DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH FOR TURKEY TO ENTER THE EUROPEAN UNION
Stephen Schwartz, The Weekly Standard
The Weekly Standard
November 27, 2006 Monday
On October 12, the Swedish Academy announced its award of the Nobel
Prize in Literature to the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. He is the author
of several books that have attained worldwide bestseller status,
the most recent in English being last year’s Istanbul: Memories and
the City. The gifted Pamuk is read widely in the West–perhaps even
more than in his native country.
Indeed, inside Turkey, political issues almost immediately intruded
into discussion of Pamuk’s prize, which he will formally accept in
Stockholm on December 10. Many in the Turkish cultural elite took a
sour view–one symptomatic of aspects of the political culture that
threaten to keep their country out of the European Union.
Sophisticated observers might have seen in Pamuk’s honor evidence
that Turkey has attained a certain cultural parity with other leading
countries–surely a favorable sign for the E.U. accession to which so
many Turkish citizens aspire. Or they might have construed Pamuk’s
selection as a cultural gain for Muslims generally. Some in the
West pointed out that Pamuk had differed with his country’s rulers
on several occasions, making him one more in the line of literary
dissenters rewarded by the Swedish Academy.
Instead, Turkish political and media circles treated Pamuk’s Nobel
prize as simply another skirmish in their endless war with the ghosts
of Armenians killed on their soil during the First World War. Last
year, Turkish authorities charged Pamuk with "public denigration
of the Turkish identity"–under a law enacted after his alleged
insult occurred. The supposed infraction came in comments made in
an interview with the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger about historic
massacres of Armenians and Kurds by the Turkish authorities. At the
beginning of 2006 the legal case was dropped, but only, it seems,
as a sop to European sensitivities.
The tragedy suffered by up to a million Armenians at the end of Ottoman
rule is not contested by serious historians anywhere, including inside
Turkey. Pamuk himself exaggerated when he claimed that "nobody but
[him] dares talk about" the subject. A Turkish leftist, Taner Akcam,
published a lengthy volume on the atrocities against Armenians,
A Shameful Act, in Turkish in 1999 (now available in English). But
Turkish nationalists labeled Pamuk’s prize a European reward for his
comments on the Armenian question.
It is easy to assert that Turkey has no place in the E.U. because
it is Muslim, and that Europe should define itself by its Christian
heritage. But would Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, or an independent
Kosovo be eternally excluded from the European Union because they have
Muslim majority or plurality populations? Very likely not. The truth
is that Turkey is handicapped in its approach to Europe much less by
its majority faith than by three aspects of its political culture that
mainly reflect the legacy of radical secularism. These are the state
ideology of Turkishness, the systematic denial of minority ethnic and
religious rights, and the excessive influence of the military within
the government.
In addition, to be sure, Turkish politics has taken an Islamist tilt
in recent years, with the ascent of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, current
prime minister and leader of the AK or Justice and Development party.
Although opposed to the petrified and crumbling national-secularist
heritage, Erdogan’s orientation indicates a path of less, rather
than more, speed toward full political reform, including individual
and minority rights. Erdogan and his colleagues have made some
concessions to the European Union–mainly changes in the legal system
(they abolished the death penalty) and gestures toward conciliation
on occupied Cyprus–but the AK party’s enthusiasm for rapid progress
soon faded. The latest assessment from the E.U., published last week,
chastised Turkey for dragging its feet on Cyprus as well as on the
rights of ethnic and religious minorities.
And it’s worse than foot-dragging. Turkey has lost ground. The
Turkish Republic has adopted, in the last two years, laws regulating
speech and written discourse based on an official definition of
Turkishness. Turkishness is defined entirely politically, and with
reference to historical events. It is officially "anti-Turkish" to
engage in frank discussion of the history of the Anatolian Armenians
or, one presumes, the standing of the Greek Orthodox Christians in
Turkey, represented by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomeus. The visit of
Pope Benedict XVI to the ecumenical patriarch scheduled for the end of
November seems bound to stir new controversy, for the simple reason
that his church has almost no rights in Turkey: It cannot operate a
seminary or publish religious literature. This is not the European
model of mutual respect between faiths (much less the American model
of free exercise of religion).
Minority issues further dramatize the distance between the present
Turkish style of governance and European principles. Kurds make up at
least a fifth of Turkey’s population. They are an Indo-European, not
a Turkic, people, and their presence in the region, like that of the
Greeks and the Armenians, predates the arrival of the Turks. In Turkey,
they have produced a notably nasty bunch of terrorists, including the
notorious Abdullah Ocalan of the former Kurdistan Workers party or PKK,
an extreme Communist group once aligned with the late Romanian dictator
Nicolae Ceausescu. But most Kurds are no more radical than their
co-ethnics in Iraqi Kurdistan, who are exemplary in their moderation.
But apart from token measures of amelioration adopted to please
the Europeans, Turkey continues to deny Kurds the right to enjoy
their historical cultural and linguistic traditions. Considering
how far Spain has gone in recognizing Catalan, Basque, and other
minority-language cultures, and the significant gains by the Scots and
Welsh in securing political autonomy in the United Kingdom, Turkey
has a long way to go before it will satisfy a European criterion on
ethnic minorities.
