Is Turkey's Constitutional Referendum Good News for Bulgaria?

The quick answer is: probably not so much even though it is too soon to tell. Many Western leaders – including Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov – have hailed the results from Sunday's constitutional referendum in Turkey and have congratulated Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

After months of bitter debate, Erdogan's Justice and Development Party has gotten 58% vs. 42% of the Turks to vote in support of its project for constitutional reform – including measures to curtail the independence of the military and the top judicial institutions – which are known as the bastions of secularism in Turkey; i.e. the revered heritage of the father of the Turkish nation, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk that went largely unchallenged for decades.

On the surface making greater strides towards a full-fledged liberal democracy in any country – such as ensuring civilian control over the military – cannot be a bad thing. What is more, the Turkish voters probably know what they want for their country better than anybody else. Yet, in the long run the results of the Turkish constitutional referendum might just be making Turkey more unpredictable – and in a dangerous kind of way – especially for neighboring countries such as Bulgaria.

The approved reforms are seen by those opposing them as paving the way for introducing a greater role of Islam and Islamist policies – that is, of religion - in the government and public life. These fears are probably justified. What is unclear is how far this "Islamization" will go: is it going to be just a gesture of respect for nice Muslim values, or is it going to mean flexing some serious neo-Ottoman muscle both at home and abroad?

Turkey's quest to join the European Union, which began more than half a century ago, has been crucial for the justification of the constitutional changes domestically and internationally. Turkey's government has argued the reforms in question are needed to bring the country closer to EU membership; EU leaders and institutions have seen the outcome of the referendum as turning Turkey into a "better candidate", in the words of EU Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fuele.

The jubilant messages and rhetoric of both the EU and the Turkish Cabinet about the referendum are disturbing bogus and hypocritical. By this point, it is largely clear to both sides that Turkey most likely will not join the EU – and that it does not really want and need to do so.

Turkey is just too big and too powerful to be "admitted" to a supranational entity by former great powers whose relative weight in international affairs is declining and by nations such Estonia, Malta, or Portugal. It is not a Bulgaria, it is too mighty to "digest". In this sense, admitting Turkey will be basically the same as admitting Russia. Sheer size does matter, especially with Turkey's population and economy growing rapidly unlike those of the EU, soon to reach the point when it will be okay to ask who will be admitting whom.

Even though the European political spectrum is divided – with the Socialists in general arguing in favor of Turkey's accession – it is clear to many factors in the EU that such a step would not only strain some existing or imagined "European identity" with the need to "redefine" it, but it will actually provide a new powerhouse – or a "regional superpower", to use the clich? that sprang up long ago – with too much influence over the fate of all of Europe. It will be like having a couple of lions, and several zebras and suricat inviting a young elephant to live in their zoo, and hoping that it won't trample on them too much as it grows even larger.

Those who believe Islam is an issue for Turkey's EU accession are largely wrong. Turkey is simply too big and too much on the rise to be admitted, an accelerating locomotive on the global economic and diplomatic track. Think of the last time the EU admitted a relatively large country. Poland! This should immediately bring happy memories of the adamant demands the emboldened Poles kept (and keep) making to the EU 15 (i.e. Western Europe) even before they were even inside the club! Double, or better, triple and quadriple that, and you will get Turkey in the EU.

For a number of reasons, the Turkish EU accession negotiation inertia is allowed to continue – not the least because of some genuine believers in Europe that Turkey might one day become a 100% Western European style democracy, peace-loving and satisfied with a modest place in Europe instead of seeking vigorously a "place under the sun" for itself.

Such a scenario is also possible, no body can know the future. However, if one looks at why Erdogan's ruling party is keeping up with its "EU accession" reforms, it is not hard to realize what can go wrong.

The EU talks provide the so far moderate Islamists, whose party was nearly banned twice in the last few years for jeopardizing secularism in the country, with the perfect justification for overcoming one after another the institutional factors which guard Ataturk's secularism with any means, including undemocratic ones, with military coups as the last resort. (By the way, the question that hasn't been mentioned by analysts commenting on the referendum is whether the Turkish military could reacted with a new coup as it has done several times in the past.)

