Spiked, UK
Oct 7 2005

Turkish discontent
The EU debate is both anti-Turkish and anti-European.

by Bruno Waterfield

In today’s European Union (EU) the question of what it is to be a
European cannot be taken for granted. One fault line is the question
of Turkey’s EU membership. Large majorities of Europeans are opposed:
over 80 per cent in Austria, over 70 per cent in France and at least
55 per cent in Germany. Are these Europeans simply racists or
Christian bigots? Or is this discontent a skirmish in a culture war
over what makes, and who defines, a European?

Proponents of Turkish membership argue that the EU is not strictly
defined by borders or geography. Instead of shared territory, claims
EU enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn, the question is one of shared
values. ‘I am often asked where Europe’s ultimate borders lie. My
answer is that the map of Europe is defined in the min’, he said
early this year. ‘Geography sets the frame, but fundamentally it is
values that make the borders of Europe. Enlargement is a matter of
extending the zone of European values.’ But what values, and who
defines and enforces them?

Turkey isn’t joining a freewheeling, Enlightenment project of
progressives. By signing-up, Turkey is committing to an ongoing
intensive, intrusive reform process. The nameless EU officials
overseeing the ‘chapters’, the bureaucratic targets that Turkey must
make the grade on to join, will recentre the country’s political life
around the rules-based system that is the embodiment of Rehn’s
‘values’. Turkey – like the countries that went before it – will be
required to embrace sweeping reform, change that will not come from
below but from above, imposed by administrators.

This is bureaucratic decision-making by committees of EU and national
officials: governance without government, perpetual administration
and political process without any of the interruptions of democratic
accountability. Sadly, joining the EU’s bureaucratic network is as
appealing to Turkey’s elite as it is to the rest of Europe’s
political classes. Turkey’s rulers have long run scared of argument
and change driven by the majority of Turks. The criminal offence of
‘openly denigrating the Turkish identity’ is an indication of a
ruling class as frail in its self-belief as the EU elites who today
outlaw free speech for Muslim clerics.

What will change with Turkey’s EU membership will be the
administrative mechanisms. As Europeans know too well, the EU’s
tick-box world of human rights rules is no guarantor of freedom.
Becoming ‘European’ for Turkey will mean embracing a EU world where
everything is tolerated – except intolerance. Turkey will lose the
old authoritarian taboos, such as prohibition on discussion of the
role of the military or the Armenian genocide – but these will be
replaced by the new taboos of modern Western society.

A burgeoning bureaucracy of unelected administrators and officials
will step into the military’s shoes. Turks will soon be able to talk
about the Armenian genocide – no more prosecutions for famous writers
like Orthan Pamuk. In fact, recognition of the historical event is
set to be a compulsory requirement for Turkey’s EU membership, and EU
hate crime laws can no doubt be cited to ensure compliance. Europe’s
culture wars will spill over into Turkey, as Turks are asked to
abandon the past and embrace EU codes of conduct.

Decades ago, NATO members in Europe overlooked Turkey’s military
dictatorships and human rights abuses with the aim of cementing a
Cold War alliance against the Soviet Union. Today, all EU member
governments – even Austria – see Turkey as a bridge between East and
West. And in these post-11 September, 11 March or 7 July days, Turkey
is regarded as a crucial bulwark against terrorism. Cultural
difference and the prospect of a ‘clash of civilisations’ is regarded
as a clear and present danger.

‘Turkey can be a bridge between Europe and the Islamic world. The
world of the twenty-first century is not doomed to a clash of
civilisations, but can be built on dialogue, cooperation and
integration’, Rehn wrote in December 2004. The premise of this view
is that Turkey must join or there will be more terrorism. This scare
story is typically EU in terms of seeking to mobilise irrational
fear. The entirely negative content of such arguments is both
anti-European and anti-Turkish, in the sense of appealing to backward
prejudices rather than a common humanity. This argument can only fuel
mistrust between Europeans and Turks, who are stripped of a proud
secular history to become Muslims.

During grumpy debates last week, European Parliament Socialist leader
Martin Schulz attacked Hans-Gert Poettering after the Christian
Democrat criticised EU ‘double standards’ that ruled Turkey in but
ruled out (at that time) Croatia. ‘Everyone shut their eyes on the
human rights issue in Turkey while Croatia was to be refused the
start of negotiations because a single general – one who was plainly
not even in Croatia – had not yet been delivered up to the Hague war
crimes tribunal’, he said. Schulz retorted that: ‘You don’t want to
have Turkey because it is Islamic and far away. Croatia is closer and
is Catholic. That is the truth of your message. Let us not beat about
the bush. We must apply the same standards to all countries.’

