Today’s Zaman, Turkey
April 12 2009
History unresolved
ANDREW FINKEL
"History, unresolved, can be a heavy weight," US President Barack
Obama told the Turkish Parliament this week, dwelling on a subject on
which he is an acknowledged authority. Mr. Obama is something of a
poster boy for a nation’s ability to own up to the skeletons in its
cupboard, and it verges on the ironic that the great fear his election
once evoked in Ankara was that he would force Turkey to do the same.
His remarks appeared designed, however, to reassure the serried ranks
of Turkish lawmakers that he would not be forcing anytime soon the
issue of exactly what happened to the Armenian population at the time
of the demise of the Ottoman Empire. He later told a press conference
that his own views of 1915 had not changed, but that his address to
Parliament consigned the recognition of genocide to the more immediate
problem of getting Turkey and Armenia to normalize relations. At the
same time, he warned against the dangers of letting the wounds of
history fester. "Reckoning with the past can help us seize a better
future," he said, and certainly the implication was that Turkey’s
allies would be much relieved not to have to bob and weave and
politically maneuver every time the subject of Armenia came up.
Turkey’s enthusiasm to confront its past is a subject this column will
return to again (and again). Arguably it is working its way backwards,
beginning with the current Ergenekon trial and the recent efforts of
an unelected few to commandeer the elected government. But there is
little doubt that the country’s capacity to deal with its own history
is an intrinsic part of the way it is itself perceived by the world in
general and Europe in particular. The ability to face the past, and
more importantly to purge past sins, is not incidental to the entire
idea of Europe. Once upon a time the axis of evil was not Iran, North
Korea and Iraq but Germany, Italy and Japan. Germany’s shedding of its
fascist past is a historical act fundamental to the founding of the
European Union. Greece, Spain and Portugal were similarly rewarded for
discarding their dictatorships. At the rhetorical level, the last wave
of enlargement candidates were not so much admitted to Europe as
welcomed back after emerging from the Soviet night. It is a process of
redemption.
The rhetoric of Turkish admission is very different. The arguments in
favor are at best a practical decision to expand the European market
and at worst an attempt to impose discipline on a potentially unstable
neighbor. Neither argument has much sex appeal. A more persuasive line
of reasoning is that Turkey’s admission would provide confirmation
that a Muslim majority nation can share European values, and this is a
view purported by the Left. German Greens have gone one further and
see Turkey’s accession as a way of atoning for their own mistreatment
of Turkish guest workers. Many were quick to draw the Obama parallel
after Cem Özdemir, the son of a Gastarbeiter, was elected to co-lead
the party. Yet it is not Turkey, but Germany itself, that is called
upon to change. To others that change is logically impossible. Indeed,
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the current pope, once lobbied for the
Christian character of Europe to be enshrined in its constitution.
The inescapable logic of this is to forever deny Turkey a European
identity.
One could argue that the historical reality is very different and that
if there is such a thing as a unitary history of Europe, then Turkey
and the Ottoman Empire are a part of that history. Conflict within
Christian Europe was far more intense than conflicts between
Christians and Muslims. So while it is true that Turks have yet to
come to terms with their past, they also have to come to terms with
the fact that their own past represents a challenge for Europe
itself. Turkish nationalists and European exclusionists remember a
history of incompatibility.
12.04.2009
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
