The Turks are coming

John Feffer in Guernica on Turkey’s increasing influence and potential. Guernica / John Feffer: Stealth Superpower: How Turkey Is Chasing China to Become the Next Big Thing

The future is no longer in plastics, as the businessman in the 1967 film The Graduate insisted. Rather, the future is in China.

If a multinational corporation doesn’t shoehorn China into its business plan, it courts the ridicule of its peers and the outrage of its shareholders. The language of choice for ambitious undergraduates is Mandarin. Apocalyptic futurologists are fixated on an eventual global war between China and the United States. China even occupies valuable real estate in the imaginations of our fabulists. Much of the action of Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age, for example, takes place in a future neo-Confucian China, while the crew members of the space ship on the cult TV show Firefly mix Chinese curse words into their dialogue.

Why doesn’t Turkey have a comparable grip on American visions of the future? Characters in science fiction novels don’t speak Turkish. Turkish-language programs are as scarce as hen’s teeth on college campuses. Turkey doesn’t even qualify as part of everyone’s favorite group of up-and-comers, that swinging BRIC quartet of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Turkey remains stubbornly fixed in Western culture as a backward-looking land of doner kebabs, bazaars, and guest workers.

But take population out of the equation—an admittedly big variable—and Turkey promptly becomes a likely candidate for future superpower. [MORE]

He makes some very interesting arguments.

Judging by developments in the North American Muslim community, I don’t find this thesis outlandish. There’s a lot of dynamism and fresh thinking coming out of Turkish corners of the Ummah these days.

My criteria are simpler: They’re one of the few (only?) Muslim peoples to make decent sausages (which non-Muslim readers might not haven’t noticed are almost always made of pork). That alone makes Turkey a superpower as far as I’m concerned. A life without alcohol has its challenges, but one without sausages would be to much to bear. One can only handle so much injustice and privation.