Which Turkey Will NATO Meet in Ankara?
Ankara and Turkey’s Place in NATO
When NATO’s heads of state and government gather in Ankara, they will be meeting a country that has been an important member of the Western alliance for more than seventy years. For Finland and Sweden, the summit will be only the second they attend as full members, following the prolonged accession process during which Turkey delayed the Nordic countries’ entry.
As host nation, Turkey will be surrounded by the diplomatic courtesy that characterizes international summits. Yet the image of Turkey presented on such an occasion risks becoming one-sided. Few member states have, over recent decades, raised as many questions about their relationship with the West as Turkey.
The fact that the summit is being held in the capital, Ankara, rather than in Istanbul, is itself symbolic. When Turkey last hosted a NATO summit, in 2004, the meeting took place in Istanbul—the historic metropolis on the Bosporus that, for many Europeans, still embodies Turkey’s past. Istanbul is the ancient Constantinople, the imperial capital linking Europe and Asia, whose historic center lies on the European shore of the Bosporus. Ankara represents something quite different. It became the capital of the republic that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk created from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.
Istanbul still bears the marks of the Ottoman and Islamic empires, but also of Byzantium—that is, the Eastern Roman Empire—and of the Greco-Roman Christian world. The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, under whose spiritual leadership the Orthodox Church of Finland also stands, still has its seat in Istanbul. The city is also home to Hagia Sophia, the church built as the center of Byzantine Christianity, later converted into a mosque after the Ottoman conquest, transformed into a museum under Atatürk, and reconverted into a mosque under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Few buildings illustrate more clearly the opposing forces that have shaped modern Turkey. The fact that part of the country—including its largest city—lies in Europe has long carried symbolic significance. Turkey has not only sought to serve as a bridge between Europe and Asia, but also to be regarded as part of Europe.
Hagia Sophia
Turkey joined NATO in 1952, alongside Greece. The simultaneous admission of these two historic rivals illustrates the alliance’s strategic logic during the early Cold War. For the United States and Western Europe, membership was above all about securing NATO’s southeastern flank against the Soviet Union. The Turkish Straits linking the Black Sea and the Mediterranean were of immense strategic importance, and Turkey shared a direct border with the Soviet Union.
Yet Turkey’s path into NATO was about more than geography. After the Second World War, the Turkish leadership also sought to demonstrate that the country belonged to the Western world. When the Korean War broke out, Turkey sent substantial forces to fight alongside the United Nations and the United States. The deployment became an important argument for NATO membership and was widely seen as proof of Turkey’s Western orientation.
The Republic’s Foundations and Kemalist Modernity
To understand this orientation, one must go back to the founding of the republic. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after the First World War, Anatolia faced the prospect of partition among several victorious powers. Under Atatürk’s leadership, the Turkish nationalist movement succeeded in defeating, among others, the Greek forces that had advanced deep into Anatolia. Out of this victory emerged the modern Republic of Turkey.
The new republic’s founding principle was encapsulated in the motto Hakimiyet kayıtsız şartsız milletindir—”Sovereignty belongs unconditionally to the nation.” The phrase expressed the fundamental shift in political legitimacy from dynasty and caliphate to the nation as the political subject. Much like the French Revolution’s principle of national sovereignty, it declared that ultimate political authority no longer derived from God, the dynasty, or the caliph, but from the nation itself.
Hakimiyet kayıtsız şartsız milletindir – Anıtkabir, Atatürk’s mausoleum
Atatürk became not only the founder of the republic but also its foremost symbolic source of legitimacy, above all through his leadership in the Turkish War of Independence and the victory over Greece. At the same time, his project was remarkably radical. The caliphate was abolished. Religious institutions were brought under state control. The reforms extended beyond the institutions of government to the language itself. The Arabic script was replaced with a Latin alphabet—including the letter ö—while thousands of words of Arabic and Persian origin were gradually replaced by Turkish equivalents.
