TIME TO ‘TALK TURKEY’ ABOUT TURKEY – AND THE EU
Mick Hume is editor of spiked

Spiked, UK
Nov 30 2006

The controversies over Turkey and the West will not be resolved by
people hiding their arguments behind the Pope, the Greek Cypriots or
the EU.

Many political Turks, I was assured in Istanbul last weekend, enjoy
nothing better than an opaque and multi-layered debate filled with
symbols, ciphers, and alleged conspiracies. If that is true, then
they will have been having a high old time this week, in the rows
over the Pope’s visit and Turkey’s accession to the European Union.

For in those international controversies, little is really as it might
appear to be, and almost everybody seems guilty of hiding their true
arguments and agendas behind a false front.

Take the visit of Pope Benedict XVI, head of the Roman Catholic Church,
to Muslim Turkey this week. The trip, following in the footsteps of
previous pontiffs, became the focus of huge controversy after the
Pope’s speech at a German university earlier this year, where he
quoted a fourteenth-century Byzantine Christian emperor who said the
Prophet Muhammad had brought only ‘evil and inhuman’ things.

Critics subsequently pointed out that, back when he was Cardinal
Ratzinger, the current Pope had opposed Turkey’s admission to the EU,
arguing that Christian Europe was a cultural, not merely economic,
entity, in which Muslim Turkey has no place.

So it was threatened that the papal visit to Turkey would be a symbol
of the clash of civilisations, more so after the Islamist prime
minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and leading ministers from his governing
Justice and Development Party (AKP) all said they were too busy to
greet the Pope. Yet come this week, it turned out to be something of
a phoney war. There have been some protests by Islamic radicals. But
Erdogan somehow found time to meet Benedict at Ankara after all. During
their meeting, the first thing the Pope seems to have done was to
declare his support for Turkey’s EU accession process. This should have
come as no surprise to those who noted that the Pope had effectively
withdrawn his remarks about Islam and violence, and apologised for
the offence, within a couple of days of the German speech.

If the papal visit is symbolic of something in international politics
today, it is less a symbol of a clash of civilisations than of a
climate in which posturing, shallow convictions and PR gestures take
the place of serious debate about big issues.

The debate about the EU’s relationship with Turkey, which will have
far more long-term significance than a papal tour, is marked by an even
greater gap between appearance and reality. This week it has been said
that the talks over Turkey’s entry to the EU are at ‘breaking point’
over the thorny issue of a settlement for Cyprus, the island divided
between the Greek Cypriot Republic (now itself a member of the EU)
in the South and the internationally unrecognised Turkish Cypriot
statelet in the North, where thousands of Turkish troops remain.

This dispute is now presented by some as a stand-off between the
Islamic and nationalist hardliners of Turkey, and the defenders of
the little Greek Cypriot republic in democratic Europe. In reality,
however, all sides are playing a rather more complex game.

Even if the drawn-out diplomatic process is completed, Turkey has
no prospect of joining the EU for a good few years. So why has this
dispute been blown up into such an urgent issue today? It seems
clear that many of those opposed to an Islamic country joining the
EU are now hiding behind the Greek Cypriots’ cause. Some who have
shown little interest in finding a solution for Cyprus over the
past 30 years have suddenly discovered that championing the Greek
Cypriots’ veto against Turkey is a matter of principle. For their
part, supporters of the Turkish Cypriots complain that 700,000 Greek
Cypriots are being allowed to hold the entire EU and Turkish nation
to ransom. But the Greek Cypriot statelet looks more like a Trojan
horse for more powerful anti-Turkish forces in the EU.

This is typical of the broader atmosphere of dishonesty in the
EU-Turkey debate. The overheated focus on the problems of Turkish
accession has become a welcome distraction from the crisis within
the EU. It allows the EU bureaucracy to present an image of a happy
Euro-family trying to cope with the external problem of Turkey. This
image conveniently ignores the real crisis that has afflicted the upper
echelons of the EU since the voters of France and Denmark threw out
their new Euro-constitution and threw all of their plans into disarray
(see The reawakening of European democracy, by Frank Furedi).

The democratic revolt captured in those referendum votes shook the
Euro-elite, which has since sought to deny that reality and find
something else to talk about. Posturing about the problems of making
Turkey an EU member shifts attention from the inconvenient detail that
millions at the heart of Europe have shown they are unsure whether the
EU as presently constituted is fit for their countries to belong to.

It is classic displacement activity. Leaders like Germany’s chancellor
Merkel and France’s president Chirac, uncertain of a troubled Europe’s
future, instead make bold statements about the trouble with Turkish
membership. The ploy is most obvious within the French elite, who
are now talking about holding another referendum, but on Turkey’s
accession; a case of ‘if we cannot get our people to vote for our plans
for the EU, maybe we can at least persuade them to vote for us against
the Turks’. This sort of posturing can only be counterproductive on
all fronts. As one Turkish commentator put it to me at the weekend,
if they keep pushing Turkey away the Turkish ‘bogeyman’ may decide
to go away, and how will that solve the EU’s problems?

However, despite the disputes there seems little immediate prospect
of that. The Turkish authorities, too, are being disingenuous in
their stand-off with the EU. They have to show willing to stand up
for the Turkish Cypriots. But despite appearances and images, the
Islamic government in Ankara needs the EU.

After coming to power in 2002, the AKP government used the prospect
of EU negotiations as a shield behind which to push forward its own
reform agenda for Turkish society. The government introduced reforms
on everything from advancing human rights law to restricting the
political power of the constitutional courts and the military, and
justified these politico-legal measures as necessary if Turks were
to reap the economic benefits of EU membership.

This may come as something of a surprise to those of us who have
seen the AKP through the images cast of it in the West, where many
look with fear at the very idea of an Islamist government in a state
that has been self-consciously secular since the Turkish republic was
established in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, ‘father of the Turks’,
whose own image is still seen everywhere.

Yet here, too, things are a little different than the political
stunts and slogans might suggest. I was in Istanbul last weekend for
discussions on various aspects of EU-Turkish relations, organised by
the British Council and the Open Society Institute, with Turkish and
European academics and writers. No doubt these experts have their
own prejudices and preconceptions. But from some of the research
they presented, a strikingly different picture of Turkish politics
in general and the AKP in particular emerged.

The bloc of voters which gave the AKP their election victory turns
out to have been based, not in the traditional Islamic base of the
urban poor, but among the new entrepreneurial middle class in places
like the Turkish heartland of Anatolia, seeking to break away from
the old centralised Kemalist system in which, as one observer put it,
‘the state is the shepherd and the people the sheep’. The AKP is a
morally conservative, but in other ways liberal, pro-market party
of modernisation, and its leaders have less of an eye on the strict
teachings of the Koran than on the privatisation polices preached by
the IMF.

Many of those who have long been outsiders in Turkish politics have
supported the AKP’s advances to the EU as the means to restructuring
the relationship between the state and society. Where ‘Westernisation’
might once have been seen as a cause of their exclusion on the margins
of Turkish society, now, through the EU, these people see it as their
entry ticket. And others who could not support the Islamic government
on ‘cultural’ grounds, such as the women’s movement or the Kurdish
left, are pinning their hopes on the government’s overtures to the
EU to fulfil their own dreams of far-reaching reform, since they see
winning the argument in the committee rooms of Brussels easier than
winning them on the Turkish streets.

As one NGO spokesman put it: ‘The simplicities of the "threat from
Islam" need to be questioned.’ Turkish politics is more sophisticated
than these caricatures allow. There are deep divisions, but these do
not simply run along straight secular v religious lines. The debate
about the headscarf, for example, worn by around half of all Turkish
women, has come to be seen as another symbol of the struggle between
the new and the old – but in fact many of the ‘new’ energetic forces in
Turkish politics around the AKP are on the side of women who ‘cover’,
while the new urban middle classes are more likely to side with the
old statist and military elite in upholding the ban on headscarves
in public offices (which means that AKP ministers whose wives cover
have not been invited to presidential ceremonies).

Meanwhile, the supposedly hardline Islamist prime minister refused
to get involved in a row over whether university students should be
allowed to wear the headscarf.

