Not only has the military been politically defanged, but it has also proved
unable or unwilling to fight back. Dozens of officers were detained last
week, and several senior ones were arrested. Top military leaders met and
managed to produce only a brief statement, never mind a coup.

"What came out of that?" said Baskin Oran, a professor of international
relations at Ankara University. "A big nothing. This is finished. Turkey has
crossed the border."

Now the country is shedding its skin, sloughing off an outdated doctrine,
but nervous about what will take its place.

"The old ideology is bankrupt, that much we know," said Soli Ozel, a
professor of political science at Bilgi University. "But what are we going
to be putting in its stead? How will we filter the world around us? How will
we see ourselves?"

Turkey is moving into uncharted territory, causing deep anxiety among
millions of secular Turks who fear that the country's domineering prime
minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan -- a former Islamist who won 47 percent of
the vote in the last election and now controls many of the country's
institutions -- will trample their rights.

That worry deepened Monday, when the Turkish authorities made two more
controversial arrests -- of an active duty general and a state prosecutor
who had investigated Islamic networks, Turkey's Anatolian News Agency
reported.

How Turkey resolves this identity crisis will reverberate well beyond its
borders. The country has the second largest army in NATO after the United
States. It is strategically placed, with the former Soviet Union to the
north and the Middle East to the south. It is a candidate for membership in
the European Union. Decades of growth have made it the seventh largest
economy in Europe.

Last week's detentions and arrests capped a month of high political drama
that began in January, when a small independent newspaper, Taraf, published
what it said were military documents from a 2003 meeting describing
preparations for a coup.

The documents were brought in a suitcase, Taraf's editors said, and included
diagrams of two Istanbul mosques that were to have been bombed, creating an
emergency that would justify a military takeover.

The military acknowledged that a meeting had taken place, but said that it
was focused only on external threats. The army chief vehemently denied plans
for bombings or a coup.

Even so, on Monday of last week, the Turkish authorities began detaining
military officers and by the end of the week had more than 60 in custody,
including two top retired generals.

"Now the army is completely pacified, eliminated as a power from the
political scene," said E. Haldun Solmazturk, a retired general. "Now the
military is touchable."

That is a profound historical change. Modern Turkey was founded in 1923 by
an army general, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who imposed radical changes in
language and habits on a largely illiterate, agrarian society. The military,
together with the judiciary and state bureaucracy, wielded immense power,
guarding Turkish democracy "as if the country was a perpetually immature
child," said Halil Berktay, a history professor at Sabanci University in
Istanbul.

"The military came to acquire a sense of, 'this is our land, this is our
Republic,' " he said. It deposed elected governments four times, most
recently in 1997.

That role began to change with the rise of Mr. Erdogan, a tough-talking
Istanbul mayor representing a rising underclass of religious Turks. He was a
confounding mix, from a background of political Islam, but with an agenda of
bringing Turkey into the European Union, where his supporters did most of
their business.

Although he was despised by the secular establishment, his party, Justice
and Development, won a national election in a landslide in 2007.

The election vastly diminished the military's role in politics, but that was
changing anyway. None of the alleged coup plots cited by prosecutors ever
came to pass because the top leadership stopped them.

And the fact that the military has not responded to the arrests -- which
include a sprawling legal proceeding against 200 people that began in 2007
-- reflects a leadership that is opposed to intervention. The current chief
of the army, Gen. Ilker Basbug, has spoken out against military meddling and
is believed to have had good relations with Mr. Erdogan.

But to Mr. Erdogan's critics, the arrests look suspiciously like raw efforts
to silence the opposition. And now that he has control over most of the
levers of power -- the presidency, the government bureaucracy and Parliament
-- they worry that his impulses will be unchecked.

Many believe that the police and prosecutors have been hijacked by an
Islamic network led by Fetullah Gulen, a Turkish preacher who lives in the
United States. Nedim Sener, a journalist who has written a book on the
network, said the involvement of Mr. Gulen's followers was an "open
secret."

A looming fear is that the last remaining institution with any power to
oppose him, the judiciary, will soon fall to his Islamic supporters, who are
unlikely to be less ideological than their rigidly secular predecessors.

Even those who are happy to see Mr. Erdogan prevail say he is a flawed
leader with autocratic tendencies. His biggest critic, Aydin Dogan, a
businessman and publisher, was slapped with a giant fine last year, and
journalists who work for his newspapers say spunky criticism is dead.

Mr. Ozel, the political scientist, described Mr. Erdogan's party as "a
democratizing force, but not necessarily a democratic one."

Yildiray Ogur, an editor at Taraf who worked on the expose that led to last
week's arrests, defended the legal cases, saying today's Turkey was a
slow-motion version of the Soviet Union in 1991, when idols fell and people
came out of the woodwork confessing secrets.

For better or worse, Mr. Ozel says, former Islamists like Mr. Erdogan are
the only ones engaged in the project of creating a new Turkey, with the
secularist party "either incapable or unwilling to be part of the process,"
routinely blocking legislation required for European Union membership.

But Mr. Sener fears this new Turkey will exclude people like him. "They say
this is about democracy, but it ends up increasing their hold on power," he
said.

Mr. Oran of Ankara University dismisses those fears. Borrowing a thought
from Marx, he noted that Mr. Erdogan's supporters, once Islamist and working
class, had grown comfortable, sowing the seeds of the party's
transformation. "It has become bourgeois," Mr. Oran said.
"They will always
be Muslims, but they won't be Islamists."



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