For many, the reform weakened the connection to the Ottoman past, since younger generations could no longer readily read older texts and documents. Dress reforms were introduced, and religion’s place in public life was sharply curtailed. The state was to be modernized and secularized along European lines. In practice, this meant a Turkish version of the French principle of laïcité, according to which religion was not to govern the state but was instead to be subordinated to it.
The Europe that inspired Atatürk was not Christian Europe but rather secular and republican Europe. In many respects, his principal models were France and the French tradition of laïcité. Turkey was to become a modern nation-state in which religion would no longer play a political role.
The Kemalist State and the Order of Laïcité
This vision came to be defended by what has often been called the Kemalist elite. The military saw itself as the guardian of the republic, but its primary loyalty was to the Kemalist order rather than to the principle that political authority ultimately derives from the people. It was also in Turkey that the expression “the deep state” first acquired broad political significance. It referred above all to networks within the military, the security apparatus, and the state bureaucracy that were believed to safeguard the Kemalist order regardless of electoral outcomes.
The ceremonial square (Tören Meydanı) in front of Anıtkabir, visible in the background
The judiciary, and especially the Constitutional Court, played a similar role, defending the Kemalist order—and in particular the principle of laïcité—with the military standing in the background as its ultimate guarantor. Throughout the republic’s history, several religiously oriented political parties were banned, and the military intervened repeatedly whenever it considered the secular order to be under threat. For the Kemalist elite, laïcité was not merely about separating religion from politics, but about protecting the state from religious influence exercised through political parties.
Contrary to what many today associate with secularism, the Kemalist model did not entail a complete separation of religion and state. Through the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), the state not only supervised religious life but also standardized and channeled Sunni Muslim practice through centrally prepared sermons and an extensive administrative system overseeing the country’s mosques. Kemalist secularism was, in reality, founded on the state’s right to define religion’s place in society. Because the overwhelming majority of the population was Sunni Muslim, the state was able, through the Diyanet, to exert an influence over the public expression of religion that would have been far more difficult in a more religiously pluralistic society.
In this respect, modern Turkish history has been marked by a recurring tension between a state-shaped secular ideal and a society whose social fabric remained overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. Despite secularization, religion never disappeared from public life. The large-scale population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923 was carried out not on linguistic or national grounds, but primarily on the basis of religion. Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians were expelled to Greece, while Greek-speaking Muslims were transferred to Turkey. Earlier still, in what is now widely recognized as the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1917, the Young Turks—whose revolution and nationalism paved the way for Atatürk and the modern Turkish Republic—killed or expelled most of the country’s Christian Armenian population.
The new republic therefore emerged in a country whose population was overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, although substantial Kurdish and Alevi minorities stood outside the idealized national narrative. For most of the republic’s history, the Kemalist vision of a secular and Western-oriented Turkey served as the state’s principal narrative of legitimacy. Yet it always coexisted with alternative understandings of the nation’s identity—a tension that continues to shape Turkish politics today.
From Kemalism to Erdoğan: Turkey’s Changing Story of Legitimacy
As recently as 1997, the Islamist-oriented Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan was forced to resign under pressure from the military. For many conservative and religious Turks, this became yet another example of how the Kemalist elite limited the political influence of the popular majority. The events of 1997 thus helped fuel the political movement that would bring Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to power only a few years later.
The following year, Istanbul’s mayor, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was himself sentenced to prison and banned from political office after publicly reciting a poem that the courts deemed inflammatory and incompatible with the principles of the secular state. For many of his supporters, this transformed him into a symbol of how the Kemalist order used the state to suppress religiously inspired politics.
Despite its grip on the institutions of power, the Kemalist elite was unable to prevent Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) from winning the elections and forming a government in 2002. By then, the Kemalist narrative had already lost much of its appeal. Many voters viewed the secular elite as increasingly detached from the broader population, while economic problems and political instability further undermined confidence in the old system. Ironically, Turkey’s aspiration to join the European Union also contributed to weakening the political influence of the military and other unelected institutions.