Nor do the attitudes of Tukish voters on other social issues easily
fit into the stereotype of Muslim societies. According to a major
survey conducted earlier this year, for example, only nine per cent
would support the introduction of an Islamic sharia state – down
from 20 per cent in 1999. Even those 1999 figures were far lower,
especially among women, when people were asked about specific sharia
laws such as men having up to four wives; less than one per cent
favoured stoning adulterers.

The debate about Turkey and the EU raises some complicated questions.

But many in the EU do not much care about the subtleties, since the
Turkish accession has been turned into a symbol in the struggle to
resolve – or at least distract from – the EU’s own problems. Thus EU
commissioners have delighted in posing on the moral high ground for
once, lecturing Turkey about its human rights record, restrictions
on free speech, attitudes to women and Kurds and much else. They
have set unprecedented deadlines for Turkish complicance with their
instructions, and made it clear that, unlike any other candidate for
EU membership, Turkey may not be allowed to join the club even if it
meets all the stringent conditions.

Inevitably, this ‘they’re not like us’ attitude has proved
self-fulfilling, fuelling a backlash among sections of Turkish
opinion. With opposition parties crying conspiracy, and comparing
the EU conditions to the infamous Treaty of Sevres – the 1920 plan to
divide Turkey among the victorious Great Powers after the First World
War – public resentment has been rising and support for EU membership
falling, down to one-in-three according to some polls, around half
what it was not long ago. Polls also show increased sympathy among
Turks for the Islamic world, not least because of the war in Iraq,
Turkey’s nextdoor neighbour.

Against this background, it was extraordinary to hear British
officials at a dinner party in Istanbul at the weekend giving
yet another lecture about all the things that Turkey ‘must’ do if
it hopes ever to join their club. They talk about how the EU will
‘democratise Turkey’, seemingly unaware of the inherent contradiction
in any notion of democracy anywhere being imposed by the diktat
of foreign bureaucrats. And then in the next breath, supporters of
Turkish accession complain about the ‘reactionary nationalist upsurge’
they claim has mysteriously appeared as if from nowhere.

All of this raises the question, should Turkey want to be in the EU?

For us here at spiked, there has always been a difference between
Europe, the continent of free and creative peoples, and the EU,
the kingdom of bureaucrats and conservatism. In many ways the EU
is a dead weight around Europeans’ collective neck. That is why we
are more pro-Europe than anybody else – favouring, for example, free
migration – but not pro-EU. And it is why, while we want the Turkish
people to be fully integrated with Europeans, we doubt whether the
EU is in any way the means to do it.

Of course we believe that there is a need for reform and free speech
in Turkish society. But these are matters for the Turks to resolve
through democratic debate, not for the EU to dictate in the false name
of democratisation. On returning from Turkey, I saw the prime minister
of Estonia interviewed on an American TV channel. He said that the
process of joining the EU had been ‘like having every bone in your body
replaced’. The Turkish body politic is expected to undergo even more
serious surgery – while sleeping under general anaesthetic, of course.

It seems likely that several chapters in the Turkish-EU negotiations
will be suspended in the current Cyprus stand-off, and there is even
talk of a ‘time-out’ for the entire accession process. These things
will drag on and on no doubt. But the debate about them is helping
to shape the political climate now, not just in Turkey but elsewhere
in Europe, too.

That is why it is time, as the Americans say, to ‘talk turkey’ –
time for all sides to be frank and open about where they really stand.

Stop hiding behind the Pope, or the Greek Cypriots, or the Turkish
Cypriots, or the EU, or Ataturk, or history. Let us have an honest
argument about the sort of Europe we want to live in. One of the
conditions for that, of course, is that we have truly free speech –
in countries like Britain and France (with its absurd tit-for-tat law
making it a crime to deny the Turkish genocide against the Armenians)
as well as in Turkey.

Near my hotel in Istanbul, a fine mosque stands in the shadow of a
spectacular suspension bridge across the river Bosphorus, joining the
European side of the city with the Asian. When President Bush was in
Istanbul for a NATO conference, they brought him there to pose for a
photo opportunity against that background – supposedly an image that
captures the relationship between East and West, ancient and modern,
change and tradition.

It is a great view. But there are arguably far too many symbols
and postures and poses in the Turkish debate, and too few straight
arguments and honest principles in plain sight. The future of Europe,
and Turkey’s place in it, is surely too important for such games.

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