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How Turkey’s Islamists Fell out of love with Iran: The Near Future of Turkish-Iranian Relations

After the 1979 revolution, Iran’s Islamist regime emerged as the clear anti-thesis of a secular Turkey and two countries’ relationship was only sustained by political Islamists on both sides. According to Akin Unver, this 1979-2010 Islamist connection is also being reversed by the sectarian faultlines unearthed by the Arab Spring. Iran’s rapid fall from grace with Turkish Islamists is one of the most important recent structural shifts in the Middle East, Unver suggests. Such a break is far from marginal and yields several important points for consideration.

Date & Time

Tuesday
Apr. 23, 2013
3:00pm – 4:00pm ET

Location

6th Floor, Woodrow Wilson Center
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Overview

Turkish-Iranian relations have long been characterized by ideological polarity. Ever since the Ottoman expansion into the Levant in the early sixteenth century and the Safavid Empire’s acceptance of Shiism as the official imperial religion, relations between these two empires have been defined along the prime schism in Islam. From 1520 to 1920s this schism defined Ottoman-Safavid relations. Akin Unver argues that it was only during the modernist-revolutionary period of Ataturk and Shah Pahlavi that Iran and Turkey established good relations on secular-modernist lines, which defined the course of the relationship until the Islamic Revolution.

After the 1979 revolution, Iran’s Islamist regime emerged as the clear anti-thesis of a secular Turkey and two countries’ relationship was only sustained by political Islamists on both sides.  According to Unver, this 1979-2010 Islamist connection is also being reversed by the sectarian faultlines unearthed by the Arab Spring. Iran’s rapid fall from grace with Turkish Islamists is one of the most important recent structural shifts in the Middle East, Unver suggests. Such a break is far from marginal and yields several important points for consideration.

This shift, Unver argues, validates the Ataturk- Pahlavi example, which shows that détente in Turkish-Iranian relations can only happen when both countries are ruled by a secular-modernist regime. If either country’s ruling government has an Islamist identity, relations can only improve to the extent dictated by the Ottoman-Safavid divide. If Islamism dictates both countries’ policies, then strategic conflict is inevitable, and the Sunni-Shiite historical memories and symbolism related to Karbala are evoked by both sides.

Hamid Akin Unver is a Faculty Fellow of Foreign Affairs with the Department of International Relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, Turkey. Prior, he was the Ertegun Fellow at the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University. Unver has also been a Jean-Monnet joint post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan’s Center for European Studies and the Center for the Middle East and North African Studies, during which he published the widely cited and the first English-language article on the topic: Turkey’s deep-state and the Ergenekon conundrum. Unver has assumed teaching positions at the University of Essex and Sabanci University, as well as policy research positions with the European Union Secretariat-General, the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Eurasian Center for Strategic Studies, and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He holds a PhD in international relations from University of Essex, UK, where his dissertation 'Defining Turkey's Kurdish Question' has won the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) 2010 Malcolm H. Kerr award for best dissertation in social sciences.

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Speaker

Hamid Akin Unver

Faculty Fellow of Foreign Affairs, Department of International Relations, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey
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Hosted By

Global Europe Program

The Global Europe Program addresses vital issues affecting the European continent, US-European relations, and Europe’s ties with the rest of the world. We investigate European approaches to critical global issues: digital transformation, climate, migration, global governance. We also examine Europe’s relations with Russia and Eurasia, China and the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa. Our program activities cover a wide range of topics, from the role of NATO, the European Union and the OSCE to European energy security, trade disputes, challenges to democracy, and counter-terrorism. The Global Europe Program’s staff, scholars-in-residence, and Global Fellows participate in seminars, policy study groups, and international conferences to provide analytical recommendations to policy makers and the media.  Read more

Middle East Program

The Wilson Center’s Middle East Program serves as a crucial resource for the policymaking community and beyond, providing analyses and research that helps inform US foreign policymaking, stimulates public debate, and expands knowledge about issues in the wider Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.  Read more

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