When Erdoğan and the AKP came to power, they presented themselves as representatives of the groups that had long been excluded from the Kemalist establishment. Initially, Erdoğan portrayed himself as a reformer seeking to reconcile conservative Muslim values with democracy and economic modernization, rather than as an opponent of democracy or Europe. Between 2003 and 2014, he served as Prime Minister while power became increasingly concentrated in his own hands. When Erdoğan was elected President in 2014, authority gradually shifted to the presidency—first de facto and, following the constitutional referendum of 2017, also de jure.
The new presidential complex, Cumhurbaşkanlığı Külliyesi, inaugurated in the same year that Erdoğan assumed the presidency, became not only the seat of executive power but also a monument to the new political order taking shape under his rule. Originally, the complex had been intended to house the Prime Minister’s Office, since the old headquarters (Başbakanlık) was considered outdated and vulnerable to surveillance. But when Erdoğan decided to run for president and redefine the office itself, he decreed that the new complex would instead become the residence of the presidency. The sitting prime minister was moved into the much smaller former presidential residence, Çankaya Köşkü—a striking symbolic transfer of the center of political power in Turkey. Built in a neo-Ottoman style, the main building of the presidential complex consciously evokes the Ottoman imperial heritage rather than the palace architecture associated with the Western tradition of the modern state.
The main building of the Cumhurbaşkanlığı Külliyesi presidential complex in Ankara
Following the failed coup attempt of 2016, Erdoğan carried out sweeping purges within the military, the judiciary, and the state administration. The institutions that had long served as guardians of the Kemalist order gradually lost their independent position. At the same time, the concentration of power that had already emerged around Erdoğan gained constitutional legitimacy through the transition to a presidential system. Gradually, new elites also emerged whose careers, experiences, and loyalties had been shaped largely under Erdoğan’s rule.
For NATO, this represented more than a shift in Turkey’s domestic balance of power. A substantial part of the officer corps that had cultivated close ties with Western military structures over several decades disappeared. In its place arose a new generation of commanders whose professional experience had been shaped by the Turkey that emerged under Erdoğan.
NATO’s own doctrinal communication since 2022 also illustrates that the Alliance is more than a military organization—it is also sustained by a narrative of its own legitimacy. In its so-called institutional narrative, NATO is described as “a democratic, multinational alliance uniting across borders to guard, with courage and competence, against threats to our home.” This narrative does not function as operational doctrine but as an overarching framework of legitimacy. At the same time, in practice the emphasis has gradually shifted away from democratic values toward competence and functional capability. As a result, membership increasingly appears to depend more on capacity than on internal political identity, making Turkey’s continued place within the Alliance easier to understand from an institutional perspective. Yet the narrative through which Turkey understands its own role in the world has fundamentally changed.
Through his emphasis on the Ottoman heritage and his recurring ambition to speak on behalf of Muslim communities far beyond Turkey’s borders, Erdoğan has at times cultivated a symbolic role reminiscent of the leadership historically associated with the caliphate, even though he has never claimed to restore the institution itself. As a consequence, the community with which Turkey primarily identifies has also gradually changed. Whereas the Kemalist Republic defined itself chiefly as part of the Western project of modernization, Erdoğan’s Turkey increasingly presents itself as an independent civilizational actor with historical and cultural ties to the broader Muslim world.
The Beştepe Millet Mosque, located within the presidential complex in Ankara
This shift in self-understanding is also reflected in Turkey’s relationship with Israel. During the 1990s, Turkey and Israel developed close security and defense cooperation. Under Erdoğan, however, the Palestinian question has become an increasingly central element of Turkey’s foreign policy identity. Through its strong support for the Palestinian cause, Ankara has simultaneously reinforced its claim to act as a leading voice in the Muslim world. This development illustrates how Turkish foreign policy has gradually become less defined by Western alliance politics and more by the ambition to reclaim an independent regional and civilizational role.
This shift stands in sharp contrast to the orientation that long characterized the Turkish Republic. For decades, Turkey sought membership in the European Union. Many secularists in Europe viewed Turkey as proof that European identity ultimately rested on political principles rather than on religion or culture. Under Erdoğan, however, Turkey has gradually moved away from that self-image.
