Erdogan Looks West
Given Ankara’s misadventures in the Middle East, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s best option to fulfill his vision of a democratic Turkey is to pivot to the West.
The little-known Turkish philosopher Celal Yaliniz, “Bearded Celal” to those who knew him, once likened Turkey’s Western-oriented intellectuals to “members of a ship’s crew who are running toward the west as their ship traveled east.”
Yaliniz, the son of an Ottoman naval commander, was a graduate of the highly Westernized Galatasaray Lycée in Istanbul, from which the famous football team also hails. He and his protégés among Turkey’s intellectual elite, including Nazim Hikmet, Haldun Taner, Hıfzı Veldet Velidedeoglu, Melih Cevdet Anday and Orhan Veli, were no enemies of the West.
