Commentary: Turkey’s EU accession not likely
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
UPI Editor-at-large
World Peace Herald, DC
Oct 3 2005
WASHINGTON — It will be an exercise in diplomatic futility and
hypocrisy, choreographed to remain on stage, kabuki-like, for 10 years,
with a cast of hundreds of diplomats and Eurocrats (EU’s civil servants
who micromanage everything from the size of condoms to the curvature
of bananas).
Turkey, with 5 percent of its land mass and 10 percent of its people
on the European side of the Bosporus and 95 percent of the country
and 90 percent of its population in Asia Minor, wants to become a
full-fledged member of the European Union. This would give EU a common
border with Syria, Iraq, Iran, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, a
notion that has already given Europeans an acute attack of Turkophobia.
EU membership negotiations, which were scheduled to start this week,
are programmed to last 10 years. By then, Turkey’s population will have
increased from 71 million to 82 million, making a Muslim country the
largest in the 25-nation European Union. That’s why it’s not going to
happen. But the European players, eyes blazing with insincerity, have
to convince the spectators that if the negotiations are successful,
and Turkey agrees to all European demands, preconditions, codicils,
and 80,000 pages of EU law, membership, strongly endorsed by the U.S.,
will be forthcoming.
Turks are beginning to question the utility of what now strikes
them as a charade whose pantomime hints have already been correctly
interpreted. These voices now say Turkey should distance itself from
a Europe that doesn’t wish to go beyond “privileged partnership”
status. Most European leaders understand that rejection could tip
Turkey, now governed by an Islamic party, into the camp of radical
Islam. But one European opinion survey after another says Turkey does
not belong in EU.
French and Dutch voters rejected the proposed new European constitution
last spring because the move was widely interpreted as facilitating
Turkey’s membership application.
A fear that transcends all others in Europe these days is called
“Eurabia.” The nightmare this conjures up is of militant Islam
overshadowing a Judeo-Christian Europe. The Ottoman Empire and before
that the sword of Islam carved out a nice chunk of Europe through
the Iberian Peninsula into southern France.
The Muslims of 1,000 years ago put the Europeans to shame. It took
Europeans several centuries to match their architecture and their
gardens. They also outclassed Europeans in astronomy, medicine,
engineering, geography and mathematics (algebra is an Arabic term).
Cordova, their capital in Spain, was Europe’s richest city, replete
with magnificent palaces and mosques.
The age of Islamic military conquest lasted until 1669, when the
Ottoman Empire made its last acquisition by conquering Crete from
the Venetians. Fourteen years later, it was curtains for the Ottomans
in Europe. They failed to take Vienna and retreated in disarray. On
the southwestern end of Europe, Islam’s armies collapsed almost 200
years earlier when they lost Granada, the last Islamic city in Spain,
in 1492, the year Columbus arrived in America.
Islam’s big mistake was to ban the printing press, which was
banned by Ottoman decree in 1485. It would have been a sacrilege,
flat earth clerics decided, to use the Arabic language in mechanical
equipment. That was the geopolitical ball game. When Napoleon arrived
in Egypt in 1798, Cairo had no printing presses. By then the European
intelligentsia had been embarked on self-improvement through books
for almost two centuries.
Today, there are approximately 20 million Muslims, including 3.8
million Turks, living in Europe, a number that is projected to double
by 2020. Poor immigrants, most of them illegal, continue to flow into
EU countries from the Middle East, including Turkey, North Africa
and sub-Sahara Africa.
New arrivals fade into the masses of mostly unemployed Muslims that
huddle in the poorer neighborhoods of Europe’s major cities. For the
most part, they are not integrated. Even second- and third-generation
European-born Muslims, now holders of EU passports, and free to travel
to the U.S. without visas, resist assimilation.
Their hero is neither European nor American, but Saudi. Pro-Osama
bin Laden literature can be found at kiosks all over Europe and on
thousands of websites.
In Europe, would-be jihadis continue to volunteer to fight
in Iraq. They use the Internet to learn how to make bombs from
store-bought chemicals. They also learn the names of mosques in Syria
and Jordan that can hide a jihadi making his way into Iraq, and then
to learn the different locations in Iraq where jihadis should report
for training and combat assignments. An unknown number have already
returned from Iraq with newly acquired terrorist skills, the ability
to form sleeper cells, and encourage others to sign up for “holy war
against the infidels.”
The Dutch intelligence service — AIVD — says radical Islam in the
Netherlands now encompasses a multitude of movements, organizations
and groups that embrace the fundamentalist line, 20 of them hard-line
Islamist. In London, authorities believe as many as 3,000 veterans
of al-Qaida training camps over the years were born or based in
Britain. And in France, a study of 1,160 recent French converts to
Islam found that 23 percent of them identified themselves as Salafists,
another way of spelling Wahhabi.
EU countries are tightening their immigration laws in response to
popular demand to retard the growth of their Muslim populations. So
talking turkey about Turkey in this environment can only produce
a turkey.