The Long Shadow of Ostpolitik: How Historical Memory of the Cold War Shapes the SPD’s Russia Strategy

Leonid Brezhnev is welcomed by Helmut Schmidt in Bonn, 1981.

As the fighting on the frontlines at the edge of East Ukraine has drifted into a brutal stalemate, the regular renewal by the EU of sanctions imposed on Russian state institutions and economic sectors in the summer of 2014 in response to the seizure of Ukrainian territory by the Putin regime has become a matter of routine. Occasionally moments of tension around flashpoints such as the Sea of Azov, where Ukrainian naval vessels were seized and twenty four sailors taken prisoner by the Russian Navy in November 2018, occasionally grip the headlines in Ukrainian, Russian and European media for a few days before receding swiftly again into the background. Over time, other serious geopolitical crises such as the Syrian War have opened up opportunities for a Russian state leadership trying to rollback this onerous sanctions regime to engage with European governments desperate to foster stability around the collective borders of the EU. With Vladimir Putin asserting that he will leave office by 2024 at the latest, emerging tensions over his succession within Russia’s state elite as well as growing social discontent among the wider Russian population have also opened up debate within EU member states about how far renewed engagement with Russia could help guide it towards a reform process that could promote the rule of law and help de-escalate regional tensions. 

For Angela Merkel and her coalition partners in the SPD, a renewed focus on dialogue with the Russian state has increasingly shaped diplomatic strategy towards the EU’s Eastern borders five years after the Putin regime coordinated the annexation of Crimea and escalated to full conventional warfare against the Ukrainian army in Ukraine’s Eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. The necessity to sustain the EU’s credibility as a global actor coupled with fears of Russian expansionism among its East European member states make a softening of EU policy anytime soon extremely unlikely. By contrast, reversing the removal of Russian delegates in response to the crisis of 2014 from the Parliamentary Assembly for the Council of Europe, crucial to oversight of the European Court of Human Rights and wider attempts to secure the rule of law across Europe, has for Germany and other key EU member states become a means through which to reengage with the Russian state.

It is a move that has elicited a furious walkout from PACE by Ukrainian, Polish, Lithuanian and other East European delegations over what they considered to be an act of appeasement for which the payment of substantial contributions owed to the Council seems to be the only concession Russia has had to make. Despite these ferocious protests, the German and other European governments hoping to reengage with Russia without affecting the EU sanctions regime have systematically removed all obstructions to the return of the Russian delegation. While concerns over the financial health of the Council of Europe as well as access to the ECHR for Russian citizens did affect these calculations in Berlin and other EU capitals, the removal of PACE sanctions is an attempt to put relations with Russia on a less hostile footing without incurring the much greater wrath from a Ukrainian ally and East European member states of the EU that would flow from any move to loosen the EU’s economic sanctions regime.  

In the case of the CDU/CSU, business opportunities for German manufacturers in Russian regions as well as the North Stream 2 gas pipeline have dampened what are still substantial suspicions over the extent to which such engagement can effectively achieve Germany’s strategic goals. For the SPD, however, the possibility of renewed engagement with Russia strikes a much deeper emotional chord. As the reluctant junior partner of the CDU/CSU, the SPD has jealously guarded its power to shape key aspects of German foreign policy through control of the Auswärtiges Amt under Frank Walter Steinmeier, Sigmar Gabriel and now Heiko Maas. Ministers and parliamentary state secretaries deeply immersed in a particular party narrative surrounding the policies of engagement with the Soviet bloc promoted by the SPD governments led by Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt in the 1970s have played a key role in shaping Germany’s diplomatic relations with the Russian state before and after its seizure of Crimea. In the years since reunification, many senior German Social Democrats have remained mesmerised by a deeply entrenched historical consensus within the SPD over the extent to which these ‘Ostpolitik’ policies of engagement and dialogue with the USSR helped pave the way towards the dissolution of the Soviet bloc. As a consequence, SPD politicians and the diplomatic apparatus they have shaped over twenty years in power have often seemed to value dialogue with the Russian state as an end in itself, rather than as a means to achieve specific strategic ends through a combination of targeted pressure mixed with strategic incentives.

This focus on achieving change in Russia through intensive engagement with the Russian state that so pervades German strategic thinking rests on a fundamental misreading of the actual strategic approach the SPD governments of the 1970s developed through Ostpolitik. In contrast to the more recent fixation of SPD leaders on grand bargains with Russia, Helmut Schmidt and Willy Brandt focused as much on expanding relations with neighbouring East European states such as Poland or Czechoslovakia as the USSR itself. Moreover, though dominated by Moscow, the ramshackle multi-national structure of the USSR was taken into account by both Helmut Schmidt and the CDU/CSU-dominated Helmut Kohl government that followed him. Both developed intensive contacts with the leaderships of various Soviet Republics, who often transitioned to dominate the politics of their successor states after they achieved independence in 1991. And while Ostpolitik certainly contributed towards intensifying the contacts between the Soviet bloc states with Western institutions and financial markets, their socio-political order ultimately collapsed because of the internal contradictions of their political systems rather than any action taken by West German governments.

Yet rather than reflecting on the complex and mixed legacies of Ostpolitik, the myths that have grown up around it in Germany since the late 1990s have led a succession of SPD leaders to focus on engagement with Russia at the expense of the concerns of the EU’s East European member states and its Ukrainian allies. This clumsy effort by the German government to use the Council of Europe as a stepping stone towards a policy of encouraging change in Russia through engagement with the Russian state based on such a faulty reading of history is actively undermining Germany’s wider strategic interests. 

By damaging its relations with East European EU partners such as Lithuania or Poland, it is alienating states whose help it needs to assert shared interests in the wider reform and consolidation process that is transforming European integration. Moreover, removing Council of Europe sanctions without receiving any clear Russian concessions in return has deeply weakened German credibility with a Ukraine that has built a formidable military and security apparatus of its own in response to the aggression of the Putin regime. Though Angela Merkel has shown a considerable level of sympathy with Ukrainian concerns, such empathy and engagement with Ukraine has often been lacking within the SPD leadership. With such a one-eyed focus on influencing the direction of travel of a Russian society that once again seems in flux, the SPD leadership has lost sight of the fact that binding in a Ukrainian state that now deploys one of the largest armies in Europe into shared norms of democratic governance and the rule of law is also of fundamental strategic importance to Germany and the European Union.

In its pivotal role surrounding the removal of Council of Europe sanctions on Russia, the SPD leadership still does not seem to have been able to extricate itself from a party mythology surrounding Germany’s historic relations with the Russian state that often seem detached from the realities of Late Putinism. Often linked with the crude self-advancement of SPD politicians, these entanglements have more often than not caused embarrassment for their own party as well as Germany’s wider diplomatic position. Even in what are probably its final months in power, when it comes to Russia the SPD still seems to remember everything yet learn nothing.

Brexit Lessons: The British State Has Forgotten How To Listen

UK troops take part in a EUFOR Exercise in Bosnia - 2013

As the dust settles after another European Council meeting to manage the ongoing Brexit Crisis, there is a brief opportunity for those in British politics to ponder how they could have ended up in such a mess. After more desperate manoeuvring, Westminster and Whitehall need to step back and start thinking strategically about how to haul the UK out of its self-inflicted predicament. As UK state institutions struggle to cope with the challenges posed by Brexit, a fundamental reappraisal of the British state’s behaviour towards European partners can no longer be avoided.

The extent to which so many in the UK misread the behaviour of the EU27 states at this most recent EUCO meeting underscored how far the British state still struggles to engage with European partners. By singling out Emmanuel Macron as its supposed, many British journalists generated an easy to follow narrative in which the French were presented in their traditional role as Britain’s adversary. Yet those who contrast what they see as German moderation with French hawkishness missed the increasing exasperation in Germany over the inability of the UK parliament to face the political realities of Brexit. For months articles by senior constitutional scholars like Franz Mayer or journalists such as Ulrich Ladurner signalled that German patience with the British is ebbing away. That other EU states such as Austria, Sweden and even Greece registered concerns over the risks British instability poses to EU institutions indicated that Macron’s grandstanding reflects wider doubts over the UK’s trustworthiness.

British responses to how the EU has extended Article 50 point to deeper structural problems in in how the UK interacts with the EU. For decades, UK governments were accustomed to being one of the EU’s big players despite remaining outside the Euro and Schengen. From this position, British politicians and civil servants dispensed often unasked for advice to European partners who still needed the assistance of such a large state. Yet as EU membership became an increasingly fraught issue in UK politics during the Eurozone and Syrian refugee crises, British politicians and civil servants found themselves detached from the constant negotiations between other European states working hard to stabilise the EU system.

Cut out from the EU’s top table during such key moments of crisis, by 2016 senior UK politicians and civil servants had become less skilled at engaging with the strategic priorities of other European states. While the UK government under David Cameron focused efforts on China and other emerging powers outside Europe, the day to day domestic politics of many EU states the UK had become intertwined with were treated as a secondary matter. In taking the politics of EU states such as Ireland or Italy for granted, much of the British elite proved badly prepared for a post-2016 world where engaging with the concerns of each EU27 state has become crucial to the future of Britain’s economy.

Yet it is not too late for UK policymakers to finally listen to what EU27 counterparts are saying in order to restore goodwill the UK has lost across the EU. Rather than wasting scarce British military resources on grandiose global plans the UK can no longer sustain, deep engagement with the needs of EU27 states can help rebuild influence either as a close ally of the EU or still a full member of the EU. This would involve devoting more resources to assisting military efforts by France and many other EU states across West and Central Africa, while also helping Italy manage the fallout from conflict in Libya. Hard work to support democratic reform in Algeria and Tunisia would also reflect genuine engagement with Mediterranean EU states for whom these developments are of existential importance. A deepening of already extensive support for East European societies facing Russian expansionism as well as struggling states in the Western Balkans would demonstrate the UK’s commitment to stability in Europe.

Such a shift towards deeper engagement with the strategic priorities of EU27 states needs to be matched with much greater focus on the EU’s institutions. UK governments locked out of EU decision-making would have to devote extensive resources to ensuring that their concerns are still listened to by its European partners. Even if the UK remains in the EU, it would need to coordinate with powerful European structures such as the ECB or Frontex that the British are unlikely to join. Such a shift to making engagement with EU institutions that shape all aspects of society and the state the central focus of British strategic thinking needs to be embedded into every aspect of training and promotion in the UK civil service. The centrality of the EU to everyday life in Britain should also impel UK politicians to build much closer personal relationships with counterparts across Europe whether the UK remains a member of the EU or not.

This comprehensive strategic effort to restore British influence in Europe would also require UK journalists, politicians and civil servants to finally take the European Parliament seriously. Even now a deeply counter-productive tendency of portraying the European Parliament and its elections as a sideshow persists in the UK. Yet year in year out the power of the European Parliament to shape policy outcomes across Europe is growing. Whether inside the EU or not, the UK government as well as British news media will need to put much greater effort into understanding the European Parliament’s role in order to develop a more realistic approach towards the EU.

Greater attention to the politics and history of other EU states in UK media would also provide British audiences with a better understanding of European societies whose politics will shape the UK’s future. Television programmes about the history of France’s sphere of influence in Africa, Poland’s struggle against Soviet dominance or Italy’s war against the mafia would do more to help inform Brexit debate in the UK than another docudrama repeating tired old tropes about the Tudors or Queen Victoria. A renewed commitment to language learning in schools and universities would help ensure that future UK governments could find more politicians and civil servants able to understand everything their European partners are saying.

Many of these measures will only pay off for in the long term. But a government willing to initiate them would at least signal to the EU27 that the UK was finally willing to not just make demands but also to listen. For if the UK fails to engage with the EU properly, then the British might find in future that European partners they need decide that the UK will be seen but not heard.

Kenan Evren's Bitter Harvest: Legacies of a Coup that Changed Turkey and Europe

Turkish Jandarma arrest Left wing activists in an Istanbul suburb - 13 September 1980

In the final hours of 11 September 1980 diplomats in the West German consulate in Istanbul began to notice an unusually high level of military activity. With information of troop movements trickling in their colleagues at the embassy in Ankara tried to phone their usual contacts within Turkey's biggest political parties only to get no answer. By midnight the West German diplomats manning the phones decided that a scenario they had dismissed only a few weeks previously was now unfolding. In the first minutes of 12 September 1980 the chargé d'affaires at the German embassy in Ankara cabled a one sentence message to Bonn confirming that the Turkish military had deposed the elected government led by Süleyman Demirel and had seized power in a swift coup d'etat.

