What is really going on in Turkey - and its region - in 2016

​A figure based in the United States has decided that the Middle Eastern country he comes from is on the wrong course and its democratic institutions are in peril.

There is no effective opposition; the country's foundations are being undermined by a "fanatic conservatism with religious undertones"; the leader is guilty of "sinister schemes"; even the military is losing its independence.

What is needed is someone from outside the tainted political system - a former military chief, for example - to "raise the banner of revolt".

I'm talking about Turkey, right?

Wrong. These words were published just days before Turkey's attempted coup by Alon Ben-Meir, a professor of international relations at New York University, about Israel.

Obviously there are differences between the two situations - whatever its democracy's problems, civilian rule in Israel is entrenched. Dr Ben-Meir is hoping ex-military chief Gabi Ashkenazi might lead a unified opposition at the next Israeli election, not a column of tanks in the streets.

But it remains true that the states of the Middle East are confronting four basic constitutional problems a century after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, which itself wrestled with such problems for a century before that.

A policeman between portraits of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, right, and the republic's founder, Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk".Credit: AP

1. The problem of the leader

The coup attempt in Turkey took place against the backdrop of a sustained attempt by the country's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to change the constitution and give his office far greater powers at the expense primarily of parliament. Even before the coup attempt, he was moving to purge the judiciary.

Two general elections in quick succession had failed to deliver the required mandate for such change, and resistance from Mr Erdogan's longtime party ally Ahmet Davutoglu saw him pushed out of the prime minister's job in favour of the more pliant Binali Yildirim.

Before the coup attempt, Mr Erdogan had declared that MPs of the opposition HDP - a party which stands in the way of his plans for the presidency - should be stripped of their immunity and charged with terrorism offences. He has now also declared the Gulen Movement - whose US-based leader Fethullah Gulen he accuses of masterminding the coup - to be a terrorist organisation.

Mr Gulen has in turn accused Mr Erdogan of pursuing "one-man rule", a problem that has a very long history in the Middle East.

A man prays at the Sultan Suleyman Mosque in Istanbul. Credit: AP Photo

2. The problem of religion - and of secularism

As his sobriquet "Ataturk" (father of the Turks) suggests, the modern Turkish republic's first leader, Mustafa Kemal, was seen not only as a political leader but as a national parent, who set about moulding his "children" by changing what men and women were allowed to wear, how they wrote their language and the way their society was organised, all in the name of secular modernity and progress. A man could be charged for wearing a hat without a brim, women were discouraged from wearing headscarves and men from growing beards.

To this day there is a taboo against any public criticism or ridicule of Ataturk, and Mr Erdogan has also sought to punish those who tell jokes about him.

A century before Ataturk's time, the Ottoman emperor Mahmoud II also changed dress codes and installed portraits of himself in Western uniform in government offices, even though this violated Sunni Islam's teachings on icons. It is a practise that has been enthusiastically adopted by leaders of post-Ottoman secular republics seeking to present themselves as the "crown of the nation", from Saddam Hussein and Hosni Mubarak to Bashar al-Assad.

Then prime minister Tony Abbott meets Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi in New York in September 2014. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Ataturk oppressed his people in the name of secularism; Mr Erdogan has been accused of Islamising Turkey by stealth. The Gulen Movement were once considered his allies in this endeavour, but now the movement's extensive network of schools is being targeted by the government.

The question of what belongs to Caesar and what to God has dogged all the successor states of the Ottoman Empire. It is a question that becomes more pressing if societies try to abandon Caesars altogether and move towards democracy. When Egyptian general and defence minister Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi led a coup against elected Egyptian president Mohamed Mursi, one of the chief charges was that Dr Mursi's Muslim Brotherhood was not a "patriotic" and "nationalist" organisation but one with a religious agenda.

Mr Sisi has since sought to portray himself as someone who can propose religious reform, winning effusive praise from then prime minister Tony Abbott among others. Yet this is a path other military dictators dressed in civilian clothes have tried to walk, including Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf, who wrote for foreign newspapers about "enlightened moderation" in Islam while suppressing political opposition at home.

Leyla Zana, right, and fellow MP Selim Sadak are greeted by supporters in Ankara in 2004 after a decade in jail.Credit: AP

3. The problem of nationalism and minorities

The crackdown in recent months on schools, businesses and media outlets associated with the Gulen Movement has been troubling. But since the founding of the republic in the 1920s, the canaries in the coalmine of Turkish civil rights have been the country's Kurdish minority, long regarded as a nation within the nation.

For decades, Kurdish ethnicity was denied by the Turkish state and the teaching and use of their language forbidden, restrictions highlighted by the swearing-in of Kurdish MP Leyla Zana in 1991. Her decision to take the oath in Kurdish and wearing red, yellow and green saw her jailed for years.

Under Mr Erdogan, restrictions on Kurdish expression were eased, and a peace process with Kurdish militants in the country's south-east began in 2012. But the role of Kurdish forces in the conflicts in Syria and Iraq and the rise within Turkey of the HDP - an opposition party with strong support from Kurdish voters but also gaining broader appeal - has led to a re-militarisation of the Kurdish problem under the guise of combating separatism and terrorism, with Leyla Zana once again in the spotlight. Mr Erdogan's ruling AKP then moved to strip MPs from the HDP of their immunity from prosecution.

The question of what happens to Kurdish citizens in a state defined as ethnically Turkish has echoes in the question of what happens to Arab citizens in a state defined as Jewish, and in recent years Israel's Arab MPs have been forced to consolidate politically to beat new electoral quotas and then to face an impeachment law aimed at excluding their voices from the forum of democracy, a campaign that has also crystallised around the speech of a single female MP, Haneen Zoabi.

Peter Greste with his al-Jazeera English colleagues Baher Mohamed, left, and Mohamed Fahmy in court in Cairo in 2014.Credit: AP

​4. The problem of "the serpent"

Mr Erdogan has been quick to hint at foreign hands behind the coup attempt, suggesting that Mr Gulen is merely the pawn of a "mastermind" in the West. The fact that Mr Gulen lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania has also allowed Mr Erdogan to portray him as an alien, external force.

Secular and religious figures kiss and the flag of the Greek minority flies next to the Turkish one in this lithograph celebrating the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. After the revolution, Said Nursi - who inspired Fethullah Gulen - was tried for treason but acquitted.

In the past, Mr Erdogan's government has also cracked down on Twitter and Google as threats to national security, part of a wider campaign against what he describes as "tutelage" by forces that run counter to the Turkish "national will".

This paranoia regarding foreign media, foreign-backed NGOs and foreigners in general has become prevalent as democracy retreats across the region. At its root is a time-honoured authoritarian vision of the nation as an Eden marred only by the whisperings and schemes of the intruding serpent. This vision lies behind the trial of NGO workers in Egypt under Dr Mursi and the trial of Peter Greste and his colleagues from the Qatar-based television network al-Jazeera under Mr Sisi.

That this depiction of foreigners serves political purposes is clear. After all, not all contributions coming into Egypt from abroad are unwelcome, and in some cases laws against foreign support have a marked ideological slant. The Iraqi and Syrian governments may both complain about foreign fighters and their foreign backers, but in that case their own sources of military support from abroad can hardly go unremarked.

If the countries of the Middle East wish to achieve greater democracy and through it greater prosperity, they must grasp the truth that democracy is never simply a matter of who has the most ballots. Taking a long look in the mirror and rethinking the compact between each nation's competing domestic constituencies may be harder work than railing at foreigners, but in the end it is likely to yield more lasting rewards.