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THE ROVING EYE
EU deaf to
Turkey's knocking
By Pepe Escobar
When he ratified the Treaty of Paris in 1865,
Emperor Napoleon III included Turkey - which had just
won the Crimean War - in the European Union of the time.
Now, 137 years after the French emperor's gesture, Turks
are still engaged in the never-ending European debate
about Turkey's European identity, and the country is
champing to be de facto admitted into Europe - in the
name of history, and despite geography. After all, most
of Turkey is in Asia; by boat or by bridges over the
Bosporus, hundreds of thousands of Asians disembark
every day in Europe, and then at sunset return to their
homes in Asia Minor.
But at a summit in
Copenhagen, the European Union on Friday only agreed to
review Turkey's application for membership in December
2004, let alone give the a date for talks to begin. In
spite of support from six EU members and fierce lobbying
from the United States, Ankara's request for early
admission was rejected. And any accession talks have
been made conditional on an improvement in Turkey's
democratic and human rights record. These proposals will
now be put to Turkish Prime Minister Abdullah Gul, who
had demanded nothing less than a firm date in 2003 for
the start of negotiations. On Wednesday, the Turkish
daily Sabah splashed on its front page: "2003 or
nothing."
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, former mayor of
Istanbul and leader of the ruling Justice and
Development Party, has been frantically touring key
European capitals lobbying for the start of
negotiations. He has also been to Washington, where he
received total support from the Bush administration:
Turkey is a key NATO ally and the role of Turkish air
bases will be crucial in the event of an attack against
Iraq. But even his efforts and the US pressure combined
have not been enough for the Europeans to throw open
their doors.
The latest snub does raise some
awkward issues in the immediate term. The problem is,
according to a poll by the University of Istanbul, 96.3
percent of Turks are against an armed offensive against
Iraq, and 77.4 percent say that Turkey should not be
involved and should not offer access to its air bases.
Having been spurned, the country's leaders could be
tempted to pander to this sentiment.
In the
longer term, though, Turkey's march towards Europe seems
as inevitable as America's march to war against Iraq. On
Tuesday, the Turkish parliament adopted a first batch of
democratic reforms. A second batch will be voted in the
next few days, and once the dust settles, it is unlikely
that Turkey will abandon its European dream.
Yalta, the Black Sea resort, is assured of a
place in history because that's where Joseph Stalin,
Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill actually
divided Europe in February 1945. The division will
disappear only in 2004, when a group of Central and
Eastern European states enter the EU: Poland, Hungary,
the Czech republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Latvia, Estonia
and Lithuania, new members alongside Cyprus and Malta.
The summit in Copenhagen is formalizing their entry. But
they will only be an effective part of the EU from May
2004 onwards. Romania and Bulgaria will enter only in
2007.
For 40 years, these Central and Eastern
European states were on the other side of the Iron
Curtain. The actual reunification of Europe is taking
place 13 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Turks see these numbers and think: it's not
such a long wait. Turkey may become an EU member well
beyond 2010, but Gul prefers to think current relations
between his country and the European Union are based on
ties that have been fructifying "for at least three
centuries". In a sort of manifesto addressed to many key
European partners and published by Le Monde, the prime
minister says that Turkey abides by European values, and
"because of its history, geography and system of values,
acts and reacts as European". The prime minister defends
Turkey's entry in the EU as "a national project,
supported by the great majority of the population". And
he stresses that only by including Turkey will Europe
realize its potential as "a truly global power".
Some historians and politicians scattered around
Europe, though, are against Turkey's entry in the
European Union. They are incapable of answering the key
question: What is Europe to do about the spread of Islam
throughout the continent?
There are very few
similarities between Islam in Turkey and Islam in the
Middle East. The republic molded by Kemal Ataturk is
essentially secular. There's no question of going back
to Sharia, Islamic law. Vakiflar - the religious
foundations - were secularized. Wearing Islamic clothes
is forbidden to men - and to women as well in certain
occasions. Sufis are banned - although they continue to
exist in a semi-clandestine way.
The most
striking characteristic of Turkish Islam is a pluralist
political system - that accommodates Islamists as well -
mixed with the enormous influence of Western culture,
and how it molded the thinking of Islamic intellectuals.
That's the charm of Turkish Islam - a truly peaceful
Islam that may reject secularization a la Ataturk but
does not try to subvert the Western notion of the
Turkish nation-state.
There was a time when
Europe wanted to turn the Ottomans towards Asia. But
today the best European minds think the Turk way is the
European way. Historian Lucien Febvre, in his famous
lectures about Europe at the legendary College de France
in Paris, wrote in 1999, "Our European political
universe is not a universe in two dimensions. It's a
universe in three dimensions … and how, for instance,
Europe and Asia could live without one another. Here, a
Westernized Turkey, filled with European institutions,
universities, schools, art services … from this Europe
to this Asia, from this Asia to this Europe, we pass
through a series of subtle translations. Today's Turkey
is something of a Balkanic state of yesterday. And a
Balkanic state of yesterday is already the antichamber
of a world that goes from Europe to Asia."
So it
is impossible to refuse entry in the European Union to a
Balkanic state. The problem for Europe is rather how to
bypass the status of a mere free trade zone - basically
what the British want - and arrive at the configuration
of a true political entity. The best European minds
believe Turkey's entry would not threaten a regression
in Europe. Febvre again: "How to integrate the biggest
possible ensembles, ensembles united by history? What
could we profit from the exclusion of Islam from a large
Western world? Do we want to federate it again against
'the infidels'."
In Turkey, a new generation of
intellectuals, feminists, entrepreneurs from Anatolia
all know Western thinking as well as Muslim thinking.
They may consider Islamic communities more important
than the nation-state, but they definitely want freedom,
political pluralism, human rights and social justice.
They want to destroy the abyss between the newcomers
from Asia Minor and the elites in Istanbul.
For
a new generation in Europe, Turkey's accession to the EU
represents a dialogue with Islam way beyond Western
colonial arrogance. It will even lead to thinking in
Utopian terms. There are many people now trying to
invent many Europes in one, the Euromediterranean
joining southern Europe in the Maghreb, and then
reaching towards the Middle East, a continental Europe
from Brest to Moscow, a Europe of islands, a Europe of
seas. The common denominator is always the idea of one
single Europe as a political and social model, based on
common deliberations and social solidarity. This
inclusive Europe could really be a role model for the
whole world.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
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