come first. Joos continued by saying that some Germans, thinking of the energy diversification issue, pipelines, Nabuco etc., propose preferential treaties – but nobody is in the clear how this would work.