Over the next few days thousands of Turkish citizens the military considered to be a threat to the state were detained with brutal force. Along with members of radical Left movements, military units also arrested many extreme Right wing nationalists and Islamists who the generals believe were a threat to the Republican social order established by Kemal Atatürk. Frustrated with the weakness of Liberal and Conservative factions that Süleyman Demirel had struggled to keep united, intelligence agents also arrested many other politicians and prominent intellectuals to give the General Staff under the leadership of General Kenan Evren the space to reshape the political system to its liking.

                         

The third Turkish military intervention in less than twenty years, the 1980 coup would dramatically alter the course of a Republican order that had endured since the early 1920s. The full scale assault by the state against the Turkish Left marginalised movements that in the previous decades had mobilised a large support base in the cities. The militarisation of relations between the Kurdish community and the Turkish state fuelled a cycle of escalation that played into the hands of an insurgency led by the PKK, a movement governed along authoritarian Democratic Centralist lines. Violent Right wing gangs loyal to the ultra-nationalist MHP were suppressed to limit their ability to defy the intelligence services.  

          

Crucially for Turkey's long term political trajectory, though activists loyal to Islamist movements such as the National Salvation Party and the Gülen network came under state pressure their social infrastructure survived the period of military rule intact. Encouraged by military support for an ideological model that came to be known as the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, Islamist networks consolidated their position in working class neighbourhoods across Turkey. In subsequent years these networks would fill social spaces once dominated by the Left to mount a systematic challenge to the Kemalist military establishment.

While the shattering impact the 1980 coup had on Turkish society has been relentlessly debated, there is a strong case for seeing it as a pivotal moment in wider European history as well. By the late 1970s it was increasingly clear that millions of Turkish migrants initially employed in West Germany and the Netherlands on temporary guest worker visas were settling permanently in the member states of the European Economic Community (EEC). Despite attempts by West German governments to encourage Turkish citizens to return to Turkey, the size of the Turkish and Kurdish diasporas in Europe expanded rapidly as former guest workers brought their family members over to the cities in which they had found a livelihood. To understand the response of these diasporas to developments such as the recent Turkish constitutional referendum in April 2016, it is essential to look at how the political seeds sown by Kenan Evren with the 1980 coup still shape the politics of Turkish and Kurdish communities today.  

                         

General Kenan Evren at the first press conference after the coup

As a NATO member and potential applicant for membership of the EEC, Turkey's own internal crisis had already become a cause of major concern for the United States and West Germany. Though there are some indications that senior figures in the Turkish military consulted with West German and US intelligence officials over initiatives to restore order, Turkish officers had kept the timing and extent of their actions largely to themselves. Caught off guard, many US and West German officials displayed mixed feelings about the actions of the Turkish military in the weeks after the coup. At the highest levels of government in Washington and Bonn there was relief that the possibility of a takeover of major cities by the radical Left had been suppressed through ruthless military action. Yet in West Germany, where Social Democrats were the dominant partner in the governing coalition, state repression that quickly moved beyond radical movements to suppress the Turkish moderate Left and Liberal elite caused considerable controversy. 

                         

With reports emerging of human rights abuses by the Turkish army, the West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt struggled to sustain parliamentary support for the extensive military and financial aid the West German state continued to provide to Turkey. In several West European states such concerns led to moves to limit cooperation with Turkey until democracy was restored. Yet the key position Turkey held in the NATO's effort to contain Soviet power meant that most NATO governments avoided taking firmer action. By the time a semblance of constitutional government was restored in 1982 such measures had largely been dropped by Turkey's NATO partners, who were willing to turn a blind eye to the Turkish military's continuing interference in the country's political life as well as its increasingly brutal war against Kurdish insurgents.

While the initial impact of the coup remained limited outside Turkey, its long term social consequences would have a profound impact on the Turkish and Kurdish diasporas. In the immediate aftermath, each of the four main milieus targeted by the military would shift considerable resources to their networks in West Germany. Under enormous pressure the Left, radical Turkish nationalists close to the MHP, Islamist groups and Kurdish nationalist networks discovered immigrant communities in Europe as a safe haven from which to organise against the state imposed interpretation of Kemalism that dominated public life in 1980s Turkey. Even with the gradual loosening of social life after 1982 the traumas of the coup provided an incentive for Turkish and Kurdish movements to organise an extensive political infrastructure in diaspora communities.

Of these four milieus the radical Left initially had the most extensive social networks to build on within the Turkish diaspora. The sudden expansion of Turkish guest worker migration to Western Europe after the Bonn-Ankara labour agreement of 1961 took place during a period in which Turkey itself was experiencing a vast process of migration from the countryside to the cities. Shaped by a surge in industrialisation and expansion of new Gecekondu slums, this mass movement of people within Turkey as well as from Turkey to West European states took place in a context of sharpening class divisions. In a fraught environment recovering from military intervention in 1961, trade union militancy and mobilisation efforts by activists from radical Left groups such as Devrimci Sol or TKP-ML fostered a significant base for Marxist movements in expanding working class neighbourhoods. It was from these same communities that much of the initial cohort of Turkish workers was recruited by West German businesses in the early 1960s.

Even in the early phase of the guest worker programme Turkish workers immersed in trade union militancy and other forms of radical Left mobilisation set up social clubs affiliated to Marxist, Maoist, Trotskyite or Leninist movements that were battling for influence in the Turkish cities they had left. By the early 1970s such activists took a leading role in wildcat strikes over bad pay and conditions for guest workers that caused as much panic among West German trade unions as among factory managers. On a broader scale, many Turkish migrants that had experienced trade unions in Turkey established an extensive set of guest worker associations that by the early 1970s had federated into a wider organisation operating on a national scale in West Germany. 

