When will the opposition and the government play in the same league?

Derya Sazak, a guest on the İskele Sancak program presented by Erhan Çelik on Kanal 7 on Friday evening, in which I also took part, made an interesting description of the relationship between the ruling and opposition parties on the discussions surrounding the latest tape scandal inside the CHP. Sazak said that while the CHP calculates how to get through the tape scandal with the least possible damage, it continues to close in on itself as much as possible, even trying to train politics for the ruling party from within the narrow confines of this context, and that, given the matters it is currently dealing with, the AK Parti is in fact playing in an extremely different league.

To support this comment it would be enough to look at the international openings Turkey has made under AK Parti administration in just the last week. While it could be said that the agreements made in Turkey by Russian President Medvedev, who came with 4 planeloads of people, would soon reach a volume of 100 billion, the lifting of visas with Russia became a reality. Before there had even been an opportunity to speak properly about Medvedev's trip, the Prime Minister's trip to Greece with 10 of his ministers, unprecedented in the history of bilateral relations, began. We followed in detail that this trip too went very successfully.

Meanwhile, the Fiscal Rule jointly prepared and announced by State Ministers Ali Babacan, Cevdet Yılmaz and Mehmet Şimşek, which would bring discipline to state spending in a way that nearly ties the hands and feet of governments, the AK Parti first of all, was one of the important agenda items of the week. This is an entirely separate subject, but it is certain that it is a revolutionary step taken to free administration in Turkey from personal and arbitrary spending and from the grip of governments' populist policies. That a ruling party is doing this by its own decision is also commendable, because once such a rule is introduced, governments are withdrawing with their own hands, for the sake of the country's future, from their initiative over public finances. In other words, a step that can in no way be ascribed to a government that wants to establish a civilian dictatorship…

On Saturday, an international conference titled Turkish Diplomacy at the Beginning of the 21st Century and the Regional and Global Order, organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu also giving the opening speech, was held. This conference, as defined by Davutoğlu himself, was organized to respond to the need of political actors, who generally do these things at great speed in practice, to turn back once in a while and look at what they have done from an academic-intellectual perspective. For this, 5 working groups formed of participants consisting of foreign policy experts who could be considered doyens of the field, historians, sociologists and political scientists, invited not only from Turkey but from many parts of the world, tried to determine Turkey's place in its relations with the EU, the US, its neighbors, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Far and Near Asia, and in new problem and formation areas likely to arise or already on the agenda within all these regions, and to make forecasts of advantages and risks regarding the future. The Minister, who on the first day visited each of the working groups for about half an hour, thus took part in the work of all the groups, and after listening to the criticisms and findings expressed his own answers and contributions as well. Having decided, upon a sudden telephone call in the middle of his speech, to go to Tehran, the minister could not attend the second day's sessions.

The performance that Davutoğlu, who comes from academic life, that is, in his own words from the high levels of theory, displays in supporting with updated and useful knowledge the politics that he has had to practice, drawn into the field by chance, is frankly a subject worth dwelling on in itself.

The conference constituted a good example of a kind of self-reflexivity of the foreign policy under Davutoğlu's direction, of its ability to see where it is going, but at the same time of this policy's being promoted through a kind of public diplomacy. While in each session Turkey's standing was being clarified around many issues, from the Armenian question to the Cyprus question, from Turkey's relations with the EU to the Israeli-Palestinian question, Turkey's theses on this standing were also explained.

What Davutoğlu said during his speech, which lasted nearly an hour and which he delivered impromptu in English, had all the parameters necessary for a foreign policy paradigm. It was a matter of framing, naming and reflecting on seven years of practice. It is not possible to mention here all the subjects discussed, but if one heading must be mentioned, in answering the criticisms directed at the policy that carries its own patent in foreign policy as "zero problems," he also gave a striking lesson on the balance between realism and idealism.

Of course he himself too knows that zero problems is an ideal that can never be attained. But what harm can there be in setting the goal so high? Especially, setting the goal this way, what harm have the efforts made to approach it done so far other than benefit? Today we see that at least in this direction many problems are one by one entering the road to a solution.

Even the dizzying distances covered in the most chronic problems should sufficiently show that setting the goal at such a place is by no means a small thing.