BRIDGING THE BOSPORUS: ‘TURKEY HAS ALWAYS REPRESENTED A DIFFERENT CONTINENT’
by Peter Goodspeed
National Post (Canada)
October 3, 2005 Monday
National Edition
Lined with tea gardens, Ottoman villas and ancient fortresses,
the straits twist and turn for 35 kilometres, linking the Sea of
Marmara to the Black Sea. With an intoxicating mix of splendour,
simple beauty and cruel history, this sliver of Turkey has become
one of the world’s great cultural frontiers.
This is where the Orient meets the Occident, where Christianity
encounters Islam, where tradition collides with modernity — a bustling
crossroads to Europe and the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus.
Now, the straits and all of Turkey are about to become the focus of
an intense international debate as diplomats prepare to negotiate
Turkey’s application for membership in the European Union.
The talks, scheduled to get underway in Luxembourg today barring a
last-minute veto by Austria, which opposes full EU membership for
Turkey, could last a decade. By the time they end, neither Europe
nor Turkey will be the same.
Turkey’s application to join the EU is already forcing Europe to
question its identity as never before. EU members are struggling
to define their future, while juggling centuries-old fears against
new ambitions.
Even as diplomats debate the terms of Turkey’s entry, Europe has been
swept by a bitter public backlash against the move.
Last spring’s rejection of the EU’s draft constitution by voters in
France and the Netherlands was said to be fuelled by fears of Turkey
joining Europe.
More recently, an opinion poll carried out by the European Commission
claims 52% of Europeans are opposed to letting Turkey join their
club. Only 35% agree.
Seventy per cent of French voters, almost three-quarters of Germans
and 80% of Austrians are against Ankara’s membership.
Angela Merkel, leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union and
possibly Germany’s next chancellor, launched a campaign last month
to block Turkey’s entry into the EU, sending letters to European
leaders asking them to offer Turkey only a “privileged partnership,”
not full membership.
“We are firmly convinced,” she wrote, “that Turkey’s membership would
overtax the EU economically and socially and endanger the process of
European integration.”
Opponents of Turkey’s admission to the EU cite everything from
clashing values to different cultures, a lack of a common geography,
differences in religion and Ankara’s record on human rights.
Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the former president of France who drafted
the latest version of the EU constitution, rejects Turkey’s membership,
declaring, “It would be the end of Europe.”
“There is an obvious contradiction between the pursuit of Europe’s
political integration and Turkish entry into European institutions,”
he says.
Former EU commissioner Frits Bolkestein, a Dutchman who used to be
responsible for the EU’s internal markets, taxation and customs union,
warns that letting Turkey join the EU will trigger a massive wave of
migration that could result in Europe being “Islamized.”
“The liberation of Vienna in 1683 [from a siege by the Ottoman Turks]
would have been in vain,” he says.
Even Pope Benedict XVI has waded into the debate. Last year, when he
was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he told the French newspaper Le
Figaro Turkey threatens European culture.
“Turkey has always represented a different continent, in permanent
contrast to Europe,” he said. “Making the two continents identical
would be a mistake. It would mean a loss of richness, the disappearance
of the culture to the benefit of economics.”
“Europe has a culture which gives it a common identity,” the
then-Cardinal said. “The roots which formed this continent are those
of Christianity.”
On the eve of today’s talks, Austria made a last-ditch attempt to
block any agreement on the ground rules for the negotiations by
demanding diplomats should clearly set out “alternatives” to giving
Turkey full EU membership.
Last week, the European Parliament grudgingly approved opening
negotiations with Turkey, but passed a non-binding resolution that
insists Turkey must acknowledge that the killing of Armenians under
Ottoman rule in 1915 was genocide before it will be admitted to the
EU. Those moves have infuriated Turkey, which has patiently been
trying to get into the EU for 42 years.
Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul has already warned “should [the
EU] place anything short of full membership [on the table], or any
new conditions, we will walk away. And this time, it will be for good.”
Turkish public opinion, which overwhelmingly favours joining the EU,
has grown increasingly frustrated over European preconditions.
In 1963, when John Kennedy was still president of the United States
and Turkey was a bulwark against communism and a key member in NATO,
the Turks were granted associate membership in the European Economic
Community, the EU’s predecessor.
But after Ankara applied for full, formal membership in 1987 it had
to wait until 1999 to be recognized as an EU “candidate.”
In the meantime, such fledgling democracies as post-Franco Spain,
post-Salazar Portugal, Greece, after it sent the military back to
their barracks, and the former communist countries of Eastern Europe
were all accepted into the EU.
Turkey still waits and successive Turkish governments have repeatedly
adopted EU-recommended reforms to pave the way for its admission.
They’ve passed laws to end torture, to abolish state security courts
and to reduce the political role of the military. They reformed
Turkey’s civil code, gave women equal rights to household property
and ended their need to obtain their husband’s permission to work
outside the home.
They’ve abolished the death penalty, rewritten the criminal code,
and legalized the use of Kurdish in education and broadcasting.
Despite growing opposition from hard-line Islamists and nationalist
politicians, Ankara’s moderate Islamic government continues to press
for EU membership.
Turkey’s elite, infatuated with the promises of liberal democracy,
long to be regarded as part of Europe, without becoming Westernized.
Turkey’s poor lust after the economic advantages of EU membership.
Still, there are Islamist religious leaders who warn of being corrupted
by the West and Turkish nationalists who feel their country is being
humiliated.
Britain, one of the strongest supporters of Turkey’s EU candidacy,
says it wants to see a staunch NATO ally, who straddles a strategically
crucial piece of real estate, safely inside Europe.
The possibility would allow Europe to shape a new accommodation between
Islam and the secular West and might even give the continent a bigger
say in the Middle East.
“It would be a huge betrayal of the hopes and expectations of
the Turkish people and of [Turkey’s] Prime Minister [Recep Tayyip]
Erdogan’s program of reform, if, at this crucial time, we turned our
back on Turkey,” British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said last week
at the Labour Party conference in Brighton.
Still, a clash of cultures that assumes religious overtones could
have serious security repercussions for Europe, which already has 23
million Muslims living inside its borders.
“For the EU to cross the Bosporus is to move from a community based
on centuries-old notions of shared history and geography to one based
on shared democratic standards and the future,” argues Timothy Garton
Ash, an Oxford University historian.
“Two logics clash at the gates of the Bosporus: the logic of unity
and the logic of peace,” he says.
“If Europe is mainly about creating a coherent political community,
with some aspirations to be a superpower, it stops on the western
side of the Bosporus — for another decade, at the least,” he says.
“If we think it is more urgent to promote democracy, respect for
human rights, prosperity and therefore the chances for peace in the
most dangerous region in the world, we step on to that bridge.”
GRAPHIC: Black & White Photo: STR, AFP, Getty Images; Members of
the Turkish Nationalist Movement Party …; Black & White Photo:
Umit Bektas, Reuters; …chant “no to Europe” during an anti-EU
demonstration in the capital, Ankara, yesterday. Some 100,000 people
turned out to protest their government’s negotiations with the European
Union, which open in Luxembourg today.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress