EUROPE’S STANCE ON TURKEY IS SHORTSIGHTED

The Irish Times
October 14, 2006 Saturday

WorldView/Paul Gillespie: ‘The imaginative exploration of the other,
the enemy who resides in all our minds." This is how Orhan Pamuk, the
Turkish writer who has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, defines
the novelist’s most important task. His work has been controversial
precisely because it reveals how false unitary accounts of political
and cultural identities can be.

This shows up in his frank acceptance that Armenians suffered
from a genocide in the final stages of the Ottoman empire during
the first World War, for which he was prosecuted by a nationalist
group for insulting Turkishness; in his novel Snow, which explores
the confrontation between secular and fundamentalist Islam; and in
his book about Istanbul published last year, which evokes the city’s
bricolage of overlapping identities. Cultures are not composed of
singular, univocal essences, he argues, but are plural and interwoven
between multivocal selves and others.

The theme was put in the foreground last weekend at a conference
in Istanbul of researchers from think tanks dealing with relations
between European and Mediterranean countries. Some 200 people from
55 institutes attended, with a large Turkish presence, including
several ministers.

Introducing the conference theme of "paths to democracy and inclusion
within diversity" Alvaro Vasconcelos from Lisbon warned against
the danger of "culturalism", the assumption that civilisations,
like national identities, are composed of such singular essences,
have personalities and are bound to clash.

"It is as if nothing has changed since the Crusades." Such a lens
obscures and distorts real political and economic changes around the
Mediterranean. They are reduced to a monolithic conception of us and
them, friends and enemies, closed and unconnected entities.

Turks are becoming all too used to such simplicities as their bid to
join the European Union runs into more and more opposition.

The Armenian question was to the fore this week, after the French
parliament voted to make the denial of genocide a crime, mirroring
a 1990 law about the Holocaust. The measure threatens to upset
Franco-Turkish relations, which are anyway fraught following rejection
of the EU constitution last year, in which Turkey’s membership became
conflated with France’s difficulty in relating to Islamic culture.

The antagonism is full of irony in that Turkish secular republicanism
was constructed by Ataturk by drawing freely on the French
experience. Now the assimilationist assumptions of both state
establishments are increasingly at odds. Mehmet Aydin, a Turkish
minister of state, made the point that when security agendas supplant
democratic ones, immigrant communities suffer from the cutting
off of funds for multicultural education and language teaching. The
ascendancy of right-wing parties has been accompanied by a shift from
integration to assimilationist policies in several European states,
including France, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria.

This is associated with growing hostility to Turkish EU membership.

Speaking to this conference, Ahmet Davutoglu, an adviser to the prime
minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, made the point that after 9/11 there
was a shift from freedom and democracy to security and power as guiding
political norms throughout western states. But Turkey was a conspicuous
exception to the trend. Erdogan’s government came to power in 2002 and
Turkey has undergone a huge programme of legal reform in preparation
for EU entry. It is led by a reforming Islamic party which believes
its cultural rights are best protected and affirmed by European norms
of tolerance and mutual respect rather than by Turkish secularism.

Even if that aspiration comes under more and more question the
programme will continue, he vowed. It is accompanied by a massive
economic growth of 40 per cent over the last three years and a doubling
of per capita income. Europe should realise that if it is to be a
power centre it must be ready for migration and multiculturalism.

There are growing fears that Turks are becoming disillusioned with
these hostile attitudes and turning away from European engagement.

The shift goes beyond the normal ebb and flow of enthusiasm seen in
other EU accession states as the intrusiveness of their adaptation
becomes more clearly apparent. Turkey has other options in its region
– with Iran and Russia, for example. The significance of Erdogan’s
commitment is that it brings a strategic element to Europe’s relations
with the Mediterranean and Middle East regions.

This speculation is premature, although it could be provoked by a
failure to resolve the issue of opening Turkish ports to Cypriot goods
next month. Several states are hiding behind the issue and stoking
it. Turkish officials believe it can be overcome by reciprocal moves
concerning access to Northern Cyprus; but one told me they will have to
draw the necessary conclusions if the interests of 70 million people
are gratuitously subordinated to those of 600,000 Cypriots. There is
a widespread belief that it was wrong to allow Cyprus join the EU,
with a veto on relations with Turkey, before its national question
was resolved.

The view is shared by European critics of these trends such as former
German foreign minister Joschka Fischer. "Safeguarding Europe’s
interests today means establishing a strong link between – indeed an
unbreakable bond – with Turkey as a cornerstone of regional security.

So it is astonishing that Europe is doing exactly the opposite:
firmly closing its eyes to the strategic challenge posed by Turkey".

Chancellor Angela Merkel was in Istanbul last week. Although she
confirmed her party wants to see Turkey in a reinforced partnership
with the EU rather than full membership, she declared the process of
negotiations should continue.

Much may change over the 10-15 years it may take to prepare for
membership. But to Turks it looks as if new conditions are being laid
out, such as absorption capacity, recognising the Armenian genocide,
or passage of constitutional reform, in addition to the 1993 criteria
for EU enlargement set out in Copenhagen.

The new culturalism is part and parcel of that. Pope Benedict XVI seeks
to harness it to the notion of a Christian Europe incompatible with
Turkish EU membership. He will have an opportunity to elaborate when
he visits Turkey next month. His controversial quotation from a 14th
century Byzantine emperor under Ottoman siege bemuses sophisticated
European Turks like Orhan Pamuk.