                                               

ATIF poster condemning cooperation between West Germany and Turkey - 1983

ATIF is a guest worker association clost to the TKP/ML, a Communist Party with Maoist leanings

While the Turkish Left had a head start, groups associated with the radical nationalist MHP also moved to find recruits in the diaspora. By the late 1970s Turkish trade unionists close to the West German SPD uncovered evidence of collusion between factory managers, local Turkish diplomats and MHP activists to elect Turkish nationalists to worker representation boards. But there were also strong indications that Turkish immigrants who had grown up in highly nationalist milieus in their regions of origin sought out representatives of the MHP in order to counteract the influence of Left wing rivals who they believed were seizing control of workplaces and neighbourhoods.

By 1980 many West German cities contained community associations and meeting places controlled by representatives of the MHP. With a such a strong infrastructure MHP supporters in West Germany were regularly visited by the movement's leader, Alparslan Türkeş, who promoted his political network as a first line of defence against Communist infiltration in meetings with senior West German politicians such as Franz Josef Strauss. As violent confrontations between radical Turkish Leftists and the MHP's Grey Wolf street militia spilled over into the diaspora, the ideological turmoil engulfing Turkey itself in the run up to the 1980 coup became a security problem for the West German state.

With radical Left and Right wing networks attracting so much attention from the West German media, the emergence of Islamist organisations in immigrant communities was often seen as less problematic by local authorities in cities such as West Berlin or Hanover. While Grey Wolf thugs and Devrimci Sol foot soldiers fought each other in street brawls, Islamist groups such as Milli Görüs linked to Necmettin Erbakan's National Salvation Party (a forerunner of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP), established a network of backstreet mosques and educational projects. By the early 1980s local Islamic associations linked to Milli Görüs were insistently lobbying schools for the right to teach Koran classes to Turkish pupils, efforts that were rejected by officials in Länder ministries of education. As younger Turkish Islamists came into contact with extremist networks in Arab diaspora mosques more radical factions within this milieu also began to gain the attention of West German security services. 

Though the role of devout Islamic organisations unsettled the SPD in particular, in the run up to the 1980 coup CDU/CSU politicians were willing to accept the notion that faith-based associations could act as a bulwark against Communists and other Left wing radicals within the Turkish diaspora. Odd as it may seem in our own contemporary environment shaped by security concerns over revolutionary Islamism, for West German politicians and intelligence agents in the late 1970s the expansion of Islamist networks was not seen as a significant problem. Only with the waning of the Cold War a decade later would attention shift to Islamist networks that were now entrenched among a significant minority within the Turkish diaspora.

In contrast to other milieus emerging among immigrants from the Turkish Republic, Kurdish networks in West Germany were still in a state of flux in the late 1970s. This partly reflected the evolution of Kurdish nationalist activism in Turkey, which had not yet exploded into the full-blown insurgency that was to consume most of the country's Southeastern provinces after the 1980 coup. Yet in the less restrictive legal environments of the Netherlands, Sweden and West Germany Kurdish organisations could celebrate forms of cultural and linguistic identity that could not be expressed openly in Turkey itself. The opportunities such European social spaces provided for activism banned in Turkey meant that control of diaspora political life became fiercely contested between nationalist organisations seeking to dominate a revival of Kurdish identity that was fiercely opposed by the Turkish military. 

Clashes between the more moderate KOMKAR and the PKK were already causing serious rifts between Kurdish migrants in the late 1970s. While KOMKAR advocated a gradualist approach towards Kurdish autonomy, the PKK's focus on revolutionary confrontation with the Turkish state began to gain traction among younger members of the Kurdish diaspora. By 1980 the PKK had a strategy in place that explicitly linked the social difficulties faced by members of the Kurdish diaspora in Europe with the violence facing Kurdish communities in Turkey. By ruthlessly suppressing competitors and successfully promoting this narrative of shared struggle between Kurds in the diaspora and Kurds in the Turkish Republic, the PKK created foundations for a formidable power base that West German governments would struggle to keep under control.

Yet until 1980 the Turkish and Kurdish diasporas remained a peripheral issue for most political movements in Turkey. Activists in the diaspora may have seen their political battles as central to a wider effort, but the leadership of the main movements remained focused on the escalating struggle to attain political hegemony in Turkey. Visits by leaders such as Alparslan Türkeş focused on fundraising to pay for campaigns in Turkey and using influence over diaspora as leverage to gain the support of West German politicians with a similar ideological outlook. 

This dynamic between diaspora communities and their regions of origin was transformed by the 1980 coup. The Turkish military's reordering of Turkish society through imprisonment and repression against those it declared to be the enemies of the state shattered the social order that had existed in Turkey since the fall of Adnan Menderes's government to the army coup of 1961. As a result Turkish and Kurdish diasporas shifted from being a peripheral factor in Turkey's political life to one of its central battlegrounds. The shock of the coup further politicised Turkish and Kurdish communities in West Germany in ways that would leave deep social cleavages shaping the response of rival milieus to moments of crisis in the following decades. In particular, there were two crucial dynamics that drew these diasporas into political conflicts that continued to wrack Turkey long after 12 September 1980. The first was the exile of many activists from Turkey to the safe haven diasporas provided. The second was a surge in interest in diaspora communities by Turkish security services concerned that they could provide a springboard from which attempts to foment revolt in Turkey. 

The influx of activists looking for a base after the 1980 coup helped the Turkish Left to entrench itself in West German cities in a way that helped define diaspora society. The initial impact of this shift of personnel and resources into the diaspora was most visible with movements that were belonged to the Turkish Left. With their fundraising apparatus in Turkey wiped out by state repression, radical Marxist-Leninist or Maoist groups such as the TKP-ML and the DHKP-C needed donations from supporters within immigrant communities in West Germany to avoid becoming completely dependent on external state sponsors. This competition for the loyalty and funds of diaspora supporters led to clashes between rival radical Left groups that escalate from street brawls to assassination attempts. 

                             

  

Devrimci Sol funeral march for an activist killed by a rival Leftist movement - Berlin-Kreuzberg 1993

Bolshevik Partizan pamphlet condemning PKK attacks on its activists - Berlin 1991

Such vicious infighting between rival Leftist groups also  opened up greater space for MHP activists that were coming under the same pressures. Public rows and even street fights for control of Left wing migrant associations often put off less ideologically driven Turkish-Germans searching for help from organisations willing to protect their interests. Hit by splits over the clash between loyalty to specific concepts of Turkish nationalism and a wider sense of transnational Islamic identity, divisions within Islamist organisations in West Germany also hampered their ability to recruit and retain members. This provided opportunities for better organised MHP and Grey Wolf affiliates to expand their support base in Germany. 

