Feature: Mad about Turkey
by GARETH HARDING

UPI – United Press International (USA)
September 1, 2005 Thursday 11:45 AM EST

BRUSSELS, Sept. 1 — Brussels, the self-styled capital of the European
Union, is a consensual sort of place, where believers in the EU project
far outnumber doubters, and polite debate is preferred to heated
argument. But when it comes to the pros and cons of Turkey’s membership
of the Union, the gloves come off and etiquette flies out the window —
as a demonstration against Ankara’s EU bid proved earlier this week.

On a leafy square wedged between the European Parliament and the
Council of Ministers in the EU quarter of the city, several dozen young
activists from the “Voice for Europe” campaign handed out leaflets
against Turkish membership of the 25-member bloc to bemused motorists,
tourists and passers-by. They held up banners proclaiming “55 percent
vs. 35 percent: can’t you count” — a reference to a recent European
Commission opinion poll showing a majority of Europeans against Turkish
membership, let off balloons with the slogan “Turkey is not in Europe,”
and set up a huge clock with the hand standing motionless at 5 minutes
to noon. The message? Even at this late stage — accession talks with
the predominantly Muslim state are due to begin in Brussels in one
month — the decision by EU leaders to open membership negotiations
with Ankara can be reversed.

It is difficult to get worked up about draft directives and
parliamentary amendments — the usual Brussels fodder — but the
question of whether Turkey should be admitted into the EU in the
latter half of the next decade unleashes powerful emotions.

When Boris Blauth, the German coordinator of the Voice for Europe
campaign, tells United Press International that Turkish immigrants
commit “far more crimes” than locals, a Belgian journalist of Turkish
origin retorts: “Turks don’t have a chance to integrate. They are
put in a ghetto and left to their own devices.” To illustrate his
point, the photo-journalist tells the story of a date he once had in
Brussels. “After two hours talking in a bar, I told the girl my name
and she spat in my face and left.”

A hot-headed Armenian demonstrator has little sympathy for the
reporter’s romantic woes or arguments in favor of Turkish entry. “You
shouldn’t be a journalist. You should be a clown,” he says, to which
the reporter replies: “Go forth and multiply” — but not quite in
those words.

It is easy to see why Turkish membership of the EU, which is the
main topic on the table of a meeting of European foreign ministers
in Wales Friday, sparks such violent reactions.

If Turkey joined the EU in 2015, it would become its most populous
state within a decade due to strong population growth in the
predominantly Muslim republic and low fertility rates in the Union.
As population size largely determines voting power in the EU, it would
leapfrog Germany to become the state with the greatest political clout.

Turkey is considerably poorer than EU states, with a per capita gross
domestic product equal to a quarter the EU average.

“Unemployed manpower will stream into European territories, which
will result in tensions both on the labor force market and on the
level of society,” says a pamphlet distributed by Voice for Europe.

Blauth’s main concern is that Turkish values, which he describes as
in the “Asian, Islamic tradition,” are different from European secular
values such as equality between men and women and freedom to practice
one’s religion. “Let them have their culture and let us have ours,”
says the German.

Opponents of Turkey’s membership of the EU vigorously deny they are
racist or xenophobic, but there is more than a hint of Islamophobia
in some of the arguments they put forward.

“A Muslim state cannot join the European Union,” says Mogens Camre,
a Danish Euro-skeptic member of the European Parliament who took
time out to meet the campaigners Monday. “You can believe in any
God you like, but the Islamic religion is not about democracy. The
Arab world rejects modern society and we don’t want their fingers
on our buttons in Europe. We’ve only been able to develop the way we
have because we are a homogenized society. If the Muslims took over,
Denmark would be a desert.”

These arguments may be crude and pander to the public’s basest fears
about a clash of civilizations between Christian Europe and Muslim
Turkey, but they are widely held in the EU. In a recent commission
poll, three-quarters of Germans and 70 percent of French respondents
came out against Turkish accession, with over half of those interviewed
opposing Ankara’s entry into the 25-member club.

Since it was founded in May, Voice for Europe has collected over
26,000 signatures for its petition against Turkish membership and
has brought its message to Budapest, Copenhagen, Athens, Warsaw,
Prague and other European capitals.

“We have had a very good response on the streets,” says Blauth. “Even
Turkish women in hijabs (headscarves) have signed our petition.”

Despite the muscular campaigning against Turkey’s membership bid by
groups like Voice for Europe and the last-minute doubts expressed by
senior members of the French, Austrian, Greek and Cypriot governments,
membership talks with Ankara are still likely to kick off as planned
on Oct. 3 — over 40 years after Turkey first filed its application
to join. But the public debate about whether to admit the large,
powerful and populous nation on Europe’s eastern fringes is likely
to run and run.