The Daily Telegraph, UK
Oct 2 2005
A cynical comedy that is likely to end in ironic tragedy
By Daniel Hannan
(Filed: 02/10/2005)
An elaborate farce will be played out in Luxembourg tomorrow. Barring
a last-minute diplomatic hitch, Turkey will formally begin the
process of accession to the European Union. Politicians from around
Europe will make speeches about how much the EU will gain from
Turkish membership and vice versa. But few of them will believe what
they are saying.
Indeed, almost the only people who are taking the EU at its word are
the Turks themselves. Unaccustomed to the way of doing business in
Brussels, they innocently believe the promise made by the existing
members last December that Turkey would be admitted once it had met
certain criteria. Since then, the EU has been shaken by the French
and Dutch No votes on the constitution – results that the Eurocrats
blame chiefly on anti-Turkish feeling. France and Austria have
responded by promising to hold referendums on Turkish membership.
Seventy per cent of Frenchmen and 80 per cent of Austrians plan to
vote No, and it takes only one veto to block the application.
Yet the Turks remain blissfully optimistic. The European Parliament
was swarming with them last week, polite men in spectacles and dapper
suits. I fell into conversation with one, an MP from the ruling
party, in a bar. “Come off it,” I told him. “It’s never going to
happen, is it? I mean, look at what this Austrian chap, Schüssel, is
telling his voters: that you can’t come in because no one wants to
pay for you.”
My Turkish friend smiled gently. “Das ist für die Gasse,” he said. It
was a clever answer. The phrase, which roughly translates as “that’s
for the gutter”, was used in the 1920s by a previous Austrian
chancellor, Ignaz Seipel, to describe the anti-Semitism that his
party preached but never practised. By quoting it, the Turkish MP was
at once signalling his familiarity with European history and
delivering a neat put-down to Mr Schüssel.
My friend’s European outlook is not surprising: like many Turks, his
ancestors had fled the Balkans with the Ottoman janissaries. As we
spoke, I kept thinking how much more urbane he and his colleagues
were than many of the MEPs already here. Spend a day in Strasbourg
and you will come across religious fundamentalists, unapologetic
Stalinists, nutty monarchist parties. You will find fascists,
indicted criminals, apologists for the IRA. Yet these same MEPs
presume to treat the Turks like half-civilised brutes.
Last Wednesday, my colleagues insisted that, before it is allowed in,
Turkey acknowledge its role in the Armenian massacres of 1915 and
recognise the Greek Cypriot administration’s jurisdiction over the
whole island. No other country has had such conditions attached to
its membership. No one demanded that, say, Belgium come clean about
its atrocities in the Congo. And asking Ankara to make further
concessions when it was the Turkish Cypriots who accepted the EU’s
reunification plan and the Greeks who rejected it seems grotesquely
unfair.
Ah, you say, but these are Western Turks. Behind them stand hordes of
Anatolian peasants, barely literate and vulnerable to Islamism. After
all, haven’t they just voted for a religious party? This is a strange
criticism. For years, the West has been lecturing Ankara about its
illiberal attitude to religious pluralism. Now, when Turkey finally
rescinds some of its most oppressive anti-clerical laws, we throw our
hands in the air and shriek about fundamentalism. The funny thing is
that we risk creating the very thing we fear: a Turkey oriented
towards Mecca. Refusing the Turks now would be one thing. But
stringing them along for another 10 years, extracting humiliating
concessions, making them assimilate hundreds of thousands of EU laws
and then, after all this, turning them away – that would be
calamitous. Today, Turkey is an inspiration to Muslims everywhere who
believe in democracy. Ten years from now, we may have turned a loyal
ally into a snarling rival, an Iran on our doorstep. We are stumbling
towards a truly epochal mistake.
– Daniel Hannan is a Conservative MEP