If the situation of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the memory of
brutalities inflicted on the Armenians are still provocative topics,
the condition of another minority in Turkey, the Alevis, is arguably
more dramatic in that they are Muslims. Ethnically both Turkish and
Kurdish, the Alevis are Sufi-Shia Muslims and comprise as much as one
quarter of the population of the republic, around 18 million people.
The religious traditions and social attitudes of the Alevis illustrate
the spiritual diversity of the Islamic global community.
While reference volumes, including The CIA World Fact Book, routinely
cite the official Turkish claim that 99 percent of Turks are Sunnis,
Alevis do not follow the established precepts of Sunni Islam. Rather,
they honor the 12 imams or religious guides of the main Shia sect.
Alevi women do not cover themselves, and they participate equally
with men in prayer. Alevis worship "truth" (hakk) rather than a
divine creator, and they believe truth resides in the hearts of all
humans. Their devotion represents a synthesis of Turkic pre-Islamic
ecstatic religion, transcendental Sufi practice, and protest against
worldly injustice. Like other Shia Muslims, they appear more influenced
by contact with Christianity than do Sunnis.
Cruelties inflicted on the Alevis in recent years include an incident
of mass murder in the Turkish town of Sivas in 1993, when 37 people
died in a hotel set on fire by Sunni extremists. The pretext for
this lynching was that an Alevi cultural group was meeting to hear
an author, Aziz Nesin, who had defended Salman Rushdie’s freedom of
the pen. Erdogan’s AK party includes no Alevis in its leadership,
and Alevis believe the prime minister seeks to exclude them from
recognition as Muslims.
Under the Erdogan administration, Alevis fear the rise of a new
government-backed, Sunni fundamentalism with strong similarities to
the official Wahhabi cult in Saudi Arabia–a shocking possibility
in Turkey, where Wahhabis were always despised as enemies of the
Ottomans. How could a Wahhabization of Turkish Sunnism take place?
With frightening ease: If Erdogan empowers a new state Sunnism, it will
expose the inadequacy of religious education and the degraded state of
theology in Turkey, a result of the nation’s secularist heritage–and
a gap in religious culture the Wahhabis will handily fill.
That is the typical Wahhabi response to the revival of Islamic feeling
under or after secular rule; the pattern has been seen in Algeria,
the Balkans, Central Asia, Nigeria, Malaysia, the Caucasus, and
Iraq. In most cases the effort at Wahhabization has failed, but only
after serious bloodshed. Turkey would be a most tempting prize for
the fundamentalists. In any case, the Alevis seem destined to endure
second-class citizenship, if not direct oppression, although they
are immensely influential in Turkish cultural (especially musical)
life. Turkey is bad, and probably getting worse, for Muslim religious
minorities like the Alevis, as well as for the much smaller non-Muslim
communities. And as we see in Iraq, fighting among Muslims can be
bloodier than combat between Muslims and non-Muslims.
As if all these barriers to Turkish-European harmonization were not
enough, there remains the enormous problem of the Turkish army.
Turkey’s armed forces are the sole survivor from an earlier era: They
still act as guardian of the official national ideology, rooted in the
militant secularism of Kemal Ataturk. Like the People’s Liberation
Army created by Mao Zedong, which attempted to gain power in the
Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, and the former Yugoslav
army, for which military professionalism was no bar to involvement
in genocidal adventures, the Turkish army has repeatedly asserted
the right to intervene in politics and to dismiss Turkey’s elected
leaders by coup. But while the Chinese army would not attempt such a
thing today, and the Serbian remnant of the Yugoslav army no longer
has the power to do so, the Turkish army still believes it can flex
its muscles when it wishes.
The last ideological military establishment in Western Europe, that
of ex-Francoist Spain, was definitively removed from any influence
over political life a quarter century ago. But the Turkish army
erupted into the civil realm as recently as 1997, when it forced
the resignation of Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan. Erbakan was an
Islamist precursor of Erdogan; but military pressure to remove him
did not match the European pattern of democratic accountability.
Unless Turkey follows Spain’s example and completely separates its
army from any direct use of political power, it cannot be considered
for E.U. accession. In today’s Turkey, separation of the army from the
state is even more urgent than maintaining the wall between religion
and the state. But how can this be accomplished peacefully?
There is little indication the Turkish army will not lash back,
once again, to keep its privileges.
Americans may have other objections to Turkish policies today,
especially in the aftermath of Ankara’s refusal to assist in the
liberation of Iraq, and the subsequent explosion of anti-American
propaganda in the country. But by contemporary European standards,
neither the state Ataturk created, with its militaristic secularism,
nor the state that threatens to succeed it, with narrow, militant
Sunnism as its foundation, would be welcome. Turkey has profound
choices to make, and soon–for the good of its citizens no less than
for the satisfaction of Brussels bureaucrats, European politicians,
and even its past, present, and future American friends.
Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.