Does Francis Read Huntington?

Walter Russell Mead

 

Pope Francis set off a diplomatic storm yesterday when he referred to the genocide of the Armenians at a service in St. Peter’s Basilica this weekend. The Turkish Foreign Ministry denounced the remarks as baseless and unfair, and summoned the Vatican’s Turkish representative to appear for a tongue lashing.

By the standards of Vatican diplomacy, this was an explosion. Conscious of the vulnerability of Christian minorities around the world, popes are usually circumspect when touching on controversial diplomatic topics. Francis’ words will certainly provoke a harsh response from Turkey where, despite very slow and painful progress at coming to grips with the legacy of violence and persecution that shaped modern Turkey, it remains illegal to refer to the Armenian massacres as a genocide.

Erdoğan and His Armenian Problem

Gerard J. Libaridian

 

When the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan came to power in Turkey in 2002, there were reasons to think that they would correct the state policies for dealing with history, particularly regarding the treatment of Armenians by the Ottoman government during the First World War.
Since their political philosophy is derived mainly from religious concepts rather than secular statism and nationalism, Erdoğan and the AKP could have denounced those policies outright. In fact they could have pointed out that it was extreme statist and nationalist ideology, rather than Islam, that was responsible. He could have saved that dimension of Ottoman legacy that was tolerant by rejecting the extremist policies of the wartime Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) government as inimical to