Turkey adds entry to book of enemies

Every month, the top executives of the Turkish government and military come together for the regular National Security Council (NSC) meetings. This time, on Oct. 30, the NSC meeting broke a record in terms its length: 10 hours, 25 minutes. It also attracted much more media attention than other NSC meetings of late because, reportedly, an update in Turkey’s infamous “Red Book,” or the National Security Policy Document, was discussed. Consequently, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s new nemesis, the “parallel state,” will now find its place in this document as yet another “internal enemy” in the history of the enemy-rich Turkish Republic.

Turkey’s NSC was established by the 1961 constitution and was augmented by the 1982 constitution. Since both charters were drafted under the auspices of the Turkish military in the aftermath of military coups, the NSC was envisioned as an institution that would impose the red lines of Turkish generals on elected politicians. In the late '90s, the NSC even served as the headquarters of a “soft coup,” when the generals forced the Islamist government of Necmettin Erbakan — Erdogan’s forerunner — to resign.

In the '90s, Turkish society also learned about the “Red Book,” a document that is drafted and updated by the NSC to list Turkey’s “domestic and foreign enemies.” Most governments have such documents — that of the United States mentions al-Qaeda as a threat, for example — but Turkey’s "Red Book" was a bit self-styled: Its threats included not only terrorist groups, but also political ideologies or social trends. The two typical examples were “separatism,” which referred to Kurdish nationalism, and “[religious] reactionaryism,” which referred to Islamist parties or independent Islamic communities. In the early 2000s, the generals even added “missionary activity” to the Red Book, assuming that a possible Christianization of Turkey would infringe Turkish national identity.

In other words, the "Red Book," which was coined by some as “a supra-governmental constitution,” was the symbol of Turkey’s authoritarian state ideology. That is why all groups who were suppressed by this ideology — such as Islamists, conservatives, liberals, leftists or Kurds — opposed the "Red Book." They ultimately found their voice in Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), which gradually subdued the military in the late 2000s and took the upper hand within the NSC. In 2010, Erdogan victoriously declared that the "Red Book" was updated with a much more liberal outlook. “From now on, there will be no enemy within,” he promised, adding that “foreign enemies” will also cease to exist thanks to his “zero problems with neighbors” policy. The era of “superficial worries and fears,” Erdogan declared, was over.