As political divisions within Turkish communities deepened, developments in the Kurdish diaspora took a different turn. The dynamics in the diaspora shifted radically as the PKK came to dominate Kurdish politics in Turkey by taking advantage of radicalisation fuelled by the Turkish Army's brutal attempts to suppress the growing insurgency in Southeastern Anatolia. As in Turkey itself, PKK activists in West Germany used ruthless tactics not only against supporters of the Turkish state but also against rival movements within the Kurdish diaspora. Such organisations as KOMKAR or groups affiliated to various Iraqi or Iranian Kurdish movements experienced intimidation and even assassination at the hands of operatives working to cement the PKK's hegemony over the politics and culture of the Kurdish diaspora.

By the late 1980s the PKK and a whole array of front organisations disguised as cultural clubs or welfare groups dominated the political life of Kurdish communities across Europe. Activists that would have faced repression in Turkey could operate relatively freely in European cities despite attempts by West German and Turkish security services to contain their influence. This enabled the PKK to develop fundraising opportunities, from voluntary donations to protection rackets imposed on more reluctant Kurdish businesses, that enabled it to maintain a degree of autonomy from external state sponsors. Most importantly to the PKK's long term strategy, its ability to dominate Kurdish communities enabled it to present itself to influential West German political milieus around the SPD, the alternative Left and the Green Party as the sole representative of the collective will of the Kurdish people. Much to the frustration of Kurdish activists hostile to the PKK, by 1990 the PKK had built a formidable lobbying network among sympathetic Germans in the radical and Centre Left to promote its agenda within a post-reunification Germany whose influence on the global stage was growing.

                                               

German-language edition of the PKK Manifesto - 1991

With the turmoil in Turkey having such clear knock on effects on the diaspora in the 1970s, there are indications that the Turkish military had anticipated a degree of radicalisation in the diaspora before it seized power on 12 September. Senior officials in the foreign and interior ministries had already discussed greater efforts by the Turkish state to intervene in Turkish and Kurdish communities in Europe with counterparts on the German federal and regional levels. Struggling to manage conflict within immigrant communities, politicians and security officials on the West German side were very open to an expanded role of Turkish state institutions in West Germany that offered to stabilise and discipline unruly migrants. 

Mirroring the military's strategy in Turkey, a mix of repressive measures as well as active intervention in the institutional structures of the diaspora was designed to increase the Turkish state's control over diaspora life. By 1981 West German regional security officials began to complain about increasingly brazen intimidation of diaspora Kurds and diaspora Turks by the MIT (Turkey's primary intelligence agency) and its various allies and proxies among extreme Turkish nationalists and organised crime. Such covert repression was supplemented with open intimidation of dissidents within diaspora communities in the Bonn embassy as well as the Turkish consulates located in every regional capital. Blacklisted immigrants would suddenly find they could not renew passports or gain much-needed documents from the Turkish state. These measures could often cause whole families considerable trouble with West German authorities, who demanded confirmation of Turkish citizenship and other consular documentation before providing social services.

Along with such punitive measures, Turkish state institutions tried to develop more positive incentives to ensure the loyalty of the Kurdish and Turkish diasporas in Europe. Three months after the coup Kenan Evren addressed the diaspora directly in a speech justifying military intervention and defending his government's record broadcast on ZDF, one of the two main West German television channels. After 1981, the military regime heavily expanded funding and support for mosques in West Germany coordinated by Diyanet, the state institution in Turkey that regulated Islamic religious life. Turkish diplomats provided financial support for charitable organisations connected to Diyanet mosques in European cities and heavily lobbied regional West German politicians to treat these organisations as the primary intermediaries with the Turkish and Kurdish diaspora. 

By the late 1980s Ankara managed to consolidate influence over diaspora communities by providing imams and language teachers that were trained and certified by the Turkish state. Promoting a state-backed blend of traditional nationalism and Islamic conservatism based on the so-called Turkish-Islamic synthesis, Diyanet mosques and West German school programmes using Turkish Education Ministry textbooks backed a worldview that emphasised the Turkish language and Sunni Islam as defining elements of Turkish identity. Despite these pressures Left wing, nationalist and Islamist alternatives to Diyanet continued to sustain considerable networks of their own in Germany. Yet this consolidation of Turkish state power within the diaspora provided every government in Ankara after 1982 with a source of leverage it could use to put pressure on West European states.

Culture festival organised by an MHP-affiliated community association - Hamburg 2016

Attempts by the Evren regime to rein in the influence of the PKK over the Kurdish diaspora met with less success. The MIT's use of ultra-nationalist proxies to intimidate activists fighting for Kurdish rights proved deeply counter-productive. Waves of street violence between Turkish nationalists and Kurdish activists drove many members of the Kurdish diaspora initially sceptical of the PKK into its network of cultural associations and self-defence organisations. Each campaign by the Turkish state to break the influence of Kurdish nationalist thought over the diaspora only helped to consolidate the PKK's grip further over Kurdish communities in Western Europe. This open struggle, in which West German police and security services at times colluded with the MIT, also mobilised support of a broad spectrum of the German Left for various PKK front organisations that claimed to represent the Kurdish diaspora as a whole.

By the early 1990s these PKK front organisations were organising massive rallies in stadiums with thousands of participants bussed in from across Germany. Despite an official ban of the PKK and affiliated groups by the Kohl government in 1993, this network was too deeply entrenched in the Kurdish diaspora to be dislodged by a more confrontational approach. The success the PKK had in mobilising large swathes of the Kurdish community against the German government caused such disruption in German cities that by the early 2000s local police and politicians turned a blind eye to the open activity of ostensibly banned PKK networks. Deeply frustrated by the resilience of the PKK within the Kurdish diaspora, Turkish governments never abandoned efforts to limit its influence. This dynamic has continued to fuel a cycle of confrontation between Kurdish and Turkish activists in German cities that has flared up again in response to current battles between the AKP government in Ankara and PKK groups expanding their power across Turkey, Syria and Iraq.