One should not forget that Turkey is also a Middle Eastern state. Is it possible that the lurking religious fundamentalism takes root there thanks to an optimistic reform dynamic spurred by the EU accession goal? After all, a number of Middle Eastern countries have seen a liberal push for democratic transition transform the principle "one man, one vote" into "one man, one vote, one time..."

One nice day both Turkey and Europe might wake up and see the former secular elite out of the picture in Ankara, and a religion-inspired regime in its place. Once again, as with the size-matters argument mentioned above, it is very crucial to emphasize that Islam in itself poses no issue – the issue how secular or how religion-dominated a political regime actually is. This goes for democratic regimes as well – as the world largely had the chance to witness in the case of the Bush Administration in the USA.

With all that said – what would the scenario of a more religiously fundamentalist Turkey mean for Bulgaria? It would probably sound like bad news. For the past almost 100 years Bulgaria lived alongside a secularizing Turkish regime. It has been rather aggressive at times, and while developing a superb military capacity, it has been very assertive with respect to the modern Turkish nation and minority issues (not to forget the Kurdish question).

The 1980s were especially troublesome in that respect with an illegal Turkish group encouraged or formed by the Turkish intelligence services carrying out a few deadly attacks in Bulgaria at about the same time the Bulgarian communist party regime came up with its idiotic and humiliating campaign to assimilate Muslims by changing their names – the so called "Regeneration" or "Revival Process" - in order to invent an internal enemy.

"While" is an important word here because I don't think either development caused the other one; they were probably generated at the the same time by equally destructive factors; but after emerging, these two developments did reinforce one another.

This is when the tensions on the Bulgarian-Turkish border reached their peak since the Cuban Missile Crisis; of course, up until 1989-91, this was a Cold War border, and Bulgaria as a satellite "enjoyed" the Soviet security blanket.

But the point is that since its establishment in the 1920s the secularist Turkish regime has been defending assertively – with or without any need for that – the rights of ethnic Turks and of Muslims in general in Bulgaria, seeing them as part of the modern Turkish nation.

The Justice and Development Party, however, appears to be viewing the whole matter differently – increasingly from neo-Ottoman positions. This means building upon both the cohesiveness of the Turkish nation and culture and on Islam as a popular religion, together with military and economic power, in order to seek to restore Turkey's influence in the former expanse of the Ottoman Empire as a sphere of influence and who knows what more.

If Erdogan's regime ever become more outrightly Islamist – or, again, the better term is religiously fundamentalist – which is not unlikely – it will be a more threatening factor to its neighbors than an aggressive secular militarized Turkish regime ever was. It is probably always possible to reason with secularists and it is probably never possible to do that with fundamentalists.

Interestingly, the high point of Bulgarian-Turkish relations in the past few decades was probably the late 1990s when Bulgarian Prime Minister Ivan Kostov and his Turkish counterpart Mesul Yilmaz have developed a close personal friendship. This was the time when Kostov spoke before thousands of Bulgarian Turkish expats in Bursa who fled the Revival Process, apologizing for the injustice done to them by the Bulgarian state and even telling them he loved them. It was a rather weird though a moving picture.

With too many dark scenarios already mentioned here, it is crucial to conclude by saying that Turkey appears to be a "brave new world" and that the Turkish nation is clearly wise enough to make its own best choices in order to ensure stability, peace, and prosperity not just domestically but in the several geopolitical regions that it bridges.

Three-fifths of the Turkish voters have said "no" to the constant military watch over the country's democracy, while two fifths have expressed their caution with respect to having too much religion in political and public life. While many analysts from around the world have been terming this "dangerous polarization", this difference of opinion reflects the long-standing debate in the Turkish society about secularism and religion that may help it find the best balance between the different sets of values.