Iran’s fertility collapse is the most extreme example of the trend across the Muslim world. Just behind Iran is Turkey.
Figure 3: Total Fertility Rate in Egypt, Turkey and Iran
Source: UN World Population Prospects
Turkey’s overall fertility rate of 2.1 children per female masks a yawning demographic gap between Turkish-speakers, whose fertility rate is just 1.5, and the Kurdish minority, whose fertility is estimated variously at between three and four children per family. Half the military-age men in Anatolian Turkey will have Kurdish as a first language a generation from now.
That is why Kurdish separatists are confident that their guerilla campaign against Turkish security forces ultimately will triumph. There is a demographic time-bomb in the Middle East, but it isn’t on the West Bank of the Jordan River, where the Palestinian Arab fertility rate long since converged with the Jewish rate. The map of Anatolia eventually will be redrawn, and probably the adjacent maps of Syria, Iraq and Iran along with it.
Syria’s Kurds have become the vanguard of Kurdish hopes for autonomy, raising the Kurdish national flag in Syrian border towns in sight of the Turkish army. Turkey’s threat to intervene in Syria’s civil war is a bluff. The country’s 2 million Kurds are divided among 17 political parties; a minority is cooperating with the Iraq-based Kurdish Workers Party, the main guerilla organization harassing Turkish security forces. Turkish analysts perceive no immediate threat that Syria’s Kurds will ally with the independence movement and attempt to establish an independent Kurdistan in the foreseeable future, as Mesut Cevikalp wrote in August. If Turkish troops entered Syria, the Kurds would unite against Turkey.
Turkey’s raids on Kurdish guerillas across the Iraqi border, meanwhile, prompted Iraq to threaten an alliance with Iran. That is the last thing that Ankara wants: the Turkish economy is living on credit from the Gulf states, which are paying for Turkey to contain Iran. If Turkey’s internal problems push Iraq into the Iranian camp, making itself more of a nuisance than a help to the Sunni Gulf States, this arrangement will be in jeopardy.
Figure 4: Turkey’s Rising Dependence on Short-Term Foreign Debt
Source: Central Bank of Turkey
Turkey’s current account deficit is running at 8% to 10% of gross domestic product, about the same level as Greece before its financial collapse. Short-term debt doubled since 2010 to cover the deficit, most of it borrowed by Turkish banks from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States. That looks more like a political subsidy than a financial investment. For all of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s grandiosity, Riyadh has Turkey on a short leash.
“The Syrian civil war is now evidence of how much Turkey overestimated itself in its dreams of great power status,” wrote the German daily Die Welt on October 6. “A year and a half ago, Foreign Minister [Ahmet] Davutoglu said that no-one could undertake anything in the entirety of the Middle East without first asking Turkey. But in the intervening year and a half, the supposed great power hasn’t been able to get things in order at its own front door.”
There is no Turkish solution for Syria. There is no Saudi or Jordanian solution, because the two conservative monarchies fear that the Muslim Brotherhood will dominate the Sunni opposition. Saudi Arabia fears the Muslim Brotherhood, the only credible organized opposition to the corrupt and feckless monarchy. The Jordanian monarchy already is under siege from the Muslim Brotherhood, which organized “reform” demonstrations last week demanding limits on the monarchy’s power.
And there is no American solution for Syria. Robert Worth reported in the New York Times October 7 that Sunni Arab countries won’t provide Syrian rebels with shoulder-fired missiles and anti-tank weapons out of fear that terrorists might obtain them. After Washington’s embarrassment in Benghazi, compounded by the appearance that the Obama administration suppressed intelligence reports of al-Qaeda activities in Libya and Syria, American caution is understandable.
No-one in the region wants Syria’s Sunnis to win, but no-one wants them to lose, either. The Syrian standoff is likely to continue into the indefinite future, lowering the cost of Arab life in the market of world opinion.
Egypt lacks all of the elements for successful economic development. Its population is 45% illiterate; its university graduates are almost without exception incompetent; it has insufficient water from the Nile to expand agriculture; its existing agriculture is inefficient and leaves the country dependent on imports for half its food; its population is for the most part pre-modern, with a 30% rate of consanguineous marriage and a 90% rate of female genital mutilation.
The bad news is that none of the major countries in the region can be kept from falling, and once fallen, they cannot be put back together again. The good news is that the bad news is not so bad. As long as the calamity is restricted to the region, and prospective malefactors are prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons, the impact on the rest of the world will be surprisingly small.