The rapid expansion of Turkish and Kurdish communities across Western Europe over the course of the 1970s meant developments in Turkey that in previous decades had remained largely a foreign policy problem for West European states began to have a disruptive impact on their domestic politics as well. With Ankara taking an interventionist approach, West German authorities had to find a balance between assuaging a strategic NATO partner and ensuring that Turkish state institutions or security services did not fuel further conflict in diaspora communities. These acute political tensions fed into the wider social challenge of managing and integrating immigrants from across Southern Europe and the Middle East at a time when many in the West German political establishment still struggled to accept that immigrants were there to stay.

The social dynamics that took shape in the aftermath of the 1980 coup shaped the Turkish and Kurdish diasporas in ways that are still recognisable today. Though the military formally handed power to civilian governments, it continued to exert influence over parties and state institutions. In the diaspora a militarised blend of Kemalist nationalism and Islamic conservatism shaped the ideological outlook of Diyanet imams, textbooks used in community schooling or the television programming on satellite channels that were common in many immigrant households. This extensive network based on Diyanet structures provided the Islamist-nationalist AKP party a platform with which to consolidate its influence over conservative diaspora milieus after it took power in 2002. Though still a significant presence, the MHP and other radical nationalist groups lost members to organisations linked with the AKP as its access to state patronage grew. With senior leaders (including then Prime Minister Erdogan) regularly staging rallies in Germany to retain the loyalty of diaspora milieus, the Turkish state structures that Kenan Evren's government had put in place to promote support for the military became co-opted by AKP networks pursuing a rather different ideological agenda. 

Rally organised by an AKP affiliate - Mainz 2011

Having secured its position of dominance within the Kurdish diaspora, by the late 1990s the PKK used front organisations to work with the German Centre-Left and Left on a local level to exert influence over the political life of several German cities. In the process, what was once a network of violent activists in permanent conflict with the German state has become a slick lobbying operation using every legal means at its disposal to promote the goals of its parent organisation in German media and politics. Within the Turkish diaspora a large swathe of the generation of Left wing activists that fled Turkey in 1980 went on to build close partnerships with German movements and organisations that shared their ideological outlook. Over time the emergence of movements such as Antifa Genclik provided a platform through which Left wing Turkish-Germans could make the first steps towards taking an active part in German local politics.

As a result, the influence of the 1970s Turkish Left is in some ways stronger in German cities than it is in Turkey. Such increased integration into German political life, particularly among the second generation of Left wing Turkish-Germans, led to a decreasing level of engagement with the day to day controversies wracking Turkey in the 2000s. This marked a central paradox of diaspora politics, that as supporters of the Turkish Left merged into German milieus the centre of gravity of diaspora politics in Germany shifted to the advantage of culturally conservative milieus less willing to support the full integration of their members into German society.

Logo of the Antifa Genclik movement - 1994

In West Germany and other West European states the impact of the 1980 coup was therefore felt in the many cities and regions whose political life had become deeply intertwined with the fate of the Turkish Republic after decades of Turkish and Kurdish immigration. Though they initially assumed this disruption would peter out once the Evren regime consolidated its grip on power, over the following decades West German officials and politicians were regularly confronted with cycles of protest and violence in Turkish and Kurdish communities triggered by continuing instability in Turkey. From 1980 onwards developments such as the wars against the PKK, sectarian conflict between Alevis and Sunnis, military crackdowns on the Left as well as Islamists or Erdogan's attempt to entrench his power after the Gezi protests of 2013 all had an immediate impact on German society through Kurdish and Turkish diaspora communities.

The legacies of the 1980 coup in Turkey, Germany and the rest of Europe present something of a paradox. The massive social changes Turkey is experiencing are not a purely foreign policy matter that can be handled at a distance. By entrenching interconnections between the domestic politics of Turkey and Germany the 1980 coup ensured that the stability of the Turkish Republic has become a matter of fundamental strategic importance to the member states of the European Union. With political conflict and economic disruption in Turkey having immediate knock-on effects on Germany and other EU states, European Union governments have considerable incentives to continue providing financial and military aid to Turkey.

Such a dynamic could have a positive effect. The lasting impact of the 1980 coup on German as well as the Turkish society belies the notion that events in Turkey are not part of European history. The legacies of the Ottoman era as well as the presence of ethnic Turkish communities across Southeast Europe are strong enough evidence of how much Turkey is part of a shared European cultural and political space. The emergence of extensive transnational Turkish and Kurdish diasporas has reinforced the pivotal role events in modern Turkey can play in the politics of the European Union and its member states. In strengthening these longstanding ties between Turkey and other European societies, diaspora communities could help provide the basis for intensifying Turkey's role in the European integration process.

Yet it is the very sensitivity in Germany to every shift and twitch of Turkish politics that is currently fuelling a rapid deterioration in relations between Berlin and Ankara. As activists and voters, large parts of the Turkish community hostile to President Erdogan can put German politicians under pressure to oppose the authoritarian trajectory of an AKP-dominated state. At the same time, Kurdish-Germans supportive of the PKK's agenda take part in open mass demonstrations and fundraising activities that infuriate the Turkish government. Those significant parts of the Turkish diaspora still loyal to President Erdogan are regularly mobilised to intimidate opponents and aggressively pressure the German state by such AKP affiliates as the Union of European Turkish Democrats (UETD). In response, German governments concerned over the loyalty of Turkish-Germans have worked much harder to create incentives for them to integrate into German society.

In such a volatile context, attempts to work together strategically over such issues as managing Syrian migration or counter-terror operations are severely affected by shifts in Turkish or German domestic politics. With the imprisonment of German journalists and activists after the 15 July 2016 coup, the accelerating deterioration in relations between Berlin and Ankara resulting from the intertwined nature of both societies risks leading to a breakdown of cooperation. This core paradox of relations between Turkey and Germany, that the diaspora that has fostered such deep links can also become a source of such deep conflict, is the bitter harvest of decisions made by Kenan Evren and his generals on a cold September day thirty-seven years ago.