While Erdoğan has increasingly employed Ottoman and Sunni Muslim symbolism to strengthen Turkey’s influence throughout the Muslim world, the state has retained extensive control over religious life through the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). Under Erdoğan, the Diyanet has not only become one of Turkey’s largest state institutions but also an important instrument of Turkish soft power. Through mosques, religious education, and the deployment of imams, it operates far beyond Turkey’s borders, particularly in Europe, the Balkans, and Central Asia. This policy is often described as part of Turkey’s neo-Ottoman ambition to regain cultural and religious influence in territories that once belonged to the Ottoman Empire.
At the same time, the Turkish state has continued to restrict the international standing of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. At times, Ankara has even cooperated with Moscow in efforts to limit the Patriarchate’s international room for maneuver. Yet Turkey has not consistently sought to prevent the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from exercising his office as primus inter pares within the Orthodox Church, as became evident when Patriarch Bartholomew granted autocephaly (independence from the Moscow Patriarchate) to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in 2019. Nevertheless, the Turkish state still refuses to recognize the Patriarch’s ecumenical status in legal terms, officially regarding him only as the leader of Turkey’s small Greek Orthodox minority. In this way, pragmatic tolerance is combined with a consistent reluctance to grant an independent religious institution public authority.
St. George’s Church, seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople
Erdoğan’s policies have nonetheless brought about a clear transformation in the place of religion in public life. Restrictions on religious dress, including the wearing of headscarves in universities and the public administration, have gradually been abolished, while religious symbols have become far more visible in public life. Whereas the Kemalist model of laïcité sought to create a public sphere free from religious expression, Erdoğan has increasingly accepted—and even encouraged—the public visibility of religion.
Yet Erdoğan’s change of course does not mean that the state has relinquished control over religion. On the contrary, the Diyanet has become an ever more important instrument through which the state shapes religious identity. What has changed, therefore, is not the state’s control over religion, but the narrative through which that control is legitimized.
The West as a Mirror: Legitimacy, Alliance, and Narrative
Turkey’s conduct during Finland’s and Sweden’s accession to NATO illustrated this transformation. The dispute was not merely about Kurdish organizations, American arms deliveries, or other concrete security issues. It also became a way for Ankara to demonstrate that Turkey no longer regarded itself as a candidate seeking acceptance into the West, but as an actor capable of setting its own conditions for the Alliance.
Paradoxically, there are certain similarities between Erdoğan’s Turkey and Donald Trump’s America. Despite their profound differences, both movements are partly built on the belief that the nation has been betrayed by a cosmopolitan elite and that its strength, self-confidence, and historical identity must be restored. Whereas Atatürk’s Turkey derived its legitimacy from modernization, Erdoğan’s Turkey increasingly derives its legitimacy from restoration.
When NATO gathers in Ankara, the Alliance therefore convenes in a city that symbolizes a narrative no longer fully aligned with Turkey’s present-day reality. Turkey remains an indispensable strategic member of NATO. Yet it is no longer the secular and Western-oriented Turkey that joined the Alliance during the Cold War.
Turkey thus illustrates a broader paradox within the contemporary West’s understanding of itself. The same political forces that warn that Europe’s cultural identity is being weakened by immigration have rarely regarded Erdoğan’s increasingly religiously oriented Turkey as presenting a comparable challenge, even though Turkey’s Sunni Muslim influence—exercised through the Diyanet—also extends into Europe. This may partly be explained by Turkey’s strategic importance and by the fact that NATO has increasingly come to be viewed as an alliance founded on capability rather than on shared values.
There is, however, another possible explanation. To many nationalists, Erdoğan’s emphasis on religion, national sovereignty, and cultural continuity appears less alien than the secularization and post-national self-understanding often associated with the liberal American elite and parts of Western Europe.
The most important question, however, is not whether Turkey still belongs to the West. Rather, it concerns which narrative now legitimizes the Turkish state. For most of the republic’s history, its institutions rested upon the Kemalist narrative of national liberation, modernization, and secularization. In today’s Turkey, that narrative competes with alternative ways of understanding the nation’s identity and historical mission.