Erdoğan, the Hejaz Railway and the Political Economy of Ottomanism

References to the glorious Ottoman past have been flying around in Turkey amid the memorandums signed with Syria and Saudi Arabia to revive the Hejaz railway. What is really going on?

These are photos of the Hejaz Railway’s Damascus station, at the heart of the old city, which I took on my last trip a few months ago. The building is majestic and intact, but the railway itself has been turned into a makeshift car park.

We have discussed over several posts what the Erdoğan regime really wants from its closeness to Ahmad al-Sharaa, the man who has led Syria since the fall of Assad. Part of it is the wish to write a success story for an Islamist government, the kind that came apart in the hands of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia’s Ennahda. Remember how Hakan Fidan, the foreign minister, recently in an interview with Al Jazeera made the subtext explicit about Syria being exactly that. True or not, it is what Erdogan government wants Syria to be, an Islamist-led state turning into a success under Erdoğan’s auspices.

But the larger pull, as I keep underscoring, is political economy. Or should I say clientelism. Influence over Syria, and inside it, gives Erdoğan’s patrimonial network of favoured businessmen somewhere to invest, above all through build-operate-transfer, the trademark arrangement of the AKP years in which a chosen firm puts up an asset and runs it for years under state guarantees …