AN IRISHMAN’S DIARY
by Kevin Myers
The Irish Times
October 6, 2005
The European Parliament, perhaps twisting in the wind of doubt over
other issues, last week demanded that Turkey acknowledge the 1915
Armenian massacres as “genocide”.
Why should Turkey do that? Turkey did not exist as a state when the
massacres occurred. The Turkish people, as a people, are innocent of
the bloodshed.
Moreover, the massacres occurred as part of a series of ethnic
slaughters reaching from the Balkan Wars before the Great War until
several years afterwards: why should the Turks alone be expected
to accept blame for events in which all the great powers were to a
greater or lesser degree involved?
One of the great disasters of world history was the failure of the
Western democracies to cherish the enormous virtues of the Ottoman
Empire. Instead, that wretched Gladstonian cliche about it being “the
sick man of Europe” became the myth that governed policy. Churchill
promulgated this with all the foolish and deceitful energy at his
command as he drove us (and I mean us) into the catastrophic Gallipoli
campaign. But even before that calamity, the Tsar’s armies, especially
his Armenians, had fallen ruthlessly on Ottoman Muslim communities
during the winter 1914-15, massacring thousands.
The allies were simultaneously conniving with Ottoman Armenian
separatists, and the UK-French invasion of Turkey in April 1915
triggered a convulsion of insanity through an already neurotically
insecure Anatolia. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were rounded
up by their Kurdish and Turkish neighbours for translocation. Vast
numbers were killed. But so too were vast numbers of ethnic Turks
killed by Russian armies, by Greek armies and by Franco-British armies
in the coming years.
So it is morally and historically absurd to identify one part of
that human catastrophe as demanding modern political culpability,
but no other. So let non-political, academic fingers sift through
the melancholy ashes of history, looking for bones. Modern politics
is not about disinterring the past but transmuting its legacy into
the future through the prism of the present.
And it is in the present that we judge things, not on some glorious
past, be it in Alhambra 50 years ago, as some letter-writers to
this newspaper have been rather fatuously doing, or in the extinct
Ottoman Caliphate. We must decide upon the future of Turkey within the
European Union because of what Turkey is today. Once I was ardently in
favour of full Turkish membership of the EU, but now I am sceptical,
primarily for the reason which is shared by much of Europe: concern
about the mass movement of Turks from eastern Anatolia into our cities.
Western Europe has experienced two post-war examples of large-scale
Turkish immigration: one to Sweden, the other to Germany. The former
was open and generous about civil and electoral rights; the latter
was not. The outcome has been much the same: both countries now have
enclosed, inward-looking Turkish communities, whose young people
marry out, back into Anatolia, and who often have little personal
contact with the indigenous peoples. And whereas Turks at home, under
the stern eye of their army, have for decades been secular in their
expression of Islam, many Turks in non-martial, democratic exile have
embraced more fundamentalist strains.
No doubt such concerns will be called “racist”. But it has nothing to
do with race, and everything to do with culture. Are the cultures of
eastern Turkey and Western Europe mutually assimilable? Could Erzurum
take 10,000 Swedish immigrants? Could Dundalk take 10,000 Anatolian
Turks? Moreover, almost every report we hear from Turkey speaks of
the rise of a dynamic and conservative Islam. When I was first there
20 years ago, headscarves and burkas were non-existent; now they are
common even in Istanbul. Can secular, post-Christian Europe cope with
large numbers of Muslim immigrants from those economically backward
Turkish regions alongside Iran and Iraq, who believe that peace and
freedom exist only in domains ruled by Islamic law?
On the other hand, there remains one sound reason to admit Turkey.
The old EU now really is the sick man of Europe. Sclerotic, over-taxed,
over-regulated, over-pensioned, it lies uncomfortably in bed with
its boisterous new companions from Eastern Europe. What will it make
of the vast energies and vaster population of Turkey? How will it
inflict its ludicrous health and safety regulations, and 80,000 pages
of fatuous Euro-law, on a vibrant Middle-Eastern culture of enterprise
and individualism? It can’t. The Titanic of Brussels would merely need
to skim its hull against the cheery anarchy of the bazaar of Istanbul,
and the wretched vessel would founder.
Moreover, as matters stand, the EU is a criminal conspiracy against
Turkey, our friend and neighbour. I say friend, because for decades,
Turkey held the southern flank of Nato against totalitarian Soviet
communism. And that the EU still has tariff barriers against Turkish
produce, while it has admitted former enemies of the Warsaw Pact,
is a bloody disgrace.
And though it is ludicrous to suppose that the megalomaniac madmen in
Brussels are actually capable of creating a superstate reaching from
the Arctic almost to Arabia, this doesn’t mean they won’t continue to
try. So we should welcome both Austria’s frank concerns about Turkey
and the Franco-Dutch rejection of the European Constitution – which
anyway was more like a detailed manual for running a nuclear power
station than a political document.
What the EU needs now is a little more sceptical honesty, a lot more
of the rigours of a Turkish marketplace, and a great deal less of the
flabby and sclerotic Franco-German welfare dependency. In other words,
it is time to re-invent the dear old Common Market, with controlled
population movements the key