TURKEY IN EUROPE? ROME ON THE SAME WAVELENGTH AS WASHINGTON
by Alberto Negri

Il Sole 24 Ore
April 7 2009
Italy

Thin as a blade, the suspension bridge over the Bosphorus is the
symbol of Istanbul and of Turkey’s unique position as the front door
linking Europe to Asia.

Turkey occupies a geopolitical space so vital that it is almost
sufficient in and of itself to contradict the notion that continents
are something different from one another. But it is precisely that
idea, that idea of Eurasia which is as old as our civilization,
that is constantly being called into question: Turkey, according to
certain key European Union member countries, is not Europe even if
it does contain an important limb of Europe within its borders, with
a population of millions and which accounts for almost one-third of
the entire GDP of a country with a population of over 70 million.

Turkey is not Europe in the view of Sarkozy’s France – though
Sarkozy himself hails from a Jewish family that came originally from
Thessaloniki and lived for a long time under the Ottoman Empire. That
very Thessaloniki where Ataturk, the founder of nonconfessional
Turkey and one of the giants of the 20th century, was born. Nor is
Turkey Europe in the view of Mrs Merkel’s Germany, a country where
Turks and Kurds have now reached the second and even third generation.

Nor can Turkey be considered Europe in the view of a large part of
the north of our continent, despite the fact that that area has taken
in millions of emigrants. The Netherlands, too, is against the idea:
After being the land of exiles par excellence, the country is torn
apart today by the results of a difficult integration process. Everyone
is proffering his reasons for rejecting a new entry into the Union
that would turn its demographic, religious, and cultural balances on
their head. Turkey is, after all, the largest Muslim country on the
Mediterranean seaboard, so powerful and strategic as to have become a
pillar of the Atlantic alliance against the Soviets after World War II.

Yet Turkey’s European calling is beyond question. It was the first
country to apply for membership back in the sixties, though it was
rejected back then; after that, it doggedly pursued a whole series
of agreements on economic integration. But of course, when the time
came to set out down the path leading to membership, things got
more complicated.

Turkey has had to face major economic crises that have very much called
into question its ability to meet stringent European parameters. It
has come to terms with the constitutional changes necessary to tailor
its laws to the Union: Three military coups, the last one of which was
in 1980, had forged a power apparatus dominated by the generals. And
above all, Turkey has come up against its own historical and moral
inconsistencies: the bloody repression of Kurdish guerrilla warfare and
of terrorism, and the denial of certain basic human and civil rights.

The Turks have only recently started to call into question certain
traditional taboo topics such as the slaughter of Armenians in the
years preceding World War I, to which Barack Obama referred in his
visit to Ankara yesterday even though he voiced ardent support for
Turkish membership of Europe.

But no one, from the Balkans to the Middle East, has made more
convincing progress than Turkey along the path leading to civic
and political emancipation. And this, in a moment of transition
that could have proved fatal, with the electoral rise of Erdogan’s
moderate Muslim AKP [Justice and Development Party] party. Italy,
Spain, and the United Kingdom have recognized that progress. So has
Greece, an age-old adversary and the country that perhaps more than
any other should have been hostile towards Ankara after 500 years of
Ottoman domination.

It is right to call on Turkey to take all the steps needed to join
the Union. But to no other dossier does Brussels devote such intense
scrutiny, on every occasion. And in any case, everyone knows the
strategic assets of a country that is a crossroads of oil and of gas,
a player increasingly involved in mediating in the crises in the
Middle East, a neighbour of Syria and of Iraq, an interlocutor of
Iran, of Moscow, and of the Turkish-speaking Asian republics, and a
leading player with its troops in international contingents as far
away as Afghanistan. And, last but not least, it is also the Muslim
country that enjoys the best relationship with the state of Israel.

Obama’s vision of Turkey, which he would like to see become a full
fledged European country, does not match the vision held by certain key
countries in the Union. In one sense, Italy’s view is more realistic
and takes continental idiosyncrasies into account. Italy has clashed
with Turkey in the past, too. One has but to recall the controversy
that blew up over the affair of Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish PKK
[Kurdish Workers Party] leader who found temporary shelter in our
country, but it was precisely that crisis that forged our increasingly
strong conviction that it is necessary to keep Ankara, an important
economic partner, hooked up to Europe.

Where Turkey is concerned, it is not a matter of reaching
a cut-and-dried decision – "in" or "out" – but of accompanying a
process towards its maturity pending the development of positions also
in north Europe, which too often talks about the integration of the
Mediterranean and of its southern rim but, when push comes to shove,
is reluctant to set off across a convenient modern bridge over the
Bosphorus. Here, on the Bosphorus, there is a historic rendez-vous
between the West and the Muslim world that needs to be honoured.