Many Europeans are turned off by EU elites setting down new rules
of life and politics

Schulz may well have a point here about Poettering. But religious
bigotry does not explain why such huge majorities, in France for
example, are against Turkey’s EU entry. In fact, a Marshall Fund
opinion survey last month showed that 59 per cent of Europeans do not
think Turkey’s ‘Muslim’ status is a reason against EU membership. The
religion issue, upholding a Christian Europe in opposition to the
Islamic East, in the style of the 1683 Siege of Vienna, is irrelevant
to most Europeans. Most Europeans are secular and turned off from the
Catholic Church or organised Christianity. In fact, it is the EU
elites who bring up religion as an argument, to avoid a ‘clash of
civilisations’, and to tutor Europeans (as well as Turks) in the joys
of ‘inter-cultural dialogue’.

By 2008, Turkey will be moiled in membership negotiations and the EU
will be entering a ‘European year of intercultural dialogue’. The
premise of the therapeutic theme is the inability of Europeans, and
Turks, to deal with the modern world. Launching the event this week,
EU culture commissioner Jan Figel explained that Europe’s citizens
were just not up to it. ‘Over the past few years, Europe has seen
major changes resulting from successive enlargements of the EU,
greater mobility in the single market, and increased travel to and
trade with the rest of the world’, he said. ‘This has resulted in
interaction between Europeans and the different cultures, languages,
ethnic groups and religions on the continent and elsewhere. Dialogue
between cultures would therefore appear to be an essential tool in
forging closer links both between European peoples themselves and
between their respective cultures.’

Commission documents claim the ‘real challenge is to move from a
“multicultural” society to an “inter-cultural” one’. But the message
is clear: the problem is interaction between Europeans. ‘It is
essential to ensure that [the] diversity [of an enlarged EU] becomes
a source of richness rather than a source of confrontation… the
peoples of the EU are increasingly made up of a mosaic of cultures,
languages, traditions, origins and religions. The social fabric of
the EU is threatened by rampant racism and xenophobia…. One is afraid
of what one does not know. In this context, it is essential to
promote dialogue between religious and ethnic communities’, states a
Brussels work document.

For Europe’s elites and bureaucrats, those who are opposed to Turkish
entry are mired in backward-looking national or religious communities
that must be ditched in today’s globalised world. Turks and Europeans
who exhibit reservations about the EU will be enlisted in the
‘intercultural’ game. ‘We should get to know Turkey better and Turkey
should… get to know European values better. The commission is
preparing proposals on how we can promote the dialogue, bringing
people together from EU member states and Turkey’, Rehn said
recently. This shows the isolated bureaucratic process that estranges
EU elites from Europeans.

Opposition to Turkish EU membership in Austria, France, Germany and
elsewhere is far wider than isolated groups of racists or chauvinist
rumps. Many Europeans are turned off by EU elites setting down new
rules of life and politics.

EU ideologues Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens are sniffy about what
they see as ‘an emotional return to the apparent safe haven of the
nation’. In the new world of globalisation, they argue, nations are
enhanced by international networks. ‘Let us start to think of the EU
not as an ‘unfinished nation’ or an ‘incomplete federal state’, but
instead as a new type of cosmopolitan project’, they wrote in the UK
Guardian on 4 October. But the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of Beck or Giddens,
or the EU elite, is empty. Cosmopolitanism cannot be built on nothing
more than isolated bureaucratic castes. Elites that themselves share
little more than their contempt for Europeans.

The idea of ‘intercultural dialogue’, which fears the interaction of
Europeans new and old, shows up elites’ pseudo-cosmopolitanism. All
the EU elites actually share are the prejudiced assumptions of a
minority pitted against the majority – and only those who sign up to
this debased worldview may join the club. The real dynamic behind the
row over EU membership is nothing to with Turkey or Europe as such,
but is the issue of how European identities should be ordered.
Europeans should oppose all attempts to bureaucratically impose the
dead ‘cosmopolitanism’ of the EU elites.

Bruno Waterfield is editor of the Brussels-based website Eupolitix
and Parliament magazine.