Orange is Not the New Brexit: Why America and Britain Face Very Different Challenges

Since Donald Trump's shock victory in the US presidential elections many commentators have compared his rise with the victory of the anti-EU Leave campaign in the 23 June referendum over Britain's membership of the European Union. Throughout 2016 the ups and downs of America's tangerine titan and the chaotic aftermath of the UK's date with European destiny have often been portrayed as part of a global populist wave undermining the established post-Cold War order. And undoubtedly there are parallels between both cases. The impact of deindustrialisation on many communities entrenched discontent with the political status quo in both countries. Specific parts of the British and American voter demographic were also drawn to themes that played on fear of migration as well as nostalgia for a mythical golden age in which their society seemed to operate autonomously from the wider world.

But if you dig deeper there are major differences between two political earthquakes that will shape how 2016 will be remembered. In Britain the anti-EU Leave campaign was made up of a disparate coalition of factions from across the ideological spectrum. Left Exit socialists, who believed the EU was holding the UK back from becoming the Marxist utopia they hoped for, worked hand in hand with so-called Liberal Leavers, who are convinced EU regulation is keeping Britain from achieving its economic potential as a global trading power. While both of these groups are not bothered about immigration, the referendum debate was often dominated by UKIP anti-immigrant isolationists who are as hostile to Scottish or Irish aspirations as any other society or culture they see as endangering their definition of English (not British) identity. The story since the referendum has been about the struggle by anti-EU Brexiteers to keep this coalition together even as the realities of Brexit come to undermine its cohesion. With clear majorities of voters below the age of 45 voting for Remain, British eurosceptics also face a demographic trap over the next few years as many elderly Leave voters who helped sustain their majority gradually disappear from the electoral roll. Faced with these pressures, Theresa May (who campaigned for Remain) and other politicians now committed to leaving the EU are desperate to complete the negotiation process as quickly as possible before demographic change and disagreement over models of departure weaken the Leave coalition and plunge the Brexit project into doubt.

The uncertainties surrounding Brexit in the UK stand in great contrast to some of the ideological and structural trends that helped bring about the rise of Donald Trump. Until David Cameron announced the EU referendum in 2013, absolutist euroscepticism that aims for a complete break with European institutions was the primary goal of only a particular faction within the British Conservative Party. Agreement that the UK needed to leave the European Union often masked very divergent views about what kind of social order should take shape in the aftermath. By contrast, Trump's rise is the culmination of long term ideological trends in the United States that came to reshape the political outlook of much mainstream thought within the American Republican Party. Trade wars, isolationism mixed with hyper-imperialism, a penchant for courting authoritarian regimes rather than less ideologically (in GOP terms) reliable democracies, hostility to the principles of the EU and the emergence of China, all of these themes have been floating around the heart of US Republicanism for twenty years. 

Attempts to suppress the votes of African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans and other minorities while trying to peel off culturally conservative elements of those communities have also been core elements of the GOP approach towards electoral politics since Richard Nixon's Southern strategy of the early 1970s. Moreover, Paul Ryan's Randian war on state institutions provided the foundations for his alliance with Trump's populist machismo. Though many Republicans have promoted free trade, the use of America First rhetoric by many mainstream GOP leaders also paved the way for Trump's bellicose threat to initiate trade wars with China and the European Union if foreign leaders do not bend to his will. As a movement hostile to the extension of electoral rights to minorities and preoccupied with the defence of the economic privileges of specific social groups, the GOP has evolved into a Far Right party since the 1990s. The key to Trump's success was his ability to ideologically outflank very right wing GOP candidates in a way that made it difficult for them to respond without alienating a base they have been cultivating for three decades. The only crucial difference between pre- and post-Trump Republicanism is that Russia's Vladimir Putin now plays the role of friendly conservative authoritarian that the Saudis or Pinochet once did under Bush and Reagan. 

Despite structural similarities in certain respects, it is likely that Brexit Britain and Trump's America will find themselves on quite different paths over the next decade. The success of the Leave campaign was the product of an ideologically diverse alliance of convenience that was able to sell leaving the European Union as all things to all people. This enabled a referendum campaign that claimed it was both open to the world as well as defending England from the rest of the world to achieve a victory that seemed unlikely only six months before. Yet the very ideological diversity of the Leave coalition is also its greatest long term weakness. As the tough business of establishing which specific institutional forms Brexit should take consumes the energies of the British state, divisions within the Leave camp over what Brexit actually means have the potential to grind the whole process to a halt even before Remainers can organise a coherent alternative model for Britain's relationship with the rest of Europe. By contrast Trump took advantage of internal contradictions within the GOP to isolate and marginalise factions within the US Right that promoted an internationalist outlook divorced from the hyper-imperialist isolationism of much of the Republican Party's base. Trump's ability to build his rise on long term ideological trends demonstrate that he does not represent a profound break with established trends in American society. By taking pre-existing institutional dysfunction and ideological polarisation within the American political system to its logical extremes, Trump was able to outmanoeuvre political opponents unwilling to believe that the US constitutional order was no longer able to guarantee stable social outcomes. 

That so many commentators emphasise parallels between Brexit and Trumpism while ignoring fundamental differences between these two moments of crisis arises from a tendency to narrowly focus on economic pressures that helped fuel their rise. For all the similarities between both cases when it comes to the impact of deindustrialisation, the importance of key institutional factors that opened up the space for such major political shocks have been given much less attention. Yet the impact of economic transformation on a society is often shaped by the particular state institutions and constitutional frameworks that sustain its political order. In this respect both Brexit and Trumpism are symptoms of distinct forms of state crisis unique to the respective constitutional orders through which they have emerged.

The roots of the state crisis that culminate in Brexit lie in the years between the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 and the return of the Stone of Scone, a key symbol of Scottish sovereignty, from Westminster to Edinburgh in 1996. Along with the emerging foundations of the devolution settlements that reshaped the internal politics of the United Kingdom, those ten years saw the adoption of a Maastricht Treaty that bound the UK into transnational legal and political structures in a much more systematic way than was the case in the 1960s or 1970s. By the early 2000s, the unwritten constitutional order of the United Kingdom had been fundamentally transformed. With the shift from the Law Lords to a Supreme Court and an increasingly firm convention that the Prime Minister has to consult Parliament before declaring war in the wake of Tony Blair's disastrous blunders in Iraq, the constitutional order of the United Kingdom on New Year's Eve 2015 had experienced an extraordinary transformation from the political world that Margaret Thatcher dominated in 1985. 

