Financial Express, India
Oct 1 2005

No key in sight for Turkey’s EU bid

Why is so much going wrong for a major western ally?

SUBHASH AGRAWAL
Posted online: Saturday, October 01, 2005 at 0028 hours IST

If there is a country even more buffeted than India by contradictory
geopolitical pulls and pressures in a post-9/11 and post-Iraq world,
it is perhaps Turkey. The country’s painful quest for a clear
definition is mirrored in the sharp contrasts in Istanbul, an
amazingly beautiful and historical city which straddles two
continents with just the slightest hint of self-consciousness.

The Eurasian interface can often be sharp, with ancient mosques
sitting in proximity to nightclubs, or the burqa and bikini mingling
on Black Sea beaches. In the daytime, Istanbul is a visual collage of
majestic minarets, labyrinthine bazaars and winding alleys, all with
a rather Ottoman buzz, but in the evening large parts of the city
come to resemble Berlin or Stockholm, pulsating in a very
cosmopolitan way to the sound, sight, smell and rhythm from hundreds
of shops, restaurants, bars and art galleries.

Turkey is a happening and waiting-to-happen place all at once, a
country that surprisingly finds itself still being viewed with
hesitation by the West even though it has travelled further than any
other to consciously jettison its historical baggage in fundamental
ways.

Under Kemal Attaturk, modern Turkey, coming out from under the
collapse of the Ottoman Empire, began its quest for a European
character and visage. It declared itself secular, replaced its
millennia-old Arabic script with the Roman script, and passed laws
obliging people to adopt western dress. This cultural big bang was
followed by quiet consolidation of its political links through much
of the 20th century. It joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
(Nato) and then the Council of Europe, and during much of the Cold
War, it was a key western bulwark against the dreaded might of the
Russian bear.

The end of the Cold War has not been very kind to what is perhaps the
only true westernised democracy in the whole Islamic world and what
is clearly a sizable military and economic power, even though its
importance has been reinforced by a growing network of hydrocarbon
pipelines from the oil-rich Caspian region that pass through it.

A range of political issues are dangerously poised against Ankara
these days: the Kurdish problem has revived, the country is under
renewed global pressure to accept, if not atone, its Armenian
history, and relations with its single biggest ally, the US, remain
frosty over the Iraq war.

However, Turkey’s single biggest concern at this time is its bid for
EU membership, a doggedly pursued and emotionally charged enterprise
over which formal negotiations are to begin this coming week in
Brussels. This is once again in trouble, this time strongly opposed
by Austria and not just by France, Poland and the Vatican. Turkey
even risks losing its biggest supporter, Germany, if Angela Merkel,
the CDU/CSU leader, manages to head the next government, as is widely
expected under a fragile coalition. Merkel is firmly opposed to
Turkish entry into the EU, favouring a privileged partnership, which,
of course, Turkey sees as an insulting downgrade and will not accept.

While the cultural nuances and discussion points of this
I-Am-European-No-You-Are-Not are endless, what is increasingly
evident is that Turkey now risks losing ground over the 30 year-old
Cyprus dispute. Turkish commentators and foreign policy experts are
now witnessing a horror in slow motion, with the possibility of an
externally forced solution (as a pre-condition for EU membership)
increasing every day.

Turkey’s bid to wrest a separate state based on ethnicity was always
unviable and without any global support, but till last year there
were hopes that the Turkish and Greek sides of the divided island
state might get more or less equal status. That now looks
increasingly unlikely.

The irony is that this overcharged debate over EU membership has
distorted many pragmatic attempts to find a reasonable and
face-saving solution over Cyprus. Now, it just may be that by pushing
Turkey on this issue, the EU will unwittingly erode much of the
pro-western sentiment in a country already internally divided among
the modern Istanbul elite and the rural Anatolian masses. As a recent
op-ed in the International Herald Tribune put it: `Turkey is still
just muddling through toward modernity’ and is delicately poised,
pulled in two different direction by its two different social
classes.

The whole nature, tenor and direction of European debate about
Turkey’s membership in the EU is very important for India because of
the multiple layers of cultural, geopolitical and Kashmir-related
issues. First, how the world settles a bitter dispute like Cyprus may
be a curtain raiser on their positions over Kashmir, should we allow
the issue to become international instead of bilateral. Second,
Turkish membership in EU will test the true limits and sincerity of
European multi-culturalism. And lastly, it will have an indirect and
but eventual fallout on the debate over the clash of cultures and
moderate versus radical faith.

The writer is editor, India Focus