Derb: Don’t worry about pan-Turkism — after all, pan-Germanism worked out so well!

Okay, I’m not exactly a dispassionate observer here, but I think Turkey’s got a lot of turbulent history to navigate yet. Turkey has veered from Islamic imperialism to exterminationist nationalism, and Erdogan is trying to reconcile the two, kind of like de Gaulle’s reconciling the French Right to the Republic or Jefferson’s inauguration reconciling his followers to the Federalist Constitution. (Walter Russell Mead posted a long piece yesterday on the implications of Erdogan’s new foreign-policy vision.) But a Turkish version of Christian Democracy is premised on the existence of a moderate Islam — but while moderate Muslims exist, moderate Islam does not. So I think we’re likely to see a lot of enthusiasm still out of Turkey.