Despite these clear indications of a constitutional transformation of the United Kingdom, large swathes of the British political elite in the UK parliament and London-based news media continue to behave as if nothing has changed since Thatcher's time. Many leaders of the Leave campaign blithely ignored the complex nature of overlapping political jurisdictions within the United Kingdom as well as how the British state has become deeply intertwined with transnational institutions in crucial policy areas. At the same time many prominent figures within the Remain campaign glossed over the extent to which the imbalances of a devolution process that gave parts of the UK more power than others and a relationship with the EU in which the British were merely observers of Eurozone and Schengen decision-making processes were inherently unstable. Even if some kind of return into the EU can be engineered, it will be most likely under very different conditions determined by the Copenhagen Criteria than the ones the UK enjoyed before 2016. Looking back at the referendum debate, what is so remarkable is not the polarisation between the two sides but rather the extent to which both Remain and Leave leaders shared assumptions about the stability and power of the British state rooted in a constitutional order that ended thirty years ago.

It is this sense of complacency that lost the Remain campaign the Brexit war before the referendum and is losing Leave the Brexit peace after it. Prominent journalists demanding that pessimism over leaving the EU must end compound an unwillingness within much of British society to recognise how a fundamental process of constitutional change already underway before 2016 necessitates a basic reconsideration of how political life is organised in order to sustain a stable and democratic United Kingdom. Yet an illusion of continuity, perhaps reinforced by the  sheer longevity of Queen Elizabeth II's reign, has slowed this much needed reassessment of British politics. Trapped by the twin cult of Attlee and Churchill, Theresa May risks being crushed by the same unrealistic public and elite expectations of the office of Prime Minister that helped destroy the careers of David Cameron and Gordon Brown. Despite an illusion of near absolute power symbolised by the worship of Margaret Thatcher in much of the British news media, in reality the role of Prime Minister has come to more resemble that of the German Chancellor. Just as Angela Merkel can at most arbitrate between rival power centres within the Federal Republic and balance conflicting interests within the European Union as first among equals, a British Prime Minister will have to contend with a whole range of policy areas where power is shared with actors as diverse as the Secretary General of NATO, the First Minister of Scotland or the Irish Taoiseach whether the UK leaves the EU or not.

A Remain campaign that built its strategy around an outmoded understanding of the power and influence of the Prime Minister was therefore as culpable for fuelling this crisis of the British constitutional order as Leave politicians are now doing in expecting Theresa May to suddenly find a quick solution to their Brexit problems. While the shock of the Brexit referendum and the institutional chaos that immediately followed it made the impact of the transformation of the UK's constitutional order clear, there is no guarantee that the outcome of this long-standing crisis will be a positive one. The London riots of 2011 and the assassination of Jo Cox act as a warning that institutional breakdown and economic pressures can often foster a recourse to violence by social groups that feel they have nothing to lose. A successful effort to restructure the UK's relationship with the European Union as well as Westminster's relationship with the British nations and English regions could complete the transformation of the British constitutional order in a way that secures stability and democracy. But a failure to harness the forces of constitutional change unleashed in the early 1990s could just as well lead to a break up of the United Kingdom and a collapse in relations with Europe that will have dangerously destabilising consequences.

In contrast to the decades of constitutional experimentation and improvisation that created the foundations for  the battles over Brexit, the crisis that has fostered the emergence of Trump as a political force is the product of constitutional stagnation and state paralysis in the United States. During the Cold War informal bipartisan conventions and shared experience of World War Two mitigated the institutional impact of vicious political conflict over US military intervention, civil rights and the expansion of the welfare state. By the early 1990s, however, generational shifts within the American political elite as well deepening ideological cleavages between Democrats and Republicans living in socially homogeneous geographical bastions began to undermine many of the informal procedural understandings that had enabled the US constitutional order to sustain stable and democratic government. Pat Buchanan's ferocious 'Culture War' speech at the GOP convention of 1992 and the takeover of the House of Representatives by New Gingrich and a Republican leadership focused on strategies of base mobilisation and voter polarisation marked the beginning of an era of aggressive winner takes all politics for which a US constitution designed in the late eighteenth century was not designed to cope.

In a zero sum environment where an embrace of ideological polarisation and the complete obstruction of the opposing party's agenda by all means possible seemed to promise the clearest path to political success, any attempts to change the US constitution to ensure that this change in political culture does not undermine stability and democracy has become impossible. The last major changes to the US system of government with the establishment of the Federal Reserve and introduction of elections to the Senate took place in 1913 and almost no further measures were taken to adapt the US constitution in the century that followed. A cult-like popular reverence of the eighteenth century gentlemen of means who became the Founding Fathers of the US constitution stifles debate about whether a political system that invests enormous foreign policy power in a president yet entrenches domestic political paralysis in its legislatures is stable or just. The deep public discontent in US politics that Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump managed to use in different ways to rise to political prominence is to a significant extent the product of this mismatch between public expectations of presidents, senators and congressmen and their inability to deliver within the confines of a dysfunctional constitutional order designed three hundred years ago. The extent to which such political frustrations from all parts of the ideological spectrum have reinforced a worship of the military as the only institution that seems to get things done should be of profound concern not just to officers and national security experts but to anyone who believes that the survival of US democracy is essential to global peace.

Donald Trump's victory in November's presidential elections was not a freakish outcome beyond the bounds of the established American constitutional order. His rise to power was very much the product of pre-existing ideological trends with the Republican Party that have accelerated the decay of the American political system. Though the Democratic Party's obsession with technocratic processes and its abandonment of large swathes of the United States to its political opponents have been major contributions to this crisis of the American state, it was a GOP drift to the Far Right that gained momentum in the early 1990s that enabled a figure with such authoritarian tendencies as Trump to gain control of the presidency. With his rise to power triggering existential struggles between and within both main parties, it is difficult to see how the root and branch reform needed to secure the survival of American democracy can take place anytime soon. 

Brexit and Trumpism are the product of an interplay between similar economic pressures and very different constitutional crisis. Though an examination of economic parallels between the two societies can provide a useful basis for reflection on the impact of deindustrialisation, the distinct political context of these two great crises of 2016 means that the search for stability, prosperity and liberty may go in very different directions. When it comes down to it, the difference between the United States and the United Kingdom in 2016 has been the difference between the death throes of a late Republic